{"id":716,"date":"2025-11-03T22:24:23","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T05:24:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/?p=716"},"modified":"2025-11-03T22:26:52","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T05:26:52","slug":"the-self-is-formed-through-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/archives\/716","title":{"rendered":"The Self Is Formed Through Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Contributors: Lorainne & Maryam<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This blog post compares Yoni Van Den Eede\u2019s \u201cExtending \u2018Extension\u2019\u201d and Alison Landsberg\u2019s \u201cProsthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through Van Den Eede\u2019s philosophical view of self-tracking technologies and Landsberg\u2019s cultural analysis of cinema, we examine how media shapes not only how we perceive the world but how we exist within it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Landsberg: Memory as Mediated Experience<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Landsberg discusses \u201cprosthetic memory,\u201d 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<\/em> and Total Recall<\/em> to show how implanted or artificial memories can still shape who we are and how we act. For her, memory, besides that it\u2019s something that comes from our real lived past, is also something that can be produced by cinema and mass media. These \u201cprosthetic memories\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Van Den Eede: Technology as Extension<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cExtending \u2018Extension\u2019,\u201d 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\u2019s view of technology is ambivalent: extensions enhance human capabilities but also bring a form of \u2018numbing.\u2019 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 \u201cautoamputation\u201d, 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.
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Memory vs. Perception – Where Mediation Enters the Self<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> through the production of prosthetic memories. She shows that cinema can install memories that \u201care radically divorced from lived experience and yet motivate his actions\u201d (p. 175). In other words, media becomes<\/em> 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, \u201cnot a strategy for closing or finishing the past \u2014 but on the contrary \u2026 propels us not backward but forwards\u201d (p. 176). Her concern is that the trace<\/em> of the past can now come from media rather than our own lives, which means identity becomes newly vulnerable to design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s point that technological extensions intensify and unbalance the senses: \u201cExtending the eye, for instance, creates a kind of tension in our visual capacity that is insufferable to us\u201d (p. 158). This sensory overload produces Narcissus \u201cnarcosis,\u201d where we \u201cfall in love with the extensions of ourselves in technologies\u201d while remaining unaware that they \u201creally hail \u2018from us\u2019\u201d (p. 157). Here, the danger is not really implanted memory. The danger is that our perception of reality itself becomes mediated without us noticing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Landsberg = media produces identity through memory
Van Den Eede = media shapes the way we perceive before identity is even formed<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/em> into us. Van Den Eede shows media shapes the present<\/em> sensory field of how we see, feel, and interpret.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Together, they show that media affects what we remember but also what we think counts as reality in the first place.

<\/strong>Authenticity and Identity – We Become Through Media<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Van Den Eede points out that the \u2018extension\u2019 idea can be misconstrued with the assumption that there is a fixed human self that exists before technology. In \u201cExtending \u2018Extension\u2019,\u201d Van Den Eede opens with iJustine\u2019s claim that technology \u201cisn\u2019t just around us. It\u2019s on us. It\u2019s in us. It\u2019s an extension of ourselves\u201d (p. 151), negating the image of a separate human self that technology merely surrounds. He states that the very word extension \u201calready suggests an autonomous, extendable entity to be present before any extension happens\u201d (p. 152). On the contrary, we are not actually independent of technology, but in fact, shaped by it from the very start. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s natural awareness, these devices reconfigure what awareness itself means. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cProsthetic Memory,\u201d she describes \u201cmemories which do not come from a person\u2019s lived experience in any strict sense\u201d (p. 175). Through media, such as film, these prosthetic memories \u2018construct an identity\u2019 for the viewer, showing that identity can be built from experiences that are technologically or collectively produced. She adds that \u201cwhether 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\u201d (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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Van Den Eede\u2019s self-tracking subject, Landsberg\u2019s 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, \u201cone\u2019s subjectivity takes shape in relation to the technology\u201d (p. 166), suggesting that technology doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Stakes of a Mediated Identity<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, both Landsberg and Van Den Eede show that the boundary we try to protect, the one between the \u201creal\u201d self and the mediated self, no longer exists. We don\u2019t encounter technology after we form a self. We form the self through<\/em> technology. Our senses, our memories, and our identities already operate through screens, images, sensors, films, and data. And that has consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This means we must stop assuming there is some stable, pure, offline \u201cme\u201d that technology acts upon. Instead, we need to recognize that technology is already inside the self, and that the self is already inside technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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?<\/em> And what kinds of selves<\/em> do those structures quietly build?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Landsberg, Alison. \u201cProsthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner.\u201d Body & Society<\/em>, vol. 1, no. 3\u20134, 1995, pp. 175\u2013192.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Van Den Eede, Yoni. \u201cExtending \u2018Extension.\u2019\u201d Foundations of Science<\/em>, vol. 19, 2014, pp. 151\u2013167.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image credit: Toledo Blade, \u201cHow technology is changing our art, our world \u2014 and even ourselves,\u201d 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<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading The Self Is Formed Through Technology<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":103003,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[109,135,108],"class_list":["post-716","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other","tag-alison-landsberg","tag-critical-comparison-of-texts","tag-yoni-van-den-eede"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/103003"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=716"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":718,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/716\/revisions\/718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}