“Technology as Extension of the Human Body”

[coberst]

“Technology as Extension of the Human Body”

When most people contact one another there is only a combining of exteriors. Few occasions develop when two people make a significant contact of interiors. James Baldwin put it succinctly when he said “mirrors can only lie”. The mirror exposes only the exterior and says nothing about the interior; I find that, as I grow older, I have less and less exterior about which to communicate and communication about the interior seems much easier with total strangers on the Internet than with those close to me.

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 occurs when an individual or society makes or uses something in a way that extends the range of the human body and mind in a fashion that is new. The shovel we use for digging holes is a kind of extension of the hands and feet. The spade is similar to the cupped hand, only it is stronger, less likely to break, and capable of removing more dirt per scoop than the hand. A microscope or telescope is a way of seeing that is an extension of the eye.”

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.”

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 does it (the medium or technology) extend?"
"What does it make obsolete?"
"What is retrieved?"
"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 placing value in the pseudopod (Pod—an anatomical pouch) 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?

Some quotes from:
http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/mcluhan.html

[scameter]

I think that essentially, the reason we needed technology, and obviously still do, is because we were originally herbivores whose bodies had everything they needed to survive, but we then had to become hunters (for whatever reason, I presume we were forced into it) and we then had to adapt our bodies to perform the things that predators' bodies are naturally capable of doing. For instance, we got sharpened weapons to mimic the claws and teeth of predators. But, the tools that were not apart of our being hunters I think assisted our gathering, fishing, and later our agricultural industries, allowing our body to perform as our intelligence saw fit for it to, even though our body does not, without aid, have all the abilities we would like. This is also why that, instead of just having claws on our hands, we adapted the technology of sharpened points to the use of long-reach spears and long-range bows, which aided in hunting game and fish. I don't think that technology is really an extension of our body, much less our self. Technology is simply the tool for our body to compensate for what our mind wishes it to do, but for what it cannot naturally do.

[coberst]

The important question to ponder is what is amputated by this extension.

"However there are negative results from all such extensions. “Amputations” represent the unintended and un-reflected counterparts of such extensions."

[Vlatko]

The important question to ponder is what is amputated by this extension.

This reminds me of a thread (http://thebigview.com/forum/showpost.php?p=80593&postcount=1) that I started while ago.

[outsider]

Like McLuhan, Bruno Latour in the text 'Give me a laboratory and I will raise the world' warned of the negative results that resulted from technology. In particular he illustrated the social changes that occur when the laboratory gets control. For example commercial demand can be exploited for economic gain and authority or power is gained because the laboratory has the specific and specialised knowledge. Latour believes that technology produced in laboratories 'can change the daily life of the multitudes'. It becomes ever-more controlling; creating a continuous stream of technologies that are targetted at a market for financial gain and social control.

There is also the concept of the cyborg or part-human, part-machine. Technology is a willing intermediary in creating cyborgs. Pace-makers, artificial limbs, bionic ears are but a few examples.

[schrodinger]

The important question to ponder is what is amputated by this extension.--Coberst--


Many years before AIDS came on the scene, I remember reading of the ‘bubble babies’ who were born with a dysfunctional immune system. These individuals had to be kept in a plastic bubble, an artificial environment that was isolated from all the contaminants of the ‘real’ world. Today, we are all encouraged to use sun screens which protect us from the harmful effects of sunlight even though without sunlight there would be no life on this planet. Our water is filtered and chemically ‘treated’, our food is processed and ‘enhanced’, we are vaccinated, air-conditioned and dehumidified. If we want exercise we must join a club and pay dearly for it. We no longer need to have face-to-face communication as we can talk to perfect strangers on the other side of the world via the Internet. If we desire something, we can ‘order’ it on line and pay for it by credit and somehow it gets delivered to our door. Our cars and appliances are built by robots and very soon our software will be produced by other software, with no human involvement. All of this seems to be pointing towards a ‘bubble’ world, where we become totally dependent on technology. But technology has always been a two-edged sword. Recently there was a sprinter who was deemed to have an ‘unfair advantage’ and barred from competing in the Olympics, because both of his legs were amputated as a child and his artificial ‘blades’ are lighter, stronger and have more ‘spring’ than natural legs! He should not only be allowed to compete, but given a Gold Medal no matter how he places in the events. I suppose with technology we lose many of our aboriginal instincts and become further removed from our basic Nature; but with technology the entire Universe is our rightful territory and there is no turning back.

[scameter]

I don't get why something has to be "amputated" to have an extension. In fact, if something is lessened and then extended, it is merely returned to it's normal state, not extended. And, unless that's what you're trying to convey, I don't think that's what technology does or is for. If you were implying that, I don't think it's true, because people were never predators like cheetahs and wolves; we never needed claws and fangs, until we were forced into the hunter role.

[coberst]

What is the message of McLuhan’s medium?

“The Medium is The Message” is the phrase that made Marshall McLuhan famous. It is a phrase most of us, young and old, have heard. Until a few months ago it was a phrase that confounded me.

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.





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 down a hallway with many doors. 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.

Darwin informs us that species survive by adaptation to the changing world in which they must live. Extinction of a species occurs when that species is no long capable of adapting adequately to a changing environment. Biological evolution is a slow process of adaptation over hundreds and thousands and millions of years.

In an age of rapid change biological evolution becomes overwhelmed and dysfunctional. Reason is the only means humans have to replace this dysfunctional process of biological evolution. Reason must develop an adaptation process that can keep pace with a world driven into overdrive by technology.

“So an attitude is caused when we think about something the same way over and over until it becomes automatic. The resulting actions in response to the thought also become automatic. Change the habit of thought and you change the attitude. Change the attitude and you change the resulting action.”

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.

[schrodinger]

Am I the only one who gets the uneasy feeling that Coberst is actually some form of “Know-Bot” an automated post and response mechanism? All of the posts are very similar in form and structure and quite often repetitive repetitive repetitive as if there is still some bug to be worked out. Say it ain’t so!:p

[coberst]

I am a retired engineer with a good bit of formal education and twenty five years of self-learning. I began the self-learning experience while in my mid-forties. I had no goal in mind; I was just following my intellectual curiosity in whatever direction it led me. This hobby, self-learning, has become very important to me. I have bounced around from one hobby to another but have always been enticed back by the excitement I have discovered in this learning process. Carl Sagan is quoted as having written; “Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.”

I label myself as a September Scholar because I began the process at mid-life and because my quest is disinterested knowledge.

Disinterested knowledge is an intrinsic value. Disinterested knowledge is not a means but an end. It is knowledge I seek because I desire to know it. I mean the term ‘disinterested knowledge’ as similar to ‘pure research’, as compared to ‘applied research’. Pure research seeks to know truth unconnected to any specific application.

I think of the self-learner of disinterested knowledge as driven by curiosity and imagination to understand. The September Scholar seeks to ‘see’ and then to ‘grasp’ through intellection directed at understanding the self as well as the world. The knowledge and understanding that is sought by the September Scholar are determined only by personal motivations. It is noteworthy that disinterested knowledge is knowledge I am driven to acquire because it is of dominating interest to me. Because I have such an interest in this disinterested knowledge my adrenaline level rises in anticipation of my voyage of discovery.

We often use the metaphors of ‘seeing’ for knowing and ‘grasping’ for understanding. I think these metaphors significantly illuminate the difference between these two forms of intellection. We see much but grasp little. It takes great force to impel us to go beyond seeing to the point of grasping. The force driving us is the strong personal involvement we have to the question that guides our quest. I think it is this inclusion of self-fulfillment, as associated with the question, that makes self-learning so important.

The self-learner of disinterested knowledge is engaged in a single-minded search for understanding. The goal, grasping the ‘truth’, is generally of insignificant consequence in comparison to the single-minded search. Others must judge the value of the ‘truth’ discovered by the autodidactic. I suggest that truth, should it be of any universal value, will evolve in a biological fashion when a significant number of pursuers of disinterested knowledge engage in dialogue.

In the United States our culture compels us to have a purpose. Our culture defines that purpose to be ‘maximize production and consumption’. As a result all good children feel compelled to become a successful producer and consumer. All good children both consciously and unconsciously organize their life for this journey.

At mid-life many citizens begin to analyze their life and often discover a need to reconstitute their purpose. Some of the advantageous of this self-learning experience is that it is virtually free, undeterred by age, not a zero sum game, surprising, exciting and makes each discovery a new eureka moment. The self-learning experience I am suggesting is similar to any other hobby one might undertake; interest will ebb and flow. In my case this was a hobby that I continually came back to after other hobbies lost appeal.

I suggest for your consideration that if we “Get a life—Get an intellectual life” we very well might gain substantially in self-worth and, perhaps, community-worth.

As a popular saying goes ‘there is a season for all things’. We might consider that spring and summer are times for gathering knowledge, maximizing production and consumption, and increasing net-worth; while fall and winter are seasons for gathering understanding, creating wisdom and increasing self-worth.

I have been trying to encourage adults, who in general consider education as a matter only for young people, to give this idea of self-learning a try. It seems to be human nature to do a turtle (close the mind) when encountering a new and unorthodox idea. Generally we seem to need for an idea to face us many times before we can consider it seriously. A common method for brushing aside this idea is to think ‘I’ve been there and done that’, i.e. ‘I have read and been a self-learner all my life’.

It is unlikely that you will encounter this unorthodox suggestion ever again. You must act on this occasion or never act. The first thing is to make a change in attitude about just what is the nature of education. Then one must face the world with a critical outlook. A number of attitude changes are required as a first step. All parents, I guess, recognize the problems inherent in attitude adjustment. We just have to focus that knowledge upon our self as the object needing an attitude adjustment rather than our child.

Another often heard response is that “you are preaching to the choir”. If you conclude that this is an old familiar tune then I have failed to make clear my suggestion. I recall a story circulating many years ago when the Catholic Church was undergoing substantial changes. Catholics where no longer using Latin in the mass, they were no longer required to abstain from meat on Friday and many other changes. The story goes that one lady was complaining about all these changes and she said, “with all these changes the only thing one will need to do to be a good Catholic is love thy neighbor”.

I am not suggesting a stroll in the park on a Sunday afternoon. I am suggesting a ‘Lewis and Clark Expedition’. I am suggesting the intellectual equivalent of crossing the Mississippi and heading West across unexplored intellectual territory with the intellectual equivalent of the Pacific Ocean as a destination.

I write to learn. I constantly write short essays to discover what I have learned and where are the holes in my learning. Because of this learning technque and because I have been posting on Internet forums for more than four years I have thought about and written about these subjects for a long time.

[Trevor]

Am I the only one who gets the uneasy feeling that Coberst is actually some form of “Know-Bot” an automated post and response mechanism? All of the posts are very similar in form and structure and quite often repetitive repetitive repetitive as if there is still some bug to be worked out. Say it ain’t so!:p

It isn't so!
Schrodinger, how can you justify your use of ad hominem when you seem so bothered after you perceive others doing it to you?