Designing Cyborg Consciousness: How Smartphones Transform Perception, Embodiment, and Cognition
My research began as a search for language – a way to describe phenomena that I, and many around me, regularly experienced but struggled to articulate. Across my California-based fieldwork, people repeatedly expressed a sense that smartphones were reshaping their minds, but that they lacked the language to explain how or why. My dissertation is, at its core, an attempt to give form to that intuition – to offer frameworks for understanding interactions with smartphones that feel intimate yet ineffable, ordinary yet unsettling.
I develop a theory of cyborg consciousness to make sense of these transformations – not as mere metaphor or science fiction, but as a materially grounded model of human experience, in which perception, action, embodiment, and cognition emerge through the integration of organic bodies and techno-cultural infrastructures.
This presentation unfolds in five parts.
First, I outline the methods and ethnographic foundations of the project. Second, I examine dominant cultural schemas of reality identified through fieldwork – essentialist frameworks that shaped not only my interlocutors’ understandings of perception, cognition, and embodiment, but my own as well. My theory of cyborg consciousness is a direct response to these essentialist assumptions. Third, I situate cyborg consciousness within a nested evolutionary framework, offering an anti-essentialist, systems-level account of human transformation that emphasizes emergence, variation, and co-construction across scales. Fourth, I draw from predictive processing, phenomenology, and ethnographic case studies of body dysmorphia, phantom sensations, and hypnotic trance to explore how recursive entanglements with smartphones reshape perception, action, embodiment, and cognition. Fifth, I develop metaphors for the cognitive norms that increasingly characterize everyday life under conditions of ubiquitous computing.
Meeting ID: 962-8462-7649
Password: 774967