Paper short abstract:

This paper presents the results of a case study conducted during a year focused to register the many ways in which young people, when they are exposed to new emergent technologies pictures such as eyeborgs and 3D Bionic ears, imagine specific futures while reshaping meanings of nature and culture.

Paper long abstract:

This paper presents the results of a case study conducted during a year focused to register the many ways in which young people, when they are exposed to new emergent technologies pictures, such as eyeborgs and 3D Bionic ears, imagine specific futures while attributing different meanings to nature. The study was developed through focal groups in which the main population included was universitary students (seventy nine) from Bogota an Cali, two big cities in Colombia. The study let us to identify not just different grammars used by students to shape specific futures but different ways to reconfiguring boundaries between nature and culture. These reconfigurations are enacted in specific ways of imagining bodies in (pervaded by particular fears and hopes) futures. The research let us to capture three main reconfigurations of the meaning of nature (and its relations to culture). While "natural order" and "artificiality" appear disengaged of the conceptual domain of nature, "natureness", mainly understood in terms of familiarity, is retaken to interrogate the moral acceptability of new "cyborg" devices. In the end, these three specific attributions to nature/culture are linked to particular ways of picturing alternative futures.