Monthly Archives: November 2025

Other

The Self Is Formed Through Technology

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

Other

Ingold, Conneller, and the Materials of Creation

3 Comments

If there is one foundational argument in all of Ingold’s Making, it would be the one presented in Chapter 2: Materials of Life. The book explores our relationship with the act of “making” through many mediums, but in this chapter, he focuses on the materials themselves, centered around the idea that it is not a project’s surrounding idea that creates it, but rather, the engagement with both materials and consciousness. In order to solidify this argument further, he cites the work of Chantal Conneller, whose 2011 book An Archaeology of Materials: Substantial Transformations in Early Prehistoric Europe prescribes concepts to Ingold that elevate his argument to a higher level of understanding- namely, the return of alchemy.

Project v. Growth

Before we begin to characterize Conneller, however, we must recap Ingold first. And this chapter can be best illustrated by a graph he provides. Two vertical lines parallel each other- one stands for a flow of consciousness, the other is a flow of materials. Then, the flow of consciousness stops to form an image, while the flow of materials stops to form an object. But instead of letting these stoppages occur and resolve naturally, we have instead formed a new connection, one where ideas and objects feed off the flows of consciousness and materials, instead of letting the natural movement of both create on their own accord. (Ingold, 20)

The diagram of consciousness, image, materials, objects. (Ingold, 20)

This is a view that Ingold and many others characterize as hylomorphism, a theory by Aristotle that creates an object from start to finish with a predetermined purpose, function, and amount of raw material. It is this to which, Ingold states, we are accustomed to- the concept of making as a project. But rather, he proposes a new way of thinking; that is, viewing making as a process of growth, an interaction with the world of materials, an intervention in worldly processes. Instead of having an ouroboros of images and objects reign supreme without paying mind to the matter that constitues them, they should be formed as natural interventions within both- not wanting to know what will occur when consciousness and materials collide, but waiting in anticipation for the result of them doing so. (Ingold, 20) And in order to do that, we need to stop viewing materials through the lens of chemistry, and instead through the lens of alchemy.

About Chantal Conneller

This perspective of alchemy is one that Conneller has focused on for quite some time, in her position as an archaeologist and a professor of early prehistory at the University of Newcastle. With a focus on the mesolithic period, her book An Archaeology of Materials: Substantial Transformations in Early Prehistoric Europe helps to shift the view of materials away from one that fuels an image or its object, but as a unique form of matter with its own qualities and manifestation. Within this book, she argues that materials cannot be understood by one singular, all-encompassing, rigid definition, but rather through the social, cultural, and technical practices in which they are appropriated. (Conneller) And this perspective is one best understood by one who works with materials for a living, one who studies the art of alchemy.

One key example by Conneller is the differences in the characterization of gold- for a chemist, gold is a periodic element and has a form different from its physical manifestation. But for the alchemist, gold is a yellow, shining matter that glows brighter under water and can have its shape transformed- and the definition of gold is applicable to anything that fits the subject criteria. (Ingold, 29) This difference is key to Conneller’s main argument- “different understandings of materials are not simply “concepts” set apart from “real” properties; they are realised in terms of different practices that themselves have material effects.” Just because one material has a specific composition does not mean it is limited to it- instead, the alchemist views the material by “what it does, specifically when mixed with other materials, treated in particular ways, or placed in particular situations.” (Ingold, 29)

Chemical Ignorance

When comparing Ingold and Conneller to one another, parallels start to form- where Ingold expresses skepticism against the loop of image and object feeding into one another, Conneller directly warns against using one context of a material as a universal definition for all others. It is the same point- one conclusion on an idea or material cannot be used as a basis of knowledge for other forms of matter. Both consciousness and materials are vast in their complexity, difference, and position in space and time- no two forms of matter are ever the same. 

And where Conneller proposes a shift to view materials as not singular categories, but amorphous forms that shift with the winds of time and context, Ingold uses this logic as a platform to propose his own shift; a shift that begins to view the act of making as a multifaceted processes that observes and intervenes in the world around us, specific to time and place. One practice, as Conneller observes, is not a basis on which one can interpret and make conclusions upon another. Instead these practices differ immensely in their purpose, their interaction with the world around it, and the final artifact they happen to create. (Ingold, 29) Everything in the act of creation, according to Ingold, is relative to the world around it- Conneller just so happens to agree.

Conclusions

To summarize, ideas and objects cannot blindly survive on their own- an awareness and a centering of creation must be shifted back to consciousness and materials. In doing so, we are giving these materials sentience and life, gifting them a wide-varying, complex definition that shifts with the practice and purpose they are used for. Conneller encourages creators to, instead of viewing materials solely through their form, view them through their process, intervene in their evolution, create with them in the forefront of their mind. Both ideas, like the diagram of creation theorized by Ingold, work in tandem to produce one another- where consciousness and materials collide and swirl to create images and objects, Conneller’s theory of material context supports and validates Ingold’s rally to indeed, shift our thinking by a quarter term- view the act of creation not as a project to be completed, but as an interaction to be mediated and observed.

Sources

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge, 12 Apr. 2013.

Conneller, Chantal. An Archaeology of Materials: Substantial Transformations in Early Prehistoric Europe. Routledge, 28 Mar. 2012.

Other

Between Noise and Making: Re-Thinking Eco through New Materialisms

Response to Leadle,  Noise versus Knowledge: Umberto Eco on the Internet: https://blogs.ubc.ca/mdia300/archives/category/critical-response.

In their post “Noise versus Knowledge: Umberto Eco on the Internet,” Leadle revisits Eco’s warning that information overload risks turning meaning into mere noise. She connects his critique of digital excess with our own scrolling habits, describing how constant exposure to fragmented posts and updates produces a kind of semiotic overfeeding. I found her reflection especially compelling because it saturates Eco’s theory in lived experience: the daily cycle of consuming, forgetting, and repeating online. Yet Leadle also resists framing technology as purely destructive. Drawing on Renata Kristo and Sherry Turkle, she shows that digital media can both scatter and sustain us,  a tension Eco himself recognized when he created Encyclomedia to teach with, rather than against, the web. Her post ends with a call for mindful media use, suggesting that meaning can still be preserved if we approach technology consciously.

This nuanced reading of Eco captures why his ideas feel so urgent today. Still, I think Eco’s distinction between information and knowledge can be expanded using more recent perspectives on new materialism and ecological thinking. Where Eco sees “noise” as the collapse of meaning under too much data, theorists like Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Garber invite us to look at abundance not as loss, but as process, a field of relations where knowledge is continuously made. Their work reframes digital overload as something living and interactive rather than chaotic and destructive. Reading Leadle’s post through this lens helps us move from Eco’s anxiety about excess toward an understanding of media as ecological and participatory.

From Materiality to Materials

Eco’s metaphor of semiotic overfeeding suggests that the digital world saturates us with signs detached from their original context. Leadle develops this by calling the internet a hypertext of our own making, where memory is constantly overwritten. This reminds me of Ingold’s essay Materials Against Materiality (2007), where he argues that scholars have focused too much on the abstract idea of “materiality” rather than on the materials themselves,  the substances that flow, shift, and transform. For Ingold, nothing in the world is ever still; every material is caught up in a continual flux of becoming.

If we apply this to Eco, information is not simply a pile of detached signs. It’s more like a stream of interacting materials, images, words, code, pixels,  each carrying histories and potentials. From this view, the problem isn’t that there’s too much information, but that we often treat it as static content instead of living matter that requires engagement. Ingold might say that Eco’s fear of noise stems from imagining media as finished objects rather than as ongoing processes of formation. Knowledge doesn’t disappear in movement; it emerges from it.

Leadle’s post resonates with this shift when she describes her laptop as both Eco’s nightmare and Newitz’s dream. That ambivalence,  technology as distraction yet also memory,  captures exactly what Ingold calls the correspondence between humans and materials. We do not simply use devices; we think through them, shaping and being shaped in return.

Ecology of Meaning

Ingold expands on this idea in Toward an Ecology of Materials (2012), suggesting that materials are perpetually interconnected, forming an ecology rather than a mere assortment of objects. Thinking ecologically involves focusing on the movements of energy, time, and matter that link humans, technologies, and environments. When Leadle expresses feeling overwhelmed by semiotic excess, Ingold might argue that the objective isn’t to escape the current but to learn to navigate it, fostering an awareness of its patterns

This perspective transforms Eco’s noise into something more dynamic. The endless content of the internet becomes a living medium, a shifting landscape of meanings, algorithms, and affects. We might still feel overwhelmed, but the solution is not less information; it’s better correspondence with the materials of information itself. In other words, meaning is ecological: it arises through ongoing adjustment, not control.

Making, Knowing, and Intra-Action

Elizabeth Garber’s “Objects and New Materialisms: A Journey Across Making and Living With Objects” (2019) extends this line of thought. She argues that objects and humans exist in intra-action (a term from Karen Barad),  they co-create one another through making. Materials aren’t passive; they have agency that calls for response. Garber writes that “making is a form of knowing,” because working with materials teaches us how they think.

Leadle’s reflection on scrolling, remembering, and forgetting can be reinterpreted through Garber’s framework. When we interact with our devices, we are not just consuming media; we are constantly making meaning with it,  arranging feeds, curating profiles, remixing content. Even the so-called noise of the internet might be understood as a collective process of making, where knowledge is distributed across humans and technologies.

This doesn’t erase Eco’s concern about misinformation, but it reframes it. If we see media as active matter rather than as neutral carriers of information, the responsibility shifts from filtering noise to engaging ethically with the ecologies that produce it. Knowledge becomes less about storage and more about relationships,  about staying attentive to how our interactions with digital materials shape what and how we know.

Re-evaluating Eco’s “Noise”

Leadle ends her post by saying she wants to think with the media without letting anyone else think for me. That sentiment perfectly captures the bridge between Eco’s skepticism and new materialist optimism. Eco was right that the internet challenges our ability to discern meaning, but Ingold and Garber show that meaning has never been something stable to begin with. It’s always been made through our entanglements with materials, ink, paper, screen, or code.

From this view, noise is not the enemy of knowledge but its condition of possibility. The excess of digital life forces us to negotiate meaning continually, to make and remake understanding in relation to the materials that surround us. Rather than Eco’s image of drowning in information, we might imagine ourselves swimming,  sometimes struggling, sometimes graceful,  within a sea of ongoing correspondence.

Conclusion

Leadle’s reading of Eco opens a vital conversation about attention, memory, and media saturation. Building on her insights through Ingold and Garber helps us see that the internet’s overflow doesn’t only fragment knowledge; it also sustains new forms of making and thinking. Meaning, like matter, is never still. It moves with us, through our screens, our hands, our networks. The challenge is not to escape the noise but to listen within it, to recognize that even in the clutter of feeds and pixels, the world of materials is still teaching us how to think.

sources used:

Critical Response

Making… In a Silent Search

2 Comments

Tactility and silence are essential conditions of meaningful learning. The blog post, “In a Silent Search: Reflection on Umberto Eco’s Library of the World”, by Maryam Abusamak, is a film analysis of the documentary, Umberto Eco: A Library of the World (2022), directed by Davide Ferrario. In this blog post, Abusamak summarizes the core themes of the documentary; she demonstrates how the library of the famous philosopher, Umberto Eco, acts as a meaningful tool of knowledge production. She proves that in an information-saturated world, this biographical film demonstrates the importance of learning slowly and selectively. To extend her analysis, I propose that this film also exemplifies the cruciality of knowing through being, a concept explained in Tim Ingold’s book, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture. Through connecting Abusamak’s analysis to Ingold’s framework, I aim to show the importance of learning independently and critically through slow-paced and tactile methods; this message is especially important in a world where mis- and disinformation is instantaneously available through simple clicks.

Both Eco and Ingold illustrate inanimate objects as living beings. Interacting with these beings achieves meaningful knowledge production. I place emphasis on the word “with”, as Ingold repeatedly encourages the reader to not think “of” but “with” objects (8). Abusamak perceives Eco’s library, as presented in the documentary, as a “living organism” that “binds matter, meaning, and mediation”. In each book, “matter and meaning are inseparable”, demonstrating Ingold’s view that knowledge is made “in correspondence” with a material rather than extracted “from” it (94, 8). To Ingold, objects are alive due to their everchanging state; a building is never fully completed, as it will experience reconstructions, mold removal, and repainting over time (48), and a statue changes continuously, as it is chiseled by its artist and eventually “worn down by rain” (22). Abusamak’s interpretation of Eco’s library exemplifies this concept metaphorically and physically. She describes his library as a “living system of technical memory”, as well as “living matter” made of “ink” and “paper” (Abusamak). As a result, the individual who peruses this library acts as a maker of knowledge among a collection of living beings. Therefore, Eco’s library exemplifies Ingold’s view by acting as a “world of active materials” in which the maker is a “participant” (Ingold 21).

Furthermore, Eco’s library exemplifies Ingold’s view that tactile mediums enable nonconformist learning. Within her blog post, Abusamak claims the library exemplifies Stiegler’s concept of  “epiphylogenesis”–the recording of human evolution through “tools, marks and traces we create” (qtd. in Abusamak). These physical traces externalize memories which survive “across generations” (Abusamak). While Eco favours tactile media consumption, Ingold favours tactile media-making; he believes handwriting, handdrawing, “weaving, lacemaking and embroidery” portray “the stories of the world” (112). He states that human knowledge production should replicate the “ongoing movement of” handdrawn and handwritten lines (Ingold 140). Furthermore, he does not praise “straight-line people” who run from point “A to B” (Ingold 140), but instead promotes “pack-donkey people” who “wander” and learn through “self-discovery” (140, 141). Rather than pursuing a linear path leading from “idea” to “action”, he embraces learning through instinct and curiosity (Ingold 140). This idea is upheld by Eco’s library, which “resists the linear order and embraces the chaos of curiosity” (Abusamak). Altogether, Eco’s library promotes knowing through being; its collection of non-chronological memories embraces the whimsical, unconventional learning promoted by Ingold.

Lastly,  Eco’s library and Ingold’s theory express skepticism towards virtual learning. According to Eco, “clicking a button” brings about a “bibliography of 10,000 titles” that is “worthless” due to its sheer ubiquity; however, if one discovered three library books, they “would read them… and learn something” (qtd. in Abusamak). Ingold agrees with this statement; he believes modern consumers abandon learning as soon as they “[fill] [their] bags” with information (5). Like Eco, he condemns the mindless clicks produced by our fingers. He states that when ubiquitous information “is at our fingertips” it is simultaneously “out of our hands” (122). Additionally, he promotes Heidegger’s views of the “hand” as a symbol of sentience; when it writes with pen, “it tells” (Ingold 122). Therefore, he argues traditional penmen produce emotional “gesture and inscription”, while modern typists do not “feel” their “letters” (Ingold 122, 123).  He shows that in order to generate true making, we must engage the entire human hand, rather than press buttons that enable machinic processes. To Ingold and Eco, technological advancement, sensitive to the touch of our fingertips, has decimated emotionally-engaged learning and impactful media consumption.

In a distracting, information-saturated world, Eco and Ingold emphasize the importance of learning through instinctual, nonconformist, and tactile means. Rather than gathering ubiquitous information through a mindless press of a button, individuals must attentively engage with physical materials to produce meaningful knowledge. As Abusamak states, Eco’s philosophy “challenges the illusion that more information equals more knowledge”; instead he attributes intellect to thinking slowly and selectively. According to Abusamak, Eco’s library relates to our curriculum through its transformation of media theory into “something we can see and feel”; her physical description of Eco’s library and its ability to evoke curiosity demonstrates the importance of slow, tactile learning. As a result, Eco’s library is an example of a tool that enacts Ingold’s concept of “knowing” occurring “at the heart of being” (6). Instead of instantaneously summoning innumerous sources of digestible information, we can engage directly with a physical environment, such as that of a library, to independently conceive truth.

Works Cited

Abusamak, Maryam. In a Silent Search: Reflection on Umberto Eco’s Library of the World, UBC Blogs, 9 Oct 2025, https://blogs.ubc.ca/mdia300/archives/394 .


Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203559055.

Image Taken by Emily Shin (Page 83 of George Orwell’s 1984)

Post Written by Emily Shin

Other

Extension and Implantation: Where Media Lives in Us

1 Comment

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