Marshall McLuhan asserted that technology is an extension of the body – clothing extends our skin, a white cane extends our touch, subways extend our movement. To revise McLuhan, technology extends a universalized body which, in turn, identifies particular human bodies by their correspondence to this universalization. It is a body of a imagined form, imagined ability, imagined dexterity. Yet it’s just that – imagined. And our imagining of bodies is divorced from their actual material forms.
My thesis will reconsider the game of Pong to explore how technology universalizes bodies. In turn, I will ask:
- How does technology shape bodies and likewise, how do bodies shape technology?
- How do we understand our body through technology?
- And how can technology extend the particularity of many bodies?