Are technologies an extension of human beings? Do technologies uplift and support human actions, or do technologies influence and shape the environment of which human beings live? Technology is a human development where humans influenced the use. However, now technology is influencing the human experience. In this essay, there will be a critical analysis of Yoni Van Den Eede’s appraisal of technology as an extension of humans and Alison Landsberg’s concept of the prosthetic memory and how technology influences human experiences. 

In Yoni Van Den Eede’s chapter “Extending Extensions”, he defines technologies as an extension of humans. He dives deeper by defining both the human and our attraction and susceptibility to interdependence of technology, and technology as extensions that render themselves obsolete if put to its extremes, which establishes the dynamic of a feedback loop that is remedied with new media, repeating the cycle. 

In Alison Landsberg’s book Prosthetic Memory, she defines the concept of prosthetic memories, which are memories not “derived from a person’s lived experience” (Landsberg, 2004, p. 25); instead, it is formed through what individuals and communities consume through the propagation of mass cultural technology of memory and mass media, specifically cinema, and with how it “dramatizes or recreates a history he or she did not live” (p. 28). 

From these two readings, an argument emerges of there being a didactic relationship between the human and technology as the human being is necessary to define technology, but technology acts as an extension to the human. Thus, they are constantly informing each other’s perceived objectivity.