And the final speaker in this early session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Jaime Riccio, whose focus is on digital identities and the techno-self from a critical cultural perspective. Very early theories about communication built on the Shannon-Weaver model of encoding and decoding, while early cyborg theories built on Norbert Wiener’s emphasis on feedback loops; but this also raises the question of power – it enables the development of a technocracy.
Ordinary populations might feel oppressed by these developments; technopolitical developments create the potential for a panopticon that is driven by big tech and biopolitics. Cyborgs embody these challenges: in popular culture, they represent irony, connection, symbiosis with non-human others, and storytelling.
The bodies and selves we inhabit now, therefore, are biomediated bodies: they are influenced by technologies on an everyday basis. This represents a new materialist perspective, too: the biomediated body can have more power and more agency than purely human bodies; it raises questions about biology, matter, life, and information; it questions what a body can do, what agency it can have, and how it might engage with other cyborgs and non-human entities.
In this sense, according to Donna Harraway, cyborgs are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and capitalism, and unfaithful to those parents; they can also push back against big tech and biopower. Jaime explored this in interviews with young adults in New York, asking them about their relationships with digital apps; this revealed their sense of open, fluid identity, collective efficacy, and renewed agency. All of this introduces entropy into the staid and simplistic mathematical model of communication.
