On my desk sits a small, red LEGO Ferrari Formula 1 car. Perfectly assembled, it’s bold, glossy, and unmistakably fast, or at least it looks like it should be. The real Ferrari SF90 can hit 350 km/h, but this one hasn’t moved an inch since I built it two summers ago. It’s made of plastic, about the length of my hand, and technically useless. Yet every time I look at it, I feel something that’s hard to explain, a quiet rush, a sense of movement, a memory of motion. For me, this LEGO Ferrari is more than a collectible. It’s a reminder of how technology mediates our desire for speed, control, and perfection, and how even still objects can capture the affective charge of the digital and mechanical worlds we live in.

When I initially created this model, it was at a moment when my life seemed far from speedy. It was the height of lockdown, courses had transitioned to online formats, and each day seemed like a monotonous cycle of screens. I recall endlessly scrolling through YouTube, viewing F1 highlights, the roar of engines, the aerial footage, the precision of pit stops. It had a quality that stood in stark contrast to the unchanging environment surrounding me. Once I received this LEGO set, I assembled it throughout one weekend, connecting each piece until the red form was completed flawlessly. It felt strangely healing, as if I were piecing together a rhythm and vitality that the digital realm had siphoned from me.

The Object as Mediation

This toy car isn’t just an object; it’s a medium. Marshall McLuhan famously said that “the medium is the message”, meaning that the form of a medium, not just its content, shapes human experience. This LEGO Ferrari mediates speed not through movement, but through its design and material presence. It turns velocity into something visual and tactile. Every aerodynamic curve, every sponsor decal, and every wheel alignment works as a miniature interface that translates the cultural idea of “speed” into something I can hold.

In that sense, this car embodies the paradox of our media-saturated world: we crave the thrill of movement, but most of our experiences of it are mediated through screens, simulations, and symbols. Watching F1 on a screen, playing the F1 video game, or even scrolling through Instagram clips of races, each of these are examples of what Friedrich Kittler calls “technological mediation”, where our relationship with the world is shaped not directly, but through layers of machines. My LEGO Ferrari sits at the end of that chain, a still life representation of digital motion. It’s a physical freeze-frame of a hyper-mediated phenomenon.

Theorizing Speed and Stillness

The concept of speed in media theory isn’t just about motion; it’s about time and attention. Paul Virilio, a French theorist who wrote extensively on technology and velocity, argued that modern life is dominated by what he called dromology, the logic of speed. According to Virilio, every advance in technology accelerates not only movement, but also perception. The faster we can transmit information, the faster our sense of time collapses. In that light, my LEGO Ferrari is ironic. It’s a static embodiment of a hyper-speed culture. It’s the calm after acceleration, the physical residue of a world obsessed with going faster.

When I look at this model, I think about how much of our media consumption today is built around acceleration: 15-second TikToks, 2x playback speed on lectures, instant streaming, and even the constant pressure to “move forward” in life. The Ferrari, both real and miniature, symbolizes that desire for optimization, precision, and speed. Yet the LEGO version, by being immobile, resists that logic. Its speed turned into contemplation. It mediates not the rush of racing, but the human longing behind it: the need to feel in control, even in an age when our devices seem to control the pace for us.

Affordances of the Object

In media theory, the term affordance refers to what an object allows or enables us to do. My LEGO Ferrari doesn’t move, but it affords reflection, nostalgia, and imagination. It reminds me of weekends spent building LEGO as a kid, of tinkering with things just for the sake of curiosity. It also affords a certain kind of identity performance, displayed on my desk, it signals taste, fandom, and aesthetic precision. It’s part of what Sherry Turkle would call the “inner life of things,” where objects become extensions of our personal narratives and self-concepts.

When Turkle writes that evocative objects are “companions to our emotional lives,” she’s describing exactly this kind of relationship. The Ferrari’s bright red surface doesn’t just reflect light; it reflects my own attachment to what it represents, ambition, movement, design, and control. Yet as I grow older and busier, it also reflects the limits of those ideals. Like a real race car, it’s all about balance: knowing when to accelerate and when to brake.

What the Ferrari Teaches About Media and Mediation

This tiny car helps me understand something larger about media: how technology constantly translates human desire into mechanical or digital form. A Formula 1 car is a triumph of media systems, GPS telemetry, radio communication, live broadcast, aerodynamic simulation, and global branding all converge in a single race. My LEGO version compresses that entire media network into a palm-sized artifact. It’s a miniature media ecology, where engineering meets storytelling, and speed becomes a symbol.

For my generation, growing up in a world where digital media often replaces direct experience, the LEGO Ferrari also represents a yearning for tangibility. It reminds me that even in a digital age, we still crave physical mediation. Building it by hand felt different from clicking or scrolling; it was a slower kind of engagement. It brought back a sense of authorship, of literally constructing something piece by piece rather than consuming something pre-made. That slowness is something media theory rarely celebrates, but perhaps it should.

Conclusion: The Stillness of Speed

Now, the LEGO Ferrari sits quietly between my books and my keyboard. I rarely touch it, but it’s always in my line of sight, a bright red reminder of the way media, memory, and matter intertwine. Through McLuhan’s and Virilio’s lenses, I’ve come to see it not just as a toy, but as a symbolic interface between speed and stillness, past and present, analog and digital.

In a world where everything demands movement, scrolling, streaming, updating, this little car offers the opposite: a pause. It invites reflection on what speed means when the world refuses to slow down. Maybe that’s why it feels so evocative. It mediates not the race, but the moment after it, the breath between acceleration and rest.

And that, I think, is where its real power lies.