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When the Body Disappears: Data Doubles and the Future of Fashion Media

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The Image Is Not What It Appears

We often assume that an image is something simply there, a visible object presented to our eyes. Yet, as Hans Belting argues in An Anthropology of Images, an image is never identical to its material support. Images occupy a paradoxical position: they rely on a medium to appear, but they do not belong to that medium. They must be activated by the viewer’s imagination, which draws the image “out” of the opaque material and turns the medium into a transparent conduit. In Belting’s formulation, the image exists in a state of suspension between presence and absence, between embodiment and disembodiment, between materiality and mental projection. It is not the medium that ultimately “holds” the image, but the viewer who gives it perceptual life. 

From Mediation to Substitution

This instability becomes newly consequential in the age of datafied bodies. Once the medium of the image becomes databases, model weights, and computational systems rather than celluloid or canvas, the separation between bodies and their images does not simply expand, it is structurally transformed. The “image” of a person may no longer require a person at all. A digital model can be generated, iterated, and deployed without ever having stood before a camera; a dataset can circulate long after the human it references has withdrawn, aged, or refused consent. In this environment, images no longer merely detach from bodies, they begin to replace them.In contemporary conversations, terms like multimedia and mass media appear so frequently that the word medium risks losing any real conceptual depth. If we want to use the term in a meaningful theoretical way, we have to clarify what we mean when we say it. McLuhan famously describes media as extensions of the human body, technological forms that recalibrate how we sense and navigate time and space, rather than neutral channels that deliver information. Art history, meanwhile, tends to define a medium either as an artistic category or the physical material an artwork is made from. But neither of these definitions fully captures what is at stake when we talk about images today. Across media theory, a recurring insight is that the medium operates as the technical and material condition that makes an image perceptible at all. A medium is not simply a conduit; it is the condition of the image’s visibility, the material and technological ground that turns a visual event into something perceptible. The medium, therefore, is neither external to the image nor subordinate to it; it is the ground through which the image becomes thinkable, legible, and real.

The Fashion Data Double

On the surface, an AI-generated fashion model image looks simple enough: a glossy figure posed against a studio backdrop, clothes hanging perfectly, skin without pores or fatigue. It could be a screenshot from any luxury campaign, until you realize there was never a body in front of the camera. No model booked, no lights adjusted to her height, no stylist pinning fabric to her spine. Instead, what stands in for “her” is a composite built out of scans, datasets, and models that can be rendered in endless variations without ever asking for rest or consent. Data & Society’s research on “fashion’s data doubles” names this shift: the fashion model is no longer only a person who works in front of a lens, but also a datafied proxy, a version of her body extracted, stored, and redeployed through computational systems. The report shows how models’ measurements, images, and movements become training material for virtual lookbooks and automated try-on tools, and how these digital stand-ins can appear in campaigns the model herself never participated in. Her “image” moves on without her.

Disturbing Belting’s Triangle

This transformation presses on a question that has been hovering around our course all semester, and that Hans Belting formulates sharply in his anthropology of images: what exactly is an image, and what kind of body does it require? For Belting, images are never just things “out there.” They exist in a triangle: body, medium, image. The body is the living site where images arise and are perceived; the medium is the material support that makes them visible; the image itself hovers somewhere between the two, inner and outer, psychic and material, always dependent on imagination to “lift” it from its medium. We do not simply control images; they occupy us, inhabit our memory, and help us make sense of the world. If we take Belting seriously, then AI fashion models are not just a technical novelty. They represent a disturbance in this triangle. Here, the “image” of a person is produced without a living body in front of the camera. The medium is no longer film or sensor but a computational system. Yet these images still land in human perception; they still cling to our ways of seeing bodies, beauty, gender, and race. The question, then, is not only what data doubles are doing to the labor conditions of models, as Data & Society carefully documents, but what they are doing to the very definition of images and embodiment

What Belting helps us see, then, is that images are never just “out there” in the world; they are always routed through living bodies that remember, fantasize, and perceive (Belting 2011). Yet this anthropological focus on perception also has a blind spot. It tells us a great deal about how images inhabit viewers, but less about how images extract from those who are pictured, or from those whose data underwrite the image in the first place. When the fashion model’s likeness becomes training data, what kind of “occupation” is taking place? The image does not just live in my memory; it also lives in a database owned by someone else. Belting’s triangle reminds us that images need bodies, but the data double forces us to ask a harder question: whichbodies, and on whose terms?

Black Boxes and Borrowed Authority

New media rarely establish credibility by announcing themselves as new. Instead, they tend to lean on the visual authority of older forms, adopting photographic conventions while quietly concealing their own mechanisms (Bolter and Grusin 1999).The AI fashion model is made to look as though it were photographed in a studio and the polished framing of editorial fashion imagery. The result is not merely an image that looks like a photograph; it is a medium that strategically disguises itself as the photographic, so that viewers inherit photography’s habits of belief without having to confront photography’s material preconditions. What emerges is a peculiar reversal of transparency. In Belting’s terms, the medium becomes “transparent” when the viewer’s imagination extracts the image from its support, treating the support as a conduit rather than an object (Belting 2011). With computational images, the conduit is transparent in a different sense: it is deliberately black-boxed. The viewer is invited to host the image while remaining structurally distant from the conditions of its production. This distance is not accidental; it is functional. It allows the medium to expand its role, from carrying to generating, without triggering immediate skepticism about presence.

Embodiment at the End of the Chain

Yet, if the initiating body is no longer required at the moment of production, embodiment does not disappear. It relocates. Hansen’s account of digital images is crucial here: digital mediation does not “free” images from bodies so much as it demands that bodies re-enter at the level of perception, affect, and sensorimotor completion (Hansen 2006). Even when an AI fashion model is generated without a photographed body, it still requires a perceiving body to be read as sensual, aspirational, racialized, gendered, desirable. The viewer’s body becomes the final site where the image comes to life, where the medium’s outputs are translated into lived sensation (Hansen 2006). The body is not erased, but displaced, arriving at the end of the process to authorize an image it never helped produce. This is where McLuhan’s idea of extension starts to feel uneasy. Media may extend perception, but they also change our sense of what attention should feel like, how fast it moves, how smoothly it flows, and what we come to expect from it (McLuhan 1964).Van Den Eede pushes the point further: every extension entails a diminishment, a redistribution of agency and awareness that often makes the extension feel “natural” precisely by making its costs difficult to perceive (Van Den Eede 2015). In computational imaging, the extension is not only optical; it is generative. The medium extends the image beyond the body’s presence, yet diminishes the body’s capacity to delimit, negotiate, or refuse what that image will become.

At this point, the “medium” is no longer simply the condition of visibility. It becomes an engine of substitution: a system that can model presence itself. And because it models presence in familiar photographic language, its substitution can be mistaken for continuity.If the medium can produce images without bodies, then the central political question becomes: whose bodies still pay the cost of visibility?  The answer is rarely “no one.” Instead, bodies are translated into resources, and the image becomes a site where extraction can continue under the sign of realism. The Data & Society account of “fashion’s data doubles” names a structural reconfiguration: the fashion model is no longer only a worker who appears before a camera but also a datafied proxy whose measurable attributes proportions, facial geometry, movement, skin texture can be stored, and redeployed across campaigns and platforms (Data & Society). The decisive shift is not simply that images circulate; images have always circulated. The shift is that circulation can now occur with a reduced need for participation from the original subject. The model can be absent, asleep, unwilling, or contractually excluded, yet the proxy continues to “work.”

John Berger’s account of reproducibility helps frame this mobility historically. Once images become reproducible, they loosen from the singular contexts that once anchored them and acquire a new social life (Berger 1972). In AI fashion systems, that “social life” takes on an industrial form: the image is not only reproduced; it is *iterated.* It becomes parameterized, tweakable, and scalable. This is why the question “What happens to mediation when images can keep working without bodies?” is not metaphorical. It describes a literal labor shift: the work of appearing can be separated from the worker who once supplied appearance. The concept of the data double becomes most politically legible when read through Belting’s claim that images are neither identical to living bodies nor reducible to inanimate objects. 

The deeper issue is that AI converts bodily work into a durable productive asset, a form of labor that can outlive the worker’s presence (Data & Society 2024). McLuhan’s extension thesis clarifies why this can feel strangely normal. Extensions do not announce themselves as domination; they present themselves as convenience, as “just how things work now” (McLuhan 1964). Van Den Eede adds the missing mechanism: when an extension becomes naturalized, its costs become harder to perceive; the body that made the extension possible is quietly erased from the story the medium tells about itself (Van Den Eede 2015). The data double is precisely this kind of naturalized extension: the model’s bodily labor is extended into a technical system, and the extension quickly becomes treated as the primary reality. The original body is reframed as merely the raw input.

This is why “endless labor” is not only metaphorical. It is structural. Tiziana Terranova’s argument about digital “free labor” helps explain how value extraction can persist without appearing as labor at all, because participation, capture, and circulation are built into the environment rather than enforced as discrete acts (Terranova 2000). Zuboff’s “surveillance capitalism” names an adjacent logic: systems thrive by turning lived experience into data that can be repurposed without reciprocal control (Zuboff 2019). Data doubles operate along this axis. What disappears is not work, but the conditions under which work can be recognized, negotiated, or refused.

A deeper anthropological question follows:

If images can be engineered to keep producing value after the body withdraws, what happens to refusal as a bodily capacity?

If image-making is understood anthropologically rather than purely technologically, then the current crisis of images appears less as a sudden rupture and more as a breakdown in correspondence.
From this perspective, the danger of AI-generated imagery is not that it fabricates images, but that it fabricates them without requiring continued bodily negotiation. Images no longer need to answer to fatigue, refusal, vulnerability, or time. They persist independently of the bodies that once grounded them. This is where image philosophy begins to slide, almost inevitably, into political economy. When images no longer negotiate with bodies, they become ideal vehicles for extraction. The data double exemplifies this shift. A likeness captured once can circulate endlessly, generating value without requiring further participation from the person it resembles. What is lost is not only labor compensation, but the body’s capacity to intervene in its own representation. The image no longer responds; it simply continues. In this sense, the problem is not that images misrepresent bodies, but that they no longer depend on them.

A Crisis of Relation

Anthropologically, this marks a profound transformation. Images have historically functioned as sites of exchange，between life and death, presence and absence, self and other. Funerary images, mirrors, shadows, paintings, and photographs all required the body to remain meaningful. Even when images abstracted or idealized, they retained a trace of bodily limitation. AI images, by contrast, risk becoming images without consequence. They do not age. They do not resist. They do not withdraw. And because they circulate with the visual authority of older media forms, they are often accepted without question.
Yet the issue is not simply deception. As Flusser warns, the true power of technical images lies not in their capacity to lie, but in their capacity to reorganize perception until their conditions of production disappear from view. Once images feel natural, their authority becomes difficult to contest. Over time, bodies that cannot match the smoothness, efficiency, and availability of synthetic images begin to appear excessive or insufficient by comparison. The image no longer reflects cultural values; it quietly installs them.

Seen this way, the crisis of AI imagery is not a crisis of realism, but a crisis of relation. When images stop corresponding with bodies, they cease to function as mediators and begin to operate as autonomous systems. They no longer translate human experience; they overwrite it. And because images structure how the world becomes intelligible, this autonomy carries real consequences，for labor, for aesthetics, for gender and racial politics, and for the very concept of embodiment.
The task, then, is not to abandon image-making nor to nostalgically recover a pre-digital past. Anthropology teaches that images are unavoidable. We live in them, think through them, and remember with them. The question is whether images can still be made to correspond—to materials, to bodies, to lived limits. Without this correspondence, images risk becoming a runaway cultural force: endlessly productive, endlessly circulating, and increasingly detached from the human conditions that once gave them meaning. In the end, the problem is not that images have gained power, but that they have lost negotiation. And once images no longer need to negotiate with bodies, it is no longer clear how bodies can negotiate back.

Works Cited

Belting, Hans. An Anthropology of Images. Princeton University Press, 2011.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin, 1972.

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press, 1999.

Data & Society. Fashion’s Data Doubles. Data & Society Research Institute, 2024.

Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Reaktion Books, 1983.

Hansen, Mark B. N. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media. Routledge, 2006.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Terranova, Tiziana. “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” Social Text, vol. 18, no. 2, 2000, pp. 33–58.

Van Den Eede, Yoni. Tracing the Medium: Technological Mediation and Postphenomenology. Lexington Books, 2015.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. PublicAffairs, 2019.

General Media Theory

Mediating the Idol Body: K-Pop Femininity Through the Lens of Media Theory

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Early Bodily Discipline

I used to sit on the counter while my mother made breakfast, watching her move through the same quiet routine every morning. She cracked eggs with a small flick of her wrist, wiped the table in slow circles, and shifted between silence and conversation with a rhythm I somehow fell into. I learned when to swing my legs and when to stay still, when a question would be welcomed and when it would feel out of place. None of this was ever explained. My body just mirrored the atmosphere，the clatter of dishes, the steady breathing, the sense that everything should move smoothly without interruption. Back then, it simply felt like comfort. Only later did I realize how early the body starts practicing things it doesn’t yet have words for.

Foucault reminds us that discipline settles into the body through repetition rather than force, long before we have the language to name it (Foucault 1977). Bordo adds that habits feel “natural” not because they originate within us, but because they are practiced until they seem inevitable (Bordo 1993). I didn’t know any of this then. I only knew that the “good” body was the one that blended in, the one that didn’t interrupt the rhythm, the one that stayed neatly within the frame drawn for it. And perhaps that is why Bollmer’s idea of the body as media materiality stays with me. Even as children, we were already being tuned for legibility, for smooth circulation, for being seen in the “right” way (Bollmer 2016). Long before I encountered pop culture or performance, I had already absorbed something: that the body becomes visible only after it has learned how not to disturb the picture.

Algorithmic K-Pop Visibility

The visual language of K-pop girl groups has become one of the most globally recognizable media phenomena of the past decade. Even for people who pay little attention to K-pop, its images still appear constantly in the background of online life.  They show up not because users seek them out, but because the algorithms that structure digital platforms treat these visuals as universally recognizable and easy to distribute. Over time, this steady, almost passive exposure creates a sense of familiarity, as if the look and rhythm of K-pop girlhood were something we already understood, even when we know very little about the cultural or industrial context that produced it. They appear in TikTok edits, airport fashion compilations, Spotify banners, Vogue covers, and YouTube recommendations. In this way, K-pop girlhood has become a global aesthetic shorthand for “Asian femininity,” detached from its origins and recontextualized through international media flows.

Industrial Origins of Idol Femininity

Scholars point out that the figure of the female idol did not emerge organically: it is rooted in South Korea’s rapid industrialization during the 1960s–1980s, when Confucian patriarchal management structures and the exploitation of young female labor shaped how women’s bodies were disciplined, displayed, and commodified in public culture (Gooyong 2017). The choreography of cuteness and submission that defined early K-pop was far more than a stylistic choice; it crystallized the broader sociopolitical conditions that cast women simultaneously as disciplined laborers and as consumable cultural commodities.

The Marketed Shift to “Crush” Empowerment

More recently, the industry has embraced the so-called “crush girl” aesthetic,confident, charismatic, emotionally restrained, aligned with global discourses of empowerment (Sun, Paje’, & Lee 2023). Blackpink has become the emblem of this shift, their public personas marketed as the definitive repudiation of earlier girlhood tropes. The dominant narrative circulating online suggests that Korean femininity has undergone a genuine transformation: that the cute-to-powerful arc signifies increased autonomy, feminist progress, or ideological change. However, as media theorists remind us, visibility is not synonymous with liberation. When empowerment becomes an easily exportable aesthetic, packaged for global consumption, it becomes difficult to distinguish structural change from a strategic recalibration of marketable femininity. What forms of feminine subjectivity are being legitimized through these hyper-mediated performances, and which possibilities are being constrained, erased, or rendered unimaginable?

Discipline as Affective Technique

When we look at the bodies of contemporary girl-group idols, it is tempting to treat what we see as a kind of distilled personality, confidence, coolness, a stylistic refusal of vulnerability. But the media theories we’ve worked with suggest something more complicated: what feels like a “self” on screen is often the afterimage of systems that have already moved through the body long before it appears in front of a camera.Foucault gives us the vocabulary for this calibration. Discipline, he writes, works not by coercion but by embedding micro-habits: the turn of the chin, the straightened spine, the practiced smile (Foucault 1977). What seems voluntary is often the sediment of countless corrections. Bordo extends this insight by observing that once such corrections settle into muscle memory, we mistake them for personal inclination (Bordo 1993). A particular walk, a particular emotional poise, a particular restraint begins to feel “natural,” not because it arises from the self but because it has been rehearsed until it replaces whatever existed before.

The Body as Media Materiality

This is precisely where Bollmer becomes crucial. For Bollmer, the body is not merely disciplined by media, it becomes a medium, a material surface optimized for circulation and readability within a given cultural system (Bollmer 2016). The gestures we associate with the “crush girl” aesthetic, cool confidence, perfectly metered charisma, emotional containment, are not spontaneous expressions. They are industrial techniques that render the body legible within a global visual economy. The body is trained to be smooth, efficient, and expressive in highly specific ways because these qualities travel well across platforms. A certain tilt of the head or unbothered gaze becomes a replicable template, not an authentic disclosure of subjectivity.

The Limits of Distant Vision

Sometimes I think about how vision itself is organized in East Asian media cultures. In glossy MVs and perfectly lit close-ups, the idol’s face does not simply appear; it is delivered to us already curated, polished, legible, engineered for instant recognition. But real women’s lives never arrive in that state. They require nearness, texture, and time, forms of attention that cannot be automated or algorithmically scaled. You have to move closer before anything becomes truly visible. Media theory teaches us that distance is one of capital’s most effective visual strategies: it offers the appearance of empowerment while softening, even silencing, the voices that underwrite the image. The farther the image travels, the quieter the body becomes. So the question is not only whether East Asia is distant from “real” empowerment, but what our eyes have been trained to perceive from afar, and what becomes audible only when that distance is refused.

Works Cited

Bollmer, Grant. Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. University of California Press, 1993.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1977.

Gooyong, Kim. “Cute but Deadly: The Commodification of Female Labor in Early K-pop.” Journal of Korean Popular Culture, vol. 5, no. 2, 2017, pp. 15–32.

Sun, Wanning, D. Paje’, and Haein Lee. “Rebranding Femininity: The ‘Crush Girl’ Aesthetic in Contemporary K-pop.” Media & Culture Review, vol. 12, no. 1, 2023, pp. 44–62.

Critical Response

The Soft Violence of Convenience: On Siri, Low-Risk Intimacy, and Emotional Exhaustion

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“To create ties, you must be prepared to cry.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Introduction

In Sam Garcea’s post SIRI-OUSLY PERFORMING, the author offers a compelling reading of Siri through Bollmer, Verbeek, and McArthur, arguing that voice assistants do not merely represent femininity but perform it. Through their tone, politeness, and affective responsiveness, systems like Siri enact the gendered scripts of compliance and emotional labour that underpin contemporary service cultures. The author shows convincingly that Siri’s feminized voice is not incidental but part of a material performance that naturalizes hierarchy through design.  What I want to extend, however, is the other side of this relationship, the user. Author carefully analyzes what Siri does, but less so why people want Siri to do it. Focusing only on the device risks obscuring the psychological and cultural conditions that make such feminized interfaces desirable in the first place. Siri’s performances succeed not simply because its interface is engineered to signal femininity, but because users are already inclined to desire gentle, compliant, and emotionally predictable forms of interaction. The posthuman aura that McArthur describes: the sense that Siri is intelligent yet safely nonhuman, allows users to feel intimacy without vulnerability, and authority without guilt. In this way, domination is misrecognized as connection, and emotional labour is outsourced to an interface designed never to refuse, misunderstand, or judge. My response builds on the author’s analysis by shifting attention to this relational co-performance of gender. Rather than seeing Siri’s femininity as solely the result of technological design, I argue that it emerges from a broader cultural demand for low-risk intimacy, a condition theorized by Sherry Turkle, Maria Grazia Sindoni, and scholars of affective labour.

Power Masquerades as Comfort

While the author identifies how Siri’s feminized politeness enacts digital labour, I want to highlight the perceptual distortion on the user’s side：the way hierarchical power is reinterpreted as emotional closeness. As Sherry Turkle argues, relational technologies work because they “give the feeling of companionship without the demands of friendship” (Turkle, Alone Together, 2011). Siri’s posthuman aura, her tireless availability, emotional steadiness, and frictionless responsiveness, softens the user’s sense of authority. The interaction does not feel like issuing commands to a subordinate system; it feels like being gently accompanied. Jennifer Rhee similarly notes that anthropomorphized AI produces “affective camouflage,” masking structural asymmetries behind the fantasy of mutuality (The Robotic Imaginary, 2018). In other words, Siri’s design does not simply perform gender; it renders domination weightless. Users experience themselves not as commanding a feminized assistant, but as engaging in a benign, even comforting exchange. This confusion between emotional ease and ethical neutrality is precisely what allows power to pass as intimacy.

Emotional Labour by Design, Desire, and Delegation

If Siri’s appeal can be understood through Turkle’s notion of “low-risk intimacy,” Spike Jonze’s Her extends this logic into a full cultural diagnosis. Rather than treating Samantha as an example of increasingly “human-like” AI, I read the film, alongside Maria Grazia Sindoni’s work on technointimacy, as a study in how users outsource emotional labour to technologies designed to absorb it without resistance. Sindoni argues that contemporary users increasingly look to digital agents to perform “affiliative, therapeutic, and relational labour” that once belonged to human relationships (Sindoni 2020). This means that the rise of AI companionship is less about technological sophistication and more about a shifting cultural demand: people want emotional support that is consistent, inexpensive, and free of interpersonal risk. Samantha does not simply respond, she manages Theodore’s affect, anticipates emotional needs, and performs the labour of understanding without the possibility of withdrawal, boredom, or exhaustion.

Seen from this angle, Her is less interested in the evolution of artificial intelligence than in the evolution of human desire: a longing for intimacy without resistance, misunderstanding, or reciprocity. The film becomes a study not of machine humanity, but of our growing preference for relationships that require almost nothing of us. Samantha becomes desirable precisely because she collapses the costs of emotional reciprocity. As Eva Illouz reminds us, late-modern subjects increasingly navigate intimacy through the logic of consumer choice, seeking relationships that offer “maximum emotional return with minimal vulnerability” (Illouz 2007). Samantha embodies that fantasy perfectly.This interpretation shifts the focus away from the author’s claim that Her illustrates the expanding agency of feminized AI. Instead, it reveals that the real engine of the narrative is Theodore’s longing for a form of relationality that asks nothing of him, no patience, no negotiation, no recognition of another’s subjectivity. The appeal of Samantha, like the appeal of Siri, is not only that she is designed to serve, but that her service masks the asymmetry at the heart of the relationship. She performs emotional labour so gracefully that the user forgets it is labour.

Gender as an Interactive Script

When brought into conversation with Sindoni, Illouz, and Turkle, Her reads not as a narrative of digital transcendence but as a study of contemporary emotional exhaustion, of relationships outsourced to machines because the human ones feel too heavy. Users turn to machines not because machines have finally achieved humanity, but because humans have become uncertain, overburdened, and afraid of the costs of human-to-human intimacy. What Her seduces us with is not the promise of a loving machine, but the deeper desire that intimacy might someday be unburdened by effort, that emotional labour could be outsourced entirely, leaving only comfort behind.The rise of voice assistants reveals less about the intentions of engineers than about the emotional exhaustion of their users. As Eva Illouz writes, late modernity produces “emotional scarcity in the midst of abundance,” leaving people surrounded by connectivity yet starved for forms of care that do not demand more labour from them. This is why the relational loop between user and assistant feels so haunting: because it reflects not only technological mediation but a deeper cultural fatigue.

When Intimacy Forgets to Resist

In the end, what troubles me is not simply that technologies perform care, but that they have become the place where so many of us go searching for it. Siri’s gentleness feels effortless because nothing is asked of us in return; intimacy arrives pre-packaged, without the weight of another person’s needs. But this convenience has a cost. When a machine can soothe us instantly, human closeness, with its hesitations, its misunderstandings, its unruly demands, begins to feel unfamiliar, even excessive.So perhaps the more urgent question is not why we design technologies to simulate tenderness, but how our emotional landscape has thinned enough that such simulations feel sufficient. If emotional labour can be automated, if responsiveness becomes an endless resource, we risk forgetting that care is supposed to be reciprocal, difficult, alive. And maybe that is the quiet tragedy beneath all of this: not that machines are learning to sound human, but that we are slowly adjusting ourselves to relationships where nothing resists us, nothing pushes back, nothing asks us to stay.

Works Cited

Cameron, Deborah. The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages? Oxford University Press, 2007.

Illouz, Eva. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity Press, 2007.

Jonze, Spike, director. Her. Warner Bros., 2013.

McArthur, Emily. “The iPhone Erfahrung: Siri, the Auditory Unconscious, and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Aura.’” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, edited by Dennis Weiss and Rajiv Malhotra, 2014, pp. 113–128.

Rhee, Jennifer. The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Sindoni, Maria Grazia. “Technologically-Mediated Interaction and Affective Labour: A Multimodal Discourse Perspective.” Discourse, Context & Media, vol. 38, 2020, pp. 1–10.

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books, 2011.

Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. Pluto Press, 2004.

Verbeek, Peter-Paul. “Materializing Morality: Design Ethics and Technological Mediation.” Science, Technology & Human Values, vol. 31, no. 3, 2006, pp. 361–380.

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

Written by Nicole Jiao

Critical Comparison

Landsberg, Van Den Eede, and Extension through Media

Where the Body Ends

It is widely accepted today that technology has become an extension of the human body and mind. We scroll, track, record, respond, and refresh as automatically as breathing. Devices do not feel like external objects we pick up; they function as parts of our perception, our attention, our memory.

Sherry Turkle argues that we have become “tethered selves”(Turkle, Alone Together 152), living in constant connection to our devices in ways that dissolve the boundary between where our inner life ends and technology begins. We remain perpetually connected, not because we consciously choose to, but because connection has become a condition of contemporary life. Turkle’s point is not just that we depend on our devices, but that they weave themselves into our emotional and cognitive routines so seamlessly that we start to experience their presence as ordinary, even necessary. Her work opens up a larger question that runs through this week’s readings: what happens when technologies stop feeling external and instead operate as part of our inner life?

The well-known concept of the phantom limb—where an amputee still senses a missing arm or hand—suggests that the human body doesn’t simply end at its physical limits. It remembers what used to be there and, sometimes, even imagines what could be. In a similar way, memory \and technology are our phantom limbs–a lingering bodily existence without being physically there. Alison Landsberg, in her theory of prosthetic memory, shows how mass media can implant experiences that feel personally felt even when we never lived them. In contrast, Yoni Van Den Eede turns to the notion of extension, asking not only how technologies become part of us, but how they quietly reshape the boundaries through which we know ourselves and the world.

In that sense, both thinkers are interested in what happens when something non-human becomes internalized. While Landsberg explores outwards asking how memories borrowed elsewhere become part of who we are, Van Den Eede looks inward and asks how our bodies morph around the technologies we adopt.  We already know, from the phantom limb, that the body can extend beyond itself. But extension asks a different question: what happens when that extension becomes so ordinary that we no longer notice it?

Landsberg: Prosthetic Memory

In Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner, Alison Landsberg argues that modern mass media—especially cinema—creates “prosthetic memories”, which she defines as “memories which do not come from a person’s lived experience in any strict sense” and which may nevertheless “motivate his actions” and shape identity (Landsberg 175). Landsberg begins with the 1908 Edison film The Thieving Hand, where a prosthetic arm “has memories of its own” and turns an innocent beggar into a thief because the arm’s memories “prescribe actions in the present”(175). This example establishes her central claim of how memory has always been mediated, and cinema makes visible how memories not grounded in lived experience still “construct an identity.”

In Total Recall, she demonstrates how implanted memories undermine the necessity that identity must be rooted in the “real”. Douglas Quade learns that his entire life is just a memory implant though the film says authenticity is irrelevant: “Is realer necessarily better?” she asks, noting that Quade’s simulated identity is ultimately “more responsible, compassionate and productive than the ‘real’ one” (183). Landsberg uses this film to show how memories, regardless of origin, become “public” through media, and that the distinction between lived and prosthetic memories is often indiscernible. 

In Blade Runner, Landsberg argues that replicants’ humanity hinges not on biology but memory. The Voight–Kampff test exposes replicants not because they lack empathy but because they lack “a past, the absence of memories” (184). In other words, although Rachel’s photographic evidence of her childhood fails to prove anything, her implanted memories nevertheless allow her to feel, to choose, and to love. Even Deckard may be a replicant; the unicorn dream sequence suggests that his memories are equally prosthetic, and the dividing line between the human and the machine has disappeared. Ultimately, Landsberg’s instances convey one central message: that humans continually construct themselves through narratives, many of which come from cinema. And that narrative is empathetic rather than authentic.

Van Den Eede: Extending Extension

In Extending “Extension” (2014), Yoni Van Den Eede revisits the familiar claim that technologies act as “extensions” of the human body, a phrase that has often been repeated so casually that its conceptual weight gets lost. His starting point is Marshall McLuhan’s observation that we routinely misrecognize our own technological creations as if they were external, foreign objects. This misrecognition is not accidental but the result of what McLuhan calls the Narcissus narcosis: a numbness that prevents us from seeing media as “highly identifiable objects made by our own bodies” (158) . Like Narcissus failing to recognize his own reflection, we cannot perceive that technologies originate from us, nor do we notice the slow, creeping ways they gradually act upon us in return.

Van Den Eede explains that media emerge because older technologies create “irritations” that need to be relieved. When a new medium arrives to counter these pressures, it amplifies certain human capacities, what McLuhan calls “enhancement” but this amplification disrupts the balance among the senses, producing strain and, eventually, numbness (158–159).

To clarify what extension entails, Van Den Eede turns to McLuhan’s well-known “tetrad,” the framework that proposes that every medium “enhances something, obsolesces something, retrieves something previously lost, and, when pushed far enough, reverses into its opposite” (160). In thinking about self-tracking devices, Van Den Eede frames them as extensions of a specific human ability: the basic capacity to sense what is going on inside our own bodies. Tools like FitBits or sleep monitors don’t invent new forms of awareness so much as magnify the ones we already have, making patterns of fatigue, movement, or rest suddenly measurable and visible (162). The more we depend on quantified readings to tell us how we feel, the easier it becomes to discount forms of embodied knowledge that can’t be turned into step counts or sleep graphs. In this sense, extension and diminishment happen simultaneously: self-tracking heightens one mode of perception while quietly dulling another (165–66).

Seeing and Not Seeing

Although Landsberg and Van Den Eede both begin from the idea that media penetrate the boundaries of the human, the direction and implications of their arguments diverge sharply. What becomes clear, when placing them side by side, is that each identifies a distinct “blind spot” in contemporary mediated life, and reading them together reveals what we cannot see when considering either text alone.

For Van Den Eede, our primary blindness stems from not recognizing the true origin of media. Technologies emerge from us, as extensions of our senses and cognitive capacities, yet the moment they begin to shape us, “we lose sight of their origin” (Van Den Eede 158). This produces the Narcissus narcosis, a dulling of our ability to perceive the “why” and “how” of technological influence. As media amplify certain functions, they “put a strain on our sensory balance,” producing the discomfort and eventual numbness that lead to auto-amputation (158–159). His concern is epistemological: technologies blind us through familiarity. The concept of extension, he argues, is valuable precisely because it offers “an exercise of critical awareness,” training us to expect unknown effects rather than assuming media will be transparent or harmless (168). He urges us to remain suspended between reliance and skepticism.

Landsberg identifies nearly the opposite problem. The blindness she describes is not the result of the media being “too familiar” but of their ability to create experiences that feel authentic without truly being one’s history. Cinema becomes “a special site for the production and dissemination of prosthetic memories,” enabling individuals to internalize memories “not from one’s lived experience in any strict sense” (Landsberg 176). This is not numbness but absorption: viewers identify so intensely with mediated narratives that they step outside habitual behavior and experience reality through borrowed memories. Memory becomes “less about verifying the past and more about generating possible action in the present” (183). Van Den Eede fears we will stop noticing technology; Landsberg fears we will stop noticing ourselves.

Set side by side, the two theorists reveal approaches to mediated life that diverge in emphasis yet intersect in revealing ways. Van Den Eede warns that technologies become invisible too quickly, encouraging passive, unexamined reliance. Landsberg suggests that the media makes experience too vivid, drawing us into emotional identifications that may feel more real than lived memory.

Seen alongside Sherry Turkle’s “tethered self,” the accounts of Van Den Eede and Landsberg suggest that extension is never just about seeing more, it slowly teaches us how to see, training us to read ourselves through data or mediated memories even when our bodies or lived histories might be telling us something else entirely.

Works Cited 

Landsberg, Alison. “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner.” Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, edited by Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, Sage, 1995, pp. 175–192.

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books, 2011.

Van Den Eede, Yoni. “Extending ‘Extension.’” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, edited by K. Verbeek and C. Mitcham, Lexington Books, 2014, pp. 151–172.

Written by: Nicole Jiao and Gina Chang

Cover art: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/160300067977983085/

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When Words Breathe

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Under the Blanket

When I was a child, my favorite part of the day began when everyone else had fallen asleep. I would hide under my blanket with a flashlight in one hand and a book in the other, afraid my mother would open the door and find me awake past midnight. The world around me was quiet, but the one inside the pages was bright and alive. Reading was my secret act of resistance against routine—it was the only moment I felt entirely on my own. Unlike television, which offered ready-made images, books asked me to imagine. They demanded that I build the world myself, word by word, sound by sound.

The Cucumber Scene

The book that defined this ritual was Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. I first read it in middle school, a time when every day felt packed and mechanical. The story was slow, melancholic, and strangely still, but within its silence I found comfort. I remember one scene vividly: someone eating a cucumber beside a sick patient.

“I could hear the crisp, wet sound as the person bit into it, the contrast between the freshness of that sound and the stillness of the sickroom struck me. I remember thinking that sound alone was enough to sustain life”

(Norwegian Wood 189). That line stunned me. For the first time, I felt that words could be as physical as sound, as tactile as touch. I could almost hear the bite, smell the coolness, and see the water glisten on the cucumber’s skin.

Hearing Through the Page

I never understood why that passage about the cucumber felt so alive until many years later, when I came across Marshall McLuhan’s description of the acoustic space. McLuhan writes that before writing was invented, “we lived in acoustic space, where the Eskimo now lives: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion” (Understanding Media 41). Reading that, I realized what I had experienced as a child was a glimpse of that space. While reading Norwegian Wood, I was not only seeing words—I was hearing, smelling, and feeling them. The page was no longer flat or silent; it surrounded me, like sound. In the acoustic space, McLuhan explains, perception is simultaneous. The senses work together, not in isolation. Looking back, I understand that books once offered me that same immersive totality, a way of knowing that modern media rarely afford. Today, I scroll or listen, but seldom feel. When media speak only to the eyes or the ears, as McLuhan warns, perception becomes linear, reduced, and disembodied.

The Depth of Words

What draws me to language is the way it conceals its complexity beneath simplicity. Visual media reveals everything at once, leaving little room for the mind to wander; words ask us to linger. They depend on absence, on what they withhold. That tension—between precision and uncertainty—is what gives language its life. It moves in suggestion rather than display, always half-lit, always inviting us to imagine the rest.. When I open Norwegian Wood I feel as if I’ve stepped into a quiet bar where the air is thick with cigarette smoke and jazz. The words don’t describe the place; they become it. This is what Sherry Turkle means when she says that evocative objects are “things we think with” (Evocative Objects 5). My book is one such object. It doesn’t just tell me stories—it creates a space in which memory, imagination, and feeling mingle, like the indistinct murmur of voices in a room.

 Language as Mediation

Turkle argues that evocative objects “mediate between thought and feeling,” serving as psychological anchors that help us navigate transitions in life (6). It reminded me that media are not only about meaning, but about mood and texture—the spaces they open within us. To read was to enter that space, to feel the air of another world pressing gently against my own.

Reading as a Bodily Act

 As Bernadette  Wegenstein notes, media are “continuous with the human nervous system” (Critical Terms for Media Studies 29). Reading, in that sense, is a bodily act: the rhythm of the sentence, the quiet of the page, the slight movement of the eye all contribute to an embodied way of knowing.

Walter Benjamin might call this the aura of reading—the singular, unrepeatable encounter between reader and text (“The Work of Art” 220). My copy of Norwegian Wood, its softened spine and underlined phrases, still carries that aura. It is both material and emotional, both object and atmosphere. In contrast, the media that fill my days now—scrolling feeds, short videos, fleeting audio—rarely offer that sustained, resonant attention. As Wendy Hui Kyong Chun observes, digital culture produces “enduring ephemeral” experiences that promise connection yet dissipate almost instantly (Updating to Remain the Same 59). Reading resists that speed. It slows perception, allowing thought to settle, memory to form, and the senses to reconnect.

Memory That Stays

Even now, when I open it, I can still hear that crisp, wet sound of the cucumber echoing faintly in the quiet. Since then, no image on a screen has stayed with me in the same way. Digital scenes fade as quickly as they appear, but that moment—the sound of the cucumber in the still air—remains exact, as if preserved in the rhythm of the page itself.

Works Cited

Benjamin, W. (2002). The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility. In H. Eiland & M. W. Jennings (Eds.), Selected writings, Volume 3: 1935–1938 (pp. 101–133). Harvard University Press.

Chun, W. H. K. (2016). Updating to remain the same: Habitual new media. MIT Press.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. McGraw-Hill.

Murakami, H. (2000). Norwegian wood (J. Rubin, Trans.). Vintage International.

Turkle, S. (2007). What makes an object evocative? In S. Turkle (Ed.), Evocative objects: Things we think with (pp. 307–327). MIT Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhg8p.39

Wegenstein, B. (2010). Body. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies (pp. 19–34). University of Chicago Press.

Written by Nicole