Man the Prosthetic god

McLuhan may be credited with popularizing the notion that tools are “extensions of man” but he was not the first. The first clear mention of technology as extensions of man is found in Kapp's concept of organ projection. Kapp, according to Mitcham (1994), developed the theory that tools and weapons are different kinds of "organ projections" (p. 23) [13]. On this premise, Kapp described the railroad as an externalization of the circulatory system and the telegraph as an extension of the nervous system. Before McLuhan, Kapp spoke of language as an extension of man (p. 24).

In chapter one of Taming the Tiger: the Struggle to Control Technology (1983), Witold Rybczynski quoted Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.SW Thus modern transportation becomes our prosthetic foot, glasses and telescopes our eyes, and computers serve to augment our brain. The same idea was carried forward by McLuhan in The Medium is the Massage; the wheel is an extension of the foot, the book an extension of the eye, and so on. For McLuhan, communication technology is an extension of the human mind. But the marriage is not perfect. Rybczynski argued that sometimes these prostheses don't fit well, they rub us raw, or itch.

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