• Journal of Science and Technology Studies
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• v.13 no.1
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• pp.41-76
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• 2013

Based on an analysis of the Japanese animation director Kamiyama Kenji's Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series, this paper discusses two important subjects in modern technoscience-cyborg and old age. In fact, age has been an important social and political category in the modern world, along with gender, race, and class. However, age has not been a significant research topic for STS scholars. Even though many of these investigators have extensively explored the complex relationship between gender and technoscience, especially after the publication of Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" (1991), few of them have been interested in how age is reconfigured by modern science and technology. If women, as Haraway has claimed, can have a different political and cultural outlook by becoming cyborgs, then, can we expect a similar socio-cultural transformation with regard to the interaction between cyborg and old age? Do the elderly experience lesser age discrimination through the growth of biomedicine and technoscience? Indeed, it is believed that seniors are increasingly becoming cyborgs with advancing age, since their declining bodily functions are consistently replaced and assisted by various biomedical technologies. Does this enable them to overcome ageism and age discrimination as well as their alleged physiological and mental limitations? As an answer to this question, Mike Featherstone has asserted that becoming a cyborg in old age could make the wrinkled skin a mere mask and create diverse new possibilities that were hitherto unavailable to an aging person. Based on my reading of Ghost in the Shell, however, I analyze a more complex set of problems when the senile cyborg is created through the encounter between the elderly and technoscience. I argue that while the senile cyborg could challenge traditional family ideology and nationalism it would leave ageism intact and define a new individualistic life form through a body controlled within the globalized internet and capitalist economy.

• Archives of design research
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• v.19 no.5 s.67
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• pp.105-118
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• 2006

From a general perspective of design history, the design methodology movement is interpreted in relations to the rationalistic and universal characteristics of modernism. This essay explores a historical context of the movement, focusing on its discursive and practical relations to cyborg sciences that has been shaped by the research and development of military technology in Cold War America. The formation of such relations could be largely devided into two processes: One is the process in which methods and techniques of system science that included operation research, system analysis, and system engineering, were appropriated by the first generation methodologists who had tried to establish "the science of design", and the other is the one in which Herbert Simon's studies on problem solving and artificial intelligence became profoundly embedded in theoretical frameworks of design methodology after the first generation. Examining such processes critically, this essay argues that a design process became finally redefined by the third generation methodology, as a 'feedback loop' of circulation of production and consumption, that is, an apparatus of information-processing which gives a concrete form to the "invisible hand" of markets.