As I was reading through “Cyborg and the Extended Self” I was very heavily reminded of the show “Ghost in the Shell”, which has many iterations and a few movies but the series as a whole is what I was reminded of. This show is a futuristic world in which cyborgs and people both exist, and are capable of immersing themselves entirely into the internet due to their cyborg brains/implants. The following is a clip of the show in which several characters are part of a sort of chatroom/talk show, where they are personified by their chosen avatars, and actually living the moment inside the internet speaking to each other, with an audience of viewers at home doing the same. The content of the video is mostly irrelevant to the topic, but the scene demonstrates how they depict this interaction.

The fact that in some ways we are not very far from this ourselves is fascinating. Perhaps not the idea of cyberbrains and putting your actual mind into the internet, but virtual chat rooms or broadcasts using other more realistic tech, like virtual reality headsets. The topic of feeling as though the tools we use are an extension of the self has always been very interesting to me, but it becomes so much more interesting the more advanced our tools become. At some point it even becomes philosophical, causing one to question where to draw the line or how to define the self, at these levels of extension where they are throwing their entire metaphysical self into the internet. Concepts like this, and anything really having that whole “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” vibe is one the most interesting philosophical topics to me. The article really resonated with the new age feeling that your devices are are part of the self, and I wonder how appropriate it is to treat them as such, and to what degree?