Introduction

People often imagine digital technologies as immaterial, floating above physical reality. Screens are described in ways that make it seem like they are part of some other space, independent of anything material. Such a belief underlines much of how we speak about online communication and our digital life. Bollmer challenges this in his book Materialist Media Theory by arguing that all media, including digital forms, depend upon physical environments, embodied routines, and global systems.

Rosenberg and Blondheim extend this argument by observing what happens when a smartphone becomes unavailable. Every time people lose their phones or the battery dies, they go through confusion and anxiety. Everyday routines fall apart, showing how deeply connected with memory, orientation, and safety the device is. This provides everyday evidence for the theory of Bollmer.

This essay makes the case for smartphones as highly material technologies. Reading Rosenberg and Blondheim through Bollmer helps us to understand the smartphone not simply as a digital screen, but as an embodied and infrastructural medium shaping perception, action, and social life.

Bollmer and the Materiality of Media

In Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction, Bollmer argues that media is not an abstract system of symbols existing in a “virtual” world, but rather expressed within concrete material structures. He points out that the digital media we use daily, such as smartphones, are built on a vast and complex material network: from ore mining and chip smelting to power supply, server operation, and the transportation and maintenance of global supply chains. It is these seemingly small and hidden material links that support the operation of modern media. Bollmer states that the so-called “digital” has never been separated from matter; it relies on an entire global industrial ecosystem (Bollmer, p2).

These easily overlooked material components have also changed our understanding of “media.” Media is not merely content on a screen or a channel for transmitting information, but an entity composed of energy, metals, and resources. Behind every click and swipe lies the use of resources and the flow of matter. This also illustrates that media is actually part of the world’s material cycle. It not only creates new meaning but also continuously consumes natural resources. The smartphone is the best example of this contradiction. While smartphones appear lightweight and convenient, their creation is inseparable from raw materials from around the world, complex technologies, and the labor of countless people. We use it every day to browse the internet, take photos, chat, and read information; it has become our primary gateway to the digital world. However, it also consumes energy, metals, and environmental resources. In other words, while mobile phones represent the convenience of modern life, they also remind us of the entire real material foundation behind the digital world.

Therefore, according to Bollmer, understanding media requires returning to its material origins. The “existence” of media lies not only in transmitting information, but also in how it participates step by step in the construction of the world through concrete material forms such as chips, wires, plastics, and minerals. This leads to the proposition that media is not a container for information, but a process constituted by the material world itself.

Rosenberg and Blondheim and the Smartphone in Its Absence

In their empirical study on smartphone use and experience time, Rosenberg and Blondheim pointed out that mobile phones are not merely communication tools, but interactive devices that combine the body and technology, profoundly changing our perception of time, social interactions, and daily habits. Through a “deprivation study,” they deprived adolescents of their phones for a period of time. When the phone was not nearby, participants subconsciously reached for it in their pockets, bags, or on nearby tables, even without any external stimulus. This is interpreted as a phenomenon of “unconscious bodily attachment,” showing that they still have a conditioned reflexive expectation of the phone at a bodily level (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p. 246). From the perspective of media materiality, the touch, swipe, vibration notifications, and screen brightness of mobile phones constantly influence our physical world. As a material technology, the mobile phone intervenes in the body and perception, making the generation of abstract media meaning no longer just language and images, but built on a cyclical interaction of body-interface-attention-time.

For example, our subconscious actions of picking up our phones to check the time, set alarms, record time, and check notifications demonstrate that the phone has become an extension of our bodies. Smartphones have transformed our physical perception of monotonous states of time like “waiting” and “idleness.” Without phones, time felt fixed and continuous. But with phones, time becomes flexible and fragmented. For example, we can check our phones, reply to messages, and switch tasks at any time, breaking time into small segments. These behaviors influence how we perceive the world, understand time, and communicate with others. Smartphones have become an integral part of our lives and bodies, transforming “media” from a mere external tool into an extension of our daily experiences.

Comparative Analysis

Reading these texts together allows us to understand the materiality of the smartphone with much greater precision. Both Bollmer and Rosenberg and Blondheim deny the notion that digital technologies exist outside the physical world, but they do so from different levels and with different kinds of evidence.

First, Bollmer focuses on the structural side of materiality. He explains that what appears to be digital is supported by big and often invisible infrastructures, including mineral extraction necessary to build chips, moving devices along global supply chains, electrical grids powering servers and data centers, down to the physical gestures, which interfaces silently train into our bodies. To Bollmer, materiality is not only an attribute of the device but also a condition that shapes how digital media become possible at all. His view, therefore, underlines the background systems we rarely think about when holding a phone.

Rosenberg and Blondheim provide a more intimate, and immediately observable perspective. They indicate how the smartphone shapes everyday experience by small but meaningful disruptions. When the phone is missing, one loses the ability to navigate, to remember appointments, or to keep up a sense of security. These are not abstract consequences but real breakdowns most people have felt. Reaching for a phone that is not there, or feeling uneasy during a commute without it, makes the materiality of the device unmistakable. Their work brings attention to the micro level of how the smartphone becomes part of bodily rhythm, affective stability, and daily decision making.

Putting the two texts in conversation reveals a layered form of materiality. Bollmer describes the macro layer by emphasizing infrastructures, production and the environmental and political conditions that allow the smartphone to exist. Rosenberg and Blondheim illuminate the micro layer by showing how the device embeds itself in gesture, habit and emotion. These layers are different in scale, yet compatible in argument. Taken together, they reveal how the smartphone operates not only as a technical artifact but also as a lived environment that organizes perception and behaviour.

These connections make the comparison especially useful for our class. The smartphone becomes a case through which we can see how media operate simultaneously as symbolic systems, physical tools, and social structures. The texts also help us understand why smartphone dependence feels so powerful. It’s not simply a matter of distraction or preference. It’s the result of a technological object materially entangled with infrastructure, mobility, memory, and emotion. By looking at the smartphone through both authors, we get a clearer sense of how digital media shape contemporary life across different scales of experience.

Conclusion

Smartphones are often treated as digital or immaterial objects, but together the readings of Bollmer and Rosenberg and Blondheim show that they are deeply material. Their absence disrupts routines and makes visible their role in attention, memory, social stability and bodily practice. Far from separating us from the physical world, smartphones reorganize that world and shape how we experience it.

Understanding smartphone materiality helps us think differently about digital media more generally. It reminds us that screens and data do not exist outside physical life. They are embedded in bodily habits, infrastructures and emotional experience. For the students in this class, this perspective demonstrates that the analysis of media cannot stop at content or representation and has to consider also how technologies participate in shaping everyday life.

The smartphone is a material medium that allows us to see our own dependence particularly well. It calls into question the assumption of much cultural commentary that digital life exists somewhat separately from physical experience. Gaining insight into these conditions allows us to understand more about what structures contemporary life.

Citations

Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

Rosenberg, Hananel, and Menahem Blondheim. “What (Missing) the Smartphone Means: Implications of the Medium’s Portable, Personal, and Prosthetic Aspects in the Deprivation Experience of Teenagers.” Mobile Media & Communication, 2025.

Written by Saber, Rai, Mio