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Escaped Hell by the Skin of my Teeth: Semiotic Systems and Context

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“Uh- Just the usual. Totally wing it, risk life and limb escape by the skin of my teeth.” – Gnomeo & Juliet (2011) 

If one imagines “by the skin of my teeth”, literally, a visceral image can be imagined. Usually, it is not taken as a literal term and is only used as an idiom to describe something else. The saying “by the skin of my teeth” is usually spoken as an expression to describe a narrow escape. However, this idiom is only the latest iteration in the evolution of the term. The original term “I escaped with only the skin of my teeth” was first used in the Bible, in the passage Job 19:20, where he was left with only himself and gained nothing. “By the skin of my teeth” and other idioms pertain to the study of semiotic systems, systems of signs and symbols (language), which can apply Roland Barthes’ concept of denotation and connotation in semiotic systems.

Denotation

In Roland Barthes’ book Elements of Semiology, Barthes describes denotation as the literal; recognizable images that consist of the literal object. Thus, when using the idiom “by the skin of my teeth” as something literal, one may imagine an image like this: 

[imagine a photo of a layer of skin over a set of teeth]

image created by Bridghet Wood

Gross, right? For Barthes, denotation was the first step in a semiotic system of a two part model which describes a transformation of messages (Griffin, 2012).  A denotation is a single-step process from an object to its literal meaning, the signifier to the signified. It is a sign that requires a minimal amount of context to understand. This object is called “an apple” and it is accepted. However, it starts to get more complicated when the literal words start to mean something different. 

Connotation 

Connotations are the second part of Barthes’ two-part model, where the already signified object is reinterpreted as a signifier, which ultimately makes a sign (Griffin 2012). In other words, there are initial signs that are literal, which mean the definitional meaning of the signified, and signs that represent a meaning in the actual-use of life. This is the progression of denotations and connotations. Therefore, when the term “by the skin of my teeth” is used, it is not about gums, but it is about a narrow escape. The different meaning is a result of overlapping perspectives that a semiotic system, of which a community has in common, provides. One cannot differentiate a literal meaning of a term versus an ironic one, unless there is context that provides the knowledge to know how to differentiate the two. 

Systems of Context 

What is the process where detonations become connotations? The Bible depicts the tale of Job, a righteous man that lives a privileged life. It is not until Satan challenges God to test Job’s faith, where Job loses everything. Through the trials, Job has lost his wealth, his health, and his community around him. Job pleads with God that he has nothing left to give. “I am nothing but skin and bones. I have escaped with only the skin of my teeth (Job 19:20).” “Skin” is defined by Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary as “an outer covering or surface layer.” Teeth, notably, do not have an outer layer, and if they did it would be so thin it would be unnoticeable. Therefore, the skin of his teeth meant Job had nothing. 

While there is no event that can be pinpointed when and where the Bible verse of Job became an idiom, there are theoretical processes that could explain how the term’s new meaning came to be. The Henry Ford Museum defines an idiom as “non-literal expression whose meaning cannot be deduced from the true meaning of its individual words (2022).” As it has been stated, the origin of “by the skin of my teeth” originated from Job, and the new meaning means to escape by a narrow margin. So, it can be assumed that a community used that term in the context of an escape where the chances of success had a margin of almost nothing. It must have been a community because as stated in class lecture, a language of one is not a language at all. This is because, if only one person speaks a language then it is not a shared system of communication that is used to mediate signs to others. Therefore,  “by the skin of my teeth” is most likely a term that was popularized by others because of the perpetual use, thus changing the meaning from the origin.

Conclusion

Roland Barthes’ two-part model of the analysis of semiotic systems reveals that denotations invoke the creation of connotations. Communities take literal meanings of signs and use them in the context of their own culture and events, resulting in new meanings. Semiotic systems are systems which are ingrained in a society’s lives, signs and symbols are actively used and manipulated to fit in certain contexts in the pragmatics of a society. The only way to understand those pragmatics is to understand the context of that system. If one is not a part of a system, then they cannot make use of it. However, one does not need to know the origins of a sign or symbol, there just needs to be the context of how it is used in that system. To use “by the skin of my teeth” as an example once more, many people hear this term in daily-life or in pop culture and understand what is being referred to in that conversation. Not as many people know that term had originated in the Bible. Certainly, this illustrates that it is how the term is used in the semiotic system that one is privy to, where it actually carries meaning. Ultimately, showing the evolution of denotations and connotations and how they are used in a person’s everyday life and solidified in the pragmatics of a society.

Citations 

Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology. Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1967.

Exploring the Origins of Idioms. Henry Ford Museum, 25 February, 2022, https://www.thehenryford.org/explore/blog/exploring-the-origins-of-idioms/.

Gnomeo & Juliet. Directed by Kelly Asbury, Walt Disney Studios, 2011.


Griffin, E.M. “Semiotics of Roland Barthes.” A First Look at Communication Theory. 8th ed., McGraw Hill, 2012

“skin.” Merriam-Webster.com. 2011. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/skin (5 November, 2025)

The Bible. International Children’s Bible, 1981.

Feature image is from Gnomeo & Juliet (2011).

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Feeling What We Never Lived: Prosthesis and Prosthetic Memory

Critical Concept Explication, by: Meha Gupta

Feeling What We Never Lived: Prosthesis and Prosthetic Memory

The term prosthesis is derived from the Greek pros-tithenai, which translates to “to add to” or “to place onto.” The Oxford English Dictionary states that it initially emerged in medical literature to indicate the substitution of an absent limb or body part. Over time, it has come to describe any external enhancement that boosts or broadens human ability, eyewear that improves sight, instruments that extend reach, or even language as a replacement for experience. This root idea of adding on is what makes prosthesis such a useful concept in media theory. If every medium functions as an extension of human senses, then all media are, in some sense, prosthetic. When we move from mechanical prostheses to cinematic or digital ones, the “added” component becomes experiential: media allow us to feel or remember things beyond our direct lives.

In Alison Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory, introduced in Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (2004), the prosthesis moves from the physical to the psychological and emotional. Landsberg argues that modern media, particularly film, enable viewers to “experience” memories that they never personally lived. Watching Schindler’s List, for example, can give a viewer an embodied sense of what it might have felt like to live through the Holocaust, even though they were not there. These memories, she writes, are not “false” or “fake” but real emotional impressions formed through mediation. They become part of who we are, influencing our ethics, identities, and sense of history. In Landsberg’s view, mass culture produces empathy through these prosthetic experiences, allowing memory to become collective and connective rather than private and individual.

Landsberg’s version of prosthesis isn’t the only one. Earlier theorists such as Bernard Stiegler and Friedrich Kittler have also used the term to describe the relationship between humans and technology. Stiegler, in Technics and Time (1998), argues that all technology is prosthetic because human life has always depended on externalizing memory and knowledge. Tools, writing systems, and media are all “memory supports” that make culture possible. For him, prosthesis is not a supplement added to an already-complete human, it is what makes the human possible in the first place. Kittler, meanwhile, focuses on machines themselves. In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999), he describes these devices as prostheses of perception and memory: they record, store, and reproduce sounds and images that human senses cannot retain. Where Stiegler emphasizes philosophical dependence, Kittler highlights technological replacement. Both show how the human body and mind rely on external systems of recording and mediation.

Compared to these more technical perspectives, Landsberg’s “prosthetic memory” centers the emotional and ethical. While Kittler and Stiegler see prostheses as tools that store memory, Landsberg sees media as creating new memories. Her version of prosthesis works on the level of empathy, not machinery. It bridges affect and technology, showing that cultural memory is mediated not just by devices but by feelings that circulate through them. In this way, Landsberg extends Stiegler’s argument about externalized memory into the realm of shared experience and social consciousness.

For students of media theory, this term is valuable because it reframes what media actually do. Rather than treating media as neutral channels that transmit information, the concept of prosthesis reminds us that every act of mediation changes how we think, feel, and remember. It ties directly to McLuhan’s idea of media as “extensions of man,” but adds a moral dimension: prosthetic media don’t just extend our senses, they extend our capacity for empathy. In an age dominated by screens and simulation, the line between experiencing something and remembering it becomes blurred. Prosthetic memory makes that blurring visible.

A clear example of this can be seen in contemporary digital culture. Virtual-reality projects like the Holocaust Memorial VR experience or immersive museum exhibits allow participants to step into other people’s histories. Even short-form platforms such as TikTok produce similar effects when users encounter raw, emotional content about war, displacement, or injustice. Viewers may never have lived these events, yet they “remember” them through the intensity of mediated experience. This exemplifies prosthetic memory at work, a technological extension of emotion that influences how individuals perceive global occurrences and their positions within those events. Nevertheless, it also prompts inquiries regarding authenticity and saturation: when empathy is mediated, can it diminish its intensity? Does ingesting excessive prosthetic memories result in compassion fatigue instead of comprehension?

Notwithstanding these conflicts, the concept of prosthesis continues to be a significant metaphor in media theory. It captures how technologies not only extend our bodies but also our minds and emotions. From Stiegler’s technical human, to Kittler’s mechanical memory, to Landsberg’s empathetic imagination, prosthesis maps the evolving relationship between humans and their media. It helps us see that mediation is never passive: each new form of media rewires our ways of knowing and remembering.

Ultimately, thinking about prosthetic memory shows that media theory isn’t just about analyzing devices, it’s about recognizing how those devices shape our inner lives. Media becomes the connective tissue between the individual and the collective, between personal experience and cultural history. They are, quite literally, the prostheses through which we feel what we never lived, and remember what we never saw.

“I realized how often my emotions toward global events are shaped by images I’ve never witnessed firsthand.”

That personal insight would make it feel more dialogical (what Schandorf values).

Tags: prosthesis, memory, mediation, embodiment, empathy, technology

References:

  • Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. Columbia University Press, 2004.
  • Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, Vol. 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford University Press, 1998.
  • Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford University Press, 1999.

Critical Comparison

Human-Technological Relations: An Exploration of McArthur and Van Den Eede

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Emily McArthur and Yoni Van Den Eede, through an exploration of Siri via Walter Benjamin’s definition of the ‘aura’ and self-tracking technologies through Marshall McLuhan’s extension theory of media, explore the relationship between humans and technology and the ways in which interactions between the two shape the media ecology. In this post, I will be comparing the two texts in order to find common ground and points of difference between the two and point out the ways in which each author conceptualizes the boundaries between the human body and technological mediation.

McArthur

McArthur builds a case for the aura of technological devices and programs. Walter Benjamin’s definition of aura is ‘the sense of uniqueness’, which deteriorates due to forces of technological reproduction. However, he has a positivist attitude towards technological development, as the destruction of aura also destroys the mysticality inherent in it, and essentially leads to a democratization of art (McArthur 115). 

Originally, Benjamin’s definition of the aura had been applied to aesthetic works such as art and literature, with technology merely being the means of reproduction in this equation (McArthur 114). But what McArthur proposes is a reimagined view of the aura; a posthuman aura which allows technologies like Siri, which teeter on the edge of humanity and artifact, to gain a unique kind of authenticity (115). This new conception of aura, as proposed by McArthur, is based on the technology’s simultaneous proximity and distance from the user. It appropriates human mannerisms and functions well enough to lull the user into perceiving it to have a ‘quasi-human’ face, while also drawing a clear boundary through its robotic tone of voice, reminding the user that it is a technology created by man (117). It also performs a democratizing function, by making available a technology to everyday users, that had only been available to people working within the tech industry up until then (McArthur 117). All in all, McArthur presents a determinist approach to perceiving human-technological relationships. She raises concerns about such algorithms collecting data and surveilling users for corporate gain, fracturing human relationships as a result of excess proximity to technology, and encourages readers to critically engage with media.

Van Den Eede

On the other hand, Van Den Eede uses self-tracking health technologies as a case study to examine the extensionism theory, often championed by media theorists. He presents arguments for and against the extensionist perspective, specifically expanding upon Marshall McLuhan’s theory of extensionism and putting it into conversation with Kiran and Verbeek’s critique of the instrumentalist nature of the extension theory. Van Den Eede himself seems to take a stance against the extensionist theory, citing it as a useful way of examining media technologies but one that ultimately reduces human-technology interactions to a binary of complete ‘reliance’ or ‘suspicion’ (156). He instead ‘superposes’ McLuhan’s extensionism theory with Kiran and Verbeek’s argument that the relationship between humans and technologies should be one of trust, in which the user learns to critically engage with the technologies (168).

Translation and Linguistics

Both McArthur and Van Den Eede bring up translation as a crucial element of the human and technological relationship. McArthur talks about how natural language processors do not actually comprehend human speech; rather it goes through a series of translations (116). From sound waves to code and then back to sound waves. The magic of the translation process, the fact that information is converted into multiple different forms before being reflected back to the user is part of what gives the technology its aura (117). She argues that this appropriation of human language simultaneously performs the function of ‘mystifying’ and ‘demystifying’ language. While technology’s ability to comprehend and respond to humans in a language they understand grants it an exalted status, human speech is wrested out of human hands, causing them to lose the unique connection they had with the language (116). 

On the other hand, Van Den Eede argues that McLuhan’s media theory is deeply rooted in linguistics, citing McLuhan’s idea that media are translations of human organisms and functions into material forms (159). He refers to media as metaphors, suggesting that these media constitute a language through which humans make sense of the world around them. Van Den Eede contends that analysing media through a linguistic framework allows us to understand them by linguistic means. He examines the etymology of media and finds that it originates from the human, which, he argues, lends weight to McLuhan’s extensionist claim that the body from which media originates should hold significance (160).

Reciprocity and Control

McArthur cites Benjamin to explore technology’s ability to ‘gaze back’ at us, noting how, in the case of traditional art, this gaze once afforded value to bourgeois works. Essentially, she argues that this returned gaze grants the object a form of social control over the human (119). While it constructs a hierarchy that gives users the illusion of mastery over a human-like apparatus, there remains an imbalance, as the data collected by these corporations is used to refine algorithms and exercise corporate control over users (McArthus 125). Moreover, just like the aura of bourgeois art, the aura of Apple’s products gain control over the masses through the strengthening and construction of social hierarchies, with Siri adding onto its exclusivity. Though McArthur claims the aura has been ‘democratized’ by the value of it being available to the common people, Apple is still a brand whose products can only be acquired by a certain class of privileged individuals. Rather than democratizing aura, it furthers commodity fetishism and the aura of technology simply becomes another part of the equation of corporate profitmaking endeavours (120). 

Van Den Eede also addresses similar concerns, drawing on McLuhan’s theory of the environment’s reciprocal relationship with human extensions. He comments on a transformative process in which humans and media continuously reshape one another. By translating ourselves into media, ‘we reach out into the environment, but this also makes it possible for the environment to reach back into us’(160). He claims that the extensionist theory creates an illusion of  one-way traffic between humans and media, leaving humans unable to notice the effects media have on them. He advocates for a ‘two-way traffic’ approach towards technologies, arguing that they shape us just as much as we shape them (166). In this sense, Van Den Eede champions a co-shaping relationship between humans and technology, in which technology and humans exist within the same environment, on equal footing.

Posthumanism

McArthur describes the aura of technologies as posthuman, meaning a type of aura that is not inherent, but is instead imbued in a device through the painstaking efforts of engineers (120). In line with her technological determinist view she seems to be skeptical towards posthumanism. She claims that the posthuman aura of Siri is broken when it fails to process spoken instructions, which happens quite frequently. It reminds the user that Siri is not actually an autonomous entity, but rather a program developed by engineers which is liable to fail (124). 

McArthur’s view on the posthumanism of technology is in line with the McLuhanian extension theory and the concept of Narcissus narcosis, the idea that humans are unaware of the fact that these technologies originate from us. Van Den Eede seems to be critical of the anthropocentric implications of the extension theory, claiming that the idea of becoming aware of the ‘origin’ of technologies from the human still prioritizes human body over technology (160). He does admit, however, that Kiran and Verbeek’s idea of ‘trusting’ oneself to technology is also based in a certain negotiation of the boundaries between the two, which has a hint of a humanist character as well (168). All in all, while he does support a posthuman approach towards technology, he also encourages readers to critically engage with technologies.

Conclusion

McArthur appears to be more skeptical of human-technology relations, raising concerns about surveillance, data collection, algorithmic control, and the varied ways in which the capitalist system harnesses technology to exercise social control over the masses. She adopts a more humanist stance, echoing the McLuhanian notion of the human body assuming a superior position in  human-technology relations by value of it being the source of technology.

In contrast, Van Den Eede adopts a more optimistic stance toward technology. He only briefly touches upon surveillance and data collection, primarily using it to support his argument for a ‘trust’ approach to human-technology interactions (165). Though he ends up finding a middle ground between extensionism and Kiran and Verbeek’s alternative ideas of human-technology interaction, it is clear that he values the posthumanist notion of a two-way relationship between humans and technologies. Despite these differences, both authors share confidence in the user’s capacity to critically engage with media, emphasizing the importance of reflection and awareness in navigating technological environments.

Works Cited

  1. Van Den Eede, Yoni. ‘Extending “Extension”.’ Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, 151-172.  https://doi.org/10.5040/9781666993851.ch-008. 
  2. McArthur, Emily. “The Iphone Erfahrung.” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, 2014, 113–28. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781666993851.ch-006.
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/

Critical Comparison

The Ways in Which Media Redefine the Self

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Introduction

Does technology merely extend our human capabilities, or does it redefine our human experience through prosthetic mediation? This is a question that is explored in both Alison Landsberg’s “Prosthetic Memory” (1995) and Yoni Van Den Eede’s “Extending ‘Extension’” (2014), where the development of media technologies is interrogated as they continue to reconfigure human embodiment, identity, and experience. While Landsberg argues that mass media formats can implant “prosthetic memories” to produce empathy and political subjectivity, Eede re-examines the idea that technology acts as an extension of human physical and nervous systems, as proposed by philosopher Marshall McLuhan. By comparing these two texts that explore a central tension in media theory, we can better understand how different theorists frame technology in relation to the human, shaping the questions we can ask about today’s ever-changing digital age.

Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner


In Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner, Landsberg theorised media as a prosthesis to the human being. The theorist spotlights the intriguing example of the armless beggar who was gifted a prosthetic arm by a wealthy passerby to illustrate the central concept of “prosthetic memory”. The arm, upon remembering its thieving past, seems to act on its own will as it snatches the belongings of people walking by. After unsuccessfully selling off the arm at a pawn shop, the beggar is brought into jail, where the arm finds its rightful owner, a one-armed criminal and reattaches itself to him. This example teaches us that prosthetic memories, as such, can be understood as memories “which do not come from a person’s lived experience in any strict sense” (Landsberg, 175). It is understood as an implantation of “otherness” that has the power to influence one’s identity, as with the case of the beggar turned into a thief.

This complexity between memory and experience that is brought forth by the idea of prosthetic memories lays the foundation for how Landsberg theorises the concept of “media”. With the introduction of mass media, our conception of what counts as real experience fundamentally changes. As humans are introduced to “mediated knowledge”, the line between the real and the mediated seems to merge into one, as the consumption of media is argued to be synonymous with the implantation of memories originating not from our own experiences. Landberg states that this marks the death of “real experiences”, as when the media is to be understood as prosthetics to human beings, such a conception constructs a fundamental split in which it does not belong to man, but lies outside of man as a distant “other-ness”.Thus, the formative effect that the media can exert on man’s identity is undeniable. In the example of Total Recall, Landsberg argued that mediated images have the power to intervene in “the production of subjectivity”. As a person is presented along with a mediated representation of themselves on a video screen, questions of authenticity and originality arise. The subject’s identity relies heavily on his memories, for they are proof of his lived experience and thus occupy an important foundational role in the making of subjectivity. However, the existence of media challenges this very notion simply by positing the possibility of memories being separated from real experience.

Extending “Extensions”: A Reappraisal of the Technology-as-Extension Idea through the Case of Self-Tracking Technologies

In Extending “Extensions” by Yoni Van Den Eede, the theory that media technology exists as an extension to the human being emerges. The traditional approach to understanding the concept of the “extension” technology is considered to be tools that extend the abilities of man, such as how glasses enhance vision. In this sense, there is still a separation between the self and its objects (media technology) as an external “other-ness”. Media is, as such, more like an instrument under this traditional understanding than it is an extension.

However, this conception of “extension” fails to fully account for more complex instances of technological tools, such as the introduction of self-tracking technologies, which entail “the collection and storage of various sorts of data in or about one’s body or life” (Van Den Eede, 161). They do more than just extend our capabilities, as they influence how we experience our identity through capturing our lived experiences. Van Den Eede argues that a smartwatch’s simple functions of capturing your steps or recording your sleep patterns have an effect on how you relate to yourself. Therefore, it is crucial that we adapt to the demands of the age and understand media and technology not purely as extensions but also as mediators of our reality. 

Under this new understanding, the separation that previously existed is successfully bridged, and only then can we acknowledge that these tools belong to us, through which they become an extension of ourselves in a more genuine sense than as an object of mere instrumental value. Since media, in its very definition, entails mediating, it cannot be properly understood simply as a tool for augmenting human abilities, although it extends our capacities manifoldly in this sense; thus, “media” is more properly conceptualised as an extension. Van Den Eede has successfully overcome the shortcomings of the past age and adapted the traditional approach to take into account the modern nuances of our time.

Critical Comparisons

While it is evident that both theorists share an interest in how media technologies blur the boundary between the self and other, their approaches, ontological assumptions, and political implications drastically differ. Landsberg’s “prosthetic” metaphor implies a sense of loss, replacement, and hybridity between technological supplements as a substitute for something missing. To Landsberg, this reconfiguration of the human comes from within. Alternatively, Van Den Eede’s “extension” metaphor suggests projection and expansion, emphasising how technology radiates from the human outward, even if that boundary begins to dissolve. Comparing the two texts, it is clear that “prosthesis” affects ethics, emphasising the ways the media we consume can implant experiences and emotions that reshape identity. “Extension” emphasises how technologies alter perception and define what counts as “human.” Altogether, these concepts reveal the logic of mediation, demonstrating how media can both inhabit the body and extend it into the world.

Furthermore, the differences in the work that these two authors do also inform the contexts of their arguments. Landsberg’s work is grounded in cultural studies, postmodernism, and feminist theory, referencing thinkers such as Haraway and Kracauer. Therefore, the author’s arguments often position media not simply to represent or supplement experience, but they actively produce new forms of subjectivity, enabling empathy and collective responsibility across diversity, spanning race, class, and gender. Contrastingly, Van Den Eede’s works are often rooted in the philosophy of technology and engaging with McLuhan’s theories. Therefore, his arguments position media as extensions of human capacities that are relational rather than strictly instrumental. 

In conclusion, comparing the Landsberg and Van Den Eede readings reminds us that as media studies students, our task is both critical and reflective. Landsberg teaches us to pay attention to the embodied, affective, and political forces that shape our mediated experience, revealing the underlying power of media that can implant shared memories and encourage empathy and awareness. Meanwhile, Van Den Eede urges us to examine the conceptual tools we depend on daily. Ultimately, by using these metaphors of “extension” and “prosthesis” that redefine how we think about technology in relation to the human experience, we can begin to understand that media is never merely just an instrument or supplement, but an active mediation through which self and world continue to become clear.

By Kim Chi Tran & Nam Pham

References

Van Den Eede, Yoni. “Chapter 8 Extending ‘Extension.’” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, Lexington Books, 2014, pp. 151–69.

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

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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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Ingold, Conneller, and the Materials of Creation

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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.

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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

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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

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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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