ABSTRACT
Surgery is experiencing rapid change in its culture, institutions, and material practices due to what we might best characterize as an accelerating technological revolution in medialization. Media inscribe our situation. We are becoming immersed in a growing repertoire of computer-based media for creating, distributing, and interacting with digitized versions of the world, media that constitute the instrumentarium of a new epistemic regime. In numerous areas of our daily activities, we are witnessing a drive toward fusion of digital and physical reality; not the replacement of the real by a hyperreal, the obliteration of a referent and its replacement by a model without origin or reality as Baudillard predicted, but a new playing field of ubiquitous computing in which wearable computers, independent computational agent-artifacts, and material objects are all part of the landscape. To paraphrase William Gibson’s character Case in Neuromancer, “data is being made flesh.”
