Media theory often starts with technologies. Cameras, screens, networks, and books are all treated as central agents of mediation, the things that shape perception, distribute information, and structure social lives. Yet, long before any technological medium emerges, humans already inhabit a medium that grounds all experience: the body. The body is not merely a vessel that encounters media; it’s the first site through which the world becomes sensible. Every medium, no matter how advanced or “immaterial”, ultimately depends on embodied perception. To truly understand media, then, we have to begin not with devices but with embodiment itself. 

The distinction between body and embodiment is critical here. The body can be approached as an object, after all, it is a visible, bounded thing with physical characteristics. As it appears from the outside, the body is seemingly stable and fixed. Embodiment, however, refers to the lived experience of having and being a body. The sensations, emotions, memories, and movements that give human existence its texture and flavour. Embodiment is contextual, dynamic, and constantly changing. It is through embodiment that perception becomes meaningful, and that media first takes shape. 

What our digital culture reveals, ironically, is not the disappearance of embodiment but its constant negotiation. Through the 20th and 21st centuries, new technologies promised a kind of disembodiment. With the invention of the internet and its numerous features, we have the possibility of creating entirely new identities, freed from physical constraints and distributed across avatars, usernames, posts, and profiles. Online, people can imagine themselves unburdened by the limits of appearance, ability, or geography. Gender can become a role performed in a textual or visual space, selfhood can multiply into curated personas, and new “people” can be created out of thin air by the click of a few buttons. You can decide at any given moment that the person you want to be online is opposite to who you really are, physically. This ideology of disembodiment suggests to people that digital technologies offer something beyond the physical constraints of the body. 

However, I would argue that in practice these technologies intensify the role of embodiment rather than diminish it. Even in “virtual” environments, our bodies respond in physical ways while we’re experiencing them. We have physical shifts like our postures changing to best adapt in viewing the screens, our eyes adapt to stare at bright screens and pixels for longer periods of time, our heart rates rise and fall as we experience the media in front of us. Like playing a virtual reality game, we have to physically embody the character in the game in order to properly play virtually, and our body reacts to the screen we’re seeing through VR lenses like we are really there. We have emotional responses ranging from anxiety, excitement, desire, envy, joy, sadness, and more registering in the body. Could you recognize and count how many emotions you flip through while you mindlessly scroll through the news, or Instagram, or TikTok? The rhythms of tapping, scrolling, and pausing all become habitual motor patterns that are cemented in your muscle memory, your fingers immediately assuming their positions when holding your phone and starting the pattern all over again every time you pick up the phone. Do you have to think about what to do with your hands when using your phone? Does your pinky finger have a small dent in the side of it, creating the perfect fit for your phone to rest on? Does your heart rate rise when you get a notification? 

The digital self is NOT separate from the physical self.

The digital self depends on and leaves traces on the embodied subject who sustains it. AKA, you. Far from escaping the body, we discover that digital media reconfigures our sense of it. This apparent tension becomes clearer when we examine the question of materiality. A common fear is that digital media detaches meaning from material substance, that the shift from paper to screens, from objects to streams, from physical archives to remote servers and digital files, signals a broader cultural “dematerialization”. While this is true, as an estimated 90% of modern human history would vanish if the internet died, even the most digital forms of media are materially grounded. A streaming platform still requires bodies capable of hearing and seeing, a VR headset must sit on an actual face, and an algorithm only functions by registering your microgestures of attention and habit. The infrastructure of digital media is itself profoundly physical, from data centers to batteries to our sensory organs that absorb and interpret the output. If digital culture appears immaterial, it is only because the material supports have been submerged beneath more seamless interfaces. 

Recognizing the primacy of the body reframes how we can understand media technologies. Each new medium can be viewed as an extension of bodily capacity as writing extends memory, photography extends vision, audio technologies extend hearing, and social platforms extend presence or attention. These extensions do not replace our embodied perception; they amplify, reconfigure, and externalize it. As McLuhan famously argued, “the medium is the message”, but this motto takes on a deeper significance if we acknowledge that the boy is the medium behind all the messages. The ways we hear, touch, see, and move through the world shape the kinds of media we create, and in turn, those media reshape how we imagine our bodies. 

Ultimately, grounding media theory in embodiment reveals that media are not external systems we occasionally interact with. They are environments we inhabit, extensions we live through, and processes that reorganize perception at its root. Before images, words, signals, or data arrive, they must pass through the sensing, remembering, and interpreting body. The body is not simply where mediation happens, it itself is a medium. Our body is dynamic, responsive, and continually shaped by the technologies we encounter every day. If media are ways of structuring experience, the embodiment is the original architecture. It remains the template through which all of the media we absorb must pass, and the anchor that keeps even the most virtual environments tethered to the material conditions of life. Media theories that forget the body risk forgetting the very ground of perception itself. To properly understand the media, we begin where experience begins: Our Bodies.

TLDR:

Media begins and ends with our bodies, because it’s all a big tangled mess that we’re dependent on, and that’s dependent on us. #interlinked #fullcircle #onewithtechnology