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I just observe the World.
General Media Theory

Oxford Word Of The Year In 2025 Is “Rage Bait” — And What?

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By Micah Sébastien Zhang

Sometimes I think human thoughts and patterns are strange — sometimes even blatantly strange and intellectually-defunct. My mind often circles back to this wild statement after much observation as a new generation person breed by perpetual online content.

Quite recently, Oxford University Press has chosen the term "rage bait" as the Word of the Year of 2025. The term "rage bait" is "online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content" as defined by their given explanation. Their presented graphic showed that the usage of the term has been sharply rising since around June of 2024.

This wasn’t the first time that Oxford UP decided to bring in significant attention to rapidly developing internet jargons. Last year, the term "brain rot" was selected as the Word of the Year in 2024. A technical definition for this term would be about meaningless pieces of low-effort content circulating on the internet, yet a figurative definition would be an alarming symbolism that marks the downfall of communications and record-keeping of the humanity.

My growth as a 2005-born Millennial defined my intertwining love-hate relationship with the internet, and now my current identity as a media studies student is adding a touch of sour taste to recognizing the reality. My early days of internet exploration around 2016 opened myself up to the massive culmination of mankind knowledge (whether it’s good or bad); the sense of novelty was lingering among the majority of good-faith online communities (I missed the days watching DanTDM as a child). Yet now coming to the end of 2025 as a (questionable) self-functioning adult after learning three years of formal media jargons, this sense of novelty was eventually replaced with subtle nausea on overwhelming effects of emotions transmitting throughout the internet.

On a deeper reflective level, this feeling now feels more like a side effect of internet or mass communication as expected from media richness theory, which was developed by Richard L. Daft and Robert H. Lengel in the 1980s. The theory developed a framework to assess different means of communications depending on their "richness" — the ability to accurately convey information with as minimum misintepretations as possible.

A core of the internet relies on mass communication and digitization of traditional humanistic experiences, and the concepts within the media richness theory seem to alarm us of a possible outcome. Concepts mentioned in the media richness theory, such as paralanguage, social cues, and social presence — which are all heavily present in in-person communications — are mostly-to-always compressed and distorted during the transformation to digitized spaces. A simple "I love you" to a person could be reprinted and reproduced numerous times on language-prevalent platforms like Twitter and Facebook; the cues brought by tone, body languages, and facial expressions were, however, obliterated by the digital presence, despite the fact that they’re heavily influential on conveying deep meanings.

Rage bait could be pretty much interpreted as the direct result of phenomenon. The social media’s lessening capacity to hold long-form discussions is leading to a tendency of encouraging primal flirts to trigger simple emotions, yet ironically speaking, keeping content forms simple for social media seems like a popular solution for a social media platform to thrive. It might seems just easy for us to randomly post anything on Twitter within a 140-word limit, preferably with some pictures to spice up your content. The ultimate outcome we often hope for from posting would be engagement and acknowledgements, whether it could be simple as a like or retweet or as complex as a well-written and formatted reply. But the mediation of language itself is inevitable (and I would personally call it as the curse of language); it’s almost impossible to mirror a specific segment of your personal, in-real-life experience onto a short amount of text and expect other people can feel your same experience through the text. On topics such as debates over ideas and opinions that would often take an insurmountable effort form proper engagements and arguments, the text itself on those topics over social media doesn’t just represent a description, but rather a much dwindled tag of primal humanistic emotions.

What lies the real danger here is that the delivery format of social media is driving such engagements — exchanges of primal humanistic emotions. The root of conflicts inside mankind could be just coming from a small misunderstanding. If one day the boundaries between online and real-life interactions blurred, I must say that I’m not highly optimistic of what might be the outcome.

Sure, you can say it’s primal humanistic emotions again. ("We’re just humans, right?") Just don’t think that I’ll take all those norms in peace.

Works Consulted

Heaton, Benedict. “‘Brain Rot’ Named Oxford Word of the Year 2024.” Oxford University Press, 2 Dec. 2024, corp.oup.com/news/brain-rot-named-oxford-word-of-the-year-2024.

Heaton, Benedict. “The Oxford Word of the Year 2025 Is Rage Bait.” Oxford University Press, 1 Dec. 2025, corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-is-rage-bait.

“Media Richness Theory | Research Starters | EBSCO Research.” EBSCO, www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/media-richness-theory#terms-&-concepts.

Copyright Acknowledgement

Cover feature image by Dmitry Vechorko on Unsplash.

Critical Response

What Can Image Gen-AI Models Teach Us About Image Perceptions?

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A Critical Response Post to THE IMAGE: REPRESENTATION, REINCARNATION, REPRODUCTION by Matthias von Loebell, Danial Schatz, Django Mavis, and Sydney Wilkins.

By Micah Sébastien Zhang

A few days ago, I have stumbled across a work by some of my peers — Matthias von Loebell, Daniel Schatz, Django Mavis, and Sydney Wilkins — on the class blog, in which they talked about the significance of images in media, and how can the manipulation of images affect people’s perception. The blog article rolled out smoothly as it took us from the early and general form and definition of images at the start, then to the connections between theories, and it all falls back to the general summary of how is their whole thesis point playing out in the modern, contemporary field of world.

The article chose a sociological point of view when comes to the analysis of images and their effects, which is a proper move in my opinion. Similar perspectives and ways of research could never get old as the time and world are shifting forward. What I found particularly agreeing is their opinion on the essence of images, as they quote it as "a visual abstraction." Through this piece of thought, we can fairly arbitrate the concept of image falling within the classical frame of media mediation, in which images serve as a mediation to a summary of thought(s).

However, in this critical response post, I would like to take a step back and make my way to a summit that grants a holistic and figurative perspective on the conception of images, notably through a rather unusual example — text-to-image generative AI models.

How come? The reason why I’m proposing this peculiar perspective approach is that I personally found the technical process of text-to-image generative AI is similar to the humanistic experience of image perception. Yet before we can go into the comparable details of it, we should first understand how do text-to-image generative AI models usually work.

A research guide from the University of Toronto gave us a pretty comprehensive outlook of the technical process, yet for the sake of convenience, a summary will be also provided below. To be technically focused and more concise, I will only focus on the process for diffusion models.

Diffusion model is a common type among image generative AI models; both Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s DALL•E are categorized as diffusion models. Inspired from thermodynamic diffusion, the technical process of a diffusion model includes two methods. The first method — forward diffusion — will declutter and scatter (or "diffuse" according to the manual) the pixels of a normal image into random noises. The machine is learning to recreate the image by reconstructing a normal image from a randomized, noisy version. That is, for example, a normal image of an apple will be diffused into randomized noise and given with the "apple" tag, then from the tagged noisy images, the machine will recreate the normal images upon requests from prompts. Each creation of the image comes from the synthesis of noises, and this will result in different image outputs even with the same prompts.

Through this process, we can partly mirror this to a general humanistic perception of images if we consider images as a mediation to higher-level information. The creation of actual, in-real-life images comes from the diffusion of the higher-level knowledge in our brains; those pieces of higher-level knowledges are, in my opinion, properly stored as a culmination of humanistic experiences since one’s birth. Upon perceiving an image, we’re essentially transforming a two-dimensional plane of "diffused noise" (this could be any form of visual representation) as pieces of higher-level knowledges in our brain, yet they could be deviated from the original intention and meaning.

On this note, images are indeed better compared to pure texts. In this example, if I put the word "apple" here, my viewers could have different perceptions to the term: maybe it’s a red apple; maybe it’s a green one; maybe it’s even Apple Inc. that made iPhones. Images can provide a more directional rectification towards transmitting higher-level thoughts and concpets. Nevertheless, it is still incomparable to direct transmissions of higher-level thoughts as it falls within the constraints of diffusion of thoughts.

Going back to the article by my peers, one of their claims is that the values of images are diminishing along with the mass production of them. Quoting from the Frankfurt School thinker Walter Benjamin, their claim is reflecting on his claim that viewing artist labour "as the process by which art is imbued with meaning." Reflecting to my claim in this article, the mass production of images may symbolize technological advancements on means of media production and the media industry itself, yet considering this holistic overview, it may also make the transmission of information into a more chaotic stage where the mass produced images bear incomplete representations of higher-level informations.

As new media studies scholars, it is important to note down the challenges currently faced by our field of study, yet having new perspectives that challenge pre-constructed perceptions may provide us more beneficial insights to shape our field of study — and sometimes it could mean taking a step back and seeing things as a whole to find general patterns.

Works Consulted

“Research Guides: Artificial Intelligence for Image Research: How Generative AI Models Work.” University of Toronto Libraries, guides.library.utoronto.ca/image-gen-ai. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.

Von Loebell, Matthias, et al. THE IMAGE: REPRESENTATION, REINCARNATION, REPRODUCTION | Approaches to Writing for Media Studies. 29 Sept. 2025, blogs.ubc.ca/mdia300/archives/115. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.

Image Acknowledgement

The header image was produced by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash.

Critical Comparison

What Does Smartphone Actually Mean To Us? — Critical Texts Comparison With Bollmer

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By Micah Sébastien Zhang

The book Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction written by Grant Bollmer in 2019 provided some comprehensive yet innovative perspectives on media studies based on contemporary media atmosphere. In this blog post, we are going to see how Bollmer’s ideas in the book are being reflected and presented in one research essay on the effect and materiality of smartphones.

A Broad Introduction

The research essay by Hananel Rosenberg and Menahem Blondheim primarily focuses on an experiment on the uses of smartphone among teenagers, yet it also provides valuable insights into how we can define the materiality of smartphones, and how are those insights come in contrast of some past, predisposed beliefs.

The researchers firstly gave an overview of the materiality of smartphone. Drawing from the ideas of the Toronto School thinkers Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan — in which they think "media technologies impact the nature of social organization…and the cognitive implications…" — the researchers claim that the functional concept of smartphone has gone "beyond the prosthetic" into a form that serves as a communication organ, which belongs to a figuratively-morphed body as a communication node. The node, in this case smartphone, has come with three natural aspects of being personal, portable, and prosthetic (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.240). It is a key element to understand the smartphone’s contemporary and figurative significance, yet the researchers also acknowledged that it is hard to understand this idea based off the Toronto School’s perspective considering the importance of smartphones in people’s daily lives.

Here, we can see some similar ideas reflected in Bollmer’s book in Chapter 5, in which Bollmer talked about the figurative definition and relationships of objects. Taking from the idea of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, he narrated that using an existing technological object withdraws its materialistic presence from our experiences, forming a "ready-at-hand" concept (Bollmer, p.143). Using an object does not equates to simply having the object as a prosthetic, but morphing it into an unifying experience; this, in my opinion, is reflecting to the point claimed by the essay’s researchers.

Altogether, it seems that we’re getting an intertwined, general idea of the extensive, prosthetic nature of an object, as it was similarly mentioned or claimed by authors of the two scholarly texts with the support from famous thinkers’ ideas. However, the results shown by the research experiment seem to contemplate the concept’s given figurative definition as from a "prosthetic" point of view. To understand this claim better, let’s take a closer look into the research experiment (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.243-245) and its conclusion on results analysis (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.251-252).

The Experiement

The researchers aimed to study the significance of smartphone in daily lives through voluntary deprivation, and they have put their focuses on teenagers. The researchers have chosen 80 teengaers aged 13-18 in Israel as participants; those teenagers all differ in terms of their average amount of smartphone uses and respective living conditions (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.243). The experiment rolled out in several steps: the enrolled participants were first being asked about their cellphone uses, then their parents were being asked to sign a declaration to make sure that they’re keeping their children’s phones away from sight for the entire experimentation period, which is one week. The experiment will play out in several separate experimentation period throughout a year; researchers also asked participants to give daily diaries and do face-to-face interviews to collect information of participants’ sentiments and feelings (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.244).

Some notable parameters of this experiment were also presented. All participants, whether followed the no-phone rules and successfully completed the experiment or not, will be granted NIS 2501 as a reward after each one-week period; researchers said that it’s not to discourage participants from using phones during an emergency (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.244, 245). Plus, participants were not barred from other electronic devices, including TVs, music and video players, tablets, and computers (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.243) as the collection of information is only bound to the variable of absence of phones in daily lives.

The results were a bit unexpected. 79 out of 80 participants have passed the one-week periods without the phone at all, contrasting against the predisposition held by participants that it would be challenging to endure a week without smartphones. Notably, this finding further challenges a prevalent discourse that describes the relationship between smartphones and teenagers as "addictions" (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.245). Participants did also express some senses of uncomfort or peculiar feelings from the deprivation based on the three aforementioned natural aspects — prosthetic, portable, and personal (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.246-248). Nevertheless, some participants also expressed positive feelings when connecting to the physical surroundings and connections away from screens, with some feelings formalized into gratifications for this experiment (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.250-251). The researchers have specifically mentioned this part in the essay’s conclusion, claiming that "alternative venues of attention and activities were embraced, and they yielded gratifications that compensated, to a surprising extent, for missing the smartphone" (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.252).

On the individual level of analysis, and in trying to penetrate media-users’ cognitive state (Levinson 1999; McLuhan 1967), the enhancement of one’s sensory scope by a personal, portable tool with prosthetic-like attributes, certainly “extends” the individual. Yet increasing one’s exposure to the outside world, with all its gratifications, may carry burdens and discontents that can be relieved by a respite — even for a relatively short time—from the constant extension of individuals, and a return to a less-technologically-expanded experiential-intake capacity.

—— Rosenberg & Blondheim (p.252)

"An Intermittent Clone" — A Reflection & Short Conclusion

Drawing from those general ideas and processes — and specifically from the points made by the researchers at their conspectus — the holistic yield provides another perspective on examining the figurative materiality of smartphone. Rather than viewing it simply as a prosthesis, it presents itself more as an intermittent clone that independently coexists with the "host" — the concept of self or ego — considering its socio-cultural capabilities and feasibility of detachment. As the experiment participants expressed that the loss of phones was getting replenished by their physical surroundings and attributes, it is important to reflect on the idea of simply defining smartphones — or even similar electronic devices — as a figurative prothesis. The concept of "prosthetic objects" was granted its characteristics by the uniqueness of its nature; that is, the objects — even if they can work materialistically as prosthetic extensions — only present themselves as irreplacable. Smartphones, on the other hand, come as an unique form of socio-cultural interactions, yet they’re still categorized as physical attributes under the grand scheme of socio-cultural interactions; a phone could work as an crucial tool, yet it doesn’t provide the uniqueness as a figurative prosthesis, which is reflected upon participants’ positive sentiments during the experiment. This feasibility of detachment, we can say, essentially disqualifies the point to view smartphones solely as a figurative prosthesis extended from the body and mind.

The chosen term "intermittent clone" comes in play if we’re reflecting on smartphone’s socio-cultural significance in an up-to-date manner. Smartphones do effectively provide a materialistic and physical entrance to a de-materialized space for humanistic developments, in which physical communications haven evolved into digital forms as compressions from three-dimesional (or even higher) experiences. Such tools serve as a pathway to create a clone (similar to a biological understanding) or clones that are subjugated under different digital socio-cultural constraints and exist independently, with the purpose of recreating real, physical connections. Note that the now-developed landscape of digital social media becomes an alternative to traditional social media, it is more important to re-adjust the scope of study of materiality into a more holistic view.

Copyright Disclaimer

The cover image is distributed under Public Domain and can be found here

Works Consulted

Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 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.” The Information Society, vol. 41, no. 4, Apr. 2025, pp. 239–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2025.2490487.

Footnote(s)

  1. NIS stands for New Israel Shekel (ISO 4217 Code: ILS), which is the legal currency used by Israel. Dated to the evening of 2025 November 14, ILS 250 approximately equal to CAD 108.62. ↩

Other

From Ingold And Clark: An Explanation On Making And Mind

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By Micah Sébastien Zhang

So…Ingold……

Tim Ingold, the author of the book Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, has presented an innovative perspective into media studies, especially the realm of production. Rather than viewing the production as a fixated, point-to-point linear path, Ingold sees production as a cumulative process that goes beyond the traditional, distinct boundaries between the creators and the creations. To further define that, Ingold thinks that the creation, or "making" as suggested by this book’s title, is a self-evolving process that entwines with the materiality and thought within creation itself.

This view into creation and media can be peeked within the chapter 7 — Bodies On The Run, in which he explored his topic deeper on the concept of body. Upon reviewing the two sculptures shown in the figures — in which one of them (Simon Starling, Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore)) was covered with mussels — he critically compares the forms between the original sculpture, Warrior with Shield by Henry Moore, and the modified piece and claims "where the former is a movement of opening" while "the latter is bent on closure" (Ingold p.94). His explanation is that the infested piece with mussels denoted a fact that "its surfaces have opened up to the surrounding medium" rather than being "wrapped up in itself that any residue of animate life has been stilled" (Ingold p.94). Drawing from the theorist Joshua Pollard, Ingold argues that the process of "making" takes similarity between the relationship between objects, subjects, and things as they "can exist only in a world already thrown, already cast in fixed and final forms; things, by contrast, are in the throwing – they do not exist so much as carry on" (Ingold p.94). Within this process, people are also "processes, brought into being through production, embroiled in ongoing social projects, and requiring attentive engagement" (Ingold p.94 via Pollard 2004: 60).1

Of course we have bodies – indeed we are our bodies. But we are not wrapped up in them. The body is not a package, nor – to invoke another common analogy – a sink into which movements settle like sediment in a ditch. It is rather a tumult of unfolding activity.

—— Tim Ingold, p.94

Nevertheless, this article’s focus is not on Pollard or any other theorists. The focus will be on the arguments proposed by Tim Ingold and Andy Clark, and we will see how their views come close together.

So Who’s Andy Clark (out of all the names from the reference list)?

Andy Clark (he/him/they) is a cognitive philosophy professor from the University of Sussex at United Kingdom. According to his biography page, his research interests include artificial intelligence, embodied and extended cognition, robotics, and computational neuroscience. He has proposed the idea of "the extended mind" and co-wrote the article The Extended Mind — the article that Ingold has also cited2 — with the Australian cognitive scientist David Chalmers.

So What Did They Say?

Clark and Chalmers argued in their article that the cognitive process does not completely rely on an internal process, but rather having external environments as attributes that constantly play a role in cognitive processes. They have made a pretty straightforward and summative description on this idea at the start of their article, in which they " advocate a very different sort of externalism: an active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes" (Clark and Chalmers p.7). Ingold has personally described that their theory "postulates that the mind, far from being coextensive with the brain, routinely spills out into the environment, enlisting all manner of extra-somatic objects and artefacts in the conduct of its operations" (Ingold p.97).

We propose to take things a step further. While some mental states, such as experiences, may be determined internally, there are other cases in which external factors make a significant contribution. In particular, we will argue that beliefs can be constituted partly by features of the environment, when those features play the right sort of role in driving cognitive processes. If so, the mind extends into the world.

—— Clark and Chalmers, p.12

We can take a look at a simple way to comprehend Clark and Chalmers’ theory by examining the example they gave in their The Extended Mind article. In their example (Clark and Chalmers p.12-14), an exhibition is happening at the Museum of Modern Art at 53rd Street. One person, Inga, recalls in her mind that the museum is at 53rd Street, so she successfully goes to the right place. Another person, Otto, suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and can’t recall the museum’s location in his head, but he also successfully arrives at the museum by looking at the note of the museum’s location from his notebook. Inga used memory retrival to get the information from her mind, and Otto did the same thing by retriving the same information from his notebook. Clark and Chalmers argue that since they achieved a congruent result even while retriving information in a physical and tangible or cognitive and non-tangible way, Otto’s notebook in this case can be recognized as the congruent component to a cognitive mind, as "the information in the notebook functions just like the information constituting an ordinary non-occurrent belief" (Clark and Chalmers p.13). Considering that Otto constantly uses his notebook, it can be viewed as "central to his actions in all sorts of contexts, in the way that an ordinary memory is central in an ordinary life" (Clark and Chalmers p.13).

And So How Do They Connect To Ingold?

Both viewpoints from Clark and Ingold presented an acknowledgement to the nuances and complexities lying within the process of mediation. Considering that both Clark and Chalmers have worked as cognitive scientists, we, in my humble opinion, might be safe to assume that they started off their idea on a more scientific approach, in which their theory draws more similarities and explanations from natural sciences than humanities.

However, Ingold proposed to push the idea further and more expanded in the realms of humanities and mediation. He argues that the sole "interactions" between the mind and materialistic objects do not fully constitute as the integral process of making (Ingold p.98). He argues that this general idea focuses too much on the external materialistic attributes to constitute or to define the whole cognition experience of engaging with the world. Rather than embracing this idea, Ingold was drawn more to the concept that regards thinking as more of a kinetic and dynamic flow, which reflects on another opinion by Sheets-Johnstone (Ingold p.98).

My Own Thoughts?

Even though we could see some differences between Ingold and Clark’s ideas, their theories and interpretations still provide some abundant insights to explain media studies in some more innovative perspectives. Personally, I found that their ideas are sufficient enough to explain my thought of interpreting mediation as a dimensional perspective. This idea will be further explained and discussed in my upcoming blog article here.

Thank you so much for your attention.

Works Consulted

“Andy Clark.” University of Sussex, profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p493-andy-clark. Accessed 27 Oct. 2025.

Clark, Andy, and David Chalmers. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis, vol. 58, no. 1, 1998, pp. 7–19. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3328150.

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge, 2013.

Media Usage Statement

The feature image in this article was published under the CC0 Public Domain License. The source of the image can be found here.

Footnotes

  1. Here’s the original citation of Pollard provided in Ingold’s book: Pollard, J. 2004. The art of decay and the transformation of substance. In Substance, Memory, Display, eds. C. Renfrew, C. Gosden and E. DeMarrais. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, pp. 47–62. ↩

  2. The book’s original citation: Clark, A. and D. Chalmers 1998. The extended mind. Analysis 58: 7–19. ↩

Other

To My Online Self — My Evocative Object(s)

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I had countless nights seeing the clock going past 3:30 a.m.; dim lights emitted from my devices are invigorating yet soothing my nerves at the same time.

Upon reading the chapter "My Laptop" by Annalee Newitz, I instantly feel connected to the topic. Yet to describe it to the most accurate extent, it is better to say that my evocative object is not only limited to a single laptop, but all electronic devices I own.

Yes, all my devices — the omnipresent yet pathetic extensions of my existence.

Laptop is the object I feel the most connected to out of all the given chapter choices of the evocative objects, at least I can guarantee that to myself. Maybe I could even assume it to the entire Gen Z generation.

I was almost bred up by devices. I’m also lucky to say that I have responsible parents, and overflowing and chaotic internet memes and cultures didn’t get to slam an injuring crater on my brain.

But they mean something else when it ultimately comes down to socializing.

Growing up as a city boy, I didn’t get any chance to experience any kinds of "socializing" that I would perceive as "normal" in a common sense. Almost all my social activities have been moved online, whether it’s just asking a question or sending out hang-out requests to a classmate in middle and high school. I didn’t have any neighborhood friends that I can hang out with, nor any buddies or pals either; I didn’t have any classmates asking me to go get drinks with them after class; I didn’t have any moments as seen from books or TV shows that I thought I would have……All that’s left are encounters, whether with people online or online contents — the encounters as mediations of my hopes and dreams; the encounters that remind me of my reality ;the encounters that send out all the glow from my devices.

That inundating, clogging, torturing, soothing, colourful, plain, and infinite-to-nothing glow.

I can still remember the last time where the glow shines my tears.

"My laptop computer is irreplaceable, and not just for all the usual reasons. It’s practically a brain prosthesis. Sometimes I find myself unable to complete a thought without cracking it open and accessing a file of old notes, or hopping online and Googling a fact or two."

—— Annalee Newitz (page 88, "My Laptop")

Newitz’s words at the start of her chapter naturally presents a slice-of-life observation which bears resemblance to my socializing experiences. After having all my connections on my devices, my overthinking and anxious would sometimes presume that someone’s dead if they haven’t been active online; I often feel scared to imagine what would happen if I’m totally detached from internet while all the social presences are deeply tied to the online realms. However, her words still hit on points that connect back to another work by Sherry Turkle, the author of this chapter collection book. Her book Alone Together provides valuable insights on the interesting dynamic between technology and societal loneliness. In the Chapter 9 Growing Up Tethered1, Turkle discussed the effect of technology on loneliness through different interviews with high school students. The main idea behind the chapter is generally about explanations behind this influence through sociological knowledge. Although it would be immense to use the entire chapter to frame the entire idea for my evocative objects, it is a precious piece of material that you can’t ignore to understand the everlasting impact of social media on psychological development. As complex, high-dimensional real-life social interactions are constantly mediated into compressed, low-dimensional formats online, the study of social media and interpersonal connections should not be only limited as one of the fields in media studies, but rather to be regarded a pressing global issue.

Maybe I hope that this simple blog article could change something. Maybe it wouldn’t.

Or I hope that the glow could be less clogging perhaps.

Works Consulted

Newitz, Annalee. “MY LAPTOP.” Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, by Sherry Turkle, The MIT Press, 2007, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhg8p.14.

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together : Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, Basic Books, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ubc/detail.action?docID=684281.

Footnotes

  1. The Chapter 9 spans across pages 197-213. ↩

Critical Concept Explication

Time & Space — A Critical Summary of the Concept in Media Realms

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The roles of time and space are present in almost all media, and the chapter asks the question: are space and time master, or meta media? Are they real and tangible? Or are they abstractions of reality? Through this blog article, we will be taking you into a dense critical summary of the idea’s development through important theorists in history and its importance in media studies.

Oh, and feel free to consult the original chapter if you’re more interested!

The Greeks considered time based art as more important, as seen in the daughters of the goddess of memory, which promoted music, history, dance, song, and more, all of which don’t have physical canvases or muses to exist, they only have the moment they are presented to exist. Lessing admits that there are elements of space in ‘time art’ and time in ‘space art’, however, Lessing is adamant that things like painting are mostly space and things like poetry are mostly time. He sees them as two friendly neighbours who respect each other and their spaces. Lessing also states that the superior art is ‘time art’ as it appeals more to the imagination. Kant believes ‘time art’ represents self expression and ‘space art’ is outward appearance, and Hagel believes the history of art shows the progression of material art to virtual art. Aristotle and Johnson argued that time elements of theatre, such as plot and emotion, were more important than spectacles, such as costumes and sets.

Frederick James argued that modernism was dominated by time because it used history and revolutionary change, while post modernism was dominated by focuses on loss of space, "the end of history", which jumped off of the ideas of Hegel and Francis Fukuyama. Fredrick Kittler argued the three most important media inventions were cinema, phonography, and the typewriter. He argued it helped us to analyze human perception in a new way, like how trying to match sound to footage in film is analyzing space and time in a new way. Kittler’s prognosis for the decoupling of man and machine/media and computers was using the objective and qualitative natures of space and time. Before, it was too hard to objectify space and time, but it is now way easier with the use of computers and more sophisticated tools that can be used to measure those aspects.

Blake saw time as the man and space as the woman, and Benjamin thought that all art strays further away from its true original aura when it is removed from the exact time and place it was made. There are some examples of this mindset today, particularly when it comes to content warnings or advisories that are placed in front of older media, typically due to off-colour depictions of slavery or other now-taboo subjects. Even when not thought of in relation to controversial subjects though, there are some effects that older audiences would’ve experienced that simply aren’t able to be replicated, like watching a movie about WWII after having been deployed.

Erwin Panofsky speaks of film as if it erased the borders that were believed to exist between space and time, as stated by Lessing. This does not mean that the existence of categories disappear, since they are still there to complement certain values associated with different artworks. Clement Greenberg dived deeper into the topics of Lessing, as Greenberg thought there was a purity that needed to be upheld with the forms of art. For example, painting and sculptures were deemed confusing during the dominance of literature in the 1700s since it was damaged by the "realistic in the service of literature". He thought that the fix for this was to banish illusion and imitation all together. Greenberg wanted to keep space and time in their metaphysical limits, he wanted visual arts like painting and sculpting to affect the viewer physically, bringing the art to immediate reception of senses and intellect.

Descartes, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel all perpetuated the idea that time was over space in many of their modern philosophical models. Edmund Husserl and Henri Bergson viewed time as an experimental continuum and space as a discrete representation of an expanse of time. Bergson called the qualitative aspect of time as duration and the quantitative aspect of time two different distinct things, and suggested that between the qualitative and quantitative aspects of time there existed a "difference of kind" that is unviewable through the analysis of time as space. It can only be experienced and viewed by those with endowed consciousness which are human beings. It is like how despite the fact that we can measure how many seconds are passing during a pause in conversation, and we know how long a second is, we cannot measure when a silence becomes awkward. There are many moments in life when it comes to time that cannot be measured or ‘known’, but rather can only be experienced.

Husserl analyzed the givenness of the world to consciousness. His work focused on the goal of bringing things back to the conditions on which experiences are constituted. His work also focused on the reduction of the natural attitude to allow him to account for the constitution of the lived experience, and differentiated between the two modes of temporalization as retention and recollection.

The retention plus the immersion trail is what Gerard Granel considers the "large now". This is because the more moments that join the past, the more "nows” we are able to experience. To him, recollection is taking a now you experienced, going into the past, then bringing it back to the now to be experienced in a new light. This concept can be universally applied to everyone who has recollected something, as every time you remember something or tell someone a story, a detail gets left out or slightly altered, since the further away you get from the event the blurrier it becomes. The idea of re-experiencing a memory as a “new now” can also be compared to when individuals who have experienced a traumatic event are remembering it. To them, according to Granel, they are literally “re-living” through the experience.

Husserl didn’t speak much on space, except for the fact that for an object to exist in space, it needs to have an end date. Martin Heidegger continued the principle of time over space as he talked about the difference between the two modes of temporality for human beings, inauthentic and authentic time. Inauthentic is the time explained by clocks in specific units, and authentic time is the truth of the experience for a human being, similar to the concept of the “difference in kind” discussed by Bergsen.

Theodore Adorno and Max Horkhiemer worked on the critique of the culture industry and how it relates to the temporal dimension of media entertainment. They believed that the industry, such as cinema, needed a temporal factor inherently, which differs from the traditional workplace or other industries. This makes sense when you consider that movies have a set length, rely on editing to determine the pace of how a story is told, and so on. They also share the same priority of time over space.

Jacques Derrida’s work discussed the necessity of a non-origin for time and space and a purpose for our existence for us to find an inner sense of peace in a physical world. With that, we can have the power to stand against the power of space and time. Bernard Steigler brought this up in relation to media, suggesting that the giving of time and space is tied to the technologies that mediate the human experience. For example, Steigler suggests that the human experience and global views have become synchronized in a way, because of the cinema industry with things like broadcast real time television. There is a coalition between human time and media time, and with the rapid way that social media has taken over our lives and often dictates where we go, what we learn, and how we act, media time is often dominating control over human time.

This work is consulted on the chapter "Time & Space" from the book Critical Terms for Media Studies edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, published by The University of Chicago Press in 2010.

Blog post words by Oliver Cheung, Tyler Hannaford, Owen Menning, and Micah Sébastien Zhang. Cover image made by Micah Sébastien Zhang.