Prosthetic Culture

In a fascinating account of how technology is altering our postmodern consciousness, Celia Lury shows how the manipulation of photographic images and ways of seeing can so redefine the relation between consciousness, the body and memory as to create a "prosthetic culture" whose capacities both extend and threaten our humanity. We live in a society in which body parts are traded commodities, in which some memories can be falsely implanted in the individual while others are stored in video archives of images, in which the powers of cartoon superheroes break through the limitations of time and space. Using the examples of photo-therapy, family albums, Benetton advertising campaigns, the phenomenon of false memory syndrome and the "lives" of cartoon characters, this book argues that the "eyes" made available by contemporary visual technologies involve not simply specific ways of seeing, but also ways of life.