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Gestures as mediational means

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In October, I gave way to the cyclist, and they showed me their palm as a sign of gratitude. A split second before they cycled away. I’ve heard that drivers also do that – they lift their fingers off the steering wheel to thank the driver across. Maybe they let you know there’s a police car with a speedometer nearby. You just do it, and you feel connected without speaking a single word. I thought about it a lot, for some reason – about those little ways in which we connect with people in a busy city and how sometimes no words are needed to understand each other. And then we discussed mediational means in class.

Writing this post feels very LinkedIn-coded: here’s what giving way to a cyclist taught me about b2b sales kind of premise. But for this whole semester, we’ve let media studies grow roots in our real lives, reading Ingold instead of Tolkien, watching “Library of the World” instead of “Muppet Treasure Island” and citing Plato in our comments instead of just saying “me fr fr XD”. So I hope you forgive me for bringing media studies into the act of being a human and showing a fellow human your palm before cycling away.

Gestures as everyday media

Try noting how many gestures you use throughout the day. Do you shrug when asked how you’re doing? Do you wave at your friends when you see them from afar? Do you move your hands around aggressively when describing the most annoying event of the day to your family?

Flusser attempts to define gestures and comes down to this: “a gesture is a movement of the body or of a tool connected to the body for which there is no satisfactory causal explanation.” (2) There is no “scientific” or “logical” reason to raise an index finger when somebody’s bombarding you with questions while you’re clearly on the phone. The gesture becomes the symbol, it carries and mediates meaning: silence, in this case. (Flusser, 4)

Often, we don’t even notice a slight hand movement, a head tilt, a wave of a finger. Don’t be fooled – gestures are very intentional, it’s how we think through our bodies. Ever gestured something while talking on a phone only to realise your interlocutor cannot see what you’re doing? This is because gestures help us process complex information and spatial data: gestures are not simply performative.

There’s a joke about an Italian soldier who was captured during the war and, when released by his fellow soldiers, was asked: they tortured you, did you tell them anything? To which he replied “how could I have told them anything, my hands were tied?”. While it’s a silly joke, it underlines our understanding of gestures as cultural transistors of meaning that are integrated into speech. Gestures and speech synchronize to express similar meanings, yet do so in vastly different ways (McNeil, 11).

Gestures as self-sufficient mediators

We might be inclined to see gestures as “sides” to our “main meals” that is speech. Gestures can seem decorative, adding emotions to the story rather than telling it.

This is probably as wrong as assuming a tree doesn’t make a noise simply because we aren’t there to hear it or that mommy disappeared because you can’t see her. That is to say: grow up.

David McNeil describes at length the unity between speech and gestures (23-24). They are, he argues, two sides of the same cognitive process, manifesting differently through different media: both equally valuable and significant. A conversation held with gesturing will feel different in both emotional and meaningful sense from a conversation held with no gestures. Because, ultimately, not every meaning is expressible through speech: that is why we use them, after all. Spatial and temporal thinking are often better expressed though gestures, containing meanings separate from words.

Gestures as mediational means

In his “Mediated Discourse”, Ron Scollon suggests shifting attention from language as text to language as social action. In his view, meaning is produced through actions in a given context rather than simply being embedded in words. He therefore defines mediational means as cultural tools: material objects that carry out the mediated action (4). Scollon specifies that mediational means include embodied practices, be it posture or movements.

Social action is always mediated: there can be no action without tools that shape how said action is performed. No omelette without a stove and a pan, no late night calls without phones, no ratting out your country’s military plans without free hands movement. This, again, makes bodies function as sites of mediation, allowing social actors to perform in socially recognized practices, mediating whatever is required at the moment.

Scollon goes on to describe five main characteristics of mediational means as follows (121):

Dialectical – there is a dialectic between the external aspects of the mediational means as an object in the world and the internal structures of the person using the mediational means. Some gestures can feel more or less fitting this characteristic, mainly because, in my opinion, Scollon does a poor job of explaining what he means.

Historical – in both global and local ways: there can be a global history of blowing a kiss, and your favourite memory of receiving such a kiss for the first time, for example.

Partial – mediational means never fits one action exactly, only some of their characteristics being useful at a time. By being both more and less than called upon, they transform the action being performed.

Connective – mediational means link both many purposes and many participants. Today, you show me your palm when I give you way on the road. Tomorrow, somebody else does, so you do that to another person. I’m not jealous, no. It’s the connective nature of mediational means.

Representational – mediational means are not specific and concrete objects, but representative tokens of a class of objects.

“So what?” says the media studies student

In media studies, we recognize meaning as being produced through so many more things than simple semiotic representation. Gestures produce meaning through embodied actions, and understanding it is what we get from reframing them as mediational means. They translate convoluted cognitive processes into socially understandable actions. Media analysis doesn’t need to focus solely on technologies and texts, I believe we need to also pay attention to the embodied practices: they are the basics of enacting media, they are the basic of human life and cultural interaction.

If anything, this post is a nice reminder that mediation and meaning can be happening away from award-winning films, away from scrollitelling websites and complicated research papers. Sometimes it is literally right in your hand.

Work cited:

Mcneill, David. 1992. Hand and Mind : What Gestures Reveal about Thought. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Scollon, Ronald. 2009. Mediated Discourse : The Nexus of Practice. London ; New York (N.Y.): Routledge.

Vilém Flusser. 2014. Gestures. U of Minnesota Press.

Book Review

Reporting on “Queer Art of Failure”

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Fellas, is it gay to fail? Yes, and it is also punk as hell. Let’s talk about it.

Queer art of Failure by Judith Halberstam

Jack/Judith Halberstam (he/him and she/her) is a modern queerness and gender philosopher, professor in the US and authoress of many books on gender and queer issues. A large part of his interest lies in female masculinity and the concept of tomboys. Halberstam is also known for coining the term “bathroom problem”: it describes a perceived genderly deviant person’s justification of being in a gender-policed zone (like a public bathroom) and how “passing” in such zone could affect that person’s identity.

In her book Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam approaches failure as something to be celebrated and embraced, and uses the argument of subversive intellectualism to see failure as an act of resistance against the restrictive societal standards of what is normal and/or successful. He suggests that unproductivity can be a radical alternative to the capitalistic heteronormative societal expectations, as well as open new ways of knowing and being. 

To support her argument, Halberstam introduces the concept of low theory. It is a mode of thinking that emphasizes the willingness to get lost and explore the “in-between spaces of high and low culture” (Halberstam, 2) to generate new forms of understanding. In other words, Halberstam suggests that wisdom and knowledge can be gathered in places other than university libraries and paywall-protected sites with highbrow studies. This is why Halberstam draws a lot of material for her analysis from animation and film and examines how these more modern and often less seriously perceived media represent the queer art of failure. Let us have a look, too!

What’s she saying?

In the very first chapter, Halberstam introduces a concept of a Pixarvolt as a genre of CGI movies about revolution and transformation, often connecting communitarian revolt and queer embodiment, showing them as equals and similars. It is important to note that while Pixar is the main producer of Pixarvolt stories, they aren’t the only ones and not everything they produce would be considered a Pixarvolt story. “The non-Pixarvolt animated features prefer family to collectivity, human individualism to social bonding, extraordinary individuals to diverse communities.” (Halberstam, 47) In Pixarvolt movies, desire for difference is not connected to a neoliberal “Be yourself!!” mentality – they connect it to selfishness, overconsumption, opposed to collective mentality. They don’t focus on the idea of nuclear family or classic romance. As such, The Incredibles, for example, cannot be considered a Pixarvolt story, since they focus on the outstanding individuals being opposed to their communities. 

Halberstam goes on to explore the theme of resistance to normality and the adult world in animated movies, such as Chicken Run, which here is viewed through multiple lenses: from class struggle and queerness to human exceptionalism. While chickens are not meant to represent literal birds in the movie, they are also used differently here than other animals are used in, say, Animal Farm. Chicken Run is not a fable about human folly told through animals, it explores ideas about humanness and alterity through the non-human characters being in the centre. 

In the second chapter, Halberstam explores themes of memory and stupidity, specifically male stupidity and its special place in the world of mainstream comedies like Dumb and Dumber (1994) and, most of all, Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000). While many things can be said about how male stupidity is treated as a charming way of knowing, as a way of openness (juxtaposed to female stupidity that is often portrayed as vain and shallow), for me, the question of memory was more interesting, since I was able to apply it to my own lived experience. 

Halberstam argues there is a duality to the act of forgetting. On one hand, many of us forget as a trauma response, as a way to move forward and not be slowed down by our past: “We may want to forget family and forget lineage and forget tradition in order to start from a new place” (Halberstam, 70). On another hand, it can be dangerous to forget, since those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it, and forgetting often means not holding people accountable: Halberstam uses the example of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the idea of “putting the slavery behind us”. By the end of the chapter, Halberstam reaches her conclusion: forgetting is required for new knowledge: “Learning in fact is part memorization and part forgetting, part accumulation and part erasure.” (83).

That was the first time that Halberstam’s theory spoke to me. It allowed me to reflect on the common experience of erasing traumatic events from your memory: if I don’t think about it, it did not happen to me, and I am fine. I think we’ve all been there. Dear reader, you should know better than that.

In the third chapter, Halberstam claims failure goes hand in hand with capitalism: “Heteronormative common sense leads to the equation of success with advancement, capital accumulation, family, ethical conduct, and hope.” (89). She also goes on to explore the intrinsically queer nature of failure by providing an anti-example of the Trainspotting story. In it, the main character is certainly undergoing a failure that is not queer, but this failure is a deliberate choice to “not choose life”. This choice to fail is allowed by society because of its “straightness”, and it can and will ultimately harm more marginalized groups in the process because of its nature. So how much of a failure can it be if the character actively chooses to “fail” within the system that will allow him to? The real, raw, almost agonizing failure, concludes Halberstam, is queer. 

She goes on to describe several projects on that topic of queer failures in all the various forms they take: my favourite is Tracey Moffat’s series Fourth, which captured Olympic sportspeople the second they realised they got in fourth. Almost on the pedestal. A second away from greatness. 

“Renton, Johnny Rotten, Ginger, Dory and Babe, like those athletes who finished fourth, remind us that there is something powerful in being wrong, in losing, in failing […]” (Halberstam, 120)

The fourth chapter is focused on the concept of shadow feminism or anti-social feminism which take form in a radical negation and refusal as opposed to traditional activism. Looking at female negativity (e.g. self-destruction, passivity, disappearance) through the lens of anti-social feminism, Halberstam connects those acts with political critique and queer failure. She references Yoko Ono’s performance Cut Piece from 1964, where she sat on a stage, inviting people to cut her clothes. I personally think about this performance a lot sometimes, alongside Marina Abramovic and her Rhythm 0. They both navigate vulnerability and expose what Halberstam described as “the sadistic impulses that bourgeois audiences harbor toward the notion of woman” (137). I feel conflicted and wonder if the men cutting Yoko Ono’s clothes and puncturing Abramovic’s skin realise what the performance is. I wonder if they think about it at all, actually. 

Chapter five, subtitled “homosexuality and fascism”, takes a closer look at the intersection of sex and politics and gay men’s troubling involvement with Nazi regime to talk about the more contradictory pages of queer history. Halberstam goes through several examples of the fascist sexual imagery in art and artists that explore those topics in their more modern art (e.g.Tom of Finland and Collier Schorr). All attempts to “purify” queer history come from the same roots as heteronormative success-obsessed manic positivity, and if we are to talk about failure, some of those failures will be rather upsetting. We have to be ready to be unsettled by what we find when we look back: see why in chapter two on forgetting. 

Finally, in the last chapter, Halberstam focuses more on the medium of animation and how its affordances contribute to the messages that animated stories convey. This passage about how animation style influences the narrative really stood out to me:

“Two-dimensional cartoons often dealt with individual forms in linear sequences—a cat chasing a mouse, a cat chasing a bird, a wolf chasing a roadrunner, a dog chasing a cat. But CGI introduced numbers, groups, the multitude. Once you have an animation technique for the crowd, you need narratives about crowds, you need to animate the story line of the many and downplay the story line of the exception.” (Halberstam, 176)

While, obviously, not every computer animated story necessarily includes crowds and has anarchist undertones to it, it is an important affordance that Halberstam highlights: these stories were way more labour-consuming to produce before CGI. Now if a story of masses needed to be told, it could be. And oh boy were those stories told: Bugs Life, Finding Nemo, even WALL-E, in a way. 

Halberstam also goes on to discuss the specific affordances of stop-motion animation: the uncanny quality of shot-by-shot change between stillness and motion and how themes of remote control and entrapment grow out of the medium. 

Why do we care?

We care about Queer Art of Failure, because it provides new readings to pre-existing media like Chicken Run and Finding Nemo, and explains why it is important to see those narratives in a new way. We care because, as media studies students in a highly academic environment, we are prone to overlooking rich sources of material for analysis and discard them as childish and therefore not valuable. 

Halberstam, however, recognizes the importance of low theory and reminds us that pop culture can be a significant subject of analysis. She shows us how cartoons, often dismissed in academic circles, actually contain plethora of meanings and lenses, how animated animals can challenge our heteronormative notions of success, and how important it is to look at the negative aspects of media we’re consuming and the world we’re living in: on the stupidity, on unbecoming, on passivity. On failure. And on how it can be more than “a stop on your way to success”, but its own separate state, way of knowing and being.

Be gay, do crime, fail. This is how we learn.

Work cited:

Halberstam J. The queer art of failure. Duke University Press; 2011

Written and illustrated by Bara Bogantseva

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Touch your books: that’s kind of what they’re for

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Within (and for) this course, I have read, reflected, said and written so much about materiality of media, that it has become a challenge to not comment on the materiality of every evocative object I see on our blogsite. This, of course, is in large part due to the very first assignment which gave me this new lens to look at things through. Now I get to analyse the importance of materiality in everything I touch and loan the only physical copy of “Making” in the library over and over again (sorry). So, obviously, I cannot go past the question of materiality of books and knowledge in the case of Umberto Eco and his majestic library of the world. 

Library of the world

A large part, if not all, of the documentary either takes place in or is based around Umberto Eco’s impressive library of over 30,000 books: it is mentioned that civil engineers were worried Eco’s collection would be too heavy for the building to hold it (which is wildly impressive if you ask me). 

It is natural that a scholar, professor and thinker would have a large library of his own. Umberto Eco valued physical books deeply and has been gathering them throughout his life – academic writings, comics and manga, encyclopedias, anything that he found interesting, really. But Eco’s library was not just for storing, – this can be done online, too, – but accumulating over time, displaying and, most importantly – interacting with books, which is what brings the importance to physicality of his library. Interacted by adults who get to curate, annotate, leave their bookmarks in, but also by Eco’s grandson. He remembers reading practically ancient books as a child. Because knowledge cannot and must not be simply accumulated by one person without sharing it, and because most grandparents have a soft spot for their grandkids. I think this particular moment stuck with me the most, because we are so used to seeing older books protected from destruction, and it was so fascinating to hear about the other perspective on that. I doubt my grandparents would ever let me touch a medieval book should they’ve had it (they’re both historians, so I would actually expect them to). In the documentary, Eco describes the difference between a bibliomaniac and bibliophile as such: the former would secretly flip through his collection in the evening like Scrooge McDuck bathing in his dollars, the latter would want people to know about the wonder of the book they are holding. 

Given Umberto Eco’s openness about his library and its treasures, given that his family donated it to the public and I doubt they’d go against his will, I believe it is safe to assume Umberto Eco was a bibliophile. 

Physicality

When explaining the inconvenience of e-books for him, Eco says books “must be touched with hands”, re-read, underlined, dog-eared. If you cannot interact with the book meaningfully, it is a different, less fulfilling process, so why settle for a book in your phone, if you can have it in your lap? 

This, of course, brings us to “Making”, in which Ingold argues that meaning and knowledge is co-produced through human-material interaction, not simply transmitted through abstract content. In the same way as a potter both changes and is changed by the clay through the means of a pottery wheel, so does the reader both affect and be affected by the knowledge through the means of a physical book. The reader adds to the knowledge in the book by meaningfully interacting with it: underlining what matters, questioning paragraphs that don’t make sense, dog-earing the most important pages. And the knowledge, obviously, also changes the reader: their perception of the world, their thoughts, their actions, in the best of scenarios. We read with the book, as Ingold would say.  

True or real?

Another connection between Eco’s library and physicality is the question of truthfulness. One of the most beautiful things about Eco’s library is his passion for untrue knowledge: scholars who have been proven wrong, theories that were debunked, conspiracy theories, you name it. In Eco’s library, the discredited is not discarded: it is archived, annotated, and re-read with attention and affection.

The documentary focuses, in part, on Athanasius Kircher, a German polymath: jack of all trades, a master of both all trades, but also somehow not really. He managed to both completely misinterpret Egyptian hieroglyphics and notice the inconsistency in magnetic north. He suggested plague’s reasons lying in microorganisms and went on to describe dragons with the same vigor. But wrong or not, Kircher is forever remembered for his writings and drawings: Eco specifically implies their significance. The schemes, diagrams, illustrations all provide a layer of validity to the information, because lies are more interesting to prove.

Authority of the physical

But more interestingly, I want to discuss the effect of materiality on the perceived truthfulness of the media. In “Always Already New”, Lisa Gitelman explores how the physicality of print media has influenced perceptions of the written word as authoritative and truthful. She claims that physical qualities of books, such as their weight and texture, mediates to the viewer the sense of legitimacy that digital media often lacks. In the nineteenth century, Gitelman explains, print’s authority was derived from its tangibility: its position of a fixed media created the assumption of stability and truth. This “fixity”, as James Secord calls it, glorifies “textual authenticity and legitimates textual evidence”, says Gitelman. 

But once the industrial revolution did its thing and industrial printing rose, so did the mass literacy and so did the critical attention to those texts. I find it very insightful how Gitelman explains it: she says that before the mass publications, reading went hand in hand with appreciation of the text, not its interpretation. Now that more and more people were able to publish anything, “mass literacy met cheap editions” and it changed the public’s perception of physical media’s authority. So here is a quick reminder that truth is not guaranteed by any one medium but negotiated through it.

Eco’s library, of course, mostly comes from the times before industrial printing, the books there often being as wrong about the world as they seem to be correct: the books are heavy, large, leather-bound, old as time and therefore radiate the aura of higher knowledge and ultimate wisdom. This is why, I believe, it is so interesting to study this contrast between the authority-mediating form and the dilly-dally content.

Conclusion

In Eco’s library, in Ingold’s book, and in Gitelman’s reflections on print and digital media, the material form of knowledge is inseparable from its content and meaning. Truth and understanding are not abstract or disembodied, they are shaped through interaction. By underlining your favourite quotes, by weaving baskets, by touching what you read. If knowledge lives through material contact, a book is never only a vessel for ideas – it is a collaborator in their creation. I’m sorry, but the medium is still the message. To read, make, or preserve knowledge is always to engage with its material body. So go touch a book. Maybe ask me to return “Making” to the library so you can loan it yourself. 

Works cited:

Ferrario, Davide. Umberto Eco: The Library of the World. Italy: Rossofuoco, 2022. Documentary Film.

Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

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

Picture and text by Bara Bogantseva

Other

Evoking control, memory and self while planning my studies

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Quick warning: this essay mentioned eating disorders. If this is something you’re not comfortable with, feel free to skip this post. Stay safe.

Ironically, my evocative object was heavily used to create this. And many other things, because I organize my whole academic life with my notion. Not to be that person, but I love it.

If a course isn’t on Canvas before the term begins, I can get frustrated: it means I can’t prepare for school in advance by adding all the deadlines into my notion, writing out grade components into each classes’ page, can’t break each assignment down and plan my workload before the first class. For MDIA 300, I wrote out not only the major and minor assignments and what each entails, but also what page of syllabus it is on, and I am very grateful to my past self for that. Notion helps me know what to do on any given day, if I’m lucky to find a good spot in either of the libraries.

That is not, however, to say that my notion has any power over me: I am free to ignore my own study plans if I feel so inclined. Notion simply evokes the feeling of control over my student life, gives me structure and simplifies the search for much needed information. 

Affordances 

In my personal case, the digital aspect of it has affordances that physical notebooks lack: mainly, accessibility, larger creative control and digital media opportunities (try putting in a hyper-link or a gif into a physical notebook). I also prefer typing out my notes and editing later over writing them down with a pen with no space for mistake. Being able to easily share my notes and copy and paste in-class assignments is also a huge boost for digital over physical copies. 

On the other hand, I’m aware that a large company holds control over my app for studying, and has the power to take it away. Which it did, actually: Notion is no longer available in Russia, so I was unable to see my notes or add my new subjects into my calendar when I was home. Which, obviously, is not that big of a problem.

Digital brain

Evocative objects are “things we think with”, according to Turkle, and that is exactly the function my Notion fills in. In her chapter about a long-lost datebook, Michelle Hlubinka describes her evocative object as “an external information organ—a piece of my brain made out of paper instead of cells”. Similarly, in her chapter on her own laptop, Annalee Newitz writes:

“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”

And both of these are truly remarkable, mostly because I believe most of us relate to this sentiment. In the digital age with technology being so wide-spread, most of us delegate our knowledge and memories to a laptop, a phone, or a memory stick. So many of my friends (and me, too), when having trouble remembering the last week or our summer, pull out a phone and go through the gallery to see which moments come in which order.

This is what I am likely to do if you ask me about the syllabus: I’ll go to Notion, because I filtered out what I need to know from Canvas and put it in there. Wrote it down and, well, immediately forgot.

Mediation of memory

Bernard Stiegler wrote a rather gloomy and dystopian chapter on Memory, where he talks about the consequences of delegating knowledge and memories to an external source. While I agree with him about the dangers of information manipulation and the act of remembering for yourself as the “true form of knowing”, I am glad (or blind) to say my situation is not as dramatic when it comes to consequences and explications. The information isn’t being manipulated in my case: professors just change syllabus and move deadlines sometimes. 

But let’s go back to Hlubinka’s chapter on databooks. She describes losing her databook as a small-scale tragedy:

“I felt as though I had lost my life. My memory of all I did and planned to do from January to May 2003 vanished, along with the physical form that contained it.”

If I were to be locked out of my Notion and all the professors were to delete their syllabi at the same time, I would be very confused but also unable to retrieve all the important dates, all my notes, and all my study plans at once. Our understanding of what we wrote down will forever be tied to the object holding these memories: it’s a memory stick that, if lost, won’t be remade. While it is liberating to get some weights off our hard-working brains, we should keep one thing in mind: once we delegate the memory, it will be outside of our control.

Mediation of control 

I see myself a lot in how Hlubinka describes her friend Ginger and the way she manages her own databook. Ginger colourcodes her plans (check!), leaves herself extra time so as to not be late (check!) and says her need for control is rooted in her now recovered eating disorder (check!). 

For us, documenting, planning, colourcoding is a way to structure the way we see our lives, understand our weeks clearer and, therefore, control it. In the modern days more than ever, our lives are filled with chaos, days are filled with events, weeks filled with plans. How do you stay on top of things the way we’re expected to? We simplify it: this day is for writing comments on blog posts and reading two more chapters, tomorrow we will worry about source traceback, and the day after that Ingold’s Making will be due in the library, so I’ll need to re-check it. The world seems more approachable when it’s simplified and, therefore, controlled. And then we give ourselves a pet on the back for doing what we should: Ginger uses stickers, I get to see my calendar turn green from all the completed assignments. 

Lastly, both Ginger and I simply like our objects of structure. She says: “my audience is myself . . . a lot of these devices are to make me happy“. Me too, Ginger! I spend hours on end picking pretty covers for each subject, finding pretty gifs, assigning symbols. And while I don’t mind people looking over and noticing how cool my Notion is, it is for me only.

Mediation of self

Hlubinka describes her lost databook as a reflection of what kind of person she was: what caught her interest, what events she considered or attended, what conversations she had and what topics she found worthy of writing down. She says “I like to think that anyone could open up my lost paper datebook and see what kind of person I am”. 

While databooks and notion study calendars are purely personal, we as humans cannot stand to not mark things as our own, not shape them to be ours. There is so much personality in how we structure our books and notions just because it will so heavily depend on how we see this world. In a way, it is a two-way communication: we input our view of the world into the databook which reflects this view back at us, shaping it further. Ginger tracks her life by weeks, I break down a term into months, because this is how we live our lives. 

Control, calendars, due-dates

To sum it all up: the way we plan our lives is a powerful mediator of control, memory and self. It allows us to simplify our life and therefore understand it better, and while storing all the most important memories on one Google Drive is not recommended, digital planner allows us to take some weight off our brains when it comes to planning ahead and remembering dates.

Hlubinka, Michelle. “THE DATEBOOK.” In Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, 76–85. The MIT Press, 2007. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhg8p.13.

Newitz, Annalee. “MY LAPTOP.” In Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, 86–91. The MIT Press, 2007. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhg8p.14.

Stiegler, Bernard. “MEMORY.” In Critical terms for media studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen, 64-87. University of Chicago, 2005.

Header and post by Bara Bogantseva