Human-centrism is a way of thinking that treats human beings as the privileged center of interpretation, value, and agency. In media theory, it is associated with approaches that understand media and environment primarily in terms of their effects on human perception and society. Marshall McLuhan’s environmental view of media opened an ecological perspective, but it still placed “the human” at the center of the discussion. Later, Donna Haraway challenged this framework directly. From the 1980s onward, she criticized human-centrism through feminist science and technology critique, arguing for a radical reconsideration of relations between humans and nonhumans.
Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” introduced the cyborg as a metaphor that unsettles modern Western binaries such as human/animal, nature/artificial, and body/machine. In this framework, the human is no longer a self-contained or exceptional subject, but one formed through concrete relations with animals, machines, and the Earth environment. Her work also suggested the possibility of hybrid subjects that cross race, gender, and species boundaries, thereby destabilizing the universal category of “the Human.”
This critique became a key part of posthuman thought. Matthew Fuller extended media ecology into the digital network era and paid attention to nonhuman agents such as algorithms and data. Karen Barad pushed the critique further by rethinking ontology itself as relational, where distinctions between human and nonhuman, or media and environment, do not hold in principle. In this broader trajectory, human-centrism names the view that later thinkers sought to dismantle in favor of relational, ecological, and posthuman understandings of media and existence.