Introduction

People often imagine digital technologies as immaterial, floating above physical reality. Screens are described in ways that make it seem like they are part of some other space, independent of anything material. Such a belief underlines much of how we speak about online communication and our digital life. Bollmer challenges this in his book Materialist Media Theory by arguing that all media, including digital forms, depend upon physical environments, embodied routines, and global systems.

Rosenberg and Blondheim extend this argument by observing what happens when a smartphone becomes unavailable. Every time people lose their phones or the battery dies, they go through confusion and anxiety. Everyday routines fall apart, showing how deeply connected with memory, orientation, and safety the device is. This provides everyday evidence for the theory of Bollmer.

This essay makes the case for smartphones as highly material technologies. Reading Rosenberg and Blondheim through Bollmer helps us to understand the smartphone not simply as a digital screen, but as an embodied and infrastructural medium shaping perception, action, and social life.

Bollmer and the Materiality of Media

In Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction, Bollmer argues that media is not an abstract system of symbols existing in a “virtual” world, but rather expressed within concrete material structures. He points out that the digital media we use daily, such as smartphones, are built on a vast and complex material network: from ore mining and chip smelting to power supply, server operation, and the transportation and maintenance of global supply chains. It is these seemingly small and hidden material links that support the operation of modern media. Bollmer states that the so-called “digital” has never been separated from matter; it relies on an entire global industrial ecosystem (Bollmer, p2).

These easily overlooked material components have also changed our understanding of “media.” Media is not merely content on a screen or a channel for transmitting information, but an entity composed of energy, metals, and resources. Behind every click and swipe lies the use of resources and the flow of matter. This also illustrates that media is actually part of the world’s material cycle. It not only creates new meaning but also continuously consumes natural resources. The smartphone is the best example of this contradiction. While smartphones appear lightweight and convenient, their creation is inseparable from raw materials from around the world, complex technologies, and the labor of countless people. We use it every day to browse the internet, take photos, chat, and read information; it has become our primary gateway to the digital world. However, it also consumes energy, metals, and environmental resources. In other words, while mobile phones represent the convenience of modern life, they also remind us of the entire real material foundation behind the digital world.

Therefore, according to Bollmer, understanding media requires returning to its material origins. The “existence” of media lies not only in transmitting information, but also in how it participates step by step in the construction of the world through concrete material forms such as chips, wires, plastics, and minerals. This leads to the proposition that media is not a container for information, but a process constituted by the material world itself.

Rosenberg and Blondheim and the Smartphone in Its Absence

In their empirical study on smartphone use and experience time, Rosenberg and Blondheim pointed out that mobile phones are not merely communication tools, but interactive devices that combine the body and technology, profoundly changing our perception of time, social interactions, and daily habits. Through a “deprivation study,” they deprived adolescents of their phones for a period of time. When the phone was not nearby, participants subconsciously reached for it in their pockets, bags, or on nearby tables, even without any external stimulus. This is interpreted as a phenomenon of “unconscious bodily attachment,” showing that they still have a conditioned reflexive expectation of the phone at a bodily level (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p. 246). From the perspective of media materiality, the touch, swipe, vibration notifications, and screen brightness of mobile phones constantly influence our physical world. As a material technology, the mobile phone intervenes in the body and perception, making the generation of abstract media meaning no longer just language and images, but built on a cyclical interaction of body-interface-attention-time.

For example, our subconscious actions of picking up our phones to check the time, set alarms, record time, and check notifications demonstrate that the phone has become an extension of our bodies. Smartphones have transformed our physical perception of monotonous states of time like “waiting” and “idleness.” Without phones, time felt fixed and continuous. But with phones, time becomes flexible and fragmented. For example, we can check our phones, reply to messages, and switch tasks at any time, breaking time into small segments. These behaviors influence how we perceive the world, understand time, and communicate with others. Smartphones have become an integral part of our lives and bodies, transforming “media” from a mere external tool into an extension of our daily experiences.

Comparative Analysis

Reading these texts together allows us to understand the materiality of the smartphone with much greater precision. Both Bollmer and Rosenberg and Blondheim deny the notion that digital technologies exist outside the physical world, but they do so from different levels and with different kinds of evidence.

First, Bollmer focuses on the structural side of materiality. He explains that what appears to be digital is supported by big and often invisible infrastructures, including mineral extraction necessary to build chips, moving devices along global supply chains, electrical grids powering servers and data centers, down to the physical gestures, which interfaces silently train into our bodies. To Bollmer, materiality is not only an attribute of the device but also a condition that shapes how digital media become possible at all. His view, therefore, underlines the background systems we rarely think about when holding a phone.

Rosenberg and Blondheim provide a more intimate, and immediately observable perspective. They indicate how the smartphone shapes everyday experience by small but meaningful disruptions. When the phone is missing, one loses the ability to navigate, to remember appointments, or to keep up a sense of security. These are not abstract consequences but real breakdowns most people have felt. Reaching for a phone that is not there, or feeling uneasy during a commute without it, makes the materiality of the device unmistakable. Their work brings attention to the micro level of how the smartphone becomes part of bodily rhythm, affective stability, and daily decision making.

Putting the two texts in conversation reveals a layered form of materiality. Bollmer describes the macro layer by emphasizing infrastructures, production and the environmental and political conditions that allow the smartphone to exist. Rosenberg and Blondheim illuminate the micro layer by showing how the device embeds itself in gesture, habit and emotion. These layers are different in scale, yet compatible in argument. Taken together, they reveal how the smartphone operates not only as a technical artifact but also as a lived environment that organizes perception and behaviour.

These connections make the comparison especially useful for our class. The smartphone becomes a case through which we can see how media operate simultaneously as symbolic systems, physical tools, and social structures. The texts also help us understand why smartphone dependence feels so powerful. It’s not simply a matter of distraction or preference. It’s the result of a technological object materially entangled with infrastructure, mobility, memory, and emotion. By looking at the smartphone through both authors, we get a clearer sense of how digital media shape contemporary life across different scales of experience.

Conclusion

Smartphones are often treated as digital or immaterial objects, but together the readings of Bollmer and Rosenberg and Blondheim show that they are deeply material. Their absence disrupts routines and makes visible their role in attention, memory, social stability and bodily practice. Far from separating us from the physical world, smartphones reorganize that world and shape how we experience it.

Understanding smartphone materiality helps us think differently about digital media more generally. It reminds us that screens and data do not exist outside physical life. They are embedded in bodily habits, infrastructures and emotional experience. For the students in this class, this perspective demonstrates that the analysis of media cannot stop at content or representation and has to consider also how technologies participate in shaping everyday life.

The smartphone is a material medium that allows us to see our own dependence particularly well. It calls into question the assumption of much cultural commentary that digital life exists somewhat separately from physical experience. Gaining insight into these conditions allows us to understand more about what structures contemporary life.

Citations

Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

Rosenberg, Hananel, and Menahem Blondheim. “What (Missing) the Smartphone Means: Implications of the Medium’s Portable, Personal, and Prosthetic Aspects in the Deprivation Experience of Teenagers.” Mobile Media & Communication, 2025.

Written by Saber, Rai, Mio

Introduction

Contemporary digital media, often understood as the transmission of information and the exchange of symbols, and the associated theories have undergone dramatic development with the emergence of AI. This blog explores the rapidly growing perspective of technology, including generative AI, and connects it to Ingold’s theory of clay and wood, which are considered materials in his theory. How is it that AI, in which even emotions and ideas are digitally “encoded,” is able to behave like a material that “co-creates” with us? We apply Ingold’s “correspondence” as a theoretical framework, using our own experiences writing and editing with AI as a concrete example. Through these explorations, we hope to reconsider AI as a new “digital material” or medium, rather than treating it as a mere tool or black box, and to encourage its discovery and development.

Theoretical frame work

Ingold’s concept of “craft” is not simply a technical handiwork or task. For him, craft is a process of correspondence between humans and materials, a way of thinking and cognition that “knows the world through making.” While it’s commonly believed that knowledge and form are acquired after a material is completed, Ingold’s theory is different. Rather, it emerges during the interaction that occurs during the process of creation. Therefore, focusing on the material’s properties and resistances, and the process of responding to them are crucial.

Ingold also uses examples of working with materials like clay and wood to demonstrate that each material has its own affordances and constraints, which create resistance. Artists, specifically saying that potters, do not “give” clay a shape, but “discover” it by receiving its response. The response Ingold advocates here refers to the properties of clay, such as deforming when pressed and hardening as it dries. What he is trying to argue is that in this dialogue, the creator’s hands move as if they are “listening” to the power of the material, and that therefore production is an act of collaboration rather than domination.

His theory, which argues that “materials themselves mediate,” further supports this idea. If we consider that materials themselves, such as clay or wood fibers and their texture, mediate the relationship between humans and the world, then mediation does not simply involve the “transportation” of meaning, with the material world simply receiving it. But rather is the act of existence and recognition being collaboratively formed, actively influencing the generation of meaning. This understanding of the “mediacy of materials” makes it possible to fundamentally reexamine the common notion in media theory that media are technological channels for transmitting information.

From Material to Medium: Rethinking AI

At first glance, AI would appear to share nothing at all with Ingold’s clay or wood. It has no smell, no resistance, no texture. But when we use an AI model to write, generate images, or brainstorm, we notice that it behaves less like an inanimate pen and more like a living material.

We can ask ChatGPT to write a paragraph, but it rarely writes exactly what we intended. Its tone either overshoots or undershoots; it introduces unexpected twists, or it stubbornly misinterprets. The process becomes iterative: We adjust the prompt, clarify the request, reject, re-ask, and build from what it offers. The dialogue is not unlike how Ingold describes craft—attending, adjusting, and responding to the material at hand.

AI is not raw material, but far from inert. It “pushes back” in its own affordances and constraints. A large data-trained model has tendencies, biases, and styles that we must work with, just as a sculptor works with the properties of marble. If Ingold were writing today, we think he might view AI as a type of “digital material”—a medium that demands attention, negotiation, and responsiveness.

The Co-Making Process

Working alongside generative AI reveals that making has more to do with coparticipation and less with control. Coparticipation happens at several levels:

1. Iteration and Resistance
When the clay slumps or fractures, so also do AI outputs often fail. The “resistance” is stylistic or semantic rather than physical. Our job is to adapt—amending our input, redirecting, or embracing the surprise.

2. Unpredictability and Surprise
Ingold highlights how makers tend to be surprised by what happens. This surprise is magnified in AI. The algorithm taps into patterns that are invisible to us, and the outcome can be lovely, infuriating, or creepy. But it is here that new knowledge comes into being.

3. Shared Agency
Ingold would oppose isolated human authorship. In creation aided by AI, authorship is yet more openly dispersed. We bring purpose, provocation, and judgment. The AI brings trained statistical relationships and probabilistic imagination. What we get is neither all ours nor all machine-made—it is a joint artifact.

A Personal Example: Writing with AI

When I use AI as a writing or brainstorming tool, the activity is not so much that of typing on a blank page but rather that of joining a studio discussion. Suppose I am attempting to come up with a theme for a fantasy essay. I put a rough concept into ChatGPT. It returns with a partially clichéd but partially stimulating outline. I seize upon a phrase it generated, flip it on its head, and follow it where it goes. Then I give feedback to my rewritten version, and the model suggests edits.

What amazes me is how learning is achieved through this process. I do not receive ready-made answers. I learn things by being in touch. Ingold speaks of making as a kind of thinking in action, and I am living that on the internet. The “thinking” is not internal to my head. It is distributed between me and the AI system. The medium itself is integrated into my mode of thinking.

Broader Implications: Rethinking Media

Ingold’s remarks also lead us to ask what we mean by “media.” If we take his argument seriously that materials themselves mediate, then AI is not just a platform where communication occurs—it is itself a medium.

Clay facilitated the connection between potter and vessel. AI facilitates the connection between digital representation and human imagination. The “material as media” idea is now applied to the algorithmic.

This has ethical and cultural implications. If AI is an agential medium, then producers must pay attention to how it shapes effects—through biases within data sets, through the aesthetics it values, through the forms of image and language that it authorizes. Just as a weaver is sensitive to the nature of threads, a digital producer has to be sensitive to the nature of AI outputs.

Why This Matters

For us, applying Ingold’s model to consider AI changes our entire perspective. It keeps us from thinking about AI as if it were a magic black box or as a neutral computer. Rather, it is more like wood or clay, something which requires skill, patience, and sensitivity to work well with.

At the same time, it extends Ingold’s ideas. Making is not confined to physical substance anymore. It can happen in virtual, algorithmic space, where “material” consists of data and statistical inference. But the rules remain the same. Knowledge emerges in the dialogue between maker and medium, human and material.

Connection to other theories

This perspective also resonates with other theories that we’ve read in class. Semiotics teaches us that signs mediate meaning, but Ingold reminds us that material does. Critical Terms in media studies are often about representation, but Ingold re-centers the process. Evocative Objects suggest that things are given meaning by personal and cultural associations, but Ingold—and we would argue, AI—suggests that things are also given meaning by their becoming, by the process of being made.

AI invention highlights the limits of a purely symbolic or representational conception of media. It shows that mediation is not just about the transmission of messages but co-production with material—material that may be wood, clay, or code.

Written by Mio, Rai, Saber

1. Introduction

When we began thinking about this project, both of us instinctively were drawn to James J. Gibson. Not because his name was on all things, but because his ideas immediately spoke to what we are most interested in. At first glance, he seems to be just another psychologist with theories about how people perceive and make sense of the world. But then we read Tim Ingold’s Making, and we realized that Gibson’s ideas are more exciting because they are about how we move through the world, how we perceive it with our bodies, and how we make beings there. His texts go beyond the idea of vision as passive and show us that perception is an active process that takes place when we are most engaged with the world.

Design is the object of our research and design interests, and Gibson’s work deals with exactly that. As media studies students we are constantly interested in how people interact with objects, spaces, and media not just visually but also through bodily and affective interactions. The idea of “affordances” points out that the world is not a static background but an active participant, inviting people to move and act. This is the way in which one may view design as not being fixed but as a dialogue between humans and material reality.

By exploring how Ingold takes Gibson’s ideas further, we will learn how theories of perception are embodied in tools for making and how these inform our knowledge of creativity and design. It is also a project about finding inspiration for our own creative work and how design can be a way of knowing and exploring the world.

2. Background: Who is James J. Gibson?

Let’s begin by learning more about his background. Gibson (his full name: James Jerome Gibson) was born in McConnelsville, Ohio, in 1904. He developed an interest in philosophy from a young age and began his undergraduate studies in philosophy at Northwestern University. He then transferred to Princeton University, where he studied experimental psychology under Herbert S. Langfeld. After his PhD, Gibson began his academic career as a faculty member at Smith College. 

Gibson’s research focused primarily on visual perception. He explored how organisms perceive their visual environment and his understanding of perception as a direct process. During his career, he challenged traditional psychology’s emphasis on mental reconstruction and inferential processing, proposing what he called the ecological approach to perception. However, the world entered World War II, and Gibson was no exception. He was forced to serve in the U.S. Army Air Forces. During his time there, he worked on applied vision tasks, such as visual identification of aircraft and the production of training films. 

After the war, Gibson returned to Smith College, and then in 1949 moved to Cornell University, where he spent the rest of his life devoted to research and teaching, passing away in 1979. His work will undoubtedly remain indelibly etched in the minds of psychologists, designers, architects, and others around the world.

3. Gibson’s Key Works and Concepts

The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception(1979) is one of Gibson’s most influential and most important works, and is also the main piece Ingold cited from in Making. In the book, he introduced the connection between perception and action and one of the central concepts of the book, affordance. 

Affordance is the action possibilities the environment offers to an organism, and is “measured relative to the animal”, which means that they are unique for each organism. Gibson explained how organisms perceive their environment in terms of the possibilities of what they can do with it. He emphasizes that perception is an interaction with the environment, not mental representation, which corresponded with Ingold’s insight on the relations between people learning and materials. Thus, pictures and films are limited in terms of reflecting the natural environment since they only respond to visual perception. 

Gibson’s other works include The Perception of the Visual World(1950), which challenged the traditional idea that perception is an interpretive process where the mind constructs an internal picture of the external world based on sensory inputs. Gibson instead states that people perceive the external world itself, not the imagery we construct in our own minds. He also introduces the “ground theory”, in which the ground provides a framework for the distance, scale, and direction of perception, and the senses that build on top of it – making it three-dimensional in a figurative way – is based on the physical interaction to the objects. 

Another key concept raised by Gibson is Gradient in perception. Texture gradients and motion gradients come together, providing still and dynamic information to allow people to perceive the object as it is in reality, without mental interference. Gibson believes that what we “perceive” is the result combining what we visualize and what we feel. This theory also laid the foundation for his work later on, which is mentioned above.

4. How Ingold Uses Gibson in Making

Ingold is heavily dependent on Gibson’s concepts in presenting his case about how people engage with the world through making. Gibson’s theoretical notion that perception is not a reception of information but more an active engagement of the individual with the environment lies at the heart of Ingold’s own theory. People, for Gibson, do not just look at the world and interpret from a distance. Instead, they only move across it, respond to it, and understand it by performing within it. Ingold finds this perspective crucial to his thinking, as he argues that knowledge emerges not from abstracted thinking but from the bodily act of doing and making.

The most influential concept Ingold draws upon is “affordance,” Gibson’s term for the possibility of action offered by the world to an organism. Ingold uses this concept to illustrate that materials, tools, and landscapes are not passive things waiting to be used. They actually influence the way we think, act, and make. For example, when a carpenter is working with wood, he is not simply insisting on his intention onto a clump of stuff. He is being challenged by the resistance, strength, and feel of the wood, its affordances, and he is adjusting his behavior in response. This dialogical exchange of human intentionality with material properties is, for Ingold, the essence of making.

Ingold also pushes Gibson’s theory beyond perception to suggest that making is a way of knowing. Since perception arises from movement and engagement, so does understanding. Through constant contact with worlds and materials, people acquire skills, techniques, and knowledge unavailable through theory. Gibson’s inheritance enables Ingold to show that making is not object-production but being actively involved in a relationship with the world.

By integrating Gibson’s theories into his argument, Ingold demonstrates that creativity and knowledge are derived from interaction rather than isolation. Perception and making are inextricably linked processes, and Gibson’s theory enables Ingold to position making as a form of thought, one that is based in the body, the senses, and the dialogue of humans with the environment.

5. Critical Reflection

Rereading “Making” and incorporating the ideas of James J. Gibson, we gradually realized that “making” isn’t simply the act of completing a “specific work,” but rather a process of ongoing understanding and interaction. Gibson’s theory teaches us that perception isn’t a static “seeing,” but rather “feeling” and “responding” through the body’s interaction with the environment. This line of thought resonates with Ingold’s view: true knowledge doesn’t come solely from external observation, but is discovered through action, experimentation, and the response of materials.

When we consider “making” from this perspective, it becomes more than a unilateral plan by the designer, but rather an ongoing exchange between people, materials, and the environment. Every adjustment, failure, and re-attempt is part of the creative process. This process merges “knowing” and “doing,” transforming creation into a way of thinking and learning.

For those of us studying media, this understanding is particularly meaningful. Whether shooting images, editing videos, engaging in interactive design, or working with digital tools like digital sculpting and rendering, we are all experiencing “responsive creation.” Media isn’t just a tool for conveying information; it constantly communicates with us, influencing our choices, feelings, and expressions. Through the ideas of Gibson and Ingold, we recognize that media practice is a way of “understanding through doing”—it allows us to relearn how to perceive the world, understand materials, and generate new meanings through interaction in the process of creation.

Image Credits

Header image designed by Mio on Canva

“James Gibson” image courtesy of Cornell University

Mio Hashimoto, Rai Yanagisawa, Saber Wang, Siming Liao

Care Bear and the Technology of Memory

When I was in the first grade, my mom bought me a Care Bear lunchbox and a piggy bank. They were bright pastel colors, smiling, and full of cute faces—little things that appeared to radiate heat. I remember to this day how happy I felt to carry the lunchbox to school, as if I had a chunk of home with me. They were not just sweet little trimmings; they were emotional extensions of my childhood and my relationship with my mother. Even now, when I glance at Care Bear products—especially those that have the aesthetic of the original American designs—I immediately feel nostalgic. Without even a second thought, I desire to buy them again, as if to spend money on a small piece of my past.

I guess the Care Bear as my evocative object throughout this blog post, according to Sherry Turkle’s Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (2007). I also draw on Bernard Stiegler’s theory of technological memory from his chapter “Memory” in Critical Terms for Media Studies (2010), in order to explore how this object mediates my relationship with time, feeling, and identity. In these paradigms, I would argue that the Care Bear is a vehicle of remembrance—a physical surface external to and reactivating memory, bringing the past to life in the present.

The Object and Its Emotional Charge

The Care Bears were originally developed in the early 1980s as greeting card characters, then expanded to toys, TV shows, and a global franchise. The original concepts were soft, rounded, and feeling-face—each bear representing an emotion like love, cheer, or friendship. My mother’s gift of the Care Bear piggy bank and lunchbox was of this early design generation. Their looks and texture were humble but comfortable: pale colors, small imperfections, and faces that seemed human and kind.

These items became a part of my early daily experience, mediating home and school, family and independence. They were comfort items, but also media items—transmitting a message about care and emotional display. Care Bears today, especially in malls or on the Internet, is not a pure experience. The photograph of the bear instantly causes a nostalgic flashback: I think of my mother’s kindness, my school lunch hours, the sense of security and being loved. It is this which Turkle (2007) describes as the evocative power of objects: they do not just represent memory—they make it come alive.

Objects as Emotional Media

Turkle (2007) suggests that objects can be “companions to our emotional lives,” mediating between thought and feeling (p. 5). My Care Bear objects do precisely this—they instantiate abstract feelings in physical form. They remind me of a period when love was enacted through physical care: a mother buying something small but thoughtful. The object is a medium—a vessel that carries affect and memory through time.

But this mediation is not stable. As the Care Bear brand evolved, so did the look. Modern versions—typically in fast fashion stores or in partnership with lifestyle brands—sport rounder eyes, more angular lines, and a slightly plastic digital glow. Their faces are discernible, almost too sleek. When I look at these newer versions, something is off. They don’t evoke the same sentiment, even though they share the same name and color scheme. This gap reveals how media transformation can reformulate emotional experience: the same image, remade in a different material or cultural context, mediates emotion differently.

This way, the Care Bear is a mirror of media’s impact on memory. Its nostalgic potential depends not only on personal experience but on material form, aesthetic texture, and historical continuity. The object’s “aura,” to borrow from Benjamin (1968), lies in its uniqueness—its attachment to a specific time, relationship, and feeling. When that form changes, so too does the emotional resonance.

Memory as Technological Mediation

While Turkle is interested in the psychological and emotional life of objects, Stiegler (2010) elaborates the concept of memory in its technical and exteriorized forms. Memory for Stiegler is never bound within the human mind; it is being exteriorized in material and technical forms all the time—a process he calls tertiary retention. Photographs, cinema, recordings, and even everyday objects are technologies of memory that allow individuals and societies to capture and transmit experience across time.

In doing so, my Care Bear is not merely nostalgic—it is a technical object of memory. It is a device that retains and reactivates what Stiegler (2010) calls “traces of temporal experience” (p. 66). Each time I see it or hold it, the bear instigates a process of remembering through mediation—a technologic reactivation of emotion. The material presence of the bear becomes a screen upon which emotion and memory are inscribed, stored, and replayed.

This text relocates nostalgia as psychological longing plus; it is a media process, one that depends upon externalized memory support. My Care Bear serves as a bridge between internal memory (what I recall) and external memory (what is stored in the object). The bear’s body—its color, its softness, the faint fading—serves as what Stiegler might call a mnemo-technical artifact, a prosthesis that extends human remembering into the sphere of things.

Recollection in the Age of Reproduction

Stiegler’s view also explains why my personal identification with the updated, digitally reengineered Care Bears is not exactly the same. These updated bears, optimized visually and mass-produced, are leaner on “temporal density” than the original. Mass reproduction itself and also the speed and seamlessness of digital culture dilute the aura Benjamin (1968) connected with singular pieces. The haptic connection that previously defined the bear—its bulk, its feel, its small imperfections—has been lost to an image that constantly circulates on the web.

To me, the old Care Bear is an analog medium of memory, the new one a digital simulacrum. The difference is not aesthetic but ontological: the older object holds time, the new one collapses time into design. That tension is representative of the greater cultural shift outlined by Stiegler—where memory is increasingly externalized by technology but in turn, paradoxically, increasingly fleeting.

Why It Matters

For my peers in this class—most of whom likewise grew up surrounded by media stars and digital photographs—the Care Bear is a familiar sight: the manner in which things are made into affective media that bridge the private and the public. The Care Bear franchise is never actually concerned with care, concern, and proximity, but only with those sentiments being intermediated by form, material, and appearance.

By Stiegler’s (2010) theory, I see that my Care Bear is a prosthesis of love: it allows my emotional memory to be externalized outside my head, in a material space. It shows how memory technologies are not limited to machines or screens but can take the shape of little, colorful toys that carry the traces of emotion from childhood.

Conclusion

The Care Bear, as my evocative object, is both emotional and technological memory. It is a case in point of Turkle’s (2007) suggestion that objects “carry meaning and emotion” (p. 6), but also of Stiegler’s argument that memory reduces to a process of externalization through techniques. The physicality of the bear is a mnemonic technology, brokering personal history and cultural continuity.

In this small pastel bear, I sense how memory isn’t something we simply have—it’s something we do with our objects, our technologies, and our media environments. The Care Bear itself might have had numerous countenances throughout the years, yet for me, its significance will forever be the same: a living medium whereby the past is resuscitated anew in the present, showing me that even the most ordinary childhood object can hold the complex machinery of memory itself.

References

Benjamin, W. (1968). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (H. Zohn, Trans.). In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (pp. 217–251). Schocken Books. (Original work published 1936)

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

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

Image Credits

The Care Bears Movie (1985) – promotional still. Image from IMDb.
Retrieved October 5, 2025, from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284713/

Official Care Bears Website. (n.d.). Care Bears character images.
Retrieved October 5, 2025, from https://www.carebears.com/

80s Fave. (n.d.). The Care Bears Movie gets U.K. collector’s edition release.
Retrieved from https://www.animationmagazine.net/2023/12/80s-fave-the-care-bears-movie-gets-u-k-collectors-edition-release/

Written by Mio Hashimoto

Introduction 

Ever find yourself filling out a job application with a drop-down menu to select your major — scrolling down and down until you find it — ‘Communications & Media Studies?’ Employers and schools alike tend to click together the terms, whether for ease of pairing the two related terms or for a lack of understanding into the nuances that define the disciplines. Are there even differences if those who confer degrees write them on the same line?

Realistically, communications is both a critical dimension & point of study for media studies and also an entirely separate field. It’s why Bruce Clarke uses his chapter on Communication in Critical Terms for Media Studies to both introduce how the word and concept shapes the two disciplines (2010).s

A Definition to Work With

Communication — as a word, not a discipline —  is derived from the Latin word communicare, referring to the act of imparting or making something common. The Oxford English Dictionary builds their definition from this; “the imparting, conveying, or exchange of ideas, knowledge, [and] information (OED.”) While the English verb implies the intentional transmission of a conception, the noun word refers instead to the material and spatial object of such an impartation. Put in other words, the object of communication is what a medium is (Clarke 2020). 

Development into Disciplines

Prior to the Industrial revolution of the mid-1800s, the study of communication was otherwise incorporated in other disciplines such as philosophy (Peters 1999). Mechanical technology flourished unprecedentedly and expanded human’s intellectual, spatial, and temporal boundaries similarly. Foreign colonies and countries became connected by their media, transitioning the globe into a community through innovations like telegraphs, phones, and radios. Around a century later, Marshall McLuhan argued the two as distinct realms of study, both equally deserving of attention. To the time of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver (1949) formalizing their namesake transmission-reception model of communication — a system built around media having their meanings embedded and static until received  —  McLuhan wrote such media are vessels of “information movement” in a society, constituting “extension[s] of man” in the physical world (1994, 89-90).

Published during a period when television became common in households, McLuhan’s attention to mediums themselves proved inspiring to those fascinated by the abundance of these multisensory devices. Contemporaries began conceiving contrasting frameworks, presenting one with meanings driven by reflexive aspects instead of solely by messages encoded (Craig, 2001). This constitutive model, defined by its recognition of social factors, opposes the media-focussed model. With this said, the line between communication studies and media can be said as focus being paid to these social factors in the former and to the technology and formal contents itself. 

Transmission as a Framework of Control

The transmission model is often simplified to the movement of information from one place to another, but this understanding is too narrow. As McLuhan reminded us, every medium not only carries content but also subtly reshapes the roles of the sender and receiver, altering the structures of power and control. From this perspective, transmission is not merely about delivering a message—it organizes the entire process of communication by establishing expectations for clarity, directionality, and authority. It is precisely this organizing function that enables institutions like journalism, education, and the military to treat communication as something that can be standardized and managed.

Transmission in Everyday Communication

When you send a text message to a friend, you compose the message, press send, and wait for it to appear on their phone. If the message is successfully delivered, communication is considered to have succeeded. If it does not arrive, for example, due to signal failure, it is regarded as a breakdown. This simple process reflects the logic of the transmission model, in which communication is viewed as the creation, sending, and receiving of a message.

As Chang points out, this model has limitations. It gives the impression that communication only succeeds when the receiver gets the message exactly as the sender intended. However, in real life, messages are often interpreted in different ways. Even a simple text can be misunderstood depending on tone or context. Chang reminds us that the transmission model values perfect sameness, but actual communication is often full of small differences. This gap reveals both the usefulness and the limitations of transmission in explaining how we connect with each other.

Linking Communication and Media

The transmission model also clearly reveals the intrinsic coupling between communication and media: communication is the act of sending and receiving information, while media is the technical means that enables this act. In practice, the two are inseparable. Whether it is print, telegraph, or digital platforms, the chosen channel not only determines the reach and speed of information dissemination but also fundamentally shapes the form of communication. Thus, the media is by no means a passive or neutral conduit—it actively defines the patterns and boundaries of communication.

Constitutive Model — MEANING is not “SENT” but “CREATED” 

In the previous chapter, we pursued an idea of communication, which is  “a sender sends a message, a receiver receives it.” However, Clarke’s approach explains the quite different communication from this ── “Constitutive Model.” This model fundamentally challenges this premise and offers a perspective that interprets communication itself as a process of creating reality and constructing meaning. In other words, rather than viewing communication as the “transmission of a fixed meaning,” he emphasizes “what is created through communicative interactions.”

Example of Constitutive Model

In this blog post, I would like to explain an example I couldn’t explain in my presentation to make  the “Constitutive Model” easier to understand. One example is news reporting. When considering a news report, even if it appears to convey the same facts in all press, interpretations can vary greatly depending on the choice of vocabulary, context, and audience, and social relationships are shaped accordingly. In other words, even if it appears to convey the facts, the meaning can change significantly depending on the choice of expression.

Thus, in the constitutive model, the sender, receiver, and message are not pre-fixed but are reconstructed within the act of communication itself. This model has been proposed as an alternative framework by contemporary theorists such as Robert Craig (1999). Researchers such as Craig have positioned communication as a reflective and dynamic process.

Communication and Digital Media

What I wanted to add to this constitutive model is an insight into communication and digital media. Real-time communication technologies such as telephone and television enable instant interaction. On the other hand, storage media such as text and video preserve information for later reference. Amid the emergence of these media, it has been argued that digital media possessed the characteristics of both.

Considering this in conjunction with Craig’s constitutive model, we can conclude that digital media enable the simultaneous transmission and preservation of information, with meanings constantly changing during the communication process.

Communication in Larger Society 

Subsequently in this chapter, we are introduced to Jürgen Habermas’ theories by Bruce Clarke, along with those of Briankle Chang and Niklas Luhmann. These were not presented as merely scholarly differences but as methods of framing a deeper question around how we could possibly understand communication within society in general. In our presentation, we were only able to present a brief overview due to time limitations, but here I would like to dig a little deeper.

Habermas and the Public Sphere

Habermas’s communicative rationality theory is especially important as a foundation for democratic public spheres. In Habermas’s opinion, people use language to exchange ideas, critique each other and bargain for mutual understanding. This goes beyond individual subjectivity and aims to create common rationality in public life. We did touch on this during our presentation but did not get a chance to connect it to the digital public sphere. On social media, the people of today now criticize and quarrel with each other in real time, but at the same time, these platforms tend to break down into echo chambers and polarization. The gap between Habermas’s idea of consensus and the fragmented reality of discussion online is worth noting.

Chang and the Limits of Intersubjectivity

Chang’s own critique of intersubjectivity must also be addressed with some additional attention. He asserts that communication can’t be a copying of ideas from mind to mind. Instead there is always difference, slippage and ambiguity between understanding. In our presentation we have only alluded to his claim that intersubjectivity is circular. What I would prefer that we had emphasized more is that Chang’s account renders difference a productive resource. Meaning lies not in sameness but in difference. News reporting is one such area. Facts are the same but interpretation varies based on vocabulary, framing and audience. These generate new discourse and not shut them off.

Luhmann and Social Systems

Luhmann develops this concept further with his theory of social systems. Society, he states, is not a space of shared meaning but is the ever-present continuation of communication itself. Only communication can communicate, he states. Messages in this model are not transmitted whole from one brain to another. Instead each system generates meaning internally. Communication goes on as long as one message produces another. Misunderstanding or conflict does not stop society, it keeps it going. We can see this quite clearly in social media arguments, where misunderstanding often gives rise to new rounds of controversy and interpretation.

Connecting to Networks

Here Clarke’s chapter overlaps with another in Critical Terms, Alexander Galloway’s “Networks.” Networks characterize society as a network of nodes and connections, where each message gets its meaning based on how it relates to the others. Based on this perspective Habermas’s aspiration for consensus can only be seen in fragments, and Chang’s emphasis on difference aligns with the diversity of nodes in a network. Luhmann’s chain of communication is consistent with Galloway’s view that decentralized and distributive structures put society in motion. Together, Communication and Networks reveal that meaning is not the fixed transmission of ideas but the ongoing generative process in the web of social relations.

Thank you for reading this blog ⭐️!