As I've mentioned before, over the last several years, I have become interested in the ways in which arguments in "popular culture" discuss the merging of the human body with a variety of popular technologies. In the tradition of Marshall McLuhan and other media theorists, I start with the premise that all technology, including what we traditionally think of as "media," can be thought of as human prosthetics.
For example, the car acts in part as a prosthetic body that makes us run faster than our natural legs; the phone is a prosthetic for our voice. While there are a number of ways of approaching these ongoing transitions between human body/consciousness and media (a topic Donna Haraway famously discussed years ago in her Cyborg Manifesto), I've always been interested in seeing how the interaction between human and technology is discussed in popular news, mainly newspapers and magazines.
In general, the discussions range on a continuum that stretches from a stress on human agency and freedom to a focus on a dystopic demise of humanity. For example, when one looks at news coverage and feature articles about the use of DVD players in cars, one will predictably see a variety of experts marched out to argue over whether the DVD players are "good" because they allow us to have our desires for movies and entertainment to be satisfied whenever we like (while simultaneously acting as a baby sitter for bored children on long trips) or they are seen as "bad" because they ultimately replace the need for human conversation and thus lead to an alteration and devolution of the family.
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