<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Where the Body Ends<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sherry Turkle argues that we have become \u201ctethered selves\u201d(Turkle, Alone Together<\/em> 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\u2019s 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\u2019s readings: what happens when technologies stop feeling external and instead operate as part of our inner life?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The well-known concept of the phantom limb\u2014where an amputee still senses a missing arm or hand\u2014suggests 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\u2013a 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Landsberg: Prosthetic Memory<\/span><\/p><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n In Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner, Alison Landsberg argues that modern mass media\u2014especially cinema\u2014creates \u201cprosthetic memories\u201d, which she defines as \u201cmemories which do not come from a person\u2019s lived experience in any strict sense\u201d and which may nevertheless \u201cmotivate his actions\u201d and shape identity (Landsberg 175). Landsberg begins with the 1908 Edison film The Thieving Hand, where a prosthetic arm \u201chas memories of its own\u201d and turns an innocent beggar into a thief because the arm\u2019s memories \u201cprescribe actions in the present\u201d(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 \u201cconstruct an identity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In Blade Runner, Landsberg argues that replicants\u2019 humanity hinges not on biology but memory. The Voight\u2013Kampff test exposes replicants not because they lack empathy but because they lack \u201ca past, the absence of memories\u201d (184). In other words, although Rachel\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Van Den Eede: Extending Extension<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n In Extending \u201cExtension\u201d (2014), Yoni Van Den Eede revisits the familiar claim that technologies act as \u201cextensions\u201d 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\u2019s 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 \u201chighly identifiable objects made by our own bodies\u201d (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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Van Den Eede explains that media emerge because older technologies create \u201cirritations\u201d 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\u2013159).<\/p>\n\n\n\n To clarify what extension entails, Van Den Eede turns to McLuhan\u2019s well-known \u201ctetrad,\u201d the framework that proposes that every medium \u201cenhances something, obsolesces something, retrieves something previously lost, and, when pushed far enough, reverses into its opposite\u201d (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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u201366).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seeing and Not Seeing<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cblind spot\u201d in contemporary mediated life, and reading them together reveals what we cannot see when considering either text alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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, \u201cwe lose sight of their origin\u201d (Van Den Eede 158). This produces the Narcissus narcosis, a dulling of our ability to perceive the \u201cwhy\u201d and \u201chow\u201d of technological influence. As media amplify certain functions, they \u201cput a strain on our sensory balance,\u201d producing the discomfort and eventual numbness that lead to auto-amputation (158\u2013159). His concern is epistemological: technologies blind us through familiarity. The concept of extension, he argues, is valuable precisely because it offers \u201can exercise of critical awareness,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Landsberg identifies nearly the opposite problem. The blindness she describes is not the result of the media being \u201ctoo familiar\u201d but of their ability to create experiences that feel authentic without truly being one\u2019s history. Cinema becomes \u201ca special site for the production and dissemination of prosthetic memories,\u201d enabling individuals to internalize memories \u201cnot from one\u2019s lived experience in any strict sense\u201d (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 \u201cless about verifying the past and more about generating possible action in the present\u201d (183). Van Den Eede fears we will stop noticing technology; Landsberg fears we will stop noticing ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Seen alongside Sherry Turkle\u2019s \u201ctethered self,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Works Cited\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Landsberg, Alison. \u201c<\/strong>Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner<\/em>.\u201d<\/strong> Cyberspace\/Cyberbodies\/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment<\/em>, edited by Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, Sage, 1995, pp. 175\u2013192.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.<\/em> Basic Books, 2011.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Van Den Eede, Yoni. \u201c<\/strong>Extending \u2018Extension.\u2019\u201d Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman<\/em>, edited by K. Verbeek and C. Mitcham, Lexington Books, 2014, pp. 151\u2013172.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Written by: Nicole Jiao and Gina Chang<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cover art: https:\/\/www.pinterest.com\/pin\/160300067977983085\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading Landsberg, Van Den Eede, and Extension through Media<\/span>