My lips purse around the little piece of plastic, and I take a deep breath—then there goes the throat hit, rush of dopamine releasing in my brain, leaving a sting of sweetness on my tongue. Followed by a cloud that vanishes almost as quickly as it appears, the vape is small enough to disappear in my hand, but its presence in my daily life is anything but invisible. I try to recall my incentive to start vaping, yet it is far from what I can remember. It might have been peer pressure from high school, or a rebellious mentality that emerged from being an obedient child. Every time I successfully take a break from vaping, I realize that I turn back to it when I face moments of stress, depression, or anger, and become more stressed from the potential harm that it creates for my body. Living in this cycle for three years, I realized that vaping mediates both personal comfort and social identity, forming a complexity that is beyond addiction.
The Vape
I remember the first vape that I owned back in high school, it was in the shape and color of a tiny, green boba tea bottle. Back then, that series of vapes were incredibly viral, but I was clueless about the authenticity of the product, and I neglected to consider what it might do to my body. Then, I owned one with a silver liquid metallic outer design, and stuck to that one single vape ever since by replacing it with vape pods. It is small and rechargeable, lasting even longer than a phone, which makes it portable and easy to use.
Trend or Need?
Vaping has a different meaning to me—unlike many who treat it as a social tool, I tend to avoid vaping in front of my friends and in places with many people. Instead, the emotional resonance came from sensory comfort when I am alone, as a way to pause and cope with hard times. Rather than saying it’s the nicotine, I’d rather say I force myself to believe that nicotine has an effect, in order to manage through times of fear and self-doubt.
The Uncanny
A strong connection was formed between my vape and Turkle’s concept of “the uncanny” in Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. Freud described the uncanny as a point in perception where the familiar meets the strange, simultaneously drawing us in and repelling us (8). I realized that the vape held power not because of its quality, but because it embodied the uncanny. Among all the types of digital devices we encounter daily, none of them is able to “digitize” scent—the vape’s vapor mimics smoke, but it is never actually lit. The sensory experience of smoking has been digitized and flavored in a way that makes the experience both intimate and strangely alien. In that sense, vaping turns one of the most important senses in ancient sensory rituals, scent, into a controlled, technologized performance. My sense of taste and smell are mediated by a sleek plastic stick, a miniature machine that reprograms how my body encounters air itself.
From Ritual to Algorithm
“If you want to find out what a new car or the inside of an Egyptian tomb smells like, “Google Nose”(Bradley, 1)” I frequently wonder what would happen if this were to turn out to be true, if scents could be experienced as easily as we do with visuals. In Bradley’s Smell and the Ancient Senses, scent in antiquity was never a secondary sense but a vital medium shaping how people experienced ritual, morality, and even social order. Smell offered both allure and danger. For instance, fragrant incense in temples could signal divine presence, while foul odors were thought to reveal corruption or moral decay. But when scent meets media, the transformation of sensory digitization alters the sense into something repeatable and methodoligcal, much like modern digital media. Each puff is standardized, each pod replaceable, and the whole cycle of intake becomes less about the unpredictability of the burning process and more about the precision of a portable device. Just as feeds and notifications organize how we see and hear the world, the vape organizes how I breathe and taste before I get to encounter it. It reduces the chances of spontaneity in the sensory world into neat, reproducible, predictable units of vapor.
Implications for Mediation
Seen this way, the vape illustrates a broader ideology about media technologies from Critical Terms for Media Studies: they do not simply extend our senses, as McLuhan might say, but actively reformat them. And what we experience is the very reformatted senses, simply from the most basic sensory human act of breathing. To vape is to experience a digitally mediated version of taste, touch, and smell, all in one, instant and artificial. It blurs the boundaries of how I am mediated, between what Plato determines as “remedy “ and “poison” in Hansen’s chapter on new media (Mitchell, 173). Inhaling vapor for me is always a painful dilemma between comfort and risk, and being normalized into an act that soothes while silently eroding. This duality reveals how technology becomes embedded in the most ordinary gestures, transforming even the breath into a site of mediation.
I remain stuck between remedy and poison, intimacy and artifice, comfort and unease. The struggle, then, is not simply to resist or to indulge, but to remain conscious of how these mediations shape us and to search for a balance in living with them. It is in that space of dilemma, between surrender and domination, that the human breath becomes both a challenge and a lesson.
Written by Gina Chang
Works Cited
Bradley, Mark. Smell and the Ancient Senses. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015.
Mitchell, W. J. T., et al. Critical Terms for Media Studies. The University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Turkle, Sherry. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. MIT Press, 2011.
Gina– I think this post uses the perfect blend of anecdote and theory and reads like an editorial personal essay. Thank you so much for your vulnerability and for exploring this topic with thoughtful insight and academic rigour. I had never thought about how a vape could mediate experience by “hacking” the sense of smell and devaluing the varied smells that we encounter in everyday life and which connect us to antiquity. To expand on this idea, there have also been studies done in psychology that link the sense of smell , emotional states, and memory. I love that your piece highlights how the air itself becomes mediated by a vape; it’s more than the sense of smell that is altered, but actually the substance that we live in (if we can apply your thoughts to the idea of ecological media). I’m looking forward to reading more from you!
Thanks for this generous and insightful response — I appreciate how you nudged my argument toward ecological media. I hadn’t initially planned for the conversation to flow towards thinking of air as a kind of mediated medium, but my idea did evolve to your point that the idea that the vape alters not just sensory experience but the very air we breathe. And in that sense, it renders atmosphere itself a designed medium — something engineered, scented, and disseminated via technology.
This was such a fascinating and honestly beautiful read, Gina. I love how you connected something as everyday and modern as vaping to the ancient idea of ritual and scent, that comparison between incense in temples and flavored vapor was so sharp and poetic. The way you described the vape as “digitizing air itself”* really stayed with me; it captures how technology mediates even the most instinctive, bodily experiences in ways we rarely think about.
Your use of Turkle’s “uncanny” felt spot-on too, the vape being both familiar and alien makes so much sense. It’s something so small and personal, yet its entire existence depends on algorithmic precision and standardization. it’s such a clear example of how media isn’t just around us but literally within us.
As someone studying media too, I found this reflection super relevant, it’s one of those pieces that makes you rethink what “mediation” actually means. Really powerful work.
Thank you for your detailed response! It means a lot to me, especially as you picked up on the tension I was trying to build between ritual and technology. I like how you mentioned the vape as both everyday and modern, while also connecting it to an older idea of ritual. That connection makes me consider how these actions — inhalation, exhalation, repetition — can have a strange continuity between sacred and secular practices. It’s interesting to think that even in something so new and artificial, there’s still a trace of that old, almost spiritual rhythm.
I also like how you articulated the idea that media is not just around us, but within us. That captures what I was trying to move towards — that mediation is now, today, so bodily and cellular. I hadn’t considered how much precision and standardization go into making something feel so intimate and personal, as you said. It’s almost a contradiction: something so designed is what becomes the vehicle for an expression of individuality or feeling.
Your response makes me want to push the “digitizing air” idea even further — not just as a metaphor, but as a way of thinking through how the environment becomes coded. Maybe the vape isn’t just mediating air but rewriting our relationship to what’s natural and shared. I appreciate how you’re reading my work through that ecological and somatic filter — makes me excited to see where I can take this trajectory next.
🙂 https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/communication-and-mass-media/ritual-view-communication
Hi professor! Thank you so much for sharing such a valuable article that enhanced my understanding of my own evocative object. This reframed how I think about vapes in relation to communication and meaning. The author argues that communication isn’t just about transmitting information, but about maintaining shared beliefs and experiences through ritual. I realized that the vape isn’t just an object, but a set of shared identity, culture, social practices, and even community.
Carey also stresses that communication binds communities by re-enacting shared meanings rather than transferring new ones. That connects closely with an interview I watched with a television producer, who said that the purpose of mass media isn’t to raise new questions — that’s the work of scholars — but to reintroduce old ideas to new audiences. In his words, mass media is “old wine in new bottles.” I think Carey would agree. The ritual view suggests that media’s true power lies not in novelty but in repetition with variation and keeping cultural stories alive by refreshing how they’re told.
The vape, in that sense, is also an “old wine in a new bottle.” The gestures it embodies echo the historical practice of smoking, only repackaged through modern design and technology. Through this lens, vaping becomes not just a habit but a ritual act that reanimates older meanings of comfort, identity, and connection in a contemporary form.
Hi Gina！
I really enjoyed reading your piece — it’s such an original take on mediation through something as everyday as a vape. I found your use of Turkle’s idea of the uncanny especially interesting. The way you describe vaping as “digitizing scent” really stood out to me — it captures how technology can make even our most familiar senses feel strange and mechanical.
I also liked how you brought in Smell and the Ancient Senses to connect ancient rituals with digital media. Your point about vaping turning breath into something standardized and repeatable really made me think about how technology reshapes the body’s natural rhythms. It reminded me of McLuhan’s idea that media don’t just extend our senses but actually reformat them.
What I found most compelling, though, was your ending — the “remedy and poison” duality. It frames mediation not as something to overcome, but as a condition we must learn to inhabit critically. Your reflection leaves me thinking about how every technological act, no matter how small, redefines our relationship with the senses and with ourselves.
Hi Nicole, it is great reading back from you! I particularly enjoy the way that you interpret my writing and how you wove Turkle and McLuhan into your response. I love that you’d picked up on the term “digitizing scent”; I think you’re absolutely right that it reflects a broader shift from experience to simulation, where something as intimate as breath is made programmatic.
Your identification with McLuhan really makes that point stronger to me. You are right that reformatting is the more necessary view — vaping not just extends the act of breathing, but reorganizes it into a loop of addiction and pleasure. Your connection with McLuhan stresses the importance of medium as experience and made it clearer for me in the context of my vape.
I also love your wording of mediation as “a condition we need to learn to inhabit critically.” That really resonates with what I was trying to say at the end — not abandoning technology, but mindful of its complexity, its power to heal and to harm. Your reply is both a reminder and an inspiration. Thanks for your beautiful insight!
Hi Gina! This was a compelling read, and your vulnerability in your writing helped you explore the theories and topics you mentioned through a really unique lens. The use of the ‘uncanny’ was a fascinating insight into how the digitisation of so many things has become so normal and standardised, but also strangely foreign. Even though your vessel has been the same, the pods are interchangeable and even customizable to whatever scent you desire. It is interesting how the vape mediates air for you, and how there is still some level of agency with choosing scents within a technological constraint.
Hi Ela! Thank you so much for your reply. I appreciate that you picked up on the detail of the vape being both familiar and interchangeable. I love that you’ve described it as a “vessel” with customizable pods — that terminology captures the uncanny, something consistent that nevertheless replaces its identity in terms of scent and sensation.
I particularly like your comment on agency in technological constraints. That’s exactly the paradox I was trying to point out. Even in selecting, we’re still operating within pre-programmed parameters. It reminds me of how Turkle’s “uncanny” isn’t just unease but also recognition—recognizing that what seems like personal control can also be mediation.
I’m glad you brought up this perspective. It prompted me to think more about the ways that design and sensory choice meet in digital culture.