By- Meha Gupta

Introduction: Making the “Immaterial” Visible

We tend to think of our phones as portals to something immaterial,  a glowing window into the digital world. Yet what happens when that window closes? Grant Bollmer’s Materialist Media Theory (2019) insists that media are never weightless or neutral: they are physical systems that shape our experience, perception, and even thought itself. Rosenberg and Blondheim’s “What (Missing) the Smartphone Means” (2025) explores this claim from the opposite direction. Their study of young people who lived without smartphones for a week exposes how deeply the device’s material presence structures our daily rhythms and relationships.

Reading Rosenberg and Blondheim through Bollmer’s framework shows that the smartphone is not just a screen we look at but a medium we live through,  one that organizes space, time, and emotion. Together, the two texts reveal that when the immaterial digital layer is stripped away, what remains is the material mediation of the body itself.

Bollmer’s Rejection of the Immaterial Myth

Bollmer opens with a straightforward argument: all media are material. From paper to pixels, each medium has weight, texture, and infrastructure that determine what can be expressed through it. He calls this “performative materiality,” borrowing from Judith Butler and Karen Barad to describe how representation itself is a material act. Meaning isn’t just transmitted through media; it’s made by them.

In his five-chapter structure, Bollmer moves from inscriptions (how media record and store information) to spatiotemporal materiality (how they reorganize time and space) and finally to neurocognitive materialism, which claims that we can’t think about media; we only think in media. For him, even thought is technologically mediated. Each device we use alters how we perceive the world, just as earlier media,  from stone tablets to telegraphs,  rearranged social and sensory experience.

Crucially, Bollmer links these processes to power. The politics of media, he writes, cannot be reduced to representation; they emerge through the material arrangements that enable or restrict communication. Server farms, lithium mines, and touchscreens all participate in shaping who can speak, move, and remember. In this sense, materiality is never just physical,  it’s social, economic, and embodied.

Rosenberg & Blondheim: The Smartphone as Prosthesis

Rosenberg and Blondheim’s 2025 study begins with a deceptively simple experiment: remove the smartphone from daily life. Eighty teenagers in Israel gave up their devices for a week and recorded their thoughts and behaviours. The researchers call the smartphone a portable, personal, and prosthetic medium, describing it as an extension of perception and identity rather than a mere communication tool.

The participants’ responses confirm Bollmer’s claim that media are inseparable from being. Without their phones, teens reported spatial disorientation (“I kept reaching for something that wasn’t there”) and temporal anxiety (“I lost track of when things were happening”). The device had become a kind of externalized nervous system,  a way of structuring presence in time and space.

Interestingly, many participants described phantom sensations: checking imaginary vibrations, feeling their pockets buzz, or seeing the absent screen in their mind’s eye. Rosenberg and Blondheim interpret this as evidence of embodied mediation,  the phone’s material routines inscribed into muscle memory. For Bollmer, these moments illustrate performative materiality in action: the medium has literally trained the body to perform its presence.

Spatiotemporal Materiality: Living in the Device’s Time

Bollmer’s chapter on Spaces and Times argues that each medium produces its own spatiotemporal regime. Some media are time-biased (durable but immobile, like stone), while others are space-biased (mobile but ephemeral, like digital screens). Smartphones epitomize this duality: they collapse distance yet demand constant, real-time attention.

Rosenberg and Blondheim’s study demonstrates this collapse empirically. Participants reported that, without their phones, the world suddenly felt larger and slower. Conversations stretched, waiting returned, and physical travel regained significance. One teen wrote that taking the bus felt longer than it used to,  like the world was farther away.

Bollmer would read this as a recalibration of the media-organized present. The smartphone’s material infrastructure,  notifications, clocks, GPS,  produces an artificial sense of immediacy that shapes social life. When that infrastructure is removed, users don’t simply feel disconnected; they experience time differently. What seems like emotional withdrawal is actually a shift in the underlying temporal architecture that the medium had been performing all along.

Thinking in Media: Cognition and Dependency

In Bodies and Brains, Bollmer challenges the idea that thought is internal. Instead, thinking is distributed across brains, tools, and environments,  a concept he calls neurocognitive materialism. Rosenberg and Blondheim’s participants reveal this distributed cognition clearly: many struggled to navigate cities or remember schedules without their phones.

The loss was not just informational but cognitive. One participant admitted, “I felt stupid,  like my brain had shrunk.” Another described reaching for her phone during conversations to “remember what to say.” Bollmer would argue that such dependency is not weakness but proof that the smartphone functions as part of our mental apparatus. It externalizes memory, calculation, and even emotional regulation.

By treating cognition as materially extended, Bollmer reframes addiction as a structural condition of mediation. Rosenberg and Blondheim’s work makes that condition visible: removing the device reveals how thinking has already been offloaded into the object. The emptiness people feel in its absence isn’t purely psychological; it’s a physical reorganization of cognition.

The Affective Charge of Absence

Bollmer’s final chapter, Objects and Affects, integrates new materialism with affect theory, suggesting that objects exert power through feeling as much as function. Media generate affective atmospheres,  anticipation, anxiety, comfort,  that circulate between users and devices.

Rosenberg and Blondheim observe the same phenomenon through what they call the affective residue of the smartphone. Even when absent, the phone’s emotional trace lingers: participants felt safer or calmer when they imagined it nearby, and some placed a notebook or another object in its place. The phone’s materiality thus persists as affective potential,  a relationship of comfort and dependence.

Here, the two texts converge on a subtle insight: materiality is not limited to touchable matter. It also includes the emotional and sensory forces that bind users to technologies. The smartphone’s affective pull is as real as its circuitry. Bollmer’s theory helps explain why detachment feels physically uncomfortable,  because the body and the medium have already co-produced each other’s rhythms.

Extending Bollmer: From Theory to Lived Materiality

While Rosenberg and Blondheim largely confirm Bollmer’s framework, their empirical method also extends it beyond abstraction. Bollmer writes from a philosophical standpoint, tracing ideas from McLuhan, Innis, and Barad to argue that media perform material politics. Rosenberg and Blondheim turn that theory into lived observation, showing how materiality operates through habit, gesture, and loss.

Their work suggests that absence is itself a mode of mediation. By examining what happens when a medium is missing, they reveal how its material functions persist as ghostly behaviours,  phantom vibrations, re-enacted swipes, and disrupted routines. This approach complicates Bollmer’s call to think in media by showing that even when the medium is removed, thinking still bears its imprint.

In other words, Rosenberg and Blondheim bring Bollmer’s ideas down to the level of the everyday. Their findings demonstrate that materialist media theory is not only about wires and circuits but about how bodies internalize those circuits through repetition and desire.

Why Materiality Matters for Screen-Based Media

Both texts ultimately challenge the class’s guiding question: Does the distinction between the material and immaterial even make sense for digital media? Bollmer would say no,  digital media depend on physical infrastructures and embodied practices. Rosenberg and Blondheim confirm this empirically: when you remove the device, you don’t escape mediation; you only expose its depth.

For students studying media today, this matters because it reframes how we think about online life. Our feeds, chats, and screens aren’t weightless flows of data; they’re material entanglements involving cobalt mines, cloud servers, hands, and habits. Understanding that entanglement means recognizing our participation in a broader system of technological dependence,  one that is physical, affective, and political.

Conclusion: Feeling the Weight of the Immaterial

When Rosenberg and Blondheim’s participants reached for absent phones, they enacted exactly what Bollmer describes: the body thinking through media, even when the medium is gone. Their week of deprivation made visible what normally stays invisible,  the smartphone’s role as a prosthetic extension of perception, memory, and emotion.

Bollmer gives us the theory; Rosenberg and Blondheim give us the proof. Together, they show that materiality in the digital age isn’t about choosing between body and screen but about acknowledging their fusion. The smartphone doesn’t just connect us to the world,  it constitutes the world we inhabit. To study media, then, is to study the very conditions of being human in a technological environment that has already rewired how we feel, think, and move.

Work Cited: 

• Clyde Partin, W. (2021). Materialist media theory: An introduction: By G. bollmer, new york & london, bloomsbury academic, 2019, 198 pp., $26.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9781501337093. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2021.1877909 
• Rosenberg & Blondheim (2025)