Протей и протезите. Предварителни съображения за антропологическия анализ на новите медии и интернет
Proteus and Prostheses. Preliminary Considerations on the Anthropological Analysis of the New Media and Internet

Summary/Abstract: The paper aims at exposing a possible theoretical perspective for reflection on the new media and in particular on the Internet, proceeding from a critical reevaluation of one particular anthropological line of defining ‘human nature’, starting with Hobbes and Rousseau, passing through Baudelaire and Nietzsche and attaining a radical expression in the anthropological ideas of diverse authors like Georges Bataille, Arnold Gehlen and Peter Sloterdijk. In that line of thinking human nature is viewed as initially insufficient, as paradoxically lacking nature. In other words, this vision places in the very core of human the technical prosthesis, which allows him to transcend the limitations of the existence in a local natural environment. Hence the cultural world in general is the totalisation of the prosthesis. In the horizon of this conception, for which the cultural-technical prosthesis is immanent to the human, the new media should be considered as nothing but its new transformation. Advancing in this direction of thinking the author formulates the hypothesis that in the neutral space of Internet could be observed the formation of a new type of subject-object relation, related to the reformulation of the opposition private-public, as well as of the traditional notions of causality and effectiveness.

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