Care Bear and the Technology of Memory

When I was in the first grade, my mom bought me a Care Bear lunchbox and a piggy bank. They were bright pastel colors, smiling, and full of cute faces—little things that appeared to radiate heat. I remember to this day how happy I felt to carry the lunchbox to school, as if I had a chunk of home with me. They were not just sweet little trimmings; they were emotional extensions of my childhood and my relationship with my mother. Even now, when I glance at Care Bear products—especially those that have the aesthetic of the original American designs—I immediately feel nostalgic. Without even a second thought, I desire to buy them again, as if to spend money on a small piece of my past.

I guess the Care Bear as my evocative object throughout this blog post, according to Sherry Turkle’s Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007). I also draw on Bernard Stiegler’s theory of technological memory from his chapter “Memory” in Critical Terms for Media Studies (2010), in order to explore how this object mediates my relationship with time, feeling, and identity. In these paradigms, I would argue that the Care Bear is a vehicle of remembrance—a physical surface external to and reactivating memory, bringing the past to life in the present.

The Object and Its Emotional Charge

The Care Bears were originally developed in the early 1980s as greeting card characters, then expanded to toys, TV shows, and a global franchise. The original concepts were soft, rounded, and feeling-face—each bear representing an emotion like love, cheer, or friendship. My mother’s gift of the Care Bear piggy bank and lunchbox was of this early design generation. Their looks and texture were humble but comfortable: pale colors, small imperfections, and faces that seemed human and kind.

These items became a part of my early daily experience, mediating home and school, family and independence. They were comfort items, but also media items—transmitting a message about care and emotional display. Care Bears today, especially in malls or on the Internet, is not a pure experience. The photograph of the bear instantly causes a nostalgic flashback: I think of my mother’s kindness, my school lunch hours, the sense of security and being loved. It is this which Turkle (2007) describes as the evocative power of objects: they do not just represent memory—they make it come alive.

Objects as Emotional Media

Turkle (2007) suggests that objects can be “companions to our emotional lives,” mediating between thought and feeling (p. 5). My Care Bear objects do precisely this—they instantiate abstract feelings in physical form. They remind me of a period when love was enacted through physical care: a mother buying something small but thoughtful. The object is a medium—a vessel that carries affect and memory through time.

But this mediation is not stable. As the Care Bear brand evolved, so did the look. Modern versions—typically in fast fashion stores or in partnership with lifestyle brands—sport rounder eyes, more angular lines, and a slightly plastic digital glow. Their faces are discernible, almost too sleek. When I look at these newer versions, something is off. They don’t evoke the same sentiment, even though they share the same name and color scheme. This gap reveals how media transformation can reformulate emotional experience: the same image, remade in a different material or cultural context, mediates emotion differently.

This way, the Care Bear is a mirror of media’s impact on memory. Its nostalgic potential depends not only on personal experience but on material form, aesthetic texture, and historical continuity. The object’s “aura,” to borrow from Benjamin (1968), lies in its uniqueness—its attachment to a specific time, relationship, and feeling. When that form changes, so too does the emotional resonance.

Memory as Technological Mediation

While Turkle is interested in the psychological and emotional life of objects, Stiegler (2010) elaborates the concept of memory in its technical and exteriorized forms. Memory for Stiegler is never bound within the human mind; it is being exteriorized in material and technical forms all the time—a process he calls tertiary retention. Photographs, cinema, recordings, and even everyday objects are technologies of memory that allow individuals and societies to capture and transmit experience across time.

In doing so, my Care Bear is not merely nostalgic—it is a technical object of memory. It is a device that retains and reactivates what Stiegler (2010) calls “traces of temporal experience” (p. 66). Each time I see it or hold it, the bear instigates a process of remembering through mediation—a technologic reactivation of emotion. The material presence of the bear becomes a screen upon which emotion and memory are inscribed, stored, and replayed.

This text relocates nostalgia as psychological longing plus; it is a media process, one that depends upon externalized memory support. My Care Bear serves as a bridge between internal memory (what I recall) and external memory (what is stored in the object). The bear’s body—its color, its softness, the faint fading—serves as what Stiegler might call a mnemo-technical artifact, a prosthesis that extends human remembering into the sphere of things.

Recollection in the Age of Reproduction

Stiegler’s view also explains why my personal identification with the updated, digitally reengineered Care Bears is not exactly the same. These updated bears, optimized visually and mass-produced, are leaner on “temporal density” than the original. Mass reproduction itself and also the speed and seamlessness of digital culture dilute the aura Benjamin (1968) connected with singular pieces. The haptic connection that previously defined the bear—its bulk, its feel, its small imperfections—has been lost to an image that constantly circulates on the web.

To me, the old Care Bear is an analog medium of memory, the new one a digital simulacrum. The difference is not aesthetic but ontological: the older object holds time, the new one collapses time into design. That tension is representative of the greater cultural shift outlined by Stiegler—where memory is increasingly externalized by technology but in turn, paradoxically, increasingly fleeting.

Why It Matters

For my peers in this class—most of whom likewise grew up surrounded by media stars and digital photographs—the Care Bear is a familiar sight: the manner in which things are made into affective media that bridge the private and the public. The Care Bear franchise is never actually concerned with care, concern, and proximity, but only with those sentiments being intermediated by form, material, and appearance.

By Stiegler’s (2010) theory, I see that my Care Bear is a prosthesis of love: it allows my emotional memory to be externalized outside my head, in a material space. It shows how memory technologies are not limited to machines or screens but can take the shape of little, colorful toys that carry the traces of emotion from childhood.

Conclusion

The Care Bear, as my evocative object, is both emotional and technological memory. It is a case in point of Turkle’s (2007) suggestion that objects “carry meaning and emotion” (p. 6), but also of Stiegler’s argument that memory reduces to a process of externalization through techniques. The physicality of the bear is a mnemonic technology, brokering personal history and cultural continuity.

In this small pastel bear, I sense how memory isn’t something we simply have—it’s something we do with our objects, our technologies, and our media environments. The Care Bear itself might have had numerous countenances throughout the years, yet for me, its significance will forever be the same: a living medium whereby the past is resuscitated anew in the present, showing me that even the most ordinary childhood object can hold the complex machinery of memory itself.

References

Benjamin, W. (1968). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (H. Zohn, Trans.). In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 217–251). Schocken Books. (Original work published 1936)

Stiegler, B. (2010). Memory (M. B. N. Hansen, Intro.). In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies (pp. 64–87). University of Chicago Press.

Turkle, S. (2007). Evocative objects: Things we think with. MIT Press.

Image Credits

The Care Bears Movie (1985) – promotional still. Image from IMDb.
Retrieved October 5, 2025, from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284713/

Official Care Bears Website. (n.d.). Care Bears character images.
Retrieved October 5, 2025, from https://www.carebears.com/

80s Fave. (n.d.). The Care Bears Movie gets U.K. collector’s edition release.
Retrieved from https://www.animationmagazine.net/2023/12/80s-fave-the-care-bears-movie-gets-u-k-collectors-edition-release/

Written by Mio Hashimoto