“Technology as Extension of the Human Body”

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by coberst, Dec 23, 2008.

  1. coberst Registered Senior Member

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    “Technology as Extension of the Human Body”

    Marshall McLuhan “The High Priest of Pop-Culture” in the mid twentieth century was the first to announce the existence of the ‘global village’ and to express that “we become what we behold”. McLuhan sought to understand and express the effects of technology on modern culture.

    McLuhan was particularly interested in “Technology as Extension of the Human Body”. An extension of our body and/or of our senses occurs when we extend the reach of our embodied mind beyond our natural limited means. As examples: the shovel is an extension of our hands and feet as we dig a trench, the spade is like our cupped hand as we remove dirt from a hole, a microscopy or telescope extends our vision to study smaller or larger dimensions.

    Going further in this vein the auto is an extension of the foot. However there are negative results from all such extensions. “Amputations” represent the unintended and un-reflected counterparts of such extensions.

    “Every extension of mankind, especially technological extensions, has the effect of amputating or modifying some other extension… The extension of a technology like the automobile "amputates" the need for a highly developed walking culture, which in turn causes cities and countries to develop in different ways. The telephone extends the voice, but also amputates the art of penmanship gained through regular correspondence. These are a few examples, and almost everything we can think of is subject to similar observations…We have become people who regularly praise all extensions, and minimize all amputations. McLuhan believed that we do so at our own peril.” Quotations from “Understanding Media” by Marshall McLuhan

    McLuhan was concerned about man's willful blindness to the downside of technology. In his later years McLuhan developed a scientific basis for his thought around what he termed the tetrad. The tetrad is four laws, framed as questions, which give us a useful instrument for studying our culture.
    What is does the technology extend?
    What does it make obsolete?
    What is gained?
    "What does the technology reverse into if it is over-extended?"

    McLuhan’s gravestone carries the inscription “The Truth Shall Make You Free." We do not have to like or even agree with everything that McLuhan said. However, we would be wise to remember that his was a life of great insight and it was dedicated to showing wo/man the truth about the world we live in, and especially the hidden consequences of the technologies we develop.

    In the book “The Birth and Death of Meaning” Earnest Becker provides us with a synthesis of the knowledge about the extensions of the human body that McLuhan spoke of and science certified through research.

    Becker informs us that the “self” is in the body but is not part of the body; it is symbolic and is not physical. “The body is an object in the field of the self: it is one of the things we inhabit…A person literally projects or throws himself out of the body, and anywhere at all…A man’s “Me” is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only his body and his mind, but his clothes and house, his wife and children, [etc].” The human can be symbolically located wherever s/he thinks part of her really exists or belongs.

    It is said that the more insecure we are the more important these symbolic extensions of the self become. When we invest undue value onto such matters as desecrating a piece of cloth that symbolizes our nation is an indication that our self-valuation has declined and this overvaluation of a symbol can help compensate that loss. We get a good feeling about own value by obtaining value in the pseudopod as the flag.

    In conceiving our self as a container that overflows with various and important extensions that our technology provides us we might appear like a giant amoeba spread out over the land with a center in the self. These pseudopods are not just patriotic symbols and important things but include silly things such as a car or a neck tie. We can experience nervous breakdowns when others do not respect our particular objects of reverence.

    Do you think of yourself as being extended as a result of using technology? Do you think such extensions are a representation of reality? Do you think that consciousness of such claims to be useful?
     
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  3. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    No matter how far technology goes, we all will die eventually of something. Technology only prolongs death.

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  5. At World's End Registered Member

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    Better yet, consider this: technology is an extension of the capabilities of the brain. The level of technology depends on the level of science, which is are discovered / developed by the brain. Nowadays, we are getting a slow-down in new technologies. Why? Because our brains have almost reached their full potential in making scientific discoveries.
     
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  7. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    I'd think not. I think that we need to just be more careful about what technologies we develop before implimenting them into society because they could do more harm than good. Look at the pollution around us and that's all caused by technology.
     
  8. At World's End Registered Member

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    Our brains use linear thinking, that is A goes to B and B goes to C thus A goes to C, it's simplified I know but essentially that's what it is. Our mathematics, no matter how fancy, is based on four basic operations: adding, subtracting, multiplying (really adding), dividing (really proportion). Thus, we do have a limit on how far we can go in term of technology, unless suddenly our brains change. That's why we are having so much trouble with certain technologies such as fusion reactors and quantum mechanics, because they defy linear thinking (correct me if I'm wrong).
     
  9. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    Not really, limits are limitless!


    You are wrong. They don't defy linerar thinking at all, where do you come up with that?:shrug:
     
  10. At World's End Registered Member

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    At the quantum level, everything is "fuzzy" and this troubles our brains, because we use linear thinking. For instance, in the quantum world, weird things happen, like something can be 0 and 1 at the same time, which would make no sense in the "meta" world.
     
  11. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    Then travel some day to the Beta world!

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  12. phandentium Greatest title Registered Senior Member

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    Caution would be a very good thing. Though compared to other animals, we are already very cautious.
     
  13. coberst Registered Senior Member

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    Let’s get very fundamental here and go back to the invention of the alphabet to understand what McLuhan is talking about and why it is important.

    “The Greek myth about the alphabet was that Cadmus, reputedly the king who introduced the phonetic letters into Greece, sowed dragoon’s teeth, and they sprang up armed men. Like any other myth, this one capsulates a prolonged process into a flashing insight. The alphabet meant power and authority and control of military structures at a distance. When combined with papyrus, the alphabet spelled the end of the stationary temple bureaucracies and the priestly monopolies of knowledge and power.”

    “The phonetic alphabet is a unique technology…This stark division and parallelism between a visual and an auditory world was both crude and ruthless, culturally speaking. The phonetically written sacrifices worlds of meaning and perception that were secured by forms like the hieroglyphs and the Chinese ideogram. These culturally richer forms of writing, however, offered men no means of sudden transfer from the magically discontinuous and traditional world of the tribal word into the cool and uniform visual medium.”

    “All of these forms [pictographic and hieroglyphic] give pictorial expression to oral meanings. As such, they approximate the animated cartoon and are extremely unwieldy, requiring many signs for the infinity of data operations of social action. In contrast, the phonetic alphabet, by a few letters only, was able to encompass all languages.”

    Consider the invention of the printing press and the introduction of books to the society. A book communicates a message. Many books communicate many messages. ‘The book’ communicates the same message to everyone who comes into contact with the book. The book transmits the same message to everyone while many books transmit many different messages to many different people.

    Evolution moves very slowly. We adapt to our environment very slowly. We survive because we do adapt. When we change more quickly than we can adapt we face problems that we have not had the time to make the kind of adjustments necessary.

    The habits we acquire determine our state of mind. Our changing habits are part of this process of adaptation to our environment. Do not think of environment as being just the quality of our air or water but it is a broad term signifying the world we live in.

    So we have changed very dramatically our habits that were part of us when we knew little and understood much. I am speaking relatively here. What happens to us as a result of this dramatic change? I do not know but I only point to the fact as worth consideration.

    Examine how we sit and watch TV for several hours everyday. When we watch TV we are constantly being transported perceptively from one scene to another. Think for a minute if instead of sitting and watching TV we were physically escorted done a hallway with many doors. Then we open a door and are physically placed into this world we see on TV. Our reaction would be very different. In other words we are creatures prepared for a certain world that no longer exists. This is the definition of a forthcoming extinction if we think about the meaning of evolution.
     

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