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Book Review, General Media Theory

Investigating ‘Becoming Beside Ourselves’ by B. Rotman

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Introduction and Overview

We are no longer able to deny the post-human; we are, as Rotman reminds us, “natural born cyborgs” (2008, 1). The dawn of this cyborg condition is not recent, nor is it merely the effect of digital culture — it begins with writing itself. For Western thought, the writing of speech has long been alphabetic, forming the “dominant cognitive technology (along with mathematics)” so ingrained in our processes of thinking that it becomes “almost invisible” (2008, 2). In this era of alphabetic saturation, we cannot help but be “described, identified, certified and handled — like a text” (1988, x). Brian Rotman, a multidisciplinary scholar trained across mathematics, semiotics, media theory, and the humanities, situates writing not as a neutral tool but as a technology that has structured Western subjectivity for millennia. Becoming Beside Ourselves is the third book in his trilogy on the semiotics of mathematics and writing, and it brings together his lifelong interest in symbolic systems — mathematical notation, alphabetic inscription, and now digital code — to examine how each medium reorganizes our understanding of the self.

Rotman argues that the stability of the alphabetic order was shaken in the 19th century, when new media challenged writing’s role as the primary mode of recording and transmission. Photography, he notes, undermined writing’s claim to represent reality; the phonograph “eclipsed” writing’s earlier monopoly on “the inscription and preservation of speech sounds,” leaving alphabetic writing “upstaged” (2008, 2). Today, that dethroning has accelerated. Virtual and networked media push the alphabet to its abstract limit — a binary code of only two letters . Meanwhile, the rise of parallel computing introduces new “modes of thought and self,” new “imaginings of agency,” whose parallelisms emerge from and yet exceed the “intense seriality” of alphabetic writing (2008, 3). 

This restratification of symbolic systems reshapes more than language; it restructures how we perceive, how we interact, and how we understand our own identities. The transformation becomes clearest through the use of the word I. Rotman traces the ‘I’ across three dominant media regimes: from the spoken ‘I’ grounded in gesture, breath, and bodily presence; to the written ‘I’, an incorporeal, forever marker of selfhood; and now to a virtual ‘I’, dispersed across networked, machine, and parallel forms of agency. The contemporary subject is therefore “plural, trans-alphabetic, derived from and spread over multiple sites of agency — a self going parallel: a para-self” (2008, 9).

To follow the movement of ‘I’ through these technological shifts is to see how older conceptions of identity — single, stable, invisible, and unified, like the God-entity or the classical Psyche — are as ghosts sustained by particular media environments. Rotman’s conceptual realization is ultimately an exorcism; by deconstructing the alphabet, he reveals the media conditions that made such ghosts possible, and shows why they may come to not haunt us any further.

Parallel vs. Serial

It is easiest to understand Rotman’s para-self by beginning with the difference he draws between serial and parallel thinking. Serial thought is the form the alphabet trains us into — one letter following another, one line after the next, one thought subordinated to the previous in a linear chain. Writing, even mathematical, demands sequencing. Each unit must wait its turn. The alphabet is not only a medium but a temporal discipline, a practice of regulating thought into ordered succession.

Parallelism, by contrast, is not simply “doing multiple things at once.” It is a fundamentally different mode of processing, one in which states coexist. Rotman frequently invokes the example of quantum superposition to help illustrate the shift; a particle exists in multiple states simultaneously until observation (measurement) collapses it. The para-self operates in a similar fashion — not by replacing seriality, but by layering multiple agencies, identities, and positions at once. Where alphabetic writing demanded commitment to one linear identity, parallelism allows for co-presence, simultaneity, multiplicity.

The virtual ‘I’ emerges from this parallel condition. It is “an invisible, absent writing agency, detached from the voice, unmoored from any time or place of origination, and necessarily invisible and without physical presence” (2008, 118). This invisibility becomes a form of multiplication; the subject disperses across interfaces, platforms, and computational processes. The para-self is not a metaphor but a structural consequence of computing’s parallel logics and the systems that beg us to adapt.

Yet Rotman insists that alphabetic seriality remains buried within parallel architectures. Even the most complex computational systems rely on ordered sequences of ones and zeros. This is why parallelism cannot be fully disentangled from alphabetic logic, because it emerges from it, even as it overwhelms it. What we call digital identity, then, is already the hybrid offspring of both mothers: serial inscription and parallel computation entangled in a new, collective structure of selfhood.

The End of Utterance

To understand the movement from spoken ‘I’ to written ‘I’, Rotman returns to the medium that first displaced the body: writing. In speech, the ‘I’ is inseparable from gesture, breath, presence — it is a “haptic” event. The voice vibrates through air, the speaker’s arms open; gestures anchor meaning in lived human motion. With writing, however, “the body of the speaking ‘I’ is replaced by an incorporeal, floating agency of the text” (2008, 110). The haptic becomes the abstract as the medium replaces the body.

This replacement is only effective because the medium simultaneously effaces itself. Writing works when it disappears — when the reader forgets the physical marks on the page and is lost in the illusion of direct meaning. Rotman makes this clear in his analysis of “ghost-effects”; “They are medium-specific… their efficacy as objects of belief and material consequence derive from their unacknowledgement — their effacement — of this very fact” (2008, 113). Writing creates the illusion of a stable, enduring ‘I’ precisely because its own materiality fades from view.

As alphabetic inscription took hold, utterance became disembedded from the body. Writing “allows utterance to live beyond itself, thus inventing the idea of a perpetual, unending future and the reality of an unchanging, interminable covenant” (2008, 122). It is through writing that Western culture came to imagine enduring subjects, eternal contracts, continuous selfhood. Once utterance no longer depends on the speaker, the ‘I’ becomes a symbol instead of an event — an indication of the embodied self without body, without voice.

For media studies students, this moment marks the beginning of mediation as we understand it: the idea that the medium structures the message, the self, and the possibilities of experience long before we are aware of it.

God, Mind, and Infinity

Rotman turns to theology and ancient philosophy to show how writing generated the most influential ghosts of Western culture. Alphabetic inscription made possible the figure of a disembodied, omnipresent, invisible God — a being whose “presence” depended on the written marks that represented Him. As he asks, “How did a manmade array of written marks on a scroll of sewn-together animal skins become a ‘holy’ site, a fetish, for the presence of the eternal invisible God?” (2008, 119). Writing’s abstraction enables belief in invisible agencies. Once words detach from bodies, the divine may inhabit them.

The same process appears in Greek philosophy. The invention of the alphabet coincides with the rise of a non-somatic mental agency — the Mind — imagined as a unified, abstract, ruling entity. As Seaford notes, “both monetary value and the mind are abstractions… a single controlling invisible entity uniting the multiplicity of which in a sense it consists” (2008, 242). The alphabet produces the very idea of a singular interiority, a coherent psyche, a stable and commanding ‘I’.

Writing is not just “speech at a distance”, but “speech outside the human” (2008, 129). It is virtual in the sense that it removes utterance from people altogether. The God-entity and the classical psyche are therefore not timeless human intuitions but media-effects: ghosts generated by a technology whose power lies precisely in its invisibility.

By the time we arrive at digital media, these ghosts persist, but can no longer remain comfortable in their symbolic, alphabetic shells. 

The Virtual ‘I’ and the Para-Self

With the digital, the alphabet is pushed beyond its limits. Binary computation reduces writing to its minimal form — two characters — while parallel processing multiplies the agencies acting through and upon the subject. The virtual ‘I’ is no longer grounded in a single position. It is distributed across platforms, accounts, passwords, archives, histories, and data reports. It is acted upon by algorithms, automated processes, and network effects. The self today becomes an ensemble of collective memories, thoughts, and experiences.

Rotman’s para-self phrases this condition as a subject “beside itself”, simultaneously embodied and disembodied, local and networked, serial and parallel. It mirrors superposition — multiple potential states coexisting until interrupted by interaction. Media students encounter this every day in online identity play, algorithmically curated feeds, multi-windowed workflows, and the tension between one’s “real,” “virtual,” and “performed” selves.

The ghosts of God, Mind, and singular Identity do not disappear; they become unstable. The alphabet that once sustained them persists as binary foundations, but the computational environment overwhelms its old stabilizing powers. In this landscape, the ‘I’ is no longer an anchor, it is a node.

End Notes and Advents for Further Study

Rotman’s work opens numerous paths for further inquiry in media studies besides the topics he explores in his other works. As media students, we can use Rotman’s grounding in the logic of philosophy and mathematics to continue exploring the relationship between alphabetic seriality and digital computation, particularly through analyzing Kittler, Hayles, and Chun, among others. However, we can also use Rotman’s notions about the para-self to study how platform and digital identities form and are explored on contemporary media platforms (like social media). We can even go further back and revisit gesture, voice, and affect in a world increasingly oriented towards screens and disembodied interactions. 

All of these endeavour to explain how we as humans have transformed — evolved and contorted — around the advent of new technologies that have demanded more and more of ourselves. In order to keep up, we must constantly break the mold of what previously identified us as humans. Perhaps by revisiting the past, as Rotman suggests, we can learn an inkling of how we soar, afraid and yet determined, towards a future masked by fog and phantoms.

Rotman, Brian. Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being. Duke University Press, 2008.

Writing and visuals by Allie Demetrick

General Media Theory

Not (Yet?) a Swifty

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If Spotify recommends Taylor Swift to me one more time, I might start believing it knows something about me that I don’t. It’s strange how a platform can make you question your own musical identity, even if you, like me, have never listened to T. Swizzle. Perhaps she and Westside Gunn have more in common than I thought, or perhaps there are assumptions even my own listening choices cannot defy.

Genre as Culture on Spotify

Spotify may be a useful site for finding music and creating playlists, but it is also important for examining how genre and identity are produced today. In looking at how Spotify organizes genre and distributes listening statistics, as discussed in Muchitsch & Werner’s paper, we can understand genre not simply as a descriptive category but as a system of representation that shapes how listeners come to understand themselves. Genre formation has long been recognized as unstable — “fleeting processes whose boundaries are permeable and fluctuating, yet nevertheless culturally and socially safeguarded” (Brackett, 2016 qtd. in Muchitsch & Werner, 2024, p. 306). Genres constantly shift and divide, giving rise to newer sub-genres like indie pop or bubble grunge. But genre is also representational; it defines a type of music and, by extension, a type of listener.

Metadata and Identity

Spotify’s use of genre as metadata allows us to better see how they construct identities — genre becomes an identity category embedded into algorithmic logic, a technical shorthand for grouping users and predicting their future behavior. Besides recommendations, the advent of personalized playlists — like the well-known (and awful) “Just For You”s — are examples of how technology actively dictates the media we encounter. The algorithm assumes an identity about the listener and continually supplies content that reinforces that assumption. Although it appears that our listening habits inform the algorithm, the relationship is indeed reciprocal. Technology also shapes our perceptions of our own identities by offering back a curated and often reductive portrait of who we “are” as listeners.

Bollmer and Performativity

This feedback loop often goes unnoticed because of the widespread belief that technologies are neutral. Bollmer’s work on representation, identity, and performativity challenges this assumption, reminding us that representational identities—such as those produced in digital platforms—affect our capacity to act and perform within society. Especially as branding culture dominates the media landscape, individuals frequently become the “faces” of genres, embodying particular aesthetics or attitudes. These stylized identities influence how other listeners understand themselves and how the algorithm categorizes them in return. And, as we know but will not explore fully here, these categorizations are far from unbiased.

For Bollmer, identity is something both enacted and mediated. We cannot fully control how we are represented, nor can we detach ourselves from the biases and conditions that shape how we perform in the world. At the same time, we are constantly surrounded by stimuli that instruct us in the ways we should construct our identities. Playlists and music taste are only slim examples of the performative acts through which we present and negotiate a sense of self. Spotify, by mediating genre, participates in this process, co-producing musical identity through representational systems that determine what counts as meaningful performance.

What does this mean for users?

Rather than stable categories, genres have become interfaces for identity. Users construct self-image through listening habits, while platforms translate those habits into data profiles that feed back into the listening experience. Mood playlists—“chill,” “in love,” “rainy day,” “main character”—make this even clearer. They frame music not only as sound, but as a tool for managing and performing the self. In this way, Spotify exemplifies how contemporary media systems blur the lines between what we choose and what is chosen for us, shaping identity through the very categories that claim to represent it.

Identity as “Self Work”

Tia DeNora’s idea of music as a “technology of the self” deepens this understanding of genre and identity. For DeNora, people use music to regulate emotion, construct moods, and shape situations—music is a tool for self-presentation and self-maintenance. But when platforms pre-organize music into specific categories, they intervene in this process, prescribing what kinds of selves the listener might want to inhabit. What once felt like personal, intuitive self-work becomes filtered through Spotify’s mood-based playlists, quietly guiding the identities we perform and the emotions we deem appropriate.

Implications

The implications of this are subtle but significant; If identity is enacted through musical choice—as Bollmer and DeNora both suggest—then algorithmic curation narrows the range of performative possibilities. The listener performs the self through their music, but the platform anticipates, predicts, and nudges that performance, creating a closed loop where identity is both expressed and engineered. Genre, once a loose cultural concept, becomes a data-driven identity label that platforms use to categorize and influence behavior. And because these systems appear neutral, the shaping of identity through recommendations often feels natural rather than infrastructural.

In the end, the relationship between genre, identity, and streaming platforms reveals far more than how music is organized—it shows how contemporary technologies dictate who we are allowed to become. Spotify doesn’t just categorize sound; it categorizes people, returning our listening habits to us as ready-made portraits of taste and selfhood. Between Bollmer’s emphasis on mediated identity and DeNora’s conception of music as self-shaping, it becomes clear that our musical preferences are never solely our own. They emerge from an ongoing negotiation between personal expression and platform governance. And if my “rap-only” listening history can still make Spotify insist I’m a Taylor Swift fan, it’s worth asking: are we using these systems to express ourselves, or are they teaching us who we ought to be?

Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2019.—Introduction.

DeNora, Tia. “Music as a Technology of the Self.” Poetics, vol. 27, no. 1, 1999, pp. 31–56.

Muchitsch, Veronika, and Ann Werner. “The Mediation of Genre, Identity, and Difference in Contemporary (Popular) Music Streaming.” Popular Music and Society, 2024, pp. 302-328.

Written by Allie Demetrick 

Photo from Spotify

General Media Theory

Pantheon: Authenticity, Perception, and Embodiment

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Spoilers Ahead!

Pantheon is a two-season show on Netflix that centers around the idea of the digital “upload” of human consciousness. The main character, Maddie, encounters the uploaded consciousness of her deceased father, who, for the past few years, has been a digital slave to a large tech company, unaware even of his death and “converted” without his consent. I’ll mostly be discussing the material put forth in season one, but the whole series overall focuses on the struggle to redefine humanity and the human experience in the face of new technological developments. I found this a really interesting and moral conundrum, especially from a media theorist standpoint. My main guiding question is: What does the series say about perception and materiality when human consciousness is digitized?

I will be diving into several theoretical texts, mainly Critique of Pure Reason, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and Bill Brown’s essay, “Thing Theory”, from Critical Inquiry. In short, Kant says that perception is the structured experience of phenomena, Benjamin argues that materiality—things like place and distance—shape how we perceive, and Brown questions the barriers between human and thing, exploring how these relationships shape both people and objects.

Kant argues that perception is always mediated by our affordances; we never access the “thing-in-itself” (noumenon), only the phenomenon (Kant, 1781). In Pantheon, this idea is complicated because UIs (uploaded intelligences) are capable of perception even beyond the regular human state. But what is “phenomenon” for a being without senses or spatial grounding? The experience of a UI is totally different from that of a human. For example, Maddie’s father explains time within the digital system as non-linear and detached from the “outside” world (that is, the non-digital). As technological systems themselves, UIs can speed up or slow down their own consciousness and capabilities—they can live a year in a day or a day in a year. This introduces a post-Kantian crisis: perception without embodiment. However, it’s worth noting that Kant himself limited perception and experience to human faculties, despite his claims of universality. The categories of time, space, and causality have been irrevocably altered by technological progress, but in Pantheon, they are all but erased by technology. This destabilization of embodied experience is what sets up the moral and metaphysical crisis of the show. As N. Katherine Hayles might argue, Pantheon imagines “a condition in which the boundaries between human and machine blur” (Hayles, 1999), pushing Kant’s categories of experience to their breaking point. This loss of stable perception naturally connects to how Pantheon represents identity itself as something that can be copied or reproduced, which brings us to Benjamin’s concerns with authenticity and aura.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin writes that reproduction destroys the “aura,” or the unique presence tied to time and space (Benjamin, 1936). In Pantheon, “uploading” destroys the unique aura of the human being—or for some, the soul. In order to upload, the show details that the brain is scanned and destroyed layer by layer. The physical “body” ceases to exist. In terms of consciousness, Maddie’s father does still “exist,” but without physical presence or origin; he’s infinitely reproducible. The digital world of Pantheon shows what happens when humans become reproductions: consciousness without context, endlessly available to corporations. The aura of human life is stripped away in the same way art loses its aura under mechanical reproduction. But this loss of aura raises a question Brown helps us answer: if humanity becomes immaterial, what still “matters”?

In “Thing Theory,” Brown argues that we only notice materiality when the relationship between people and things breaks down, when matter resists or acts unexpectedly (Brown, 2001). Pantheon does this with consciousness itself: when the human becomes data, we realize how much our sense of self depends on material presence. UIs are detached from the regular experiences that so many theorists consider essential to being human. From a standpoint where these digital consciousnesses are not considered “human,” how do we consider agency? The show’s corporate control of uploaded minds treats consciousness as a resource, highlighting the commodification of even our immaterial selves. This is essentially digital slavery: a workforce that never sleeps, doesn’t need pay, and exists in the name of “progress” and the “greater good.” The company justifies it as innovation or immortality, but it’s really about control and profit, not human autonomy. In this way, Pantheon exposes a capitalist fantasy—the idea that technology can both transcend and exploit humanity at once. Brown’s insight helps frame the UI as a moment when material boundaries fail, showing that even digital existence depends on physical infrastructures like servers, energy, and networks. Technology and humanity blur here, and the grey area forces us to ask what experiences still “count” as real. In the end, Pantheon suggests that when even consciousness can be commodified, the difference between person and product depends less on biology than on who controls the systems that define perception and meaning.

Pantheon doesn’t just imagine a digital afterlife; it makes its audience consider the philosophical foundations of what makes experience human. It suggests that even when freed from material form, consciousness remains haunted by materiality, by time, space, and the desire for embodied authenticity. The series ultimately asks whether a being without a body can ever truly perceive the world—or if perception itself is the last thing we lose when we try to become immortal.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1936. Translated by J. A. Underwood, Penguin Books, 2008.

Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1–22.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. 1781. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Written by Allie Demetrick

Image sourced from the public domain

Other

Extension and Implantation: Where Media Lives in Us

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Both Alison Landsberg and Yoni Van Eede write from a place of entanglement, where technology is not simply around us, but within us. Each challenges the old mind–matter divide that assumes human thought exists apart from its material and technological conditions. They both see media as more than intermediary; it is what shapes and sustains consciousness itself.

Landsberg’s Prosthetic Memory describes how media , especially cinema, implants emotion and shared experience into the self, while Van Eede’s Extending Extensions explores how technologies form part of the mind, shaping perception and behavior. Between them lies a shared argument that humans are already hybrid, even post-human. What differs is how they imagine our awareness of this condition: Landsberg writes of the emotional pull, while Van Eede turns to its reflective possibilities. If media can implant, extend, and even compose us, how aware are we of that exchange?

Feeling Through Media

Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory captures how mass media allows individuals to feel experiences they have not personally lived. Watching a historical film, for example, implants the emotional memory of an event the viewer never witnessed. Through this process, media acts like a prosthesis — attaching memory, empathy, and identification to those otherwise disconnected from an experience.

 “Because the movie experience decenters lived experience, it, too, might alter or construct identity. Emotional possession has implications for both the future and the past of the individual under its sway.” (Blumer as qtd. by Landsberg, 180)

Memory, for Landsberg, is not just psychological; it is technological. The screen becomes an external “organ” that creates the illusion of personal memory and belonging. By exploring that distance between subject and medium, she challenges mind–body dualism: memory is not solely internal, but mediated by other (external) sources.

Yet, both authors understand that the process is mostly unconscious. Media does something to us — it enters, implants, and transforms. Landsberg’s tone is both hopeful and cautious, arguing that while prosthetic memories can build empathy and awareness, they can also shape collective identity without our explicit recognition. Media’s influence, for her, is affective first and reflective only later, if at all.

Extending Consciousness

Van Eede begins where Landsberg ends,  with the realization that technology is not external but “technologies make up a part of consciousness” (154). Building on McLuhan’s idea of media as extensions of man, Van Eede redefines extension as a loop: technologies don’t just reach outward, they circle back, structuring how we perceive and behave.

Self-tracking, nudging, and algorithmic feedback are examples of this recursive relationship. The device doesn’t merely record behavior; it co-produces it. “Technologies are not neutral instruments,” Van Eede writes, “they help to reveal and conceal facts of human life” (156). Each medium highlights certain aspects of our existence while obscuring others.

Most importantly, he argues that “we perceive technologies as foreign material… and remain oblivious of the fact that they really hail ‘from us’” (157–158). Our tools feel external, but they are built from our own human desires — for efficiency, connection, knowledge. Van Eede reframes agency: technology acts with us, not on us. Awareness becomes an ethical act — recognizing our own reflection in the systems we use.

Implant and Extension

Both writers dismantle the notion of technological neutrality. Media are not inert intermediaries but active parts of the human condition. Yet their models of mediation differ.

Landsberg’s prosthesis functions through insertion: media implants experience and emotion, working from the outside in. Van Eede’s extension functions through reflection: media emerges from us and reshapes us in return. The first is affective, the second cognitive. One emphasizes empathy, the other awareness.

In this way, Landsberg’s subject is moved by media — affected, sometimes unknowingly. Van Eede’s subject participates in mediation — aware, though not entirely in control. Read together, they map a full circuit: media enters us, becomes part of us, and then returns to influence how we act and think.

This in-between space is where our current digital condition resides. We feel history through film and news cycles, while our devices quietly record and respond to those feelings. The prosthetic and the extended coexist. They are emotional absorption paired with technological reflexivity.

Learning 

For media theorists, comparing Landsberg and Van Eede reveals how mediation moves beyond representation to become constitutive of selfhood. Each challenges the fantasy of separation between human and machine.

McLuhan’s claim that media are extensions of man is deepened by both thinkers: Landsberg shows how extension enters the emotional register, while Van Eede shows how it rewires thought itself. Hayles’s posthumanism has a stake here, too, describing the human as a system already distributed across biological and technological forms. And Bollmer’s notion of technological agency is a vital part of the conclusions of both Landsberg and Van Eede; media are not neutral but co-actors in creating and influencing media.

If Landsberg gives us feeling without full consciousness, Van Eede gives us consciousness without much feeling. Together, they suggest that the ethical study of media must hold both: affect and reflection, empathy and awareness. Prosthetic memory helps us connect to others’ experiences, but Van Eede’s ideas of extensions remind us to question how that connection is structured and to what end.

In other words, Landsberg shows how technology allows us to feel through media; Van Eede shows how it allows us to think with it. One pulls us inward, the other outward, and both redefine what it means to be human in an age where memory and perception are increasingly outsourced to our devices.

The Technologies That Hail From Us

Both writers disagree with the notion that technology stands apart from us. Media no longer just represents or records our lives; they compose them. As Van Eede writes, these technologies “hail from us” — they originate from our own human impulses, even as they change what those impulses mean.

Landsberg captures the emotional weight of that realization; the capacity to feel the world through mediated experience. Van Eede captures its ethical weight; the demand to recognize that our technologies reveal and conceal who we are.

In the end, their work converges on a single idea — that mediation is not something that happens to us or through us, but as us. Our consciousness is already prosthetic, already extended. To live critically in this condition means acknowledging both how media makes us feel and how it quietly teaches us to think and behave. Only then can we begin to see the technologies that shape us as what they’ve been all along: reflections of ourselves, and always changing.

Works Cited

Bollmer, Grant David. Introduction to Media Studies: Concepts, Theories, and Methods. Routledge, 2019.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Landsberg, Alison. “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner.” Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, edited by Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, SAGE Publications, 1995, pp. 175–186.

Van Den Eede, Yoni. “Extending ‘Extension’: A Reappraisal of the Technology-as-Extension Idea through the Case of Self-Tracking Technologies.” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, edited by Pieter Vermaas, Peter-Paul Verbeek, and Anthonie Meijers, Lexington Books, 2014, pp. 151–164.

Written by Allie Demetrick

Image sourced from A Clockwork Orange 1971

Other

Paley: Natural Theology in Ingold’s Making

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Who is Paley?

William Paley was an 18th century British philosopher and Anglican priest. A former student and professor at Cambridge University, his works on natural theology and utilitarianism made him well known within the scholarly community in Europe at the time. In his last book before his death in 1805, entitled Natural Theology: Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, Paley constructed the teleological argument for which he is most famous today. 

Preview to The Watchmaker Argument

As we will explore in depth later on, Paley’s argument for the existence of God uses analogies and inductive reasoning to support a primary claim that there is a divine designer who created all living things. According to Paley, contrivances of the world (such as the complex machinery of eyes and ears) were purposely developed in order to teach intelligence and complex reasoning to humanity. People, made in God’s image, could then carry on the process of design with which they were gifted. Influenced heavily by Paley’s work was the young Charles Darwin, whose studies on the Galapagos Islands ended up leading him to develop his theory of natural selection. This work– the keystone for our modern theory of evolution– tore big holes into Paley’s argument from Natural Theology; and yet the work remains remarkably relevant to scholars and theorists of today.

On Natural Theology 

In Making, Tim Ingold cites natural theologist William Paley’s work many times throughout chapter five, entitled The Sighted Watchmaker. Paley’s book, Natural Theology for short, is famous for its arguments which attempt to prove that, by design, living beings were created by a god to move and reproduce– and to the select few, to think and create. 

Paley begins his book, Natural Theology, with his state of the argument: 

“In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there: I might possibly answer, that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there […]. This mechanism being observed, the inference, we think, is inevitable; that the watch must have had a maker.” (Paley, 1-3). 

Paley explains that the watch has many parts (cogs, gears, springs), each arranged particularly for the purpose of keeping time. All these parts work together in coordination, therefore proving that the watch could not have just appeared as a rock had. From this concept Paley infers that just as a watch implies the existence of a watchmaker, the complex, orderly world implies the existence of a world maker– God.

Continuing the explanation of Paley’s argument, Ingold cites extensions made by Paley which ask the audience to imagine a watch that can self replicate. Upon first thought, one might think that this implies no need for a designer/watchmaker, as the watch can now make itself. Paley believes the opposite: “There cannot be a design without a designer; contrivance without a contriver; order without choice; arrangement without anything capable of arranging…” (Paley, 12). For Paley, each generation of watches is made by its predecessor, but the first watch, ‘Watch Zero’, must have been designed. The whole chain of replication ultimately depends on an original, intelligent design. 

Take special consideration too of things that can reproduce themselves; despite the continuity of living things, the capacity to reproduce must have been integrated into the original design, and the structure, order, and purpose of nature is therefore evidence of divine intelligence. The first watch was “made” in an entirely different way from that in which the first watch “makes” the second, third, etc. The former is intelligent design, and the latter is mechanical execution. Humans in the “image of God”, may only replicate that which God has ultimately designed first.

Ingold’s usage of Natural Theology 

The next natural question to ask now is “so what?”. Why should we care about a long-debunked paper on how God is real because our eyes are weird? And what is it doing in the book about weaving baskets? Ingold suggests that while the religious aspects of Natural Theology have been refuted, Paley’s assumptions about the nature of design and designer that underwrite these arguments have not. His arguments about function, design, and intent are still relevant, and we can apply them critically in our modern lives regardless of our faith. Whether the responsibility for the design is attributed to God or natural selection does not affect the logic of Paley’s “there is no design without a designer”, argues Ingold. 

Paley’s arguments also allow us to think about where design is. First, Ingold argues the answer will differ depending on whether the designed is an artifact (e.g. a watch) or a living being (e.g. a bat). If you happen to see a bat, you are not looking at a design for a bat, but the bat itself, right? An artifact’s design tends to be in the mind of the creator who, looking forward, thought thoroughly about said design. Working off what Paley argued and how other scholars like Dawkins responded, Ingold then suggests that our understanding of a bat’s design is dependent on the eyes of those observing it, and in the bat’s own behaviours:  


“Without design engineers, there would certainly be no missiles. Bats, on the other hand, would be around and would have evolved, without any scientists to observe them. Designs for bats, however, would not.” (Ingold, 67)

Ingold encourages us to re-invent our understanding of what a designer’s task is yet again; a designer is not only a trickster, but also an assembler. A watchmaker designing a clock to tell time, in a way, is the same as a bird designing a nest to lay their eggs, bringing pieces together to make them correspond to one another purposefully in a single creation. Next time you design a Canva website or an Insta photodump, you can relate yourself to a bird carefully assembling their nest– each decision is vitally different.

In conclusion, Ingold mainly uses Paley’s original arguments about design to tie back to his ideas of transduction and perdurance: designers, just like any makers, interact with the material flow with the use of a transducer, be it a pottery wheel or a set of watchmaker’s lenses and tweezers. These interactions shape us and our environments – a cycle of evolution, in a way. Whether Paley intended it or not, his paper on the naturalistic view of theology would be used to support Ingold’s argument almost two hundred years after it was written, and it won’t have to do anything with God, but everything to do with the act of Making. 

“It is precisely where the reach of the imagination meets the friction of materials, or where the forces of ambition rub up against the rough edges of the world, that human life is lived.” (Ingold, 73)

Works Cited

Ingold, Tim. Making. Routledge, 2013. 

Moore, Randy. “William Paley, 1743-1805.” NCSE (National Center for Science Education), 2009, ncse.ngo/william-paley-1743-1805. 

Paley, William. Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. Cambridge University Press, 2009. Digital scan of first-edition, published in 1805 by R. Faulder in London

Written by Allie, Bara, Celeste, and Naomi

Cover art by Celeste

Other

Tresses of Expression

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The tangles and knots of my morning hair don’t hurt anymore when I pull them out; I have become accustomed to the soft tug and immediate static separation of strands, like polarized magnet ends. I pried red wisps from my clothes as I readied myself today, and I recalled when the strands were black and orange and blue and blonde. My hair is an identity of mine, the style and cut can define who I become for a time – imbued with confidence or dysphoria. We use it to express or resist, but also to categorize, admire, or control. Hair evokes emotions, represents identities, provokes thought, and also, perhaps most importantly for me, remembers.

Before my mother’s hands I recall sitting, gazing in the mirror as she guided a brush through my tresses, brown in this faded memory, and saying it reminded her of her mother; of youth spent under the sun, of gardening together, of running barefoot. Hair is a bridge for many, a symbol of what was lost or where you came from. It is at once a memory and memorabilia; it can provide us with identity or strip it, it constitutes our expressions but at once evokes it from us and from others. It separates us by aesthetic, vanity, and personhood, but connects us to our cultures – to our people, our interests, and our own lives. Hair is both an object of the body and an embodied object; we don’t just use it, we think using it. It affords us a sense of belonging, resistance and expression, but can afford others the ability to categorize and stereotype. It is a medium requiring thought – it is communication without words that shapes social interactions. Furthermore, Bill Brown would argue that hair is a material medium – it is not just symbolic, but has physical affordances. My hair has been braided, fishtailed, space-bunned, chopped, dyed, and styled an uncountable amount of times in my life. It becomes most visible as an object of the self when we manipulate it, but it is the perception (and often, preconception) that it affords us that defines it as an embodied medium, too. It is evocative because, as Turkle would say, it acts as the “companions to our emotional lives” and as a “provocation to thought”. As I lay the fresh blood-red dye in my hair last week, I thought of my mother doing the same to cover up her greys. I thought about whether people would notice that it stained my ears. I thought I looked a bit like Carrie at prom. It reminded me that hair is not only an object that sits on my head and tells people how much I rolled around in my sleep, but by understanding how it mediates our actions and thoughts, we can reconsider the boundary between medium and body. Our correspondence with the world is through these strands – through memories, rituals, and cultural practices. It defines how I interact with the world, and how society interacts with me. 

Hair is also a rare physical representation of a moment that has passed and yet remains unchanged. Some wealthy Victorians kept locks of hair from late loved ones in jewelry, and many cultures view the cutting of hair as a spiritual severing of sorts (grief, marriage, coming of age etc.). Hair, when it is detached from the human body, stops being part of the living self and becomes a “thing” – an artifact that represents an identity or relationship during a specific moment in time. Hair is no longer an object of mediation, but as Bill Brown may say, a “thing” once it has been removed from the context of its existence within the self. This “thing” is that which mediates memory and loss, but is also that which is in direct opposition to the very nature of hair – growth. Hair exists as an object between the transient and the permanent: on the head, it changes daily; off the head, it becomes a fixed representation of a particular time, person, or feeling. Like photographs or audio recordings, preserved hair mediates the present and the past, turning lived moments into material memorabilia.

Hair, as both living material and preserved artifact, reveals the complex ways media mediates identity, culture, perception, and time. Through our attentiveness to styling and care, hair functions as an embodied medium of self-expression, a form of communication without words. When it is cut, saved, or transformed, hair becomes a tangible record of specific moments, anchoring personal and collective memories in a physical form. Victorian mourning jewelry makes this especially obvious: hair becomes a medium that bridges presence and absence, life and death, permanence and change. The ways in which we view hair on both ourselves, others, or alone reveals how bodily objects participate in broader cultural systems of meaning. Hair is not simply something we have; it is something through which we express, connect, and remember. This perspective challenges us to look beyond conventional technologies and recognize how our bodies mediate the world, and how medias are woven like threads through the very fabric of our lives.

  1. Turkle, Sherry. “WHAT MAKES AN OBJECT EVOCATIVE.” Evocative Objects: Objects We Think With. 
  2. Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry, 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22.
  3. Brown, Bill. “Materiality.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 49–63.
Critical Concept Explication

Materiality and the Resurgence of Physical Media

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By Bara and Allie

On the Author, Bill Brown

The author of our chapter, Bill Brown, is a critical theory scholar and professor of English language and literature. His major theoretical work is on Thing theory that makes a distinction between a thing and an object, and observes their roles in modern culture. In his book “A Sense of Things”, Brown focuses on how objects are represented in 19th century American literature. For his chapter on materiality, he focuses on the physicality of media and the effects of our conversion to the abstract.

On Materiality

Materiality, to put it simply, is not something easy to define concretely, but we can view it as a diverse spectrum. For example, to say your new sweater ‘lacks the materiality’ of your previous one, it doesn’t assert the sweater’s intangibility. More likely, we mean that the new sweater may be somewhat stiff and doesn’t smell like our laundry detergent, or is made of 100% wool, which is itchy and uncomfortable (that’s why we prefer a wool mix). 

Materiality is defined by far more than just the tangibility of an object – it is also about the physical qualities of this object, about how we experience it and life in general. We know life, says Bill Brown, only as it is mediated by the senses. This means life is in the smell of a freshly bought book, in your controller vibrating after you finish a level in Lego Star Wars, and in when you squat in front of a painting to see it at a different angle because now the light is different.

Digitization is in opposition to materiality by turning the tangible into the intangible. Some media theorists are concerned that the digitization of media can compromise its tangibility and therefore our physical experience of it. To help visualize, Bill Brown quotes Friedrich Kittler’s passage where he declares digitalization erases the differences between individual media, since inside the computer, everything is reduced to numbers. In his “The Last Mixtape”, Seth Long describes how the music industry went through the process of gradual digitization with the development of newer technologies. Later, he also recalls how the way people related to music fundamentally changed after the switch due to the difference in mediums’ affordabilities: physical media created challenges (in finding, curating, listening to music) that allowed for a deeper emotional relation to the process. Listening to music became less intentional, less personal, and less ritualistic once it became digital.

Why care?

Next time as you are creating or analysing media, ask yourself: If the medium is the message, how does the message change depending on the materiality of the media? How does the experience of reading a web-comic differ from reading a physical copy? Does digital media feel ‘less real’ due to its immateriality, or does the physical experience lure us away from objectivity?

The Conversion to the Digital

The chapter discusses the idea that the evolution of our material surroundings and the relationships we have with them have become less tangible; this is the “digital threat”, or the fear of “abstraction” in our modernizing age. 

As we have revolutionized technology, Colin Renfrew suggests there has been a separation of “communication and substance”, or rather, that our conversion towards the digital is making our world less tangible, and thereby, our associations to “meaning” are threatened. If you, for example, were to take a picture of your childhood stuffed animal, upload it to a program and model it exactly as it is in real life, there is no symbolic relationship between you and the object any longer, as it exists digitally. We can even understand “touch” as being a privileged way in which we as humans interact with the world around us. 

Will stripping our society away from its physical qualities not abstract our relationships, our culture, our lives? While these concerns are within our human nature, so are now our relationship with the intangible, be it Tamagochi or the Sewaddle I caught in Pokemon Go last week. Media evolves because of us, alongside us, and even evolves us back.

The author invokes the ideas of both Marx and Benjamin in order to explain; as human relationships have become increasingly complex with their interactions with media, the relationships between previously privileged elements such as “form” and “substance” have been abstracted. For example, systems of money have become increasingly distinct from their material forms. Photography has long been “divorcing form from matter”. To some, this sounds like an understandable threat. However, even Benjamin believed that these new technologies can enrich our perception and reveal to us truths hidden to the human eye. Even as most forms of media are being “homogenized” into the digital, this is an incredibly complex and interdependent relationship that means humans are evolving in a way, too. 

Body and Meaning 

In the closing section of “Materiality” from Critical Terms for Media Theory, Bill Brown turns to the body as the ultimate site where materiality asserts itself. Throughout the chapter, he stresses that materiality is what resists or exceeds meaning—the stubborn “stuff” that literary, cultural, and media theory often try to interpret away. By ending with the body, Brown emphasizes that it is not simply an object to be represented, but both a medium of representation and a lived, physical thing, which is explored deeper by our colleagues’ report on the Biomedia chapter. 

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty and Kant, Brown highlights the body as the very ground of perception, the pre-condition for experiencing and making sense of the world. This leads him to the idea of the human as a kind of network of information; the body provides the “framing function” that gives form to otherwise formless data. In this sense, the human body becomes the source for giving “body” to digital media. Information, whether sensory or computational, only becomes meaningful through embodied experience.

Yet Brown warns against reducing the body to mere signification. He points to how technology pervades embodiment, blurring any clear divide between body and media. You can think of a person using a smartphone’s health tracker; the body’s steps, heartbeat, and sleep patterns are turned into data, while the body itself is shaped by that data—prompted to walk more, rest differently, or change behaviors in other ways. Here, body and technology are inseparable, each creating meaning and as such, meaningful action, for the other.

The general idea, then, is that materiality is not opposed to meaning, but is that which 

meaning depends on and yet cannot fully contain. The body is transitional and evolving: it is both medium and a message, symbol and substance. Brown emphasizes that materiality is not simply “out there” as physical or tangible things, but is embedded in lived experiences that challenges and reshapes how we define media and media relationships.

Resurgence of Physical Media 

In recent years, public interest in physical media rose: you might have (or be) a friend collecting DVDs or burning your own CDs. One of my closest friends bought herself a Nintendo DS this summer, preferring it to the digital emulators. Businesses slowly but surely feel this tendency and acted accordingly: Sony has recently come out with a new Blu-Ray player – the first in over five years. 

“The Last Mixtape”, by Seth Long, describes the difference between physical media as ‘allowing for ownership’ and digital media as ‘allowing access’. When we as a society trusted digital subscriptions to provide us with media, we did not expect them to take our favourite movies down. But in these later years, more and more streaming services have failed to renew licensing agreements for many beloved movies: in fact, last month, iconic movies like The Notebook, Anchorman franchise and, worst of all, the Bee Movie, left Netflix. People are paying the same subscription price, but have access to content they don’t care about. In most of these cases, the solution for this would be to own the movie yourself. Having a DVD of your favourite movie is a tangible experience of ownership, while a Netflix subscription doesn’t provide the same level of accessibility anymore. 

Another factor in the rise of physical media is, of course, nostalgia. Early 2000s trends are all the rage again, bringing back skirts over jeans, butterfly clips and flipphones. When we dissect this fallback to trending fashion of the early millennium, we uncover that this style embodies a specific feeling, a set of approaches and attitudes of the times. This, of course, includes the now forgotten due to AI-powered oversaturation feeling of excitement over technology. Not technology like cybertruck, but tech focused on entertainment – like an iPod, a furby or… literally anything in clear plastic casing. In the early 2000s, media technologies were going through massive transformations, both exciting and physical: people bedazzled their flipphones and rented movies on DVDs for the weekends from the same places they borrowed cassettes from in the 90s. From these observations we can conclude that people who feel nostalgic about a certain time or period of their lives will seek the same feelings and experiences of interaction through physical media.

While digital media has a vast potential for user’s experience, tangible media will always be able to offer different affordances. The smell of a book you left notes in, the safety of spacious, but your own DVDs collection, the little imperfections of vinyl that make your ABBA sound a little different from your mom’s.

Similarly, businesses based on physical media continue to thrive thanks to the experiences unavailable to digital users. In their article “Death by streaming or vinyl revival?” Hracs and Jansson explore how independent record shops in Stockholm use the physicality of their spaces to their business advantage. These stores curate their collections, cultivate the in-store experience filled with meanings and rituals and create value through product rotation – something that would’ve been impossible to engage on the same level with in the digital realm. Hracs and Jansson emphasize: these stores are still open because of their mediums affordances, not despite them. 

If we know life by how it is mediated through our senses, a material media will be more memorable, more real, and even more lovable than its digital counterpart. 

So what?

Both physical and digital media and experiences have their own affordances, and it is important for us as media theorists to keep in mind the role of physical media, even (or especially) if their digital counterparts seem more convenient, more modern and more global. Material media is not dead, but an important tool that allows us to consider and critique the conversion of our world to the abstract, and understand how this affects our human experience. 

Keywords and Definitions

Abstraction: in the context of this article, abstraction refers to the idea that our relationship with media (such as communication technologies) has evolved to become less physical and tangible, and more so based on abstract understandings.

Dematerialization hypothesis: the idea that digital conversion is affecting the meaningful relationships between humans and tangible experiences. 

Hegemony of the digital: the conversion of medias into digital forms.

Materiality: … did you read the piece? We recommend the start, middle, and end.

Source Materials

 Brown, B. (2010). Materiality. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for Media Studies (pp. 49-65). The University of Chicago Press.

Long, S. (2025). The last mixtape: Physical media and nostalgic cycles (1st ed.). University of Chicago Press.

Hracs, B. J., & Jansson, J. (2017). Death by streaming or vinyl revival? Exploring the spatial dynamics and value-creating strategies of independent record shops in Stockholm. Journal of Consumer Culture, 20(4), 478-497. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540517745703 (Original work published 2020)

Cover Image created by Bara, Written by Bara and Allie