All posts by crobin06

General Media Theory

The Digital Self is NOT Separate From the Physical Self. Here’s Why.

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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

Critical Comparison

Behind the Glass: Seduction as the Missing Piece in Materialist Media Theory

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In Materialist Media Theory, Grant Bollmer argues that our media are never immaterial, even if they often feel that way. What appears virtual and weightless is actually grounded in vast infrastructures, sensory demands, physical interfaces, and bodily routines. Bollmer’s central project is to shift media studies away from its traditional focus on representation and toward an understanding of digital technologies as material agents reshaping human perception, experience, and cognition at a fundamental level. However, Bollmer emphasizes materiality; Mark Weiss’s “Seduced by the Machine” emphasizes something more elusive. The emotional, aesthetic, and psychological seductions that draw us toward our devices. Weiss’s account suggests that our relationships with technology cannot be explained solely by reference to hardware, interfaces, or infrastructures. Instead, our attachments are driven by fantasies, desires, and the subtle ways technologies promise mastery, autonomy, and intimacy. If Bollmer gives us the mechanics of media materiality, Weiss gives us the affective charge that makes people care about and often depend on their machines. 

The main argument of this blog post is that Weiss’s concept of technological seduction exposes a significant limit in Bollmer’s materialist framework. While Bollmer helps us understand the physical conditions that shape digital experience, he underestimates the role of pleasure, fantasy, and symbolic attachment in shaping how people engage with media. Weiss complicates Bollmer’s claim that materiality is the primary site of media’s power, suggesting instead that music of this power operates in the immaterial or material realm of desire. 

For Bollmer, digital media only appear immaterial because their interfaces are smooth, their screens are luminous, and their infrastructures are hidden from everyday experience. Beneath this illusion lie data centers, cables, processors, gestures, cognitive adaptations, and bodily postures. Materiality for Bollmer is not just about physical hardware but about all the background conditions that make media possible: how technology occupies space and time, how it organizes sensory experience, and how it silently governs attention, movement, and affect. The point is not simply that machines have bodies, but that their material operations shape our own bodies long before meaning or interpretation comes into play. 

Weiss, however, presents a different angle. In “Seduced by the Machine”, he argues that people are drawn into technological systems not implicitly because of their material affordances but because technologies seduce them. Seduction, in Weiss’s sense, involves allure, desire, and the promise of seamlessness and control. People feel recognized by their devices; they experience the pleasure of instant response, and they embrace the fantasy that the machine “knows” them. This sense of intimacy or fluency is not reducible to the way a touchscreen works, even though that material mechanism makes the feeling possible. It is instead a symbolic and affective process, something closer to psychological enchantment than to bodily conditioning. 

This is where a limit in Bollmer’s framework emerges. Bollmer urges us to look past representation and symbolism, but Weiss suggests that these elements are not distractions from materiality; they help explain why materiality matters in the first place. Technologies succeed not only because they physically shape our habits and perceptions, but because they seduce us into wanting those shapes. The fantasy of immateriality, for instance, is not an innocent misunderstanding that Bollmer can correct by revealing the true material structure of digital media. It is an engineered aesthetic effect that technology companies carefully cultivate. In other words, the illusion of immateriality is part of the seduction. Bollmer’s framework does not fully capture how this illusion is produced or why it is so compelling. Materiality alone also cannot explain technological desire. Bollmer shows how media act on us through bodily rhythms, infrastructural constraints, and neural patterns. However, he doesn’t fully address why users form powerful emotional bonds with devices, nor why they experience guilt, pride, pleasure, or even longing in their technological interactions. Weiss’s emphasis on seduction fills this gap by showing that technologies engage not just our senses but our fantasies, positioning themselves as objects of intimacy and aspiration. 

There is also a political dimension to this critique. Bollmer focuses primarily on the politics of infrastructure, how technology organizes power through access, distribution, and bodily modulation. Weiss introduces another form of power: the politics of seduction. When technologies promise empowerment while quietly increasing dependency, seduction becomes a mechanism of control. It masks coercion behind convenience, and surveillance behind personalization. Bollmer’s framework, while useful for uncovering hidden infrastructures, does not fully account for this more subtle dynamic. This tension between Bollmer and Weiss matters for how we think about digital media today. In class, we have often discussed representation, signification, and the ways media objects act as tools for thought. Bollmer asks us to shift our focus to the material operations that underlie these symbolic processes. Weiss, however, shows that the symbolic dimension cannot be dismissed so easily. The seductive surface of the devices works together with their material operations to shape behaviour and desire. Screen-based media do not fall neatly into categories of material or immaterial, they are materially constricted precisely to appear immaterial. The fantasy of frictionless immediacy is part of their design.

The encounter between Bollmer and Weiss suggests that the im/material distinction itself might be misleading. What matters is how media use the fantasy of immateriality to hide their actual material conditions, and how this fantasy helps produce the forms of attachment that Weiss describes. Materiality and immateriality, in other words, are not opposites. They are co-produced. The sleep interface depends on the heavy infrastructure, the seductive illusion depends on the physical labour and environmental cost that Bollmer wants us to acknowledge. 

Expanding on this entanglement of desire and materiality, it becomes clear that Weiss’s framework forces us to reconsider what counts as “material” in the first place. Bollmer tends to define materiality through physical infrastructures, bodily interfaces, and spatial-temporal structures, while Weiss shows that affect and desire themselves have a kind of material force. Seduction produces real behavioural patterns: people check their phones reflexively, experience phantom vibrations, and organize their days around notifications or algorithmic nudges. These are not simply symbolic effects, they are embodied habits that shape muscle memory, attention spans, and even sleep cycles. In this sense, Weiss pushes materiality into a more psychological or phenomenological register, one that Bollmer gestures toward but does not fully theorize. This broader perspective matters because it highlights how deeply screens shape our lived experience. Even though the interface feels frictionless, the effects it produces are anything but. The seduction of seamlessness often results in fragmented attention, compulsive scrolling, and a form of low-level dependency that becomes part of everyday life. When a device feels natural or indefensible, this is not a purely material process, it is a combination of affect, design, and desire. Bollmer’s emphasis on infrastructure helps us understand why these patterns emerge, but Weiss helps us understand why they persist and why users rarely resist them. Together, these insights reveal that any serious critique of digital media must move beyond a strict materialist lens. Seduction is not a superficial or secondary effect but a crucial part of how technologies maintain their power. If Bollmer uncovers what digital media are, Weiss uncovers why we let them in so easily, and why they’re so hard to give up. 

Ultimately, a fuller theory of digital media requires combining Bollmer’s attention to material conditions with Weiss’s account of technological seduction. Bollmer helps us see the infrastructures and bodily routines that shape digital experience, while Weiss helps us understand why those experiences are so compelling and why users so willingly submit to them. If Bollmer shows us how media shapes us, Weiss shows us why we cooperate.  By bringing the two thinkers together, we get a clearer picture of the power of screen-based technologies. They are material objects that create immaterial desires, physical infrastructures concealed beneath seductive illusions. And it is precisely through this entanglement, not through materiality alone, that media exert their deepest influence on everyday life. 

Other

Life Long Comforts: How Objects From Early Childhood Stay With Us For Life.

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(The earliest photo I can find of the blanket, vs my blanket this week)

[Prefix: I am just a girl, and when writing this felt quite vulnerable with the idea that I would share it with you. My mom reminded me that while vulnerability feels like a weakness to ourselves, it looks like courage to others. So be nice!!]

When we’re babies, we’re given many toys, stuffies, and blankets, but many of us grow an attachment to just one particular thing. In my family, we refer to that one thing as a “Lovey”. Many children begin to lose their attachment to their lovey when they enter their teens, sometimes younger, sometimes older. Others hold onto that attachment for life. Clearly, there was a gene in my family that made us so attached to our Loveys; both my parents still have teddy bears that they were given as young children and held onto. For me, my object was my little pink blanket. 

The blanket itself is not impressive. I’ve been told and seen in photos that my blanket was soft and bright pink at first, but as far as I can remember, it’s been rough and white. It’s about 2ft by 3ft, and literally tearing at the seams. It’s worth nothing, but to me it is worth everything. To me, it’s worth going back to my house to grab it in an emergency, or pack fewer clothes than I need to bring it with me on trips; it’s even to come to friends’ houses with me. This blanket has moved houses with me eleven times and has spent the last 20 years with me. It is, without a doubt, 100% a security blanket. It is an analog of my emotional data. Each tear or stain is a sign, an index of past use and care. It bridges my past and present, mediating the “temporal aspects” of experience, as it literally allows me to relive or re-access memories and moments of safety and comfort from earlier stages in my life. In this way, it shows how media and memory are coextensive, and how even a humble object can serve as a living archive of feeling. 

But to me, it’s so much more than a blanket, and it offers me so many affordances. It allows me comforted sleep at night, it offers me warmth. The blanket acts as an anchor, a constant in my life, and stays with me every night when I am most vulnerable; when I’m asleep. The affordances of comfort aren’t inherent to my blanket alone, it emerged through embodiment, my lived experience and relationship with it over time. In McLuhan’s terms, “The medium is the message”, the way my blanket soothes and anchors me is inseparable from what it is, a soft, small, familiar object.

My blanket is a medium of experience, just like how our bodies are a medium of human experience. Like Turkle’s evocative objects, it’s both loved and thought with, my emotional companion and tool for reflection on things in my life. The blanket mediates my feelings on such a wide spectrum, in moments of joy and in moments of hardship, it is always waiting for me, wherever my “home” at the time has been. It is something that knows everything about me, and yet nothing at all (because it’s just a blanket, not a conscious thing). It acts as a technological medium in miniature, something that stands in the middle between my inner world and my external world, helping me process and feel my emotions and transitions. 

As we continue through time and advances in technology, I can’t help but think about how much media is experienced through their physical qualities, and how that meaning is threatened by the digital age as we become more abstracted from material experience in a digital world. My blanket is lived and tangible, and stands as an opposition to the transition into digital mediators. It reaffirms the importance of touch, texture, smell, and material presence in the making of meaning. Nothing digital could replace any aspect of my blanket, material or immaterial in meaning. It is also an active counter to dematerialized media: a reminder that mediation can be intimately physical and that memory is not just cognitive, but physical and textual. Would a carpet still feel the same on a phone screen? Would the Mona Lisa be as popular if it were only to be seen digitally? My blanket is also a great example of Eco’s “vegetal memory”- memory preserved in organic material. It stores my personal information and history in its fabric, colour, tears and frays

If we were to think about my blanket with some critical theoretical insight, it could teach us that media are not always obvious or high-tech, mediation begins with everyday objects that are transformed to have meaning. The comfort, touch, and emotional security are themselves mediated experiences that can change an object’s meaning. The memory is not abstract or purely cognitive but entangled with physical matter. The theories of media and mediation must include the affective and tactile, not just the visual or digital. 

In closing, my blanket shows how mediation begins with the material and personal, not just digital or technological media. It embodies the link between body, memory, and materiality, showing that meaning and comfort are felt through touch and texture. It illustrates Turkle’s idea of evocative objects as things that are both loved and thought with/through. It reflects Gibson and McLuhan’s affordances, as my blanket’s value comes from what it allows, which is warmth, safety, and reflection. Its value is not determined by what it physically is. It reminds me that media theory isn’t only about our devices or information, but also how objects can mediate our relationships with the world and ourselves. And ultimately, it teaches me that mediation is intimate and embodied, a process that connects mind, matter, and memory across time. 

Thanks for reading!