To be a cyborg these days, you don't have to walk the streets encased in a homemade wearable computer or share a surgically implanted "love" chip with your life partner. To the contrary: freed from the archaic twentieth century, futurist "experts" are now proclaiming all humanity's transformation into cyborg beings. We take pills to modify the workings of our brains, we implant metal chunks in our bodies to keep our hearts beating, we strap electrical appliances to our ears, wrists, waists. From watches to walkmans, we are getting quite comfortable with the idea of living our lives in tandem with personal technologies -- and that, as the experts will tell you, is what being a cyborg is all about.

But are we really cyborgs? Are you, sitting there on the bus or the toilet or the couch with the television flickering music videos on mute as you think about the Leafs latest trade and your favourite episode of the Incredible Hulk, and the half done power point presentation waiting for you in your cubicle the next morning, are you a cyborg? Who me? You think. No, not just you -- all of us.

I spent the summer writing a book with one of the few people who is actually eager and willing to call himself a cyborg. I'm referring to Steve Mann, Hamilton born, MIT Media Lab graduate, now a professor at the University of Toronto. You've probably seen Steve on television sporting thick black sun glasses that conceal a computer apparatus which, aided by a laser mechanism dubbed the EyeTap, allows the wearer to turn himself into a walking talking home broadcast centre and portable online computer.

Steve Mann makes people nervous. At a recent public function I attended with him, a crowd milled around gawking, but few were willing to go up and talk to the inventor. I recognized their reluctant fascination as my own. When I was first approached by the ironically named Mann, I knew next to nothing about cyborgs, and considered the notion of human-machine symbiosis an appalling idea. To this day, my meetings with Mann remain marked by a mixture of repulsion and compulsion. Nevertheless, after spending a fair bit of time with Mann and even more time reading as much material as I could find on the phenomenon of the cyborg, I have come to a rather awkward conclusion: What we fear about Steve Mann is what we fear about ourselves; we're already cyborgs, we just don't like to admit it.

My take on what makes us already cyborgs is significantly different from the bulk of the techno-philosophers. These types point to physical manifestations -- implants, pharmaceuticals -- to argue that the process is well under way. But in working with Mann to articulate his man-machine manifesto, I've realized that we don't need even a single surgical implant to lay claim to cyborg status. Our ubiquitous status as cyborg is mental, not technological. Our minds have long been colonized by the invisible forces of mass pop. Early childhood memories are tainted by television and McDonald's, spontaneous conversation is peppered with references to catchy slogans and favourite movie moments. In truth, we can barely say, see, or think anything without referring to the mass culture landscape that makes up so much of our lives. This, more than any mechanism we might make use of, marks us as cyborgs, human-machine entities living as much in an electronic world as a "natural" one.

The original notion of the cyborg is quite different from our conventional, pop predicated, idea of the cyborg as a creature born out of a literal fusion of man and mechanism. Cyborg comes from the term cybernetic, coined by the mathematician Norbert Wiener in 1948. Cybernetics was the name Wiener gave to the feedback loop by which information is processed both in the human brain and in the computer. Then, in 1960, Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline imagined thathumans and machines could share a cybernetic loop which would function unconsciously to extend certain predetermined processes. Kline and Clynes created the term cyborg, a human being having robot-like systems that work unconsciously, thus "leaving man free to explore, to create, to think and to feel."

Steve Mann's wearable computer invention, the WearComp, is a lot more along the lines of the original cyborg conception than its sci-fi incarnations.Mann's wearable computer is not a super solider, but an information tool, a filter that allows you to unconsciously immerse yourself in the feedback loop of mass communication. Encased in the wearable computer, you can weed ads out of your visual space, you can open yourself to instant communication from people around the world via anywhere anytime reception of everything from email to video, or you can completely close yourself off, refusing all stimuli. Once you set up your parameters, the computer automatically mediates your surroundings. The wearable computer is more like having the television on in the background while you eat dinner and talk to your family, than working on a desktop computer that demands your undivided attention.

Not just a McLuhanesque extension of the nervous system, the fabled "second skin", the wearable computer is a mass communication appliance that turns every wearer into a pop culture production facility. You can take pictures, send video live to the web, record and disseminate your ideas, and turn every aspect of your life into a mass produced show. Constantly online, constantly existing in a feedback loop with the mass culture world, the new cyborg is, finally, a full and equal participant in the electronic world known variously as cyberspace, pop culture, and tv-land. (In the book, we coin a new term: "cyborgspace".) Where once we could only stare at the tv screen, could only hum along to the pop world implanted in our heads, we are now on the verge of becoming full fledged denizens of the pop world, each of us equally capable of creating, producing and distributing, of living and breathing an electronic mass culture fantasy that just keeps getting more real.

Technologies like the WearComp are not such strange departures from the thruway of human life. Rather, they are extensions to the mass culture highway we are all speeding down. We grew up and live in an electronic mental environment. Take away our contact lenses and our bionic arms and our cell phones and our super fast connections, and we are still citizens in a placeless pop culture country. Could you ever get mass culture and its infinite number of references and recipes out of your mind, regardless of what technology you are (or aren't) using, wearing, or implanting?

Wearable computers won't make us cyborgs any more than implanted modems or bionic hearts will. Steve Mann's WearComp is merely the first apparatus to truly take advantage of a transformation that took place in the last century. We don't change when we put on WearComp, we simply facilitate our already developed ability to understand life as a series of mass fantasies disseminated by a wired world. It's JenniCam taken to its natural extreme, the speeding up of the cybernetic process by which ordinary people turn themselves into everyday disembodied self reflexive superstars trolling the interior space of our hyper-connected imagination(s). No longer a mythical creature trapped in the speculative amber armour of Robocop and Terminator, no longer an idea forever blurred into a hazy future yet to be harnessed to the treadmill of highspeed innovation, the cyborg today is everywhere and nowhere, a doppelganger creature who resides inside and outside us. Forget Frankenstein and Steve Austin. Imagine, instead, our grandparents or great-grandparents as the first tentative cyborg prototypes -- conjuring another world out of a crackling radio signal, falling into the grainy flicker of the motion picture.