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Critical Comparison

What Does Smartphone Actually Mean To Us? — Critical Texts Comparison With Bollmer

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By Micah Sébastien Zhang

The book Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction written by Grant Bollmer in 2019 provided some comprehensive yet innovative perspectives on media studies based on contemporary media atmosphere. In this blog post, we are going to see how Bollmer’s ideas in the book are being reflected and presented in one research essay on the effect and materiality of smartphones.

A Broad Introduction

The research essay by Hananel Rosenberg and Menahem Blondheim primarily focuses on an experiment on the uses of smartphone among teenagers, yet it also provides valuable insights into how we can define the materiality of smartphones, and how are those insights come in contrast of some past, predisposed beliefs.

The researchers firstly gave an overview of the materiality of smartphone. Drawing from the ideas of the Toronto School thinkers Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan — in which they think "media technologies impact the nature of social organization…and the cognitive implications…" — the researchers claim that the functional concept of smartphone has gone "beyond the prosthetic" into a form that serves as a communication organ, which belongs to a figuratively-morphed body as a communication node. The node, in this case smartphone, has come with three natural aspects of being personal, portable, and prosthetic (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.240). It is a key element to understand the smartphone’s contemporary and figurative significance, yet the researchers also acknowledged that it is hard to understand this idea based off the Toronto School’s perspective considering the importance of smartphones in people’s daily lives.

Here, we can see some similar ideas reflected in Bollmer’s book in Chapter 5, in which Bollmer talked about the figurative definition and relationships of objects. Taking from the idea of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, he narrated that using an existing technological object withdraws its materialistic presence from our experiences, forming a "ready-at-hand" concept (Bollmer, p.143). Using an object does not equates to simply having the object as a prosthetic, but morphing it into an unifying experience; this, in my opinion, is reflecting to the point claimed by the essay’s researchers.

Altogether, it seems that we’re getting an intertwined, general idea of the extensive, prosthetic nature of an object, as it was similarly mentioned or claimed by authors of the two scholarly texts with the support from famous thinkers’ ideas. However, the results shown by the research experiment seem to contemplate the concept’s given figurative definition as from a "prosthetic" point of view. To understand this claim better, let’s take a closer look into the research experiment (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.243-245) and its conclusion on results analysis (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.251-252).

The Experiement

The researchers aimed to study the significance of smartphone in daily lives through voluntary deprivation, and they have put their focuses on teenagers. The researchers have chosen 80 teengaers aged 13-18 in Israel as participants; those teenagers all differ in terms of their average amount of smartphone uses and respective living conditions (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.243). The experiment rolled out in several steps: the enrolled participants were first being asked about their cellphone uses, then their parents were being asked to sign a declaration to make sure that they’re keeping their children’s phones away from sight for the entire experimentation period, which is one week. The experiment will play out in several separate experimentation period throughout a year; researchers also asked participants to give daily diaries and do face-to-face interviews to collect information of participants’ sentiments and feelings (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.244).

Some notable parameters of this experiment were also presented. All participants, whether followed the no-phone rules and successfully completed the experiment or not, will be granted NIS 2501 as a reward after each one-week period; researchers said that it’s not to discourage participants from using phones during an emergency (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.244, 245). Plus, participants were not barred from other electronic devices, including TVs, music and video players, tablets, and computers (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.243) as the collection of information is only bound to the variable of absence of phones in daily lives.

The results were a bit unexpected. 79 out of 80 participants have passed the one-week periods without the phone at all, contrasting against the predisposition held by participants that it would be challenging to endure a week without smartphones. Notably, this finding further challenges a prevalent discourse that describes the relationship between smartphones and teenagers as "addictions" (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.245). Participants did also express some senses of uncomfort or peculiar feelings from the deprivation based on the three aforementioned natural aspects — prosthetic, portable, and personal (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.246-248). Nevertheless, some participants also expressed positive feelings when connecting to the physical surroundings and connections away from screens, with some feelings formalized into gratifications for this experiment (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.250-251). The researchers have specifically mentioned this part in the essay’s conclusion, claiming that "alternative venues of attention and activities were embraced, and they yielded gratifications that compensated, to a surprising extent, for missing the smartphone" (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.252).

On the individual level of analysis, and in trying to penetrate media-users’ cognitive state (Levinson 1999; McLuhan 1967), the enhancement of one’s sensory scope by a personal, portable tool with prosthetic-like attributes, certainly “extends” the individual. Yet increasing one’s exposure to the outside world, with all its gratifications, may carry burdens and discontents that can be relieved by a respite — even for a relatively short time—from the constant extension of individuals, and a return to a less-technologically-expanded experiential-intake capacity.

—— Rosenberg & Blondheim (p.252)

"An Intermittent Clone" — A Reflection & Short Conclusion

Drawing from those general ideas and processes — and specifically from the points made by the researchers at their conspectus — the holistic yield provides another perspective on examining the figurative materiality of smartphone. Rather than viewing it simply as a prosthesis, it presents itself more as an intermittent clone that independently coexists with the "host" — the concept of self or ego — considering its socio-cultural capabilities and feasibility of detachment. As the experiment participants expressed that the loss of phones was getting replenished by their physical surroundings and attributes, it is important to reflect on the idea of simply defining smartphones — or even similar electronic devices — as a figurative prothesis. The concept of "prosthetic objects" was granted its characteristics by the uniqueness of its nature; that is, the objects — even if they can work materialistically as prosthetic extensions — only present themselves as irreplacable. Smartphones, on the other hand, come as an unique form of socio-cultural interactions, yet they’re still categorized as physical attributes under the grand scheme of socio-cultural interactions; a phone could work as an crucial tool, yet it doesn’t provide the uniqueness as a figurative prosthesis, which is reflected upon participants’ positive sentiments during the experiment. This feasibility of detachment, we can say, essentially disqualifies the point to view smartphones solely as a figurative prosthesis extended from the body and mind.

The chosen term "intermittent clone" comes in play if we’re reflecting on smartphone’s socio-cultural significance in an up-to-date manner. Smartphones do effectively provide a materialistic and physical entrance to a de-materialized space for humanistic developments, in which physical communications haven evolved into digital forms as compressions from three-dimesional (or even higher) experiences. Such tools serve as a pathway to create a clone (similar to a biological understanding) or clones that are subjugated under different digital socio-cultural constraints and exist independently, with the purpose of recreating real, physical connections. Note that the now-developed landscape of digital social media becomes an alternative to traditional social media, it is more important to re-adjust the scope of study of materiality into a more holistic view.

Copyright Disclaimer

The cover image is distributed under Public Domain and can be found here

Works Consulted

Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2019.

Rosenberg, Hananel, and Menahem Blondheim. “What (Missing) the Smartphone Means: Implications of the Medium’s Portable, Personal, and Prosthetic Aspects in the Deprivation Experience of Teenagers.” The Information Society, vol. 41, no. 4, Apr. 2025, pp. 239–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2025.2490487.

Footnote(s)

  1. NIS stands for New Israel Shekel (ISO 4217 Code: ILS), which is the legal currency used by Israel. Dated to the evening of 2025 November 14, ILS 250 approximately equal to CAD 108.62. ↩

Critical Comparison

Landsberg, Van Den Eede, and Extension through Media

Where the Body Ends

It is widely accepted today that technology has become an extension of the human body and mind. We scroll, track, record, respond, and refresh as automatically as breathing. Devices do not feel like external objects we pick up; they function as parts of our perception, our attention, our memory.

Sherry Turkle argues that we have become “tethered selves”(Turkle, Alone Together 152), living in constant connection to our devices in ways that dissolve the boundary between where our inner life ends and technology begins. We remain perpetually connected, not because we consciously choose to, but because connection has become a condition of contemporary life. Turkle’s point is not just that we depend on our devices, but that they weave themselves into our emotional and cognitive routines so seamlessly that we start to experience their presence as ordinary, even necessary. Her work opens up a larger question that runs through this week’s readings: what happens when technologies stop feeling external and instead operate as part of our inner life?

The well-known concept of the phantom limb—where an amputee still senses a missing arm or hand—suggests that the human body doesn’t simply end at its physical limits. It remembers what used to be there and, sometimes, even imagines what could be. In a similar way, memory \and technology are our phantom limbs–a lingering bodily existence without being physically there. Alison Landsberg, in her theory of prosthetic memory, shows how mass media can implant experiences that feel personally felt even when we never lived them. In contrast, Yoni Van Den Eede turns to the notion of extension, asking not only how technologies become part of us, but how they quietly reshape the boundaries through which we know ourselves and the world.

In that sense, both thinkers are interested in what happens when something non-human becomes internalized. While Landsberg explores outwards asking how memories borrowed elsewhere become part of who we are, Van Den Eede looks inward and asks how our bodies morph around the technologies we adopt.  We already know, from the phantom limb, that the body can extend beyond itself. But extension asks a different question: what happens when that extension becomes so ordinary that we no longer notice it?

Landsberg: Prosthetic Memory

In Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner, Alison Landsberg argues that modern mass media—especially cinema—creates “prosthetic memories”, which she defines as “memories which do not come from a person’s lived experience in any strict sense” and which may nevertheless “motivate his actions” and shape identity (Landsberg 175). Landsberg begins with the 1908 Edison film The Thieving Hand, where a prosthetic arm “has memories of its own” and turns an innocent beggar into a thief because the arm’s memories “prescribe actions in the present”(175). This example establishes her central claim of how memory has always been mediated, and cinema makes visible how memories not grounded in lived experience still “construct an identity.”

In Total Recall, she demonstrates how implanted memories undermine the necessity that identity must be rooted in the “real”. Douglas Quade learns that his entire life is just a memory implant though the film says authenticity is irrelevant: “Is realer necessarily better?” she asks, noting that Quade’s simulated identity is ultimately “more responsible, compassionate and productive than the ‘real’ one” (183). Landsberg uses this film to show how memories, regardless of origin, become “public” through media, and that the distinction between lived and prosthetic memories is often indiscernible. 

In Blade Runner, Landsberg argues that replicants’ humanity hinges not on biology but memory. The Voight–Kampff test exposes replicants not because they lack empathy but because they lack “a past, the absence of memories” (184). In other words, although Rachel’s photographic evidence of her childhood fails to prove anything, her implanted memories nevertheless allow her to feel, to choose, and to love. Even Deckard may be a replicant; the unicorn dream sequence suggests that his memories are equally prosthetic, and the dividing line between the human and the machine has disappeared. Ultimately, Landsberg’s instances convey one central message: that humans continually construct themselves through narratives, many of which come from cinema. And that narrative is empathetic rather than authentic.

Van Den Eede: Extending Extension

In Extending “Extension” (2014), Yoni Van Den Eede revisits the familiar claim that technologies act as “extensions” of the human body, a phrase that has often been repeated so casually that its conceptual weight gets lost. His starting point is Marshall McLuhan’s observation that we routinely misrecognize our own technological creations as if they were external, foreign objects. This misrecognition is not accidental but the result of what McLuhan calls the Narcissus narcosis: a numbness that prevents us from seeing media as “highly identifiable objects made by our own bodies” (158) . Like Narcissus failing to recognize his own reflection, we cannot perceive that technologies originate from us, nor do we notice the slow, creeping ways they gradually act upon us in return.

Van Den Eede explains that media emerge because older technologies create “irritations” that need to be relieved. When a new medium arrives to counter these pressures, it amplifies certain human capacities, what McLuhan calls “enhancement” but this amplification disrupts the balance among the senses, producing strain and, eventually, numbness (158–159).

To clarify what extension entails, Van Den Eede turns to McLuhan’s well-known “tetrad,” the framework that proposes that every medium “enhances something, obsolesces something, retrieves something previously lost, and, when pushed far enough, reverses into its opposite” (160). In thinking about self-tracking devices, Van Den Eede frames them as extensions of a specific human ability: the basic capacity to sense what is going on inside our own bodies. Tools like FitBits or sleep monitors don’t invent new forms of awareness so much as magnify the ones we already have, making patterns of fatigue, movement, or rest suddenly measurable and visible (162). The more we depend on quantified readings to tell us how we feel, the easier it becomes to discount forms of embodied knowledge that can’t be turned into step counts or sleep graphs. In this sense, extension and diminishment happen simultaneously: self-tracking heightens one mode of perception while quietly dulling another (165–66).

Seeing and Not Seeing

Although Landsberg and Van Den Eede both begin from the idea that media penetrate the boundaries of the human, the direction and implications of their arguments diverge sharply. What becomes clear, when placing them side by side, is that each identifies a distinct “blind spot” in contemporary mediated life, and reading them together reveals what we cannot see when considering either text alone.

For Van Den Eede, our primary blindness stems from not recognizing the true origin of media. Technologies emerge from us, as extensions of our senses and cognitive capacities, yet the moment they begin to shape us, “we lose sight of their origin” (Van Den Eede 158). This produces the Narcissus narcosis, a dulling of our ability to perceive the “why” and “how” of technological influence. As media amplify certain functions, they “put a strain on our sensory balance,” producing the discomfort and eventual numbness that lead to auto-amputation (158–159). His concern is epistemological: technologies blind us through familiarity. The concept of extension, he argues, is valuable precisely because it offers “an exercise of critical awareness,” training us to expect unknown effects rather than assuming media will be transparent or harmless (168). He urges us to remain suspended between reliance and skepticism.

Landsberg identifies nearly the opposite problem. The blindness she describes is not the result of the media being “too familiar” but of their ability to create experiences that feel authentic without truly being one’s history. Cinema becomes “a special site for the production and dissemination of prosthetic memories,” enabling individuals to internalize memories “not from one’s lived experience in any strict sense” (Landsberg 176). This is not numbness but absorption: viewers identify so intensely with mediated narratives that they step outside habitual behavior and experience reality through borrowed memories. Memory becomes “less about verifying the past and more about generating possible action in the present” (183). Van Den Eede fears we will stop noticing technology; Landsberg fears we will stop noticing ourselves.

Set side by side, the two theorists reveal approaches to mediated life that diverge in emphasis yet intersect in revealing ways. Van Den Eede warns that technologies become invisible too quickly, encouraging passive, unexamined reliance. Landsberg suggests that the media makes experience too vivid, drawing us into emotional identifications that may feel more real than lived memory.

Seen alongside Sherry Turkle’s “tethered self,” the accounts of Van Den Eede and Landsberg suggest that extension is never just about seeing more, it slowly teaches us how to see, training us to read ourselves through data or mediated memories even when our bodies or lived histories might be telling us something else entirely.

Works Cited 

Landsberg, Alison. “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner.” Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, edited by Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, Sage, 1995, pp. 175–192.

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books, 2011.

Van Den Eede, Yoni. “Extending ‘Extension.’” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, edited by K. Verbeek and C. Mitcham, Lexington Books, 2014, pp. 151–172.

Written by: Nicole Jiao and Gina Chang

Cover art: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/160300067977983085/

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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

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Extension and Implantation: Where Media Lives in Us

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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

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What Alison Landsberg and Van Den Eede Teach Us About Technology

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Nowadays, we are seeing emerging technologies like the Apple Vision Pro, Fitbits, and Oura Rings, which are making our senses increasingly extended and reshaped by digital media. This begs the question as to whether or not our senses are being strengthened or even manipulated due to technology. Alison Landsberg, in “Prosthetic Memory” (1995) and Yoni Van Den Eede in “Extending Extension” (2014), question how we understand the relationship between humans and media. Landsberg sees media as a “prosthetic”, technology that inserts itself into ourselves, affecting our mind and body (Landsberg 175). On the other hand, Van Den Eede sees media as an extension that expands and redefines what it means for us to be “human” (Van Den Eede, 151). Though their ideas are slightly different, each reveals how media and technology may not be neutral tools, presenting media as the active players in shaping us as modern humans. In an increasingly mediated world, their discussions depict how representation and interface influence our identity, control, and perception in an increasingly mediated world.

Landsberg: Prosthetic Memory

In “Prosthetic Memory,” Allison Landsberg begins by presenting the idea that cinema and mass media can implant memories in audience members and viewers, reshaping their identity, even though these recollections never truly occurred to them in real life. Landsberg defines these as “memories which do not come from a person’s lived experience in any strict sense”, but are still real nonetheless (175). The media we consume, including film, television, and social media content, can make us feel as if we are living in someone else’s experiences rather than just following their narrative. As Landsberg explains, cinema is “aware of its ability to generate experiences and to install memories of them ― memories which become experiences that film consumers both possess and feel possessed by” (176). Landsberg explained this idea using the film The Thieving Hand (1908), a story that follows a one-armed man who is given an artificial limb that causes him to steal from people against his will (175). Just like how technology can create and amplify our experiences, oftentimes, it is extended too far, where there is a loss of control. In this case, media can write images, feelings, and experiences into our minds that were never ours. Now, our screens can edit our sense of who we are, rewritten by the cultural technologies we consume, whether we like it or not. Especially where the algorithm feeds AI content, Landsberg’s argument that media “implants” memories is a cautionary tale that every image or video we encounter, real or fake, has the possibility to rewire who we think we are. 

Eede: Critical Awareness towards “Extension”

In Extending “Extension”, Eede mainly discusses the relationship between technology and the human being by applying the idea proposed by Marshall McLuhan – technology is the extension of the human being – and uses this as a way to call on the public to perceive technology in a more critical way. 

Eede points out that modern researchers often look at technology under an “external” context: “technologies and humans are seen here as independent entities, and the relation between them—the extension—as an external supplement to both.”(Eede, 156) This approach only leads to two extreme directions in which one side relies on technology blindly while the other side completely rejects it. 

To look at technology in a more practical sense one needs to accept that technology is not only “simple intermediaries” or a tool for humans to use but also acts as a source of influence that co-shapes human beings. To internally approach technology, one has to accept that we have already intertwined with technology, though one should remember to trust their own thinking rather than technology, despite its convenience in many aspects. At the same time, according to Eede, technology is also self-tracking and constantly shifting its position in the human-technological relationship and the boundaries between it and humans. This goes back to Eede’s promotion in critical thinking in a time when everyone needs to have awareness when it comes to treating technology.

Common ground and relations

Eede and Landsburg both made similar statements along with their main ideas when it comes to human-media relations. Eede emphasized on the fact that technology and media can influence and co-shape human beings, and that technology today should be seen as an internal element for humans since they can reflect and intervene with what people think they originally thought. The idea similar, or even can be considered an continual to “extending the mind through technology” can be found in Landsburg’s works, in which he describes how human memories can be influenced by what they watch on different media outlets and so “tricking” the mind to accept them as part of reality – consciously or subconsciously. In both works, the authors try to raise the awareness amongst the public to see media and technology in a more critical way. 

Main differences

While both thinkers see media as a force that is entangled with human experiences, they approach these ideas from different perspectives. Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory depicts media entering our bodies and creating emotional memories that are not ours. On the other hand, Eede focuses on media as an entity that is “an extension of ourselves” (151), rather than media being inserted into us. His perspective is loyal to McLuhan’s thinking about media as “technology is an extension of the human being, of human organs, body parts, senses, capabilities, and so on. ” (153). For Eede, media stretches and reshapes our sensory boundaries; it changes the way we move, see, and act in the world.

Landsberg emphasizes how media implants memories and emotions, while Eede is concerned in how media transforms our abilities in perception and our abilities as humans. Lansberg approaches media with more regard for its ability to emotionally penetrate ourselves with new memories, producing empathy and identity through what she calls the “unsettled boundaries between real and simulated ones” (174). In contrast, Eede’s priority in his thinking is not about emotional manipulation but about our loss of understanding of how media shape us while we use them, which is becoming increasingly unclear. Eede mentions technology itself creates a “fog to distort our sight; a blindness we are victim to or, even more precisely, an inability to assess the “why” and the ‘how’ of technologies in an immediate and direct way, at a glance so to speak.” (168). 

Contextualizing in Media Theory

Landsberg and Eede remind us that media are not just things that we consume, because it is a heavy influence on how we think, feel, and behave. We’ve often returned to McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message.” Van Den Eede explicitly extends this saying, while Landsberg adds by presenting the implantation of memories and emotion. This shows that modern media can impact us from many directions, both outward and inward.

Even further, Ingold’s mention of correspondence in Making or Gibson’s “education of attention” also applies here. According to Ingold, our perception arises through actively interacting with materials. Then, for Gibson, we observe affordances that invite us to act. Landsberg’s ideas similarly lean toward feeling through film’s affordances, while Van Den Eede’s extensions demand continual adaptation to technology.

Conclusion

Both of the readings emphasized on the importance of critical thinking with media and technology, and in a society filled with advertisements, new technology and implementations of various ideas from billions of people, critical awareness and consideration to accepting these information are indeed of vital importance. Meanwhile, not easily accepting the provided ideas also extends to the researching grounds – taking in the ideas and reminders from Eede and Landsburg, implementing them as an “extension” to our own thoughts and memories entirely without critical consideration is probably not what the authors would like to see, either. Indeed, our knowledge should come from our own interactions with materials, and this should be kept in mind in both interactions with the passages by Eede and Landsburg as well as with media and technology in our daily lives. 

References

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 et al., Lexington Books, 2014, pp. 151–164.

Image: Pierznik, Christopher. “Our Brains Can’t Handle Technology.” Medium, 5 June 2019, https://medium.com/the-passion-of-christopher-pierznik-books-rhymes/our-brains-cant-handle-technology-8dfabe90505d

Contributers:

Siming Liao, Aubrey Ventura