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We Shape the Algorithm, and It Shapes Us

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Contributors: Adela, Lorainne, Maryam

Social media is at the center of everyday life. We scroll through endless streams of content carefully curated to our tastes, shaped by algorithms that “learn” from our behaviour. In this digital landscape, anyone can create and share media about anything, while platforms personalize what we see based on our activity. This constant curation keeps us engaged, presenting an illusion of infinite choice while subtly guiding what gains visibility.

Both creators and consumers play active roles in the system. Creators learn to work with the algorithm: choosing specific sounds, hashtags, and editing styles that fit its rhythm, while consumers customize their feeds to match their interests, following or blocking certain tags, creators, and engaging with select content. Together, these behaviours teach the system what “works,” creating a feedback loop in which both the user and the algorithm continually adapt to one another. It’s through this ongoing exchange that trends emerge.

In this blog, we attempt to extend Tim Ingold’s notion of correspondence to digital contexts, suggesting that users and algorithms are engaged in an ongoing process of co-creation: a form of digital correspondence where each shapes the other through continuous interaction.

We argue that, through the lens of correspondence, social media algorithms can be understood as both a system of control and responsive materials that evolve with user activity, forming a digital environment where trends are “made” collaboratively through attention, resistance, and adaptation.

Making as Correspondence

To set the ground, Ingold defines correspondence as the relationship we form with the world when we think through doing. For him, genuine inquiry is not at all about standing apart from the world and describing it from a distance, as if we were detached observers. Instead, it involves, as he writes, “opening up our perception to what is going on there” (p. 7) and responding to the world’s movements, textures, and changes. Therefore, correspondence is an ongoing, two-way process of mutual responsiveness between ourselves and our surroundings: we attend to what the world is doing, and our actions, in turn, answer back to it.

Ingold compares interaction and correspondence to the act of walking with another person. When two people walk beside each other, they are engaged in a deeply companionable activity, despite not speaking directly to each other and rarely making eye contact. Instead, they coordinate their pace, rhythm, and direction through subtle bodily cues and peripheral vision, and their connection unfolds through movement itself, rather than through communication or representation. This is not a verbal or face-to-face exchange but a lived attunement. It’s rather a way of “growing older together” (p. 106) in shared time, making the nature of the relationship dynamic, ongoing, and co-creative. Walking together, therefore, reveals what Ingold calls correspondence: a mutual responsiveness that arises through motion, and never through detached interaction.

Ingold extends this idea to the act of making, describing it as a dialogue between the maker and the material. The maker does not really impose form but learns from the material’s resistance and possibilities, adjusting gestures in response. Through this ongoing exchange, both the maker and the material are transformed. Therefore, we think to correspond is not at all to represent reality from outside, but to join with it: to move, learn, and evolve alongside it. It’s a way of knowing with the world, rather than knowing about it.

Correspondence in the Digital Sphere

Viewing algorithms through the lens of Ingold makes it clear that the relationship between them and social media users is one of correspondence. The production of and interaction with content on a platform is processed as data that continuously shapes our digital experiences. Every user’s contribution to the algorithm, regardless of whether they post content, is significant but often overlooked. The very act of liking, saving, or even swiping after a certain amount of time signals one’s level of enjoyment of a specific kind of content. Such simple actions give rise to personalized feeds, such as TikTok’s famous “For You Page”, that grow in effectiveness the longer one stays on the app. 

Correspondence is not limited to just being between user and algorithm, but also among users themselves too. Ingold describes the scene of a string quartet: players do not interact nor move position, but create interwoven sounds that blend into one (p. 107). This music room, we think, can be seen as equivalent to the digital spaces of social media platforms, in which users continuously contribute to an ever-changing conversation that describes a song, however discordant, of collective consciousness. Only through the algorithms that push forth voices and encourage user responses can such dynamic conversations take place. TikTok’s “stitch” feature that allows a direct response to videos is one of many that illustrates how users engage in a mutual feedback loop of responsiveness, and hence correspondence – similar to a string quartet’s act of “listening as they play, and playing as they listen” (p. 106). 

This phenomena is largely seen through the prevalence of trends on social media. Thanks to the dynamic, ever-shifting nature of the algorithm, trends disappear just as quickly as they arise. When a post gains traction, the algorithm prioritizes it and pushes it out to users’ feeds, leading to further engagement and more user-generated content on that topic. And through the use of popular hashtags and sounds, and the continuous mutual responsiveness among users, trends proliferate, change and shift – then fall off just as easily. This way, we correspond with other users while also corresponding with the algorithm by answering to what it shows us, collectively contributing to a fluctuating digital landscape that shapes our perceptions of the world.

The ability of algorithms to tailor the content fed to users allows for the positive engagement with personal interest and the development of niche, creative communities. However, we think its detrimental impacts cannot go unmentioned. Algorithms are strong perpetrators of echo chambers, in which the development of “filter bubbles” limits exposure to opposing views and reaffirms users’ confirmation bias (Latimore).

Furthermore, we must realize the content filtered out by algorithms is not only derived from user interactions, but also from the biases ingrained within their very programming – biases that mirror existing hierarchies of visibility and power.

Power and Algorithmic Control

These built-in biases remind us that algorithms are never at all neutral, they are shaped by the same social, political, and economic forces that structure the world around us. What began as a relationship of mutual correspondence between users and platforms starts to reveal a deeper imbalance. The very systems that seem to “listen” and adapt to us are, in reality, governed by unseen mechanisms of power.

Through Ingold’s framework, when we think about how we interact with social media today, we see a similar kind of correspondence, but one that has been distorted by forces we cannot fully perceive. Every post, like, and comment feeds into the algorithm, which in turn “learns” our behaviour and shapes what we see, believe, and desire. It’s still a dialogue but one that has become asymmetrical, where one side listens with human curiosity, and the other responds through invisible forms of data-driven control.

The algorithm, through Ingold’s lens, starts to look like a “material” that has learned to push back. It resists our intentions, reshapes our sense of connection and perception of reality, and even determines what counts as “worthy” of attention. But this correspondence is never innocent, never neutral; it’s shaped by power. The algorithm actually amplifies certain voices while silencing others, rewarding what is profitable, making certain things visible and trending while burying what doesn’t serve power and its agendas – very often the stories and struggles that most urgently demand to be heard.

We see inevitable connections in Critical Terms for Media Studies, and we keep returning to the description of mass media as “the playthings of institutions… under the management of the palace, the market, or the temple” (p. 277). That feels truer than ever. What appears as a participatory and democratic space is, in fact, an infrastructure of control. Algorithms amplify what serves institutional power and suppress what threatens it.

We see this in real time as voices exposing genocide, colonial violence, and injustice are shadow-banned, flagged, and buried beneath layers of distraction and a public that has been numbed into passivity.

Reclaiming Media as Ethical Making

As media students, we have a responsibility to see through this illusion, to think critically, to question, and to resist. Ingold teaches us that making is an ethical act of correspondence, one rooted in care and attention. To “make” within algorithmic systems, then, must mean to intervene consciously and to create media that refuse erasure, that restore presence where silence has been systematically imposed. 

In resisting the algorithm’s pull, we think that our role cannot stop at consumption or critique, it must extend to re-making media itself. Re-making as a tool for truth-telling, for exposing injustice, and for reawakening correspondence as a living, ethical practice.

Contributors: Adela, Lorainne, Maryam

References
Latimore, E. (n.d.). The echo chamber of social media. Retrieved from https://edlatimore.com/echo-chamber-social-media/
Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge.
Peters, J. D. (2010). Mass Media. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. Hansen (Eds.), Critical Terms for Media Studies (pp. 261–276). University of Chicago Press.
Photo credit: Which? Trusted Trader, “How to use social media for your business”, June 1 2023. https://for-traders.which.co.uk/advice/how-to-use-social-media-for-your-business

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In a Silent Search

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Reflection on Umberto Eco’s Library of the World

When the film opened with Umberto Eco walking slowly through his library, surrounded by more than 30,000 books, I felt something stir inside me. His library is, quite honestly, my dream library. The way the camera moved through the endless rows of books felt almost like watching time itself, layer by layer and century by century. Eco’s library felt like a living organism and a space for remembering and a pulse of thought and time. 

Rewatching the film again at my own pace, taking notes and pausing throughout, I realized how much of what we’ve been learning in this course came to life in Eco’s words and character. As he said early in the film, “a library is both a symbol and a reality of universal memory” (2:01). That line stayed with me because it shows exactly what the film explores, the library as an extension of the human mind and a living memory system that binds matter, meaning, and mediation together.

Books as Media & Memory

The film presents the library as a medium of memory and through it, Eco shows how matter and meaning are inseparable. Eco’s son says, “It’s a living thing, not an archive, not a traditionally organized library” (44:14), and that description stayed with me because it reframed what a library could be. In Eco’s eyes, every book is both an object and an idea, a kind of container of thought that only becomes alive when touched, opened, and read.

I think this connects to Stiegler, from the chapter on memory in Critical Terms for Media Studies, where he explains that “human memory is originally exteriorized, which means it is technical from the start” (p. 67). He calls this process epiphylogenesis, the way we evolve “by means other than life,” through the tools, marks, and traces we create (p. 65). In other words, memory has always existed partly outside of us. Eco’s library, in that sense, becomes an externalized form of what Stiegler calls hypomnesis, meaning “recollection through externalized memory” (p. 67), sort of a living system of technical memory that carries human thought across generations.

Eco, in the film, categorizes memory into three kinds: vegetal, organic, and mineral. He explains that books represent vegetal memory because they are literally made of living matter: “books are made out of trees and anciently from papyrus” (9:40). The paper, ink, and bindings store traces of human experience the same way trees store rings of time. Books, then, are one of humanity’s earliest forms of technical memory, bridging nature and culture and body and medium. In a sense, when Eco walks through his library, he’s walking through a forest of preserved thought, each book a leaf in the great tree of human memory. That’s a library of the world.

Mediation, Knowledge, & the Human Mind

Eco’s intellectual life thrives through mediation. He believed that “to be curious intellectually means to be alive” (40:59). That line really stood out to me because it shows how Eco lived with a kind of restless curiosity that never stopped questioning or exploring. For him, thinking is an ongoing process of understanding. 

“I feel I had a full and long childhood because I stole somebody else’s memories,” he says, describing how reading allowed him to experience countless lives (33:46). This made me think about how books become mediators of experience, carrying us into other people’s memories, stories, and worlds. He also rejected the hierarchy between “important” and “unimportant” texts: “The life you conquer with reading does not discriminate between great literature and entertainment” (34:09). I think this aligns with Mitchell and Hansen’s idea of media as “environment for living—for thinking, perceiving, sensing, feeling” (p. xii). Reading, to Eco, was a way of living through mediation itself.

And this reminded me of Turkle’s ideas in Evocative Objects, where she writes that “everyday objects become part of our inner life: how we use them to extend the reach of our sympathies by bringing the world within” (p. 307). His library feels alive because I think it mirrors the structure of a human mind. It’s associative, layered, and full of contradictions. It very much resists the linear order and embraces the chaos of curiosity.

Silence, Information & the Loss of Meaning in Today’s World

One of the most thought-provoking parts of the film was when Eco talked about silence. He said, “You cannot find God where there is noise. God reveals himself only in silence” (1:15:00). That line felt timeless but also so relevant to the kind of world we live in today, one that is constantly oversaturated with distractions.

At some point in the film, an interviewer asked Eco if he didn’t own a cellphone, and Eco said, “Yes, but it’s always out… I don’t want to receive messages, and I don’t want to send messages! This world is loaded with messages, and even each of them says nothing!” (48:10). I actually laughed listetning to that but the more I thought about it, the more profound it became. I don’t think Eco is anti-technology but he was critiquing the modern condition of constant noise, essentially that is communication without depth and meaning.

He warns that “the risk is losing our memory on account of an overload of artificial memory,” because when everything is available instantly, nothing stays long enough to matter. “Clicking a button, you can get a bibliography of 10,000 titles. A bibliography like that is worthless. You can just throw it away. Once you went to the library and found three books, you would read them, and you would learn something” (26:10). 

In the film, there was a sign that read: “In a library, silence is both a duty and a necessity” (31:51). I think that really summed up Eco’s entire philosophy. Silence, for Eco, is so sacred, it’s almost a form of preservation. It’s the condition for memory, reflection and meaning to survive. In a world overflowing with noise and distraction, Eco’s library felt like an act of resistance and a reminder that real understanding is born from the quiet, slow process of thought.

Why this Film Matters, Now

This film matters especially now because it reminds us what it means to think slowly in a world that never stops moving. In an age of instant access and algorithmic noise, Eco’s library feels almost radical and a sanctuary of slowness, silence and curiosity. His philosophy challenges the illusion that more information equals more knowledge, showing instead that depth is actually what sustains understanding.

Eco’s philosophy pushes back against the digital condition in which technology’s promise of infinite access leads to the loss of knowledge itself. His insistence on silence and reflection feels like an act of intellectual resistance.

I think we were asked to watch this film because it turns the media theories we’ve been studying so far into something we can see and feel. Eco’s closing words were so important: “There’s no truth or creativity in an earthquake, only in a silent search” (1:15:25). I think it means we should slow down, remember, and think again.

References

Eco, U. (2022). Umberto Eco: A Library of the World [Film]. Directed by Davide Ferrario.

Cinecittà. Mitchell, W. J. T., & Hansen, M. B. N. (Eds.). (2010). Critical terms for media studies. University of Chicago Press.

Stiegler, B. (2010). Memory. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies (pp. 64–87). University of Chicago Press.

Turkle, S. (Ed.). (2007). Evocative objects: Things we think with. MIT Press.

Photo Credits

Daily Sabah. (2021, February 22). A library of all libraries. Daily Sabah. https://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/op-ed/a-library-of-all-libraries

Screenshot from the film (31:51).

By Maryam Abusamak

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Holding Memory

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Photo by me at the Laver Cup 2023 – making memories with friends

There’s a quiet intimacy in holding memory in your hands. My Fujifilm Instax camera has become a way for me to pause time, to transform fleeting moments with friends and family into fragile objects that I can touch, arrange, and carry. Unlike the endless scroll of images on a phone, each Instax print is deliberate. Film is limited (and a bit expensive), the picture develops slowly, and the print itself is singular. And by the time the image fully appears, the moment it records has already slipped into the past, leaving me with both proof and loss. This happened, and it’s gone.

I keep every print in a small photo album, a growing collection that has begun to feel like its own living archive. Flipping through its pages is different from scrolling through a phone gallery. Each print takes up space, carrying its own imperfections like a fingerprint smudge, a faded corner, a hint of overexposure. That’s why I think it’s an evocative object, one that teaches me how media hold onto time, how photos can mediate between presence and absence, and how the simplest object can become a way of thinking about what it means to remember.

To understand why these images feel so different from the thousands on my phone, I turn to media theory, which helps me see how the Instax mediates memory, materiality, and presence in ways that resist digital ephemerality.

Theory Part I – Objects & Materiality

Sherry Turkle writes that objects are “things we think with,” extensions of our inner lives that carry paradoxes into tangible form. My Instax camera has become exactly that. Every time I press the shutter, I’m reminded of what Turkle calls the way objects “extend the reach of our sympathies by bringing the world within.” This camera collapses an instant into a card I can hold, an object that forces slowness and attention in a world of infinite scroll. In the quiet ritual of waiting for an image to appear, I feel what Turkle describes in her account of Seymour Papert’s childhood gears, the way falling in love with an object can also mean falling in love with an idea. For Papert, gears opened the door to mathematics. For me, Instax prints open the door to thinking about time and how memory is always both preserved and already slipping away. Each print becomes, in Turkle’s phrase, a “partnership” that helps me live with presence and absence layered in the same frame. To hold one is to realize, as Turkle suggests, that theory itself can become an evocative object and that even in the smallest square of film, theory is brought down to earth.

Bill Brown helps me see why this matters so much especially now. He says, “materiality has come to matter with new urgency,” because we live in an era where images and information are constantly dissolving into pixels and numbers. With that context, my Instax photos feel like small rebellions. Unlike the phone gallery, where thousands of pictures blur into the endless scroll, each Instax print insists on its body. It can bend, fade, and hold the trace of a thumbprint. These so-called imperfections, in my opinion, are what make it feel alive and what Brown might call the “materiality-effect,” the way an object persuades us of its reality. Sliding a print into my album makes me realize that remembering is tactile and fragile, always mediated by surfaces, fibers, and light. Brown notes that new media often provoke a melodrama of threatened materiality as though the physical world is vanishing into code. But the Instax resists that narrative. It’s stubbornly here. A one-of-one artifact you can’t swipe away or back up to the cloud. In a time when digital photographs circulate endlessly yet somehow lose weight with every reproduction, my Instax reasserts the stubborn truth that memory is also matter.

Theory Part II – Images & Memory

W. J. T. Mitchell argues that images live in contradiction. They are, he writes, both “there and not there”material objects you can hold and spectral apparitions that summon what is absent. My Instax photos embody this paradox in the most literal way. When I watch a white square slowly darken into an image, I feel that double moment Mitchell describes: the excitement of recognition as my friend’s face or a fragment of sunlight appears, paired with the sudden awareness that the moment itself has already slipped away. Each print, I feel, is like a ghost, present enough to touch yet haunted by absence. Unlike the thousands of phone photos that blur together into a continuous stream, an Instax photo freezes the contradiction in miniature. Again, the feeling that this happened, and it’s gone.

Bernard Stiegler gives me another way of understanding what’s at stake here. He distinguishes between anamnesis (the living act of remembering) and hypomnesis (the technical supports) like writing or photography that externalize memory. The Instax makes me aware of both at once. Taking the photo is an act of attention, of choosing and framing a moment, an embodied practice of remembering. But the print that emerges becomes hypomnesis, a technical memory that lives outside me, tucked into an album. Unlike the automatic flood of digital images, though, this process feels deliberate. I decide what to keep, how to arrange the pages, what story the album tells. In Stiegler’s terms, my Instax resists the “industrial exteriorization of memory” that digital platforms often produce, where algorithms and infinite storage do the remembering for us. Instead, my album feels like a collaboration between lived memory and technical support. It’s not infinite, not perfect, definitely not optimized, and that’s what makes it special.

Thinking About Memory Now

We live in a time when most of our memories are outsourced to clouds and algorithms, where platforms decide what resurfaces for us through “memories” notifications and automated feeds. The Instax, by contrast, resists that industrial exteriorization of memory. It asks me to be deliberate, to decide what is worth holding onto and to give memory a material home. In that sense, it’s nostalgic but critical as it makes visible the stakes of how media mediate our lives.

In a way, this is a return to photography’s origins. Early cameras required patience and darkrooms producing images slowly and with effort. It feels like a strange return, a twenty-first century camera that reintroduces limits and imperfection. Maybe that’s what makes the Instax an evocative object. It reminds me that media are central forces in how we experience time, relationships, and even ourselves. And in thinking about memory now, in this moment of digital abundance and digital forgetting, we can see more clearly why theory matters as it helps us make sense of the fragile, human ways we hold on.

References

Brown, B. (2005). Materiality. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies (pp. 49–63). University of Chicago Press.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (2005). Image. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies (pp. 85–98). University of Chicago

Stiegler, B. (2005). Memory. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies (pp. 64–87). University of Chicago

Turkle, S. (2007). Evocative objects: Things we think with. MIT Press.

Blog post by Maryam Abusamak

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Gaza and the Failure of Mass Media

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Never before has a genocide been both the most documented in history and the first ever livestreamed in real time. And never before has the world scrolled past such unthinkable horror.

Carpet bombing entire residential neighbourhoods, erasing streets, homes, and entire families in seconds.
A boy screaming into the night after Israeli airstrikes wiped out his entire family.
A father collecting the scattered remains of his daughter in a plastic bag because there is no body left to bury.
Premature babies pulled from incubators after hospitals were bombed.
Doctors forced to operate on children without anesthesia, using vinegar and sewing needles because medicine has been cut off.
Hospitals, mosques, and churches bombed to rubble.
UN schools turned into mass graves.
People burning to death because bombs ignited their homes, trapping them under rubble and fire with no way out.
The deliberate murder of journalists, medics, doctors, nurses, UN staff, aid workers.
White phosphorus and other internationally banned chemical weapons raining down on crowded refugee camps.
Children starving to death, due to malnutrition and Israeli-made famine.

They are my family. Many of them have been murdered. Others are still buried under the rubble. And for nearly two years now, my people have been forced to livestream their own genocide to the world.

But this genocide did not begin in 2023. It’s actually the latest chapter in a 77-year Zionist settler-colonialism of Palestine. It’s a continuation of the Nakba of 1948, where 750,000 Palestinains were forcibly expelled and 500 villages destroyed to make way for the creation of the colony of “Israel.” It has carried on through decades of apartheid policies and military occupation of indigenous Palestinian lands.

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A UN ambassador described Gaza as “the most documented genocide in history.” According to the latest UN OCHA update, Gaza’s Ministry of Health reports 65,419 Palestinians killed and 167,160 injured since October 2023. International law is shattered with impunity, and war crimes are committed in plain sight. A genocide carried out by a settler-colonial power, protected and armed by Western governments, and sanitized by Western media institutions. 

That is the contradiction I cannot shake. Billions see it but nothing changes. 

I think this paradox, of hyper-documentation alongside silence, denial, and complicity from institutions of power, is what makes Gaza one of the most urgent media events of our lifetime.

Messages, Means, and Agents Under Attack

To understand this paradox, I turn to John Durham Peters’ chapter on Mass Media in Critical Terms for Media Studies. The author explains that media always involve three things: a message, a means, and agents. The “what,” the “how,” and the “by/to whom” (p, 266)

In Gaza, all three are under attack.

The messages Palestinians send are live footage of their mass murder, but by the time they reach Western newsrooms, they are twisted into biased reporting that flattens, sanitizes, and outright misrepresents the truth. And this in turn, dehumanizes Palestinains to justify occupation and genocide. What is really the genocide of an indigenous population, carried out by a colonial state on illegally stolen land, occupied for 77 years, is reframed as a “conflict.”

The means are our devices and social media platforms. One would expect them to amplify oppressed voices, expose injustice, and make Palestinian suffering impossible to ignore. Yet these very platforms censor, shadowban Palestinian content and suspend accounts, silencing the very voices they should be carrying to the world. In fact, a 2025 report revealed that Meta, under an Israeli-led censorship campaign, complied with 94% of government takedown requests, removing or suppressing over 38 million posts about Palestine. At the same time, Israel has launched coordinated propaganda campaigns, paying influencers up to $7,000 per post to spread pro-Israel narratives.

And the agents, the local Palestinian journalists on the ground who risk everything to document the truth, are being targeted by the illegal Israeli occupation, murdered one after another. The occupation has deliberately murdered over 270 journalists and media workers during this genocide, an unprecedented number in history.

This is a systemic war on truth.

Power as the Ultimate Medium

“Power is perhaps the ultimate mass medium: it speaks to whom it will, multiplies symbols across space and time, and immobilizes audiences” (Peters, p. 278). The colonial state and its Western allies are not only waging war on an indigenous people and their land but also on the narrative itself. What the world sees, and what it is kept from seeing, is shaped by the machinery of power.

“Where mass media are, there is usually power” (p. 277). The myth of neutrality collapses when Western outlets uncritically reproduce and parrot the colonizer’s talking points, from the debunked “40 beheaded babies” claim to justifying the bombing of hospitals as “strikes on Hamas targets.” This is not journalism but propaganda laundering, justifying genocide and the 77-year-long illegal occupation and colonial oppression of Palestinians. Every accusation is a confession. Power multiplies these frames until they dominate the discourse, drowning out the voices of the oppressed.

Peters calls mass media “the playthings of institutions… under the management of the palace, the market, or the temple” (p. 277). In Gaza, the palace is the state power of the illegal Israeli occupation and its Western allies, which provide the political cover and billions of dollars in military aid (funded by our own tax dollars) that supply Israel with the most advanced weapons and military equipments in the world. The market is the military-industrial complex and corporate platforms, where profit is tied to both arms sales and digital control over information flows. The temple is the settler-colonial and ideological narratives that justify the occupation and genocide of Palestinians.

And when truth does break through, power immobilizes. Billions witness livestreamed massacres, children pulled from rubble, and entire neighbourhoods flattened yet visibility yields no action. Audiences are numbed, while those who resist and speak out are harassed, censored, fired, or cancelled. Cancel culture is weaponized against anyone who challenges these narratives, from journalists to students and professors, ensuring that speaking truth to power comes at the cost of their lives and careers.

Gaza exposes mass media as a battlefield where power itself is the ultimate medium, deciding what circulates, what is erased, and how the world responds—or fails to respond—to the most documented genocide in history.

Conclusion: Solidarity & Awareness as the Counter-Medium & Our Responsibility as Media Students

Gaza forces us to confront the failure and limits of the media. Never before has the world been so saturated with real-time evidence of genocide and war against humanity itself, and never before has that evidence been so easily dismissed, reframed, and silenced by those in power.

Yet despite censorship, despite propaganda, the truth is inevitable.

Citizen journalism in Gaza has created an indestructible archive that history will remember and hold power accountable. And global solidarity, from university encampments to mass protests and digital solidarity campaigns, shows that resistance and awareness are growing more than ever, worldwide. 

If mass media are the “playthings” of power, then solidarity and awareness are the counter-medium. It ensures that even when headlines distort and platforms censor, the truth still breaks through, carried by those who refuse silence and ignorance and choose to stand on the right side of history. Gaza teaches us that while mass media can immobilize, it can also mobilize when audiences choose to resist.

As Malcolm X said: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” 

And as media students, that choice is ours. We are not passive observers. We are agents who can decide whether to reproduce power’s narratives or to challenge them. To study media critically is to recognize its dangers but also its possibilities. Our responsibility is agency, and we have the tools to question, to respond, to expose, to resist.

By Maryam Abusamak

Image Credits

  • Photo: AFP – A relative mourns Palestine TV journalist Mohamed Abu Hatab and 11 family members, the day after they were killed in Israel’s bombardment of Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, November 3, 2023.
  • Photo: Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) – Pro-Palestine protest in Dublin, Ireland.
  • Photo: Abdel Kareem Hana / Associated Press – Relatives and colleagues mourn over the bodies of Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza, 2024.
  • Photo: Majdi Fathi / NurPhoto via Getty Images – Palestinian children walk past the rubble of the al-Bukhari mosque in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, March 2, 2024, after an overnight Israeli airstrike.
  • Photo: Anas Baba / AFP via Getty Images – Smoke rises above buildings in Gaza City as Israeli warplanes drop bombs at night.
  • Photo: Ali Jadallah/Anadolu Agency (AA Images) – The body of a Palestinian child after an airstrike.
  • Photo: Ahmed Hasaballah / Getty Images – Palestinian children mourn during the funeral of relatives killed in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza.
  • Cover image: Ashraf Amra / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images – Funeral ceremony held for Palestinian journalists Saeed Al-Taweel and Mohammad Sobh, who were killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza on October 10, 2023, while filming the targeting of a residential building in the Rimal district, western Gaza.

Critical Concept Explication

Mass Media is Never Neutral

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What does it really mean to speak to the masses? From kings carving words into stone to TikTok clips spreading across the globe, people have always tried to push their voices further than the moment in front of them.

Mass media, as John Durham Peters explains in Critical Terms for Media Studies (Mitchell & Hansen, 2010), is part of this long history of communication across distance and time. In our group’s presentation, we looked at how mass media reshape communication, power, and culture. Peters (2010) explains this through a triad: the message (content), the means (delivery), and the agents (authors and audiences). Together, these form an ecosystem of media. 

Mass Media has transformed from speaking face-to-face, to broadcasting for unknown audiences in three main features:

  1. Generalization, where the content is made for public standards and interests rather than tailor for specific individual needs. 
  2. Spatiotemporal Reach, which enables communication across space and time. 
  3. Elective Participation, related to the targeted audiences’ availability in time and the method of access.

Classic Theorists on Media & Power

These three aspects allow the media to become “mass” by expanding its audience while addressing them as strangers.

Classic theorists like McLuhan and Innis deepen this argument. 

  1. “The Medium is the Message”, one of Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrases, on how the form of media covers more meaningful information than the content it carries. 
  2. Harold Innis shows a different perspective on power and different media forms, proved  by the space-binding media like images, prints and audios serve better in Commerce, while time-binding media like oral traditions and scripture sustain Religious and Cultural authorities. 

These key arguments of the chapter highlight why media matters while showing how mass media has always been tied to structures of power while still leaving room for audiences to interpret and resist.

Media’s Reach & The Power of Audiences

Our chapter on Mass Media looks at media through a general lens that broadly covers concepts about its development and reception. It begins by discussing how “any form of communication has potential for spillage,” meaning that any form of communication, but most significantly word of mouth/face-to-face communication, may not be limited to being understood by the target audience. For example, a conversation, a speech, or a broadcast always has the potential to be overheard by an external audience that the content is not intended for. 

The second point, which the chapter elaborates on most extensively, is crucial to understanding the presence and efficacy of mass media: the Spatiotemporal Range. This basically refers to the presence of a media object across time and space, and how it maintains permanence through this.

The spoken word is a temporary form of communication. It addresses only a finite audience. Even though it can address large audiences at once, it cannot be passed on across cities or countries or years in the exact same way. In these terms, writing has a better spatiotemporal range. With the printing press, the written word could be replicated multiple times, which gives it permanence and the ability to be transported across landscapes. This becomes even easier with the internet and, in today’s age, social media. Now, ideas can be communicated instantly, reach an indefinitely large audience, and be preserved over decades effortlessly.

Lastly, the writer addresses the fact that interaction isn’t always two-sided. The way a piece of media is interpreted, and by whom, lies mainly in the hands of the audience/ consumers. Creators, authors, and speakers can curate their content to address a specific group of people and ensure it is understood in a certain way. However, the actual engagement with that content can always differ from the intended outcome. 

These sections lead us to understand the place of mass media in culture and through its evolution, eventually guiding us to a main argument, which, according to Peters is that “power is perhaps the ultimate mass medium.” Keeping this in mind, we think that the most crucial point that the readers can latch onto is that, despite Mass Media being centered around institutions of power, ultimately, the power to choose what influences people resides with us as audiences and consumers of media. Or in simple words: audiences have agency. 

This chapter is especially important and relevant now, when every individual has the ability to create independently, as well as easy access to any form of media through the internet. In such a digital environment, people of power can spread messages farther than ever. At the same time, this amplification of the spatiotemporal range, also amplifies the ability for audiences to reinterpret, resist, boycott, or support these messages and spread their own individual ideas. The vastness and accessibility of the internet allow the audience to do more than just accept or reject dominant ideas, which adds fragility to power. 

Connecting the Dots: Finding Common Ground in Media Theory

While this chapter looks at mass media through a broad lens, we found that other groups’ presentations had many overlapping themes with ours and were able to dive deeper into certain concepts to provide further insight into areas of media. 

For instance, though our presentation used the term ‘communication’ loosely, the group that presented on communication further explained how it works and the systems within it. They compared two models of communication: the transmission model, which focuses on the one-way transfer of information, and the constitutive model, which views communication as a dynamic, reflexive process. The latter describes how meanings are not fixed and are instead created during interaction, as the decoding of a message by a receiver heavily relies on social and contextual factors. We found that the constitutive model is similar to our chapter’s discussion of mass media’s indefinite form of address, in which it is explained that different audiences outside of the target group can interpret the same piece of information differently and thus change the original meaning. 

Furthermore, we emphasised the significance of power in mass media, which is a theme that runs through many other chapter presentations. The presentation on image talked about how we as humans heavily rely on images to act as tangible representations of concepts, which is why religious imagery, such as paintings, has such a strong influence on audience perceptions. The group that covered writing detailed different forms of writing such as recordkeeping or numerical notion for trade, and how the ability to write distinguishes those who have access to knowledge, and therefore power and control. Thus, image, writing, religion and art are some of the many chapters that relate back to our chapter’s argument that media is always tied to institutions of power, which makes mass media a tool of global influence.

Reflective Conclusion

Looking back on our presentation, we think there are a few things we could have done differently. One main thing we wish we had included was more examples, both from the author’s text and from our own media experiences. The chapter itself is filled with vivid illustrations from medieval manuscripts to modern broadcasting, and bringing more of those into the presentation might have made the theory feel less abstract. Even more importantly, connecting the ideas directly to examples familiar to us as BMS students, maybe like current events, pop culture or how we consume global media. We think this could have made it more interactive and relatable for our audience.

What we found challenging about this chapter was its sheer scope. The author moves from ancient kings and religious sermons to radio and television, and at first it was difficult to pin down what exactly he meant by “mass media.” Was it a modern invention or a timeless human practice? Eventually, we came to see that his answer is both: the urge to reach the many, to preserve messages across space and time, has always been central to communication. Even face-to-face speech, the author argues, carries the potential for mass communication because words inevitably spill beyond their intended audience. That realization reshaped how we think about communication itself, it is never fully contained.

Preparing this presentation also taught us something valuable that we think matters for the rest of the class: the importance of studying media historically and critically. It’s easy to treat mass media as something that began with the printing press or exploded with radio, television, and the Internet. Still, the author shows us that the logic of mass communication is much older. Religious texts, oral performances, decrees, even monuments, all functioned as forms of mass media long before the digital era. For us, that was a crucial takeaway. Mass media is always entangled with institutions of power but it has also always been reshaped by the audiences who interpret and respond to it.

If we had to summarize our own takeaway, it’s that mass media is never neutral. It carries with it histories of power, control, and institutions, yet it is never completely one-sided. Audiences always bring their own interpretations and agency, whether that’s through critique, resistance, or creative re-use. That tension, between institutional influence and human response, is what makes studying media so relevant to us today. In a world where media can both oppress and liberate, the responsibility falls on us to recognize its power, challenge its narratives and imagine new possibilities for how stories are told.

Contributors: Maryam Abusamak, Adela Lynge, Minh Ha Nguyen (Eira), Kenisha Sukhwal

Reference: Peters, J. D. (2010). Mass media. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies (pp. 267–280). University of Chicago Press.