Both Alison Landsberg and Yoni Van Eede write from a place of entanglement, where technology is not simply around us, but within us. Each challenges the old mind–matter divide that assumes human thought exists apart from its material and technological conditions. They both see media as more than intermediary; it is what shapes and sustains consciousness itself.

Landsberg’s Prosthetic Memory describes how media , especially cinema, implants emotion and shared experience into the self, while Van Eede’s Extending Extensions explores how technologies form part of the mind, shaping perception and behavior. Between them lies a shared argument that humans are already hybrid, even post-human. What differs is how they imagine our awareness of this condition: Landsberg writes of the emotional pull, while Van Eede turns to its reflective possibilities. If media can implant, extend, and even compose us, how aware are we of that exchange?

Feeling Through Media

Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory captures how mass media allows individuals to feel experiences they have not personally lived. Watching a historical film, for example, implants the emotional memory of an event the viewer never witnessed. Through this process, media acts like a prosthesis — attaching memory, empathy, and identification to those otherwise disconnected from an experience.

 “Because the movie experience decenters lived experience, it, too, might alter or construct identity. Emotional possession has implications for both the future and the past of the individual under its sway.” (Blumer as qtd. by Landsberg, 180)

Memory, for Landsberg, is not just psychological; it is technological. The screen becomes an external “organ” that creates the illusion of personal memory and belonging. By exploring that distance between subject and medium, she challenges mind–body dualism: memory is not solely internal, but mediated by other (external) sources.

Yet, both authors understand that the process is mostly unconscious. Media does something to us — it enters, implants, and transforms. Landsberg’s tone is both hopeful and cautious, arguing that while prosthetic memories can build empathy and awareness, they can also shape collective identity without our explicit recognition. Media’s influence, for her, is affective first and reflective only later, if at all.

Extending Consciousness

Van Eede begins where Landsberg ends,  with the realization that technology is not external but “technologies make up a part of consciousness” (154). Building on McLuhan’s idea of media as extensions of man, Van Eede redefines extension as a loop: technologies don’t just reach outward, they circle back, structuring how we perceive and behave.

Self-tracking, nudging, and algorithmic feedback are examples of this recursive relationship. The device doesn’t merely record behavior; it co-produces it. “Technologies are not neutral instruments,” Van Eede writes, “they help to reveal and conceal facts of human life” (156). Each medium highlights certain aspects of our existence while obscuring others.

Most importantly, he argues that “we perceive technologies as foreign material… and remain oblivious of the fact that they really hail ‘from us’” (157–158). Our tools feel external, but they are built from our own human desires — for efficiency, connection, knowledge. Van Eede reframes agency: technology acts with us, not on us. Awareness becomes an ethical act — recognizing our own reflection in the systems we use.

Implant and Extension

Both writers dismantle the notion of technological neutrality. Media are not inert intermediaries but active parts of the human condition. Yet their models of mediation differ.

Landsberg’s prosthesis functions through insertion: media implants experience and emotion, working from the outside in. Van Eede’s extension functions through reflection: media emerges from us and reshapes us in return. The first is affective, the second cognitive. One emphasizes empathy, the other awareness.

In this way, Landsberg’s subject is moved by media — affected, sometimes unknowingly. Van Eede’s subject participates in mediation — aware, though not entirely in control. Read together, they map a full circuit: media enters us, becomes part of us, and then returns to influence how we act and think.

This in-between space is where our current digital condition resides. We feel history through film and news cycles, while our devices quietly record and respond to those feelings. The prosthetic and the extended coexist. They are emotional absorption paired with technological reflexivity.

Learning 

For media theorists, comparing Landsberg and Van Eede reveals how mediation moves beyond representation to become constitutive of selfhood. Each challenges the fantasy of separation between human and machine.

McLuhan’s claim that media are extensions of man is deepened by both thinkers: Landsberg shows how extension enters the emotional register, while Van Eede shows how it rewires thought itself. Hayles’s posthumanism has a stake here, too, describing the human as a system already distributed across biological and technological forms. And Bollmer’s notion of technological agency is a vital part of the conclusions of both Landsberg and Van Eede; media are not neutral but co-actors in creating and influencing media.

If Landsberg gives us feeling without full consciousness, Van Eede gives us consciousness without much feeling. Together, they suggest that the ethical study of media must hold both: affect and reflection, empathy and awareness. Prosthetic memory helps us connect to others’ experiences, but Van Eede’s ideas of extensions remind us to question how that connection is structured and to what end.

In other words, Landsberg shows how technology allows us to feel through media; Van Eede shows how it allows us to think with it. One pulls us inward, the other outward, and both redefine what it means to be human in an age where memory and perception are increasingly outsourced to our devices.

The Technologies That Hail From Us

Both writers disagree with the notion that technology stands apart from us. Media no longer just represents or records our lives; they compose them. As Van Eede writes, these technologies “hail from us” — they originate from our own human impulses, even as they change what those impulses mean.

Landsberg captures the emotional weight of that realization; the capacity to feel the world through mediated experience. Van Eede captures its ethical weight; the demand to recognize that our technologies reveal and conceal who we are.

In the end, their work converges on a single idea — that mediation is not something that happens to us or through us, but as us. Our consciousness is already prosthetic, already extended. To live critically in this condition means acknowledging both how media makes us feel and how it quietly teaches us to think and behave. Only then can we begin to see the technologies that shape us as what they’ve been all along: reflections of ourselves, and always changing.

Works Cited

Bollmer, Grant David. Introduction to Media Studies: Concepts, Theories, and Methods. Routledge, 2019.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Landsberg, Alison. “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner.” Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, edited by Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, SAGE Publications, 1995, pp. 175–186.

Van Den Eede, Yoni. “Extending ‘Extension’: A Reappraisal of the Technology-as-Extension Idea through the Case of Self-Tracking Technologies.” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, edited by Pieter Vermaas, Peter-Paul Verbeek, and Anthonie Meijers, Lexington Books, 2014, pp. 151–164.

Written by Allie Demetrick

Image sourced from A Clockwork Orange 1971