In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, How We Became Posthuman provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here.

In simple terms, cybernetics is the study of controls of any system by using technology. But the essence of this approach is to understand the functions and processes of systems capable of receiving, storing and processing information and then using it for its own control.

cybernetics, control theory as it is applied to complex systems. Cybernetics is associated with models in which a monitor compares what is happening to a system at various sampling times with some standard of what should be happening, and a controller adjusts the system’s behaviour accordingly.

Editors: Taylor, Carol, Hughes, Christina (Eds.) Examines how we can develop understandings of beyond-the-human aspects of the world in social research.

Thankfully, N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman provides a rigorous and historical framework for grappling with the cyborg, which Hayles replaces with the more all-purpose ‘posthuman.’…

For Hayles the central issue in post-humanism is whether the body is superfluous: “Should the body be seen as evolutionary baggage that we are about to toss out as we vault into the brave new world of the posthuman?” she asks. [viii] In its philosophy and practice, the modern age sought to separate mind from body.

Thus, Hayles’ conception of the post-human is marked by two characteristics: it is not a sharp or radical break, but is a historically specific conception of subjectivity, just as Enlightenment humanism was.

–Julian Dibbell N. Katherine Hayles is a postmodern literary critic and the James B. Duke Professor of Literature at Duke University. Start reading How We Became Posthuman on your Kindle in under a minute .