If the medium is one requiring intellectual thought and inquiry, then the media is likely to be interpreted as such; likewise, in the case of television, the corollary holds true.
Donna Haraway takes the "medium as the message" statement a few steps further. There is no denying that she sees a powerful connection between the medium and the message. Perhaps, she takes this message a bit too far or a bit too fast (It may just be that I'm not willing to accept her cyborg theory since I'm just beginning to understand the meaning of a cyborg). Specifically, when Haraway wears the hat of media theorist, she sets forth the forward-thinking, modern, and somewhat controversial statement that human beings are so closely linked to the mediums of today that we are actually morphing into half cyborg-half human creatures given our interconnectedness with the medium of computers themselves and their intrustion and/or interconnectedness to our lives: "We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs" (Haraway 15a0). Haraway continues to define A cyborg as a: cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, and a creature of both fiction and lived social reality.
Yet, a primary difference is that Haraway has still not decided whether or not technology will contribute to the liberation of women while it is fairly safe to conclude that Barthes does not see television, the technological advent of his day, as liberating us; instead, the television or the medium numbs us to where we do not have to think, to process, or to interact. With television, we become passive beings to Barthes; with computers and technology, we become another being altogether as per Haraway. From now on, I will check my pulse upon logging on and off to ensure I have not internalized the meaning of the media.
Works Cited
Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies. London: J. Cape.
Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Socialist Review . (1985): 150-166. Print.
Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, . New York, NY:
Routledge Press, 1991. Print.
