Any observer of contemporary culture would have to acknowledge that the human species is involved in an extraordinary, and accelerating, technological transformation of the biosphere with such side effects as the cultivation of most of the world's wild, the "invention" of domestic animals, crops and fire, urbanization, mass extinctions, monocultures (the corn of Iowa), billions of humans and global warming. This includes our own self-modification of the body directly (make-up, tattoos, piercings, exercise, vaccination, surgery, genetic engineering) and with prosthesis, both inert (clothes, glasses, other tools), active as through intimate machine interfaces (musical instruments, bikes, cars, computers) and as implants (myloelectricarms, pacemakers).
This process, this constant making and remaking the world, is not unique to humans--beavers dam, bees build hives, birds weave nests. But the system of culture, growing out of language, has made it possible for humans to develop technoscience and an ever expanding process of improving that technoscience that is producing the world changing effects of today. Qualitatively and quantitatively, human technoscientific culture is unique on this planet, and dominant for now.
One doesn't have to call this a Cyborg Society, although on this site you will certainly find many arguments for the utility of this approach. Other observers prefer to see it as a fundamental aspect of modernity, or postmodernity, or focusing more on the merging of organic and machinic it has been labeled "the Vital Machine" (Channel 1991), or the "Fourth Discontinuity" that goes beyond the human/machine dichotomy (Mazlish 1993) or it is the global system of humans and their machines as a giant "Metaman" (Stock 1993). All these schemas have something to offer and certainly all critiques, challenges, rejections, modifications, additions and improvements of the term cyborg and the concepts of cyborgization, cyborgology, and cyborg society, among others, are welcome here.
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