Tag Archives: Sloop and Gunn

From the Sloop and Gunn article:

The use of any means of communication materially alters the body (and its movement) and strongly encourages a change in the way we understand our world and our identities through the expansion of the body in space and time.

Note this Gothamist.com post on a topic we spent at least twenty minutes talking about in the class the other day.  Note both the picture (which I mentioned in class), and the figure for average speed at which someone wearing headphones walks.  I think that qualifies as having the way we move our bodies materially altered.  It should also be of interest that headphones are generally banned during competitive running events, although mainly only for elite runners and with enforcement being at the race directors’ discretion.  For any of you who work out or run, or even if you just listen to your iPod while walking down the street, do you feel a change in your stride when you listen to music?  Do you sometimes notice this change only after you’ve already been doing it?   This non-conscious change is what Sloop and Gunn mean to imply when they are using Marshall McLuhan’s concept of technology being “prosthetic.”  It is an extension of our bodies, one that sometimes we neglect to really notice.