Contributors: Lorainne & Maryam
Media is not merely a medium for communication or for sharing ideas, it is an instrument that shapes how we understand ourselves and the world. From the data we collect about our bodies to the memories we inherit through images and stories, technology helps us determine what it means to be human.
This blog post compares Yoni Van Den Eede’s “Extending ‘Extension’” and Alison Landsberg’s “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner” to explore how media act as extensions of our being. Both authors tackle the idea of an authentic, pre-technological self and introduce the idea that identity is always mediated.
Through Van Den Eede’s philosophical view of self-tracking technologies and Landsberg’s cultural analysis of cinema, we examine how media shapes not only how we perceive the world but how we exist within it.
Landsberg: Memory as Mediated Experience
Landsberg discusses “prosthetic memory,” which is the idea that media, especially films, can give us memories and emotional experiences that we never personally lived through. She uses movies like Blade Runner and Total Recall to show how implanted or artificial memories can still shape who we are and how we act. For her, memory, besides that it’s something that comes from our real lived past, is also something that can be produced by cinema and mass media. These “prosthetic memories” can influence identity, feelings, and even political beliefs. They can make us feel connected to histories or events we never experienced. Therefore, Landsberg argues that the experience we get from media can actually become part of our sense of self and how we understand the world.
Van Den Eede: Technology as Extension
In “Extending ‘Extension’,” Yoni Van Den Eede describes technology as an extension of the human being. He starts with a historical context, discussing early thinkers like Ernst Kapp who viewed tools as externalized organs, and Marshall McLuhan who claimed that all media are extensions of the body and mind. Van Den Eede explains that McLuhan’s view of technology is ambivalent: extensions enhance human capabilities but also bring a form of ‘numbing.’ In extending part of ourselves through technology, we distance ourselves from the bodily or sensory experience that technology takes over and essentially lose sensitivity to that part. McLuhan calls it “autoamputation”, a process wherein technological expansion dulls human perception even as it enables new forms of experience. Van Den Eede suggests that the extension concept can serve as a critical tool for reflecting on the dynamic, interdependent relationship between humans and technology.
Memory vs. Perception – Where Mediation Enters the Self
The first major difference between these two authors is where media intervenes in the subject. Landsberg argues that film, beyond representing the world, writes itself into us through the production of prosthetic memories. She shows that cinema can install memories that “are radically divorced from lived experience and yet motivate his actions” (p. 175). In other words, media becomes experience itself. For Landsberg, the power of prosthetic memory destabilizes the idea that identity comes from some original lived past. She claims that memory is generative, “not a strategy for closing or finishing the past — but on the contrary … propels us not backward but forwards” (p. 176). Her concern is that the trace of the past can now come from media rather than our own lives, which means identity becomes newly vulnerable to design.
Van Den Eede, by contrast, focuses on the level of perception, essentially the way media reconfigures our sensorial relation to the world before memory even forms. He explains McLuhan’s point that technological extensions intensify and unbalance the senses: “Extending the eye, for instance, creates a kind of tension in our visual capacity that is insufferable to us” (p. 158). This sensory overload produces Narcissus “narcosis,” where we “fall in love with the extensions of ourselves in technologies” while remaining unaware that they “really hail ‘from us’” (p. 157). Here, the danger is not really implanted memory. The danger is that our perception of reality itself becomes mediated without us noticing.
Landsberg = media produces identity through memory
Van Den Eede = media shapes the way we perceive before identity is even formed
When we put this together, they both show how media intervenes in the self but on two different levels. Landsberg shows media writes the past into us. Van Den Eede shows media shapes the present sensory field of how we see, feel, and interpret.
Together, they show that media affects what we remember but also what we think counts as reality in the first place.
Authenticity and Identity – We Become Through Media
Van Den Eede points out that the ‘extension’ idea can be misconstrued with the assumption that there is a fixed human self that exists before technology. In “Extending ‘Extension’,” Van Den Eede opens with iJustine’s claim that technology “isn’t just around us. It’s on us. It’s in us. It’s an extension of ourselves” (p. 151), negating the image of a separate human self that technology merely surrounds. He states that the very word extension “already suggests an autonomous, extendable entity to be present before any extension happens” (p. 152). On the contrary, we are not actually independent of technology, but in fact, shaped by it from the very start.
Van Den Eede does not aim to dismiss the extension idea but rather to deepen it, to show that extension is not just a metaphor but a way of understanding how humans live within technological environments. He states that humans and technologies constantly shape each other, changing together over time. In his example of self-tracking technologies, he shows how devices such as the Fitbit transform how people sense, measure, and interpret their own bodies. Rather than simply extending the user’s natural awareness, these devices reconfigure what awareness itself means.
Van Den Eede points out that such devices do more than assist a ready-made subject, they help form the subject itself. As he explains, self-tracking mediates the very self it is supposed to represent, so that technologies shape lives and one’s subjectivity takes shape in relation to the technology (p. 166). For instance, the data the Fitbit collects becomes part of how a person perceives and understands who they are. The device turns the body into something to be interpreted through numbers. As a result, the user begins to see their identity reflected in this data, measuring their sense of health, discipline, and even self-worth through technological metrics rather than inner feeling alone.
Both Van Den Eede and Landsberg question the idea of a fixed, authentic self that exists independent of technology. Landsberg questions the idea of identity as something fixed or organic. In “Prosthetic Memory,” she describes “memories which do not come from a person’s lived experience in any strict sense” (p. 175). Through media, such as film, these prosthetic memories ‘construct an identity’ for the viewer, showing that identity can be built from experiences that are technologically or collectively produced. She adds that “whether those memories come from lived experience or whether they are prosthetic seems to make very little difference. Either way, we use them to construct narratives for ourselves” (p. 186). These prosthetic memories blur the boundary between our authentic and artificial experiences. The self becomes a product of shared, mediated emotions and histories.
Like Van Den Eede’s self-tracking subject, Landsberg’s film viewer is shaped by outside, mediated experiences and technology. Therefore, both writers dismantle the notion of an authentic self beneath technology. As Van Den Eede explains, “one’s subjectivity takes shape in relation to the technology” (p. 166), suggesting that technology doesn’t just add to who we already are, but helps make us who we are. Both authors show that to be human is already to be mediated, and that our sense of self is continually produced through our extensions in media.
The Stakes of a Mediated Identity
In the end, both Landsberg and Van Den Eede show that the boundary we try to protect, the one between the “real” self and the mediated self, no longer exists. We don’t encounter technology after we form a self. We form the self through technology. Our senses, our memories, and our identities already operate through screens, images, sensors, films, and data. And that has consequences.
If media can produce prosthetic memories, then media can also design, curate, and manipulate identity itself. If media extends perception, then media can also subtly redirect the way reality feels without us ever noticing it.
This means we must stop assuming there is some stable, pure, offline “me” that technology acts upon. Instead, we need to recognize that technology is already inside the self, and that the self is already inside technology.
We should stop asking whether media changes us. It always does. The real question is: Who designs the structures that mediate our perception and memory? And what kinds of selves do those structures quietly build?
If we don’t critically reflect on these technologies, if we move through them passively, without questioning how they shape us, then the risk is not only losing authenticity. The risk is losing the ability to even recognize that we have lost it.
Works Cited
Landsberg, Alison. “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner.” Body & Society, vol. 1, no. 3–4, 1995, pp. 175–192.
Van Den Eede, Yoni. “Extending ‘Extension.’” Foundations of Science, vol. 19, 2014, pp. 151–167.
Image credit: Toledo Blade, “How technology is changing our art, our world — and even ourselves,” May 21 2017, https://www.toledoblade.com/business/technology/2017/05/21/How-technology-is-changing-our-art-our-world-and-even-ourselves/stories/20170519185