Everyday objects as mediators of thought, our digital and material environments think with us.

Thinking with Objects in a Digital World

When Sherry Turkle writes that “we think with objects,” I keep looking around my desk. My phone sits face-down beside a half-open laptop, an empty coffee cup, and a sketchbook I haven’t touched in weeks. Each of these things quietly mediates how I move through the day, how I focus, communicate, and even remember. The more I notice them, the more I realize that none of my thoughts or habits exist outside of objects. They frame what I can see and feel. This week I’ve been wondering: if, as Turkle suggests, our inner lives are shaped through the objects we live with, what happens when those objects become almost entirely digital?

Turkle’s idea of evocative objects positions things as psychological mediators, tools that help us think, not just things we think about. Her examples are tactile: a computer mouse, a stuffed animal, a family photo. But our current objects are often immaterial, apps, tabs, files, feeds. We can’t hold a TikTok algorithm the way we can hold a childhood toy, yet it clearly organizes our perception and attention. I started to realize that what counts as an “object” has shifted from the physical to the infrastructural. A For You Page isn’t an item in space; it’s an environment of ongoing mediation.

This connects closely to J. J. Gibson’s idea of affordances that we discussed in lecture. Every medium or environment, he said, offers both possibilities and constraints. The air affords breathing and speech;  the screen affords scrolling and swiping. What fascinates me is how easily those affordances become invisible. I don’t usually think about how my phone affords distraction, how its notifications structure my attention before I consciously decide what to notice. Gibson’s ecological language helps me see the phone not as a tool I use, but as the medium I inhabit, one that sets the conditions for what I can do and think.

Tim Ingold’s critique of methodological individualism adds another layer here. He argues that understanding doesn’t come from analyzing isolated parts, people, tools, media, but from tracing the correspondence between them. In practice, that means I can’t study my digital habits separately from the interfaces, algorithms, and social expectations that co-produce them. My notes app isn’t just storage for my ideas; it shapes the rhythm of how I write. The medium literally participates in the thought. Ingold’s idea reframes Turkle’s thinking with objects into a more dynamic process: we and our technologies are always thinking together.

Grant Bollmer’s materialist media theory extends this even further. He claims that media aren’t just channels that represent the world, they perform it. Representation is a material act, not a symbolic one. When I post a photo or write a caption, I’m not simply expressing myself through a medium; I’m performing selfhood through a set of technological, aesthetic, and cultural constraints. The interface decides what counts as a postable image, what ratios fit, which emotions trend. Bollmer’s framework helps me see social media less as a window into identity and more as a factory that produces it.

If Turkle invites us to notice our attachments to objects, Bollmer makes us confront how those attachments are structured by power and design. He reminds us that the digital “object” isn’t neutral, it’s materialized through code, servers, and labour. A selfie on Instagram depends on rare minerals mined for phone batteries, content moderators filtering trauma, and algorithms optimizing engagement. When he says media are performative agents, I hear an ethical call: our digital gestures participate in vast systems of material consequence.

These theories start to converge around a single tension, presence and absence. Turkle’s “evocative object” bridges self and world; Ingold’s correspondence links body and environment; Bollmer’s materialism collapses the gap entirely. Yet in each case, mediation comes with loss. McLuhan called it amputation: every extension of our senses reduces some other capacity. The phone extends my reach but amputates my patience. The cloud preserves my photos but dulls my memory. I used to think of these as trade-offs; now I see them as conditions of being mediated.

A small example: last week my phone storage filled up, so I moved thousands of pictures onto Google Drive. Instantly my camera roll felt lighter, almost empty. I caught myself scrolling through old screenshots I didn’t even like, proof that my sense of self had become tangled with the device’s archive. Eco’s distinction between memory and information suddenly made sense: I had data, not memories. Offloading my photos felt like offloading part of my brain. The technology didn’t just store my experiences; it quietly changed what counted as an experience worth keeping.

Throughout the course, we’ve returned to the idea that media are environments, not just tools. Turkle’s desk objects, Gibson’s ecological mediums, Ingold’s correspondences, and Bollmer’s performative materiality all suggest that mediation is how being itself happens. I find this both comforting and unsettling. Comforting, because it means our entanglement with technology isn’t new, it’s just the latest form of human-object reciprocity. Unsettling, because recognizing this doesn’t free us from it. The point isn’t to escape mediation but to understand its affordances and costs.

Sometimes I wonder if the digital age has made mediation too smooth. The interfaces are so seamless that the in-between disappears. We rarely experience lag, friction, or texture, the qualities that remind us something is being mediated. Maybe that’s why nostalgia filters and vintage aesthetics feel satisfying; they re-introduce the sense of distance, the material grain that digital media often erase. Bollmer would probably call that a longing for the visible performance of mediation, a desire to feel the medium again.

So what does it mean to “think with objects” today? For me, it’s less about choosing the right tool and more about staying aware of how the tool thinks back. The phone on my desk isn’t just reflecting my habits; it’s helping to script them. Each notification, algorithmic suggestion, or design choice participates in shaping my attention, my memory, and even my sense of time. Recognizing that doesn’t make me less dependent on technology, but it might make the dependency more conscious, less automatic.

I’d love to hear how others in the class notice this in their own routines. Do certain objects, digital or physical, change how you feel yourself thinking? Are there moments when a medium suddenly becomes visible again, when you sense the in-between that usually disappears? Maybe paying attention to those moments is the first step toward what Ingold calls correspondence: learning to move with our media, rather than through them.

image link: https://unsplash.com/photos/aerial-photography-of-mountain-ranges-during-daytime-Y8lCoTRgHPE