An Analysis Of The Cyberpunk Anime Film Ghost In The Shell

It has become a reflexive instinct to reach out for our phones whenever it lights up with a notification. With the proliferation of social media, we share and receive information about daily lives of ourselves and other people, even when we are physically apart. Our daily use of technology including but not limited to the Internet, social media platforms, electronic devices etc. demonstrates how we participate in forming and simultaneously subjected to these networks. The omnipresence of technology- communication (phones, emails), control (surveillance, military), life support (medical-related) etc.- signifies the extent technology has become integrated and interwoven into our daily lives.

With these technological advances, increasing reliance on complex technological networks for survival and the connection of bodies with the urban space through electronic and digital mediums, the city cannot simply be explained in terms of physical, tangible territories and material networks. Instead, the city should be thought more like urban systems, circuits and networks operating like a computer matrix, where urban experiences and environments are straddling the boundary between real and virtual, which is becoming increasingly blurred by cybernetic and bio technologies.

This paper aims to use the idea of the cyborg as a means to explore the urban condition and draws upon analysis in the cyberpunk genre to examine the role of technology in defining and conceptualizing the city. I will analyze the cyberpunk anime film Ghost in the Shell, where individual’s use of technology have been developed to the extent where technologies of communication and control have integrated and reconfigured the body (cyborg), to gain insight on new technologi...

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...gh network technology as individuals increasingly stay within the boundaries of their own homes. The cyborg metaphor allows us to conceptualize the interaction between social and biological processes that produce urban space and possibilities for everyday. Existing urban spatial relations and power relations can change with the introduction of new technology. At the same time, we should also recognize that new technology also be used to reinforce the centralities of existing power centers. Technology can be seen to change existing spatial relations and power networks at a global level, national or local level. By using concept of the cyborg urbanization as a way of conceptualizing the human technology interface we can attempt to develop an imaginative response to the uncertainty of the future of the city and its implications on wider social and political processes.