Critical Concept Explication, by: Meha Gupta

Feeling What We Never Lived: Prosthesis and Prosthetic Memory

The term prosthesis is derived from the Greek pros-tithenai, which translates to “to add to” or “to place onto.” The Oxford English Dictionary states that it initially emerged in medical literature to indicate the substitution of an absent limb or body part. Over time, it has come to describe any external enhancement that boosts or broadens human ability, eyewear that improves sight, instruments that extend reach, or even language as a replacement for experience. This root idea of adding on is what makes prosthesis such a useful concept in media theory. If every medium functions as an extension of human senses, then all media are, in some sense, prosthetic. When we move from mechanical prostheses to cinematic or digital ones, the “added” component becomes experiential: media allow us to feel or remember things beyond our direct lives.

In Alison Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory, introduced in Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (2004), the prosthesis moves from the physical to the psychological and emotional. Landsberg argues that modern media, particularly film, enable viewers to “experience” memories that they never personally lived. Watching Schindler’s List, for example, can give a viewer an embodied sense of what it might have felt like to live through the Holocaust, even though they were not there. These memories, she writes, are not “false” or “fake” but real emotional impressions formed through mediation. They become part of who we are, influencing our ethics, identities, and sense of history. In Landsberg’s view, mass culture produces empathy through these prosthetic experiences, allowing memory to become collective and connective rather than private and individual.

Landsberg’s version of prosthesis isn’t the only one. Earlier theorists such as Bernard Stiegler and Friedrich Kittler have also used the term to describe the relationship between humans and technology. Stiegler, in Technics and Time (1998), argues that all technology is prosthetic because human life has always depended on externalizing memory and knowledge. Tools, writing systems, and media are all “memory supports” that make culture possible. For him, prosthesis is not a supplement added to an already-complete human, it is what makes the human possible in the first place. Kittler, meanwhile, focuses on machines themselves. In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1999), he describes these devices as prostheses of perception and memory: they record, store, and reproduce sounds and images that human senses cannot retain. Where Stiegler emphasizes philosophical dependence, Kittler highlights technological replacement. Both show how the human body and mind rely on external systems of recording and mediation.

Compared to these more technical perspectives, Landsberg’s “prosthetic memory” centers the emotional and ethical. While Kittler and Stiegler see prostheses as tools that store memory, Landsberg sees media as creating new memories. Her version of prosthesis works on the level of empathy, not machinery. It bridges affect and technology, showing that cultural memory is mediated not just by devices but by feelings that circulate through them. In this way, Landsberg extends Stiegler’s argument about externalized memory into the realm of shared experience and social consciousness.

For students of media theory, this term is valuable because it reframes what media actually do. Rather than treating media as neutral channels that transmit information, the concept of prosthesis reminds us that every act of mediation changes how we think, feel, and remember. It ties directly to McLuhan’s idea of media as “extensions of man,” but adds a moral dimension: prosthetic media don’t just extend our senses, they extend our capacity for empathy. In an age dominated by screens and simulation, the line between experiencing something and remembering it becomes blurred. Prosthetic memory makes that blurring visible.

A clear example of this can be seen in contemporary digital culture. Virtual-reality projects like the Holocaust Memorial VR experience or immersive museum exhibits allow participants to step into other people’s histories. Even short-form platforms such as TikTok produce similar effects when users encounter raw, emotional content about war, displacement, or injustice. Viewers may never have lived these events, yet they “remember” them through the intensity of mediated experience. This exemplifies prosthetic memory at work, a technological extension of emotion that influences how individuals perceive global occurrences and their positions within those events. Nevertheless, it also prompts inquiries regarding authenticity and saturation: when empathy is mediated, can it diminish its intensity? Does ingesting excessive prosthetic memories result in compassion fatigue instead of comprehension?

Notwithstanding these conflicts, the concept of prosthesis continues to be a significant metaphor in media theory. It captures how technologies not only extend our bodies but also our minds and emotions. From Stiegler’s technical human, to Kittler’s mechanical memory, to Landsberg’s empathetic imagination, prosthesis maps the evolving relationship between humans and their media. It helps us see that mediation is never passive: each new form of media rewires our ways of knowing and remembering.

Ultimately, thinking about prosthetic memory shows that media theory isn’t just about analyzing devices, it’s about recognizing how those devices shape our inner lives. Media becomes the connective tissue between the individual and the collective, between personal experience and cultural history. They are, quite literally, the prostheses through which we feel what we never lived, and remember what we never saw.

“I realized how often my emotions toward global events are shaped by images I’ve never witnessed firsthand.”

That personal insight would make it feel more dialogical (what Schandorf values).

Tags: prosthesis, memory, mediation, embodiment, empathy, technology

References:

• Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. Columbia University Press, 2004.
  
• Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, Vol. 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford University Press, 1998.
  
• Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford University Press, 1999.
  

Response to Leadle,  Noise versus Knowledge: Umberto Eco on the Internet: https://blogs.ubc.ca/mdia300/archives/category/critical-response.

In their post “Noise versus Knowledge: Umberto Eco on the Internet,” Leadle revisits Eco’s warning that information overload risks turning meaning into mere noise. She connects his critique of digital excess with our own scrolling habits, describing how constant exposure to fragmented posts and updates produces a kind of semiotic overfeeding. I found her reflection especially compelling because it saturates Eco’s theory in lived experience: the daily cycle of consuming, forgetting, and repeating online. Yet Leadle also resists framing technology as purely destructive. Drawing on Renata Kristo and Sherry Turkle, she shows that digital media can both scatter and sustain us,  a tension Eco himself recognized when he created Encyclomedia to teach with, rather than against, the web. Her post ends with a call for mindful media use, suggesting that meaning can still be preserved if we approach technology consciously.

This nuanced reading of Eco captures why his ideas feel so urgent today. Still, I think Eco’s distinction between information and knowledge can be expanded using more recent perspectives on new materialism and ecological thinking. Where Eco sees “noise” as the collapse of meaning under too much data, theorists like Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Garber invite us to look at abundance not as loss, but as process, a field of relations where knowledge is continuously made. Their work reframes digital overload as something living and interactive rather than chaotic and destructive. Reading Leadle’s post through this lens helps us move from Eco’s anxiety about excess toward an understanding of media as ecological and participatory.

From Materiality to Materials

Eco’s metaphor of semiotic overfeeding suggests that the digital world saturates us with signs detached from their original context. Leadle develops this by calling the internet a hypertext of our own making, where memory is constantly overwritten. This reminds me of Ingold’s essay Materials Against Materiality (2007), where he argues that scholars have focused too much on the abstract idea of “materiality” rather than on the materials themselves,  the substances that flow, shift, and transform. For Ingold, nothing in the world is ever still; every material is caught up in a continual flux of becoming.

If we apply this to Eco, information is not simply a pile of detached signs. It’s more like a stream of interacting materials, images, words, code, pixels,  each carrying histories and potentials. From this view, the problem isn’t that there’s too much information, but that we often treat it as static content instead of living matter that requires engagement. Ingold might say that Eco’s fear of noise stems from imagining media as finished objects rather than as ongoing processes of formation. Knowledge doesn’t disappear in movement; it emerges from it.

Leadle’s post resonates with this shift when she describes her laptop as both Eco’s nightmare and Newitz’s dream. That ambivalence,  technology as distraction yet also memory,  captures exactly what Ingold calls the correspondence between humans and materials. We do not simply use devices; we think through them, shaping and being shaped in return.

Ecology of Meaning

Ingold expands on this idea in Toward an Ecology of Materials (2012), suggesting that materials are perpetually interconnected, forming an ecology rather than a mere assortment of objects. Thinking ecologically involves focusing on the movements of energy, time, and matter that link humans, technologies, and environments. When Leadle expresses feeling overwhelmed by semiotic excess, Ingold might argue that the objective isn’t to escape the current but to learn to navigate it, fostering an awareness of its patterns

This perspective transforms Eco’s noise into something more dynamic. The endless content of the internet becomes a living medium, a shifting landscape of meanings, algorithms, and affects. We might still feel overwhelmed, but the solution is not less information; it’s better correspondence with the materials of information itself. In other words, meaning is ecological: it arises through ongoing adjustment, not control.

Making, Knowing, and Intra-Action

Elizabeth Garber’s “Objects and New Materialisms: A Journey Across Making and Living With Objects” (2019) extends this line of thought. She argues that objects and humans exist in intra-action (a term from Karen Barad),  they co-create one another through making. Materials aren’t passive; they have agency that calls for response. Garber writes that “making is a form of knowing,” because working with materials teaches us how they think.

Leadle’s reflection on scrolling, remembering, and forgetting can be reinterpreted through Garber’s framework. When we interact with our devices, we are not just consuming media; we are constantly making meaning with it,  arranging feeds, curating profiles, remixing content. Even the so-called noise of the internet might be understood as a collective process of making, where knowledge is distributed across humans and technologies.

This doesn’t erase Eco’s concern about misinformation, but it reframes it. If we see media as active matter rather than as neutral carriers of information, the responsibility shifts from filtering noise to engaging ethically with the ecologies that produce it. Knowledge becomes less about storage and more about relationships,  about staying attentive to how our interactions with digital materials shape what and how we know.

Re-evaluating Eco’s “Noise”

Leadle ends her post by saying she wants to think with the media without letting anyone else think for me. That sentiment perfectly captures the bridge between Eco’s skepticism and new materialist optimism. Eco was right that the internet challenges our ability to discern meaning, but Ingold and Garber show that meaning has never been something stable to begin with. It’s always been made through our entanglements with materials, ink, paper, screen, or code.

From this view, noise is not the enemy of knowledge but its condition of possibility. The excess of digital life forces us to negotiate meaning continually, to make and remake understanding in relation to the materials that surround us. Rather than Eco’s image of drowning in information, we might imagine ourselves swimming,  sometimes struggling, sometimes graceful,  within a sea of ongoing correspondence.

Conclusion

Leadle’s reading of Eco opens a vital conversation about attention, memory, and media saturation. Building on her insights through Ingold and Garber helps us see that the internet’s overflow doesn’t only fragment knowledge; it also sustains new forms of making and thinking. Meaning, like matter, is never still. It moves with us, through our screens, our hands, our networks. The challenge is not to escape the noise but to listen within it, to recognize that even in the clutter of feeds and pixels, the world of materials is still teaching us how to think.

sources used:

• Ingold, T. (2012). Toward an ecology of materials. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41(1), 427-442. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145920
• Ingold, T. (2007). Materials against materiality. Archaeological Dialogues, 14(1), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203807002127
• Garber, E. (2019). Objects and new materialisms: A journey across making and living with objects. Studies in Art Education, 60(1), 7-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2018.1557454
• Clyde Partin, W. (2021). Materialist media theory: An introduction: By G. bollmer, new york & london, bloomsbury academic, 2019, 198 pp., $26.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9781501337093. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2021.1877909

By- Meha Gupta

Introduction: Making the “Immaterial” Visible

We tend to think of our phones as portals to something immaterial,  a glowing window into the digital world. Yet what happens when that window closes? Grant Bollmer’s Materialist Media Theory (2019) insists that media are never weightless or neutral: they are physical systems that shape our experience, perception, and even thought itself. Rosenberg and Blondheim’s “What (Missing) the Smartphone Means” (2025) explores this claim from the opposite direction. Their study of young people who lived without smartphones for a week exposes how deeply the device’s material presence structures our daily rhythms and relationships.

Reading Rosenberg and Blondheim through Bollmer’s framework shows that the smartphone is not just a screen we look at but a medium we live through,  one that organizes space, time, and emotion. Together, the two texts reveal that when the immaterial digital layer is stripped away, what remains is the material mediation of the body itself.

Bollmer’s Rejection of the Immaterial Myth

Bollmer opens with a straightforward argument: all media are material. From paper to pixels, each medium has weight, texture, and infrastructure that determine what can be expressed through it. He calls this “performative materiality,” borrowing from Judith Butler and Karen Barad to describe how representation itself is a material act. Meaning isn’t just transmitted through media; it’s made by them.

In his five-chapter structure, Bollmer moves from inscriptions (how media record and store information) to spatiotemporal materiality (how they reorganize time and space) and finally to neurocognitive materialism, which claims that we can’t think about media; we only think in media. For him, even thought is technologically mediated. Each device we use alters how we perceive the world, just as earlier media,  from stone tablets to telegraphs,  rearranged social and sensory experience.

Crucially, Bollmer links these processes to power. The politics of media, he writes, cannot be reduced to representation; they emerge through the material arrangements that enable or restrict communication. Server farms, lithium mines, and touchscreens all participate in shaping who can speak, move, and remember. In this sense, materiality is never just physical,  it’s social, economic, and embodied.

Rosenberg & Blondheim: The Smartphone as Prosthesis

Rosenberg and Blondheim’s 2025 study begins with a deceptively simple experiment: remove the smartphone from daily life. Eighty teenagers in Israel gave up their devices for a week and recorded their thoughts and behaviours. The researchers call the smartphone a portable, personal, and prosthetic medium, describing it as an extension of perception and identity rather than a mere communication tool.

The participants’ responses confirm Bollmer’s claim that media are inseparable from being. Without their phones, teens reported spatial disorientation (“I kept reaching for something that wasn’t there”) and temporal anxiety (“I lost track of when things were happening”). The device had become a kind of externalized nervous system,  a way of structuring presence in time and space.

Interestingly, many participants described phantom sensations: checking imaginary vibrations, feeling their pockets buzz, or seeing the absent screen in their mind’s eye. Rosenberg and Blondheim interpret this as evidence of embodied mediation,  the phone’s material routines inscribed into muscle memory. For Bollmer, these moments illustrate performative materiality in action: the medium has literally trained the body to perform its presence.

Spatiotemporal Materiality: Living in the Device’s Time

Bollmer’s chapter on Spaces and Times argues that each medium produces its own spatiotemporal regime. Some media are time-biased (durable but immobile, like stone), while others are space-biased (mobile but ephemeral, like digital screens). Smartphones epitomize this duality: they collapse distance yet demand constant, real-time attention.

Rosenberg and Blondheim’s study demonstrates this collapse empirically. Participants reported that, without their phones, the world suddenly felt larger and slower. Conversations stretched, waiting returned, and physical travel regained significance. One teen wrote that taking the bus felt longer than it used to,  like the world was farther away.

Bollmer would read this as a recalibration of the media-organized present. The smartphone’s material infrastructure,  notifications, clocks, GPS,  produces an artificial sense of immediacy that shapes social life. When that infrastructure is removed, users don’t simply feel disconnected; they experience time differently. What seems like emotional withdrawal is actually a shift in the underlying temporal architecture that the medium had been performing all along.

Thinking in Media: Cognition and Dependency

In Bodies and Brains, Bollmer challenges the idea that thought is internal. Instead, thinking is distributed across brains, tools, and environments,  a concept he calls neurocognitive materialism. Rosenberg and Blondheim’s participants reveal this distributed cognition clearly: many struggled to navigate cities or remember schedules without their phones.

The loss was not just informational but cognitive. One participant admitted, “I felt stupid,  like my brain had shrunk.” Another described reaching for her phone during conversations to “remember what to say.” Bollmer would argue that such dependency is not weakness but proof that the smartphone functions as part of our mental apparatus. It externalizes memory, calculation, and even emotional regulation.

By treating cognition as materially extended, Bollmer reframes addiction as a structural condition of mediation. Rosenberg and Blondheim’s work makes that condition visible: removing the device reveals how thinking has already been offloaded into the object. The emptiness people feel in its absence isn’t purely psychological; it’s a physical reorganization of cognition.

The Affective Charge of Absence

Bollmer’s final chapter, Objects and Affects, integrates new materialism with affect theory, suggesting that objects exert power through feeling as much as function. Media generate affective atmospheres,  anticipation, anxiety, comfort,  that circulate between users and devices.

Rosenberg and Blondheim observe the same phenomenon through what they call the affective residue of the smartphone. Even when absent, the phone’s emotional trace lingers: participants felt safer or calmer when they imagined it nearby, and some placed a notebook or another object in its place. The phone’s materiality thus persists as affective potential,  a relationship of comfort and dependence.

Here, the two texts converge on a subtle insight: materiality is not limited to touchable matter. It also includes the emotional and sensory forces that bind users to technologies. The smartphone’s affective pull is as real as its circuitry. Bollmer’s theory helps explain why detachment feels physically uncomfortable,  because the body and the medium have already co-produced each other’s rhythms.

Extending Bollmer: From Theory to Lived Materiality

While Rosenberg and Blondheim largely confirm Bollmer’s framework, their empirical method also extends it beyond abstraction. Bollmer writes from a philosophical standpoint, tracing ideas from McLuhan, Innis, and Barad to argue that media perform material politics. Rosenberg and Blondheim turn that theory into lived observation, showing how materiality operates through habit, gesture, and loss.

Their work suggests that absence is itself a mode of mediation. By examining what happens when a medium is missing, they reveal how its material functions persist as ghostly behaviours,  phantom vibrations, re-enacted swipes, and disrupted routines. This approach complicates Bollmer’s call to think in media by showing that even when the medium is removed, thinking still bears its imprint.

In other words, Rosenberg and Blondheim bring Bollmer’s ideas down to the level of the everyday. Their findings demonstrate that materialist media theory is not only about wires and circuits but about how bodies internalize those circuits through repetition and desire.

Why Materiality Matters for Screen-Based Media

Both texts ultimately challenge the class’s guiding question: Does the distinction between the material and immaterial even make sense for digital media? Bollmer would say no,  digital media depend on physical infrastructures and embodied practices. Rosenberg and Blondheim confirm this empirically: when you remove the device, you don’t escape mediation; you only expose its depth.

For students studying media today, this matters because it reframes how we think about online life. Our feeds, chats, and screens aren’t weightless flows of data; they’re material entanglements involving cobalt mines, cloud servers, hands, and habits. Understanding that entanglement means recognizing our participation in a broader system of technological dependence,  one that is physical, affective, and political.

Conclusion: Feeling the Weight of the Immaterial

When Rosenberg and Blondheim’s participants reached for absent phones, they enacted exactly what Bollmer describes: the body thinking through media, even when the medium is gone. Their week of deprivation made visible what normally stays invisible,  the smartphone’s role as a prosthetic extension of perception, memory, and emotion.

Bollmer gives us the theory; Rosenberg and Blondheim give us the proof. Together, they show that materiality in the digital age isn’t about choosing between body and screen but about acknowledging their fusion. The smartphone doesn’t just connect us to the world,  it constitutes the world we inhabit. To study media, then, is to study the very conditions of being human in a technological environment that has already rewired how we feel, think, and move.

Work Cited: 

• Clyde Partin, W. (2021). Materialist media theory: An introduction: By G. bollmer, new york & london, bloomsbury academic, 2019, 198 pp., $26.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9781501337093. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2021.1877909 
• Rosenberg & Blondheim (2025)

Everyday objects as mediators of thought, our digital and material environments think with us.

Thinking with Objects in a Digital World

When Sherry Turkle writes that “we think with objects,” I keep looking around my desk. My phone sits face-down beside a half-open laptop, an empty coffee cup, and a sketchbook I haven’t touched in weeks. Each of these things quietly mediates how I move through the day, how I focus, communicate, and even remember. The more I notice them, the more I realize that none of my thoughts or habits exist outside of objects. They frame what I can see and feel. This week I’ve been wondering: if, as Turkle suggests, our inner lives are shaped through the objects we live with, what happens when those objects become almost entirely digital?

Turkle’s idea of evocative objects positions things as psychological mediators, tools that help us think, not just things we think about. Her examples are tactile: a computer mouse, a stuffed animal, a family photo. But our current objects are often immaterial, apps, tabs, files, feeds. We can’t hold a TikTok algorithm the way we can hold a childhood toy, yet it clearly organizes our perception and attention. I started to realize that what counts as an “object” has shifted from the physical to the infrastructural. A For You Page isn’t an item in space; it’s an environment of ongoing mediation.

This connects closely to J. J. Gibson’s idea of affordances that we discussed in lecture. Every medium or environment, he said, offers both possibilities and constraints. The air affords breathing and speech;  the screen affords scrolling and swiping. What fascinates me is how easily those affordances become invisible. I don’t usually think about how my phone affords distraction, how its notifications structure my attention before I consciously decide what to notice. Gibson’s ecological language helps me see the phone not as a tool I use, but as the medium I inhabit, one that sets the conditions for what I can do and think.

Tim Ingold’s critique of methodological individualism adds another layer here. He argues that understanding doesn’t come from analyzing isolated parts, people, tools, media, but from tracing the correspondence between them. In practice, that means I can’t study my digital habits separately from the interfaces, algorithms, and social expectations that co-produce them. My notes app isn’t just storage for my ideas; it shapes the rhythm of how I write. The medium literally participates in the thought. Ingold’s idea reframes Turkle’s thinking with objects into a more dynamic process: we and our technologies are always thinking together.

Grant Bollmer’s materialist media theory extends this even further. He claims that media aren’t just channels that represent the world, they perform it. Representation is a material act, not a symbolic one. When I post a photo or write a caption, I’m not simply expressing myself through a medium; I’m performing selfhood through a set of technological, aesthetic, and cultural constraints. The interface decides what counts as a postable image, what ratios fit, which emotions trend. Bollmer’s framework helps me see social media less as a window into identity and more as a factory that produces it.

If Turkle invites us to notice our attachments to objects, Bollmer makes us confront how those attachments are structured by power and design. He reminds us that the digital “object” isn’t neutral, it’s materialized through code, servers, and labour. A selfie on Instagram depends on rare minerals mined for phone batteries, content moderators filtering trauma, and algorithms optimizing engagement. When he says media are performative agents, I hear an ethical call: our digital gestures participate in vast systems of material consequence.

These theories start to converge around a single tension, presence and absence. Turkle’s “evocative object” bridges self and world; Ingold’s correspondence links body and environment; Bollmer’s materialism collapses the gap entirely. Yet in each case, mediation comes with loss. McLuhan called it amputation: every extension of our senses reduces some other capacity. The phone extends my reach but amputates my patience. The cloud preserves my photos but dulls my memory. I used to think of these as trade-offs; now I see them as conditions of being mediated.

A small example: last week my phone storage filled up, so I moved thousands of pictures onto Google Drive. Instantly my camera roll felt lighter, almost empty. I caught myself scrolling through old screenshots I didn’t even like, proof that my sense of self had become tangled with the device’s archive. Eco’s distinction between memory and information suddenly made sense: I had data, not memories. Offloading my photos felt like offloading part of my brain. The technology didn’t just store my experiences; it quietly changed what counted as an experience worth keeping.

Throughout the course, we’ve returned to the idea that media are environments, not just tools. Turkle’s desk objects, Gibson’s ecological mediums, Ingold’s correspondences, and Bollmer’s performative materiality all suggest that mediation is how being itself happens. I find this both comforting and unsettling. Comforting, because it means our entanglement with technology isn’t new, it’s just the latest form of human-object reciprocity. Unsettling, because recognizing this doesn’t free us from it. The point isn’t to escape mediation but to understand its affordances and costs.

Sometimes I wonder if the digital age has made mediation too smooth. The interfaces are so seamless that the in-between disappears. We rarely experience lag, friction, or texture, the qualities that remind us something is being mediated. Maybe that’s why nostalgia filters and vintage aesthetics feel satisfying; they re-introduce the sense of distance, the material grain that digital media often erase. Bollmer would probably call that a longing for the visible performance of mediation, a desire to feel the medium again.

So what does it mean to “think with objects” today? For me, it’s less about choosing the right tool and more about staying aware of how the tool thinks back. The phone on my desk isn’t just reflecting my habits; it’s helping to script them. Each notification, algorithmic suggestion, or design choice participates in shaping my attention, my memory, and even my sense of time. Recognizing that doesn’t make me less dependent on technology, but it might make the dependency more conscious, less automatic.

I’d love to hear how others in the class notice this in their own routines. Do certain objects, digital or physical, change how you feel yourself thinking? Are there moments when a medium suddenly becomes visible again, when you sense the in-between that usually disappears? Maybe paying attention to those moments is the first step toward what Ingold calls correspondence: learning to move with our media, rather than through them.

image link: https://unsplash.com/photos/aerial-photography-of-mountain-ranges-during-daytime-Y8lCoTRgHPE

When Tim Ingold describes making as a process of correspondence rather than control, I started to realise that much of what we call “media theory” feels like a craft itself. In the lecture, Dr Schandorf said that theory is “something we do,” not something we memorise, and that has stayed with me.

The more I engage with these ideas, the more I see parallels between theorising and making: both involve learning through doing, responding, and revising. This post explores media theory as a craft-based practice, a form of making knowledge rather than just writing about it.

1. Media Theory as Process, Not Product

Ingold’s Making reminds us that to understand how something comes into being, we must attend to the process rather than the finished object. That idea reshapes how I read theory, not as a list of answers but as a movement of thought.

Each reading, discussion, or post in MDIA 300 feels like a thread woven into a collective fabric. You can’t test theory the way you test memory; you can only practice it, by writing, dialoguing, and iterating through others’ ideas.

This helps explain why there are no exams in this class: the learning happens through the act of doing media theory, not memorizing it.

2. Mediation as Relation, Not Object

The recurring concept of mediation, from McLuhan to Bolter & Grusin, now feels less like a property of technology and more like a way of relating.

Media aren’t just tools or devices; they’re relationships that shape meaning. Whether it’s a TikTok feed or a physical book, each mediates the world differently.

When Bolter and Grusin talk about remediation, new media refashioning old forms, they echo Ingold’s notion of correspondence. Mediation, then, is a conversation, not a command. This class’s use of blogs, wikis, and Teams channels mirrors that idea: each tool mediates how we learn and think together.

3. Writing as Material Practice

Dr. Schandorf often says that writing is thinking, and I’m finally starting to see why. Writing theory isn’t about polishing conclusions, it’s about shaping ideas in real time.

Like clay, words have texture they resist, reshape, and sometimes collapse before reforming into coherence. The process of writing itself becomes a site of discovery.

So perhaps clarity in this course doesn’t mean perfection, it means honesty. It’s the moment when your readers can see you working through the material, thinking aloud on the page.

4. Collaboration as Media Ecology

Another revelation in MDIA 300 is how inherently collaborative theory is. Blog comments, shared lecture notes, and collaborative presentations aren’t side work, they are the work.

Each contribution is a form of mediation within a living media ecology. McLuhans idea that “the medium is the message” feels newly relevant here: our medium (Teams, Blogs, Wiki) is the structure of our collective knowledge-making.

Ingold’s craftsman doesn’t work alone, and neither do we. Each comment or co-authored post is part of an ecosystem where ideas grow through interaction, not isolation.

5. Theoretical Clarity as Ethical Practice

Schandorf’s idea that clarity is not about correctness but about communication struck me hard. To be clear is to be responsible, it’s about writing in a way that invites others in rather than keeping them out.

If theory is a social practice, clarity becomes an ethical one. It’s a gesture of care toward your audience, recognizing that your words can either connect or exclude. Just as Ingold’s maker listens to their materials, a good theorist listens to their readers.

6. So what?

I’m offering a simple argument: media theory is a craft. It’s not just a way to describe media, it is a form of mediation itself.

By treating theory as something we make together, we can appreciate it not as abstract jargon but as a living, evolving practice that connects people, tools, and ideas. That’s why MDIA 300 doesn’t feel like a typical class; it feels like an ongoing studio where thinking is material and meaning is handmade.

Let’s Keep the Conversation Going

• Does writing theory change how you understand creativity?
  
• When do you feel in control of your ideas versus in correspondence with them?
  
• Can we treat digital media, like AI or wiki, as collaborators rather than tools?
  

Author: Meha Gupta
Tags: media theory, mediation, making, Ingold, collaboration, clarity, MDIA300

Source Traceback in Ingold’s “Making” (Week 6)

When I initially read Tim Ingold’s Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (2013), I was captivated not only by the elegance of his prose but also by the vitality of his conception of making. Ingold doesn’t discuss creation as occurring once a plan is established or a design is completed. He views making as a continuous dialogue between individuals and materials, involving learning, adapting, and reacting as forms evolve.

Reading further, I realized that this idea didn’t come out of nowhere. Ingold is building on the work of David Pye, a twentieth-century furniture maker and design theorist who questioned what craftsmanship really means in a world increasingly dominated by machines. Pye’s ideas about risk, skill, and material responsiveness give Ingold the vocabulary to describe making not as mechanical execution but as an act of correspondence, a two-way relationship between maker and material. In this post, I’ll trace how Ingold uses and expands Pye’s concepts, and how this exchange between them helps us think differently about creativity, design, and even knowledge itself.

Who Was David Pye?

David Pye (1914–1993) was a British craftsman and teacher at the Royal College of Art in London, known for his detailed thinking about how things are made. He wasn’t an anthropologist or philosopher, he built furniture, but his observations about craftsmanship turned out to be surprisingly theoretical.

In his influential book The Nature and Art of Workmanship (1968), Pye defined two types of workmanship: the workmanship of risk and the workmanship of certainty. In the workmanship of risk, the quality of the outcome depends directly on the maker’s skill. A potter, for example, never knows exactly how the glaze will fire, or how the clay will behave under pressure. Every movement could lead to success or ruin. The workmanship of certainty, by contrast, describes industrial or mechanical processes where results are predetermined and uniform, the maker’s skill no longer matters, only the machine’s precision (Pye, 1968).

Pye also distinguished between properties and qualities in materials. Properties are measurable, weight, density, elasticity. Qualities, however, are felt and interpreted: the warmth of wood, the shine of metal, the resistance of fabric. For Pye, design might start with measurable properties, but true craftsmanship happens through attention to the material’s qualities, which reveal themselves only in the act of working with them.

Pye’s central insight, that design is what can be drawn or described, while workmanship is what happens in action, creates a bridge between the conceptual and the practical. It is precisely this bridge that Ingold crosses in Making.

Pye’s Influence Inside Making

Ingold explicitly cites Pye’s The Nature and Art of Workmanship in both Making and his earlier essay “The Textility of Making” (2010). He uses Pye’s concepts as stepping-stones for his own argument that making is not about imposing form on matter, but about following materials as they unfold in time (Ingold, 2010).

In Chapter 2 of Making, “Materials of Life”, Ingold borrows Pye’s distinction between properties and qualities to reframe how we think about materials. He argues that materials are not passive substances waiting to be shaped by human intention; they are lively, responsive, and in motion. While scientists or engineers might focus on fixed properties, the maker experiences materials through their shifting qualities, how they stretch, absorb, or resist (Ingold, 2013). As Ingold puts it, “The world is not ready-made, but continually in the making” (p. 21).

Here, Pye’s language gives Ingold a bridge between the craftsperson’s workshop and the anthropologist’s field site. Both are spaces where knowledge emerges through doing. Just as a carpenter learns by sensing the wood grain, an anthropologist learns by being immersed in the flows and rhythms of life rather than standing apart from them.

From Workmanship of Risk to Correspondence

Pye’s “workmanship of risk” becomes, in Ingold’s hands, the foundation for his own key concept: correspondence. For Pye, risk means that each gesture in the making process contains uncertainty, every cut or stroke carries the potential to change the outcome. Ingold takes this further by framing that uncertainty as a relationship. Making, he argues, is not simply risky; it’s relational and dialogic.

Ingold often uses vivid examples: a carpenter following the grain of wood, or a draughtsman tracing a line that “goes for a walk.” Both figures are guided not by strict design but by attention, a kind of mutual responsiveness between maker and material (Ingold, 2010). In The Textility of Making, Ingold writes that practitioners are “wayfarers whose skill lies in finding the grain of the world’s becoming and following its course” (p. 92). That phrase, finding the grain of the world’s becoming, could almost be Pye’s motto rewritten in anthropological language.

For Ingold, then, risk is not a flaw or obstacle in making, it’s the condition of creativity. The outcome cannot be predicted because it doesn’t yet exist; it emerges through the unfolding relationship between hand, tool, and material. In the same way, knowledge for Ingold is not something discovered after the fact but grown along the way, an improvisation in motion.

Expanding Pye Beyond Craft

What makes Ingold’s use of Pye so interesting is how he expands it beyond the traditional craft context. Pye’s observations were rooted in woodworking and design; Ingold applied them to anthropology, art, and architecture, the “Four A’s” that structure Making.

For instance, Ingold compares archaeology to craftsmanship: excavating isn’t about extracting finished objects but about corresponding with the materials of the earth, responding to their fragility, texture, and depth. In architecture, he critiques the Renaissance notion of perfect design (what he calls the “architectonic”) and instead celebrates the improvisational, textilic work of medieval builders who built cathedrals “from the ground up” without fixed plans (Ingold, 2010). This echoes Pye’s celebration of skilled, adaptive practice. Even anthropology, he argues, is a kind of workmanship of risk. Fieldwork depends on responsiveness, not certainty. It requires being open to the world’s unpredictability, just as a potter or carpenter must adapt to their material’s behavior.

In all these examples, Pye’s craftsman becomes Ingold’s wayfarer, someone who learns and creates through movement, uncertainty, and care. Ingold generalizes Pye’s philosophy of making into a philosophy of living, where every action participates in the world’s ongoing formation.

The Thread That Connects Them

In both The Textility of Making and Making, Ingold often uses metaphors of thread, weaving, and flow. He argues that the Western tradition of design (the “hylomorphic model”) has privileged straight, abstract lines, the kind you see in blueprints or computer renderings, over the curved, living lines of hand-drawn work (Ingold, 2010). The shift from spinning thread to stretching string between points, he writes, marks the historical move from bodily making to intellectual design.

This thread imagery resonates with Pye’s emphasis on the tactile, felt qualities of materials. For both thinkers, making is rhythmic and embodied, a process of continuous adjustment. A machine may repeat the same movement perfectly each time, but a human maker must respond to small differences, to tension, resistance, sound, and feel. Ingold calls this responsiveness “itineration” rather than “iteration”: a rhythmic, sensory way of moving through the world rather than mechanically repeating steps (Ingold, 2010).

That shift, from perfect repetition to living rhythm, captures what both Pye and Ingold value most: the vitality of process.

How Pye Strengthens Ingold’s Argument

Ingold’s dialogue with Pye gives his anthropology of making a concrete foundation. Without Pye, Ingold’s philosophy might seem too abstract, too poetic to be practical. But Pye’s distinction between risk and certainty provides the empirical grounding Ingold needs to argue that uncertainty is essential to creativity. It’s not just about craft anymore; it’s about how humans think, learn, and relate to the world.

By borrowing and expanding Pye’s ideas, Ingold also makes a subtle argument about knowledge production itself. Academic research, he suggests, should be more like craftsmanship: experimental, responsive, and aware that outcomes can’t be fully known in advance. In this sense, Ingold’s anthropology is a form of intellectual workmanship of risk. His writing performs what it describes, it moves, weaves, and improvises rather than delivering a fixed, finished theory.

Conclusion: Thinking With the Hand

Reading Ingold through Pye changed the way I think about creativity. Both remind us that making is not simply about control or execution; it’s about attention, care, and risk. The moment of uncertainty, the slip of a tool, the unexpected bend of a material, is where new possibilities emerge.

For Pye, this was the essence of craftsmanship. For Ingold, it becomes the essence of life itself: the idea that we are all continually making the world in correspondence with the forces around us. To make it is to think with the hand, to learn by feeling our way forward.

And maybe that’s why Ingold’s Making still feels so fresh, it’s not just theory about making; it’s theory made through making.

References

Ingold, T. (2010). The textility of making. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34(1), 91–102. https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/bep042

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge. http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/8315/1/179.pdf

Pye, D. (1968). The nature and art of workmanship. Cambridge University Press. file:///Users/mehagupta/Downloads/4959-Article%20Text-50710-1-10-20210904.pdf

On my desk sits a small, red LEGO Ferrari Formula 1 car. Perfectly assembled, it’s bold, glossy, and unmistakably fast, or at least it looks like it should be. The real Ferrari SF90 can hit 350 km/h, but this one hasn’t moved an inch since I built it two summers ago. It’s made of plastic, about the length of my hand, and technically useless. Yet every time I look at it, I feel something that’s hard to explain, a quiet rush, a sense of movement, a memory of motion. For me, this LEGO Ferrari is more than a collectible. It’s a reminder of how technology mediates our desire for speed, control, and perfection, and how even still objects can capture the affective charge of the digital and mechanical worlds we live in.

When I initially created this model, it was at a moment when my life seemed far from speedy. It was the height of lockdown, courses had transitioned to online formats, and each day seemed like a monotonous cycle of screens. I recall endlessly scrolling through YouTube, viewing F1 highlights, the roar of engines, the aerial footage, the precision of pit stops. It had a quality that stood in stark contrast to the unchanging environment surrounding me. Once I received this LEGO set, I assembled it throughout one weekend, connecting each piece until the red form was completed flawlessly. It felt strangely healing, as if I were piecing together a rhythm and vitality that the digital realm had siphoned from me.

The Object as Mediation

This toy car isn’t just an object; it’s a medium. Marshall McLuhan famously said that “the medium is the message”, meaning that the form of a medium, not just its content, shapes human experience. This LEGO Ferrari mediates speed not through movement, but through its design and material presence. It turns velocity into something visual and tactile. Every aerodynamic curve, every sponsor decal, and every wheel alignment works as a miniature interface that translates the cultural idea of “speed” into something I can hold.

In that sense, this car embodies the paradox of our media-saturated world: we crave the thrill of movement, but most of our experiences of it are mediated through screens, simulations, and symbols. Watching F1 on a screen, playing the F1 video game, or even scrolling through Instagram clips of races, each of these are examples of what Friedrich Kittler calls “technological mediation”, where our relationship with the world is shaped not directly, but through layers of machines. My LEGO Ferrari sits at the end of that chain, a still life representation of digital motion. It’s a physical freeze-frame of a hyper-mediated phenomenon.

Theorizing Speed and Stillness

The concept of speed in media theory isn’t just about motion; it’s about time and attention. Paul Virilio, a French theorist who wrote extensively on technology and velocity, argued that modern life is dominated by what he called dromology, the logic of speed. According to Virilio, every advance in technology accelerates not only movement, but also perception. The faster we can transmit information, the faster our sense of time collapses. In that light, my LEGO Ferrari is ironic. It’s a static embodiment of a hyper-speed culture. It’s the calm after acceleration, the physical residue of a world obsessed with going faster.

When I look at this model, I think about how much of our media consumption today is built around acceleration: 15-second TikToks, 2x playback speed on lectures, instant streaming, and even the constant pressure to “move forward” in life. The Ferrari, both real and miniature, symbolizes that desire for optimization, precision, and speed. Yet the LEGO version, by being immobile, resists that logic. Its speed turned into contemplation. It mediates not the rush of racing, but the human longing behind it: the need to feel in control, even in an age when our devices seem to control the pace for us.

Affordances of the Object

In media theory, the term affordance refers to what an object allows or enables us to do. My LEGO Ferrari doesn’t move, but it affords reflection, nostalgia, and imagination. It reminds me of weekends spent building LEGO as a kid, of tinkering with things just for the sake of curiosity. It also affords a certain kind of identity performance, displayed on my desk, it signals taste, fandom, and aesthetic precision. It’s part of what Sherry Turkle would call the “inner life of things,” where objects become extensions of our personal narratives and self-concepts.

When Turkle writes that evocative objects are “companions to our emotional lives,” she’s describing exactly this kind of relationship. The Ferrari’s bright red surface doesn’t just reflect light; it reflects my own attachment to what it represents, ambition, movement, design, and control. Yet as I grow older and busier, it also reflects the limits of those ideals. Like a real race car, it’s all about balance: knowing when to accelerate and when to brake.

What the Ferrari Teaches About Media and Mediation

This tiny car helps me understand something larger about media: how technology constantly translates human desire into mechanical or digital form. A Formula 1 car is a triumph of media systems, GPS telemetry, radio communication, live broadcast, aerodynamic simulation, and global branding all converge in a single race. My LEGO version compresses that entire media network into a palm-sized artifact. It’s a miniature media ecology, where engineering meets storytelling, and speed becomes a symbol.

For my generation, growing up in a world where digital media often replaces direct experience, the LEGO Ferrari also represents a yearning for tangibility. It reminds me that even in a digital age, we still crave physical mediation. Building it by hand felt different from clicking or scrolling; it was a slower kind of engagement. It brought back a sense of authorship, of literally constructing something piece by piece rather than consuming something pre-made. That slowness is something media theory rarely celebrates, but perhaps it should.

Conclusion: The Stillness of Speed

Now, the LEGO Ferrari sits quietly between my books and my keyboard. I rarely touch it, but it’s always in my line of sight, a bright red reminder of the way media, memory, and matter intertwine. Through McLuhan’s and Virilio’s lenses, I’ve come to see it not just as a toy, but as a symbolic interface between speed and stillness, past and present, analog and digital.

In a world where everything demands movement, scrolling, streaming, updating, this little car offers the opposite: a pause. It invites reflection on what speed means when the world refuses to slow down. Maybe that’s why it feels so evocative. It mediates not the race, but the moment after it, the breath between acceleration and rest.

And that, I think, is where its real power lies.