Are We Cyborgs Yet?: Evolution of the DROID Commercials

I distinctly remember the first DROID commercial I ever saw. It was for the DROID 2, and it ran in 2010. Somehow, it seems so long ago, perhaps because the idea of a smartphone still seemed novel and now it’s become a part of everyday life. In any case, upon seeing the commercial, I was taken with the way in which the smartphone turns the man in the commercial into a machine—literally. As he types on the slide-out keyboard (which only a year later seems so quaint), his fingers, hands, and arms gradually become metallic, his muscles replaced with metal and his tendons transforming into wires. The phone has made him a cyborg—an amalgamation of human and machine.

I found myself mesmerized and a little disturbed by the commercial. If the comments on the commercial’s YouTube video are anything to go by, I wasn’t the only one. Most of them approved of the commercial, but others seemed displeased with the lack of humanity, references to The Terminator and Cybermen of Doctor Who, and disgust with corporations turning their clients into robots. Personally, I think the red DROID eye is reminiscent of the glowing Hal of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Whatever the reference, the glaring red light that seems to be looking at the viewer is reminiscent of various movie and television examples of technology gone awry and controlling people’s lives. Hal takes over the ship in 2001. The Terminator, a robot meant to infiltrate human society and kill a particular human target, is the result of Skynet, a self-aware program that rebelled against the humans that created it in the Terminator movies. The Cybermen are the frequent adversaries of the Doctor in Doctor Who, as they overpower biological subjects and turn them into metal automatons. All of these robots are pop culture warnings of what can happen when technology becomes too all-consuming in our lives.

Other DROID commercials also portray the smartphones as part of a person or in one case, a snowman, and not merely a tool to be used. However, the commercials seem to be moving away from presenting the DROID as a physical part of a person. The DROID Bionic commercial places the smartphone outside the protagonist of the commercial. In fact, the ending tagline states that the DROID was “made from machines to rule all machines.” This most recent commercial seems to be making up for the earlier ones, in which the phone was so seemlessly melded to its user that it was hard to tell who was controlling whom. The statement that the DROID Bionic “rules all machines” suggests that the smartphone is giving the user control over machines instead of being controlled by them.

So, who really does control our smartphones? Do we control them, or do they control us? Or have we entered into a sort of symbiotic relationship with them? In many ways, we are beginning to think of our technology as extensions of ourselves, though whether this is due to marketing that gives us an identity associated with a product or to the increasing prevelance of technology in our society, I can’t say. Most likely, it’s some combination of the two. In any case, as these commercials show, our close relationship with our technology is turning us into a sort of cyborg, something part human and part machine. Technically, anytime our culture presents the human body as being something like a machine, like a piece of technology, it is presenting us as cyborgs.

Rather than worry about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing (because there are good arguments on both sides), I’d like to focus on how these commercials present our interactions with technology as embodied. Usually, when we think about going on the Internet or using smartphones, we aren’t thinking much about our bodies. We tend to think more about our minds, since Western culture has generally placed more emphasis on the mind over the body. But using technology is an embodied experience. We type on our keyboards, our smartphones, our iPads or tablets with our fingers. We manipulate webpages with our hands, whether through a touchscreen or a mouse. Our interactions with technology are not something that takes us out of our bodies. Instead, they do the very opposite. They rely on our bodies, so much so that they have become an extension of our bodies.

As changes in the DROID commercials suggests, this doesn’t seem to be a concept that we, as a culture, are completely comfortable with yet.