Paper Title: Postmodern Perspectives on the Effects of Technology on Humans

Author: Marie W. Bivona

Email: mwb0508@aol.com

"The increase of global capitalism and the evolution away from nature and the biological to a total technological society has been a contemporary worry for the last fifty years.  Fredric Jameson describes culture that has been altered or modified as becoming a "second nature" when nature, as such, is "over" and therefore no longer exists.  Three futuristic texts depicting the tensions and anxieties felt in which all the analysis of, worrying about, and infatuation with the "posthuman" future takes place are Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Alien, and Blade Runner.  Edward O. Wilson speaks about biophilic responses being created through "the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms."  Cybernetics becomes the living organism in each of these postmodern perspectives as first seen with electronic duplication of animals as one means of creating empathy, the spacecraft computer "Mother" as the maternal figure overseeing its crew during an outer space mission, and 'replicants' longing to increase their brief life span in order to become more "human."  Feelings of biophilia as seen in the eco-apocalyptic society  longing to return to a past natural order in Do Androids Dream quickly turn into biophobia when the foreign organism in Alien becomes feared as it turns into a parasite and then an all-devouring creature.  And Blade Runner, the adaptation of Do Androids Dream, represents a complete move entirely away from nature with the total takeover of technology becoming the norm in this eco-dystopian society where the sun never shines."