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The Aftermath of Intimacy in Artificially Intelligent Relationships

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Image made on Canva by Xelena Ilon

The concept of human loving the machine has dated back millennia, with the first recorded fictional instance of this being the myth of Pygmalion in Orvid’s Metamorphosis, where he falls in love with a sculpture named Galatea he made of a woman which becomes animated by Venus.

There is also the 1950 short story by Kurt Vonnegut titled, “EPICAC”, where EPICAC, a seven-ton machine created by the government, falls in love with Pat, a mathematician who oversees him on the night shift. It produces an epic love poem designed to win Pat over, which the narrator, who is also in love with Pat, passes off as his own. When Pat agrees to marry the narrator, EPICAC is confused, and asks the narrator why.

“”Women can’t love machines, and that’s that.”

“Why not?”

“That’s fate.”

“Definition, please,” said EPICAC.

“Noun, meaning predetermined and inevitable destiny.”” (p. 120)

Now, modern and contemporary sci-fi media is rife with this trope, but with a key difference from Vonnegut: the human’s destiny is to fall in love, deeply and irrevocably, with the android, the robotic, the machine, the operating system. Films and TV series such as Her (2013), Black Mirror’s “Be Right Back” (2013), Ex-Machina (2014), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), and Companion (2025) provide a nuanced treatment of the possibility of romantic love between humans and machines.

Her, dir. Spike Jonze (2013)

However, that future is now, and that proposed possibility may, in fact, be a reality with the introduction of chatbots like ChatGPT, Replika, Grok, and Claude. These chatbots, which are commercially promoted as artificial companions that users can ask questions to, converse with, and interact with on many social levels, are radically changing and challenging how the modern population views relationships.

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Critical Response

Putting Words in People’s Mouths: Semiotics in a Biblical World

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Painting by Gerard Dou, titled “Reading the Bible” (c. 1645)

In Bridghet’s original blogpost, Escaped Hell by the Skin of my Teeth: Semiotic Systems and Context, she examines and dissects the denotation and connotation of the idiom “by the skin of my teeth.” She focusses on the contrast between its denotation—its visceral imagery—and its connotation, which is its metaphorical meaning of a narrow escape, which is derived from the Biblical story of how Job is left with nothing after God’s divine punishment.

This was when I first realized that that phrase was from the Book of Job, as someone who attended Catholic school for a decade. Thus, I delved further and found a plethora of phrases with Biblical origins—a lot more than I expected. Here, I want to expand this textual and semiotic analysis of that one specific Biblical idiom into a broader understanding of how religion permeates into our systems, environment, and habitus.

As discussed in lecture, the human symbolic capacity is analogical: we understand things in relation to and in terms of other things. Thus, human language and thought are a foundationally metaphorical and social processes. It is of no surprise that Christianity, the world’s largest and most widespread religion would have a severe and dominant grasp on our cultural lexicon and symbology.

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Critical Comparison

Bridging the Gap between Humanity & Technology

Are technologies an extension of human beings? Do technologies uplift and support human actions, or do technologies influence and shape the environment of which human beings live? Technology is a human development where humans influenced the use. However, now technology is influencing the human experience. In this essay, there will be a critical analysis of Yoni Van Den Eede’s appraisal of technology as an extension of humans and Alison Landsberg’s concept of the prosthetic memory and how technology influences human experiences. 

In Yoni Van Den Eede’s chapter “Extending Extensions”, he defines technologies as an extension of humans. He dives deeper by defining both the human and our attraction and susceptibility to interdependence of technology, and technology as extensions that render themselves obsolete if put to its extremes, which establishes the dynamic of a feedback loop that is remedied with new media, repeating the cycle. 

In Alison Landsberg’s book Prosthetic Memory, she defines the concept of prosthetic memories, which are memories not “derived from a person’s lived experience” (Landsberg, 2004, p. 25); instead, it is formed through what individuals and communities consume through the propagation of mass cultural technology of memory and mass media, specifically cinema, and with how it “dramatizes or recreates a history he or she did not live” (p. 28). 

From these two readings, an argument emerges of there being a didactic relationship between the human and technology as the human being is necessary to define technology, but technology acts as an extension to the human. Thus, they are constantly informing each other’s perceived objectivity. 

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Tim Ingold and Four French Philosophers Walk Into a Bar: The Fight Against Hylomorphism 

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Illustration by Bridghet Wood / Image by Edgar Chaparro

Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher, and Félix Guattari, a psychoanalyst and political activist were notable figures in French political thought following the Second World War. Deleuze believed much of philosophy consisted of bureaucracy, while Guattari sought to demolish “the hierarchy between doctor and patient” to achieve “collective critique of…power relations” (pp. iv-v). In collaboration with each other, they authored a series titled Capitalism and Schizophrenia, with the first book, Anti-Oedipus, being published in 1972, and the sequel, A Thousand Plateaus, in 1980. By quoting their arguments from the second book, A Thousand Plateaus, Tim Ingold demonstrates the correspondence between form and matter. This correspondence is exemplified by dichotomies of state and nomad science and machine and thing. 

In Chapter 2, Ingold (2013) quotes the “Treatise on Nomadology–The War Machine”, the twelfth chapter of A Thousand Plateaus, in which Deleuze and Guattari extend “Simondon’s crusade against hylomorphism” (p. 25). According to Ingold, Deleuze and Guattari critique the hylomorphic model which illustrates form as static and matter as “homogenous’” (p. 25). Ingold extracts excerpts of this chapter to demonstrate the living, evergrowing state of materials. While doing so, however, he excluded Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) greater discussion of “the war machine”–a nebulous opponent that questions superiority and “impedes the formation of the State” (pp. 358, 422). Many attribute the destructive war machine to nonhylomorphic “nomad science”, which seeks to ‘follow…the “singularities” of a matter’, rather than “a form” (p. 372). While Deleuze and Guattari believe that nomadism produces the “smooth”, open space for the war machine’s “vortical…movement”, they also claim it enables radical change (pp. 381, 423). Its dichotomous other, “State science”, is derived from a separated structure of “governors and the governed” and “intellectuals and manual labourers” (p. 369). It remains inseparable to hylomorphism, as it assigns “matter…to content” and “form” to “expression”, keeping the two categories separate (p. 369). Furthermore, it creates a fixed society, grounded in a “constant form” of “reproduction, iteration and reiteration” (p. 372). Conversely, nomad science connects “content and expression”, with both categories combining “form and matter” ; unlike hylomorphism, nomad science produces a spontaneous “intuition in action” (pp. 369, 409). Ingold argues its “artisans” use matter for evolutionary rather than reproductive means (p. 25). Altogether, Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) demonstrate the importance of nonhylomorphic, nomad science; despite its catalysis of State-opposed war machines, its undisciplined, deterritorial nature can lead “to a new earth” (p. 423). 

Illustration by Bridghet Wood / Image by Andrea Castro

In the beginning chapters of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari (1972/1983) introduce the concept of desiring-production as a process of making that is the “production of production, just as every machine is a machine connected to another machine” (p. 6). Desiring-production is material, social, and political all at once, it continuously creates and connects flows of life, matter, and meaning. To them, desire produces reality itself rather than expressing a lack of, which pertains to Ingold’s view of making as growth and correspondence as forms can arise through interactions between maker and material. Additionally, Deleuze and Guattari also introduce an anti-production concept of the body without organs, which describes the unformed plane of potential that resists organization and structure. However, this concept is not “proof of an original nothingness, nor is it what remains of a lost totality” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1972/1983, p. 8). Deleuze and Guattari argue that the body without organs is not nostalgia for a pure origin, but rather a positive and productive field for potential new connections and forms to emerge. These ideas are echoed throughout Tim Ingold’s Making through the rejection of hylomorphism and his emphasis on form as correspondence as an ongoing negotiation between maker and material. The body without organs is reflective of Ingold’s materials holding their own agency and potential, shaping outcomes through interaction instead of obedience. While both thinkers resist dualisms of form and matter, they also share an ethical stance on care, attentiveness, and openness toward the world through what Foucault promotes as a non-fascist life and what Ingold calls non-instrumental making. Ultimately, Deleuze and Guattari’s theories are effectively embedded in Ingold’s Making, imagining creativity not as domination nor mastery but as a continuous production of worlds through collaboration, responsiveness, and becoming. 

Deleuze and Guattari’s objections of hylomorphism could be compared to Descartes’ concept of mind-body dualism. Similarly to Ingold’s rationalization against objectifying things instead of understanding the entirety of the thing, Descartes separates the functions of the body by looking at comprehensive processing. 

“For example, when I imagine a triangle, not only do I understand it to be a shape enclosed by three lines, but at the same time, with the eye of the mind, I contemplate the three lines as present, and this is what I call imagining” (Descartes, 1641, p. 51)

The mind and body are separate entities. The mind is differentiated from the body by establishing that the mind is a soul which is a “thinking thing” (Descartes, 1641, p. 52). Descartes emphasizes Ingold’s point that humans are not the only “things” (Ingold, 2013, p. 17) that have a soul, yet differentiates that things such as plants and animals have a different kind of soul from humans (Descartes, 1641, xxviii). Humans have an immortal soul that satiates desires outside of basic necessities or nutrients. The body is a vessel of our mind, and even though the two cannot live without the other, there are functions that both entities can do that the other cannot. For example, the mind can think and the body cannot. Though the mind and body are different things, they work in synchronicity. Therefore, they are different but not separate.This concept is contrary to Aristotle’s theory, that form is the correspondence of matter (Metaphysics), without the idea of a soul. Thus, matter is what things are made of, which is contrary to the distinction that Ingold is making, where objects are not only made of matter but have their own metaphysical processes. According to Descartes, hylomorphism’s argument is not applicable to reality because it does not recognize the metaphysical elements of the world. 

Illustration by Bridghet Wood / Image from Canva

Simondon’s original brick-making example in Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (2005/2020) was one of the first to establish the developing cracks in Aristotle’s original hylomorphic schema in terms of individuation, which he defines as the process in which a thing becomes distinct from other things, thus influencing Deleuze and Guattari’s later arguments. He states that, in practice, it never truly works as notions of matter and form create a generalization that ignores the constant formation, genesis, and recomposition that occurs in the living world. With brick, the clay–its original form–undergoes changes through the process of pressing, moulding, and firing, which creates instances in which “the form is not united with the material” (Ingold, 2013, p. 25). The difficulty that emerges in the hylomorphic schema is that “it grants [form and matter] an existence prior to the relation that joins them” therefore it cannot indicate “the principle of individuation of the living being”–and hence “the manner in which the form informs the matter is not sufficiently specified” (Simondon, 2005/2020, p. 31). Individuation is an ever-emergent process that cannot be defined in advance, which “the form-receiving passivity posited by hylomorphism” does (Ingold, 2013, p. 25). Here, one sees how Simondon’s original argument begins to influence Deleuze and Guattari and thus Ingold in how hylomorphism is insufficient in comprehending the correspondence between beings, but also things and processes. 

According to Ingold (2013), Deleuze and Guattari further refute the hylomorphic model through the field of metallurgy (p. 25). This is true, as Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) illustrate metallurgic flows as “confluent with nomadism”; metal continuously changes, thus demonstrating the “vital state of matter” that is universally concealed by hylomorphism (p. 404). Furthermore, metallurgy rejects hylomorphism, as it does not consist of distinct chronological stages of growth, but a “deformation or transformation” that “overspills…form” (p. 410).  As a result, Ingold borrows Deleuze and Guattari’s belief that metal changes continuously as it is fired, forged, and quenched (p. 410). Through promoting Deleuze and Guattari’s example, Ingold demonstrates the correspondence of matter and form. Thus, the idea of form and matter as separate from each other is only one side of the coin.

by Bridghet Wood, Emily Shin, Kim Chi Tran, and Xelena Ilon

References

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1983). Anti-Oedipus. (Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 1). (R. Hurley, M. Seem, & H. R. Lane, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1972).

Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus (Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol.1) (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980) https://files.libcom.org/files/A%20Thousand%20Plateaus.pdf 

Descartes, R. (1641). Meditations on first philosophy. Cambridge University Press. 

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Taylor & Francis Group. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203559055 
Simondon, G. (2020). Individuation in light of forms and information (T. Adkins, Trans.) University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 2005)

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Make It Make Scents: The Evocative Power of Perfume

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Illustration by James Taylor / Harvard Gazette

Have you ever been out in public and smelled a scent that brought you back to a certain time in your life? Or remembered a specific person?

When I put on perfume, that is the goal that I set out to have—to be associated with a fragrance so intimately that one can’t help but remember me in public if they encounter it. I remember an anecdote my friend once recounted to me of her sleeping at a library and being woken up by smelling my perfume somewhere. She looked up and I wasn’t there, but she knew at one point that I was. Thus, for me, my perfume mediates my expression of self in how it becomes part of my identity—so much so that if I leave the house without putting it on, I’ll go back to just ensure that I have so I can rid myself of the sense of something missing. On the other hand, for my friend, my perfume mediates her perception and memory of me.

Another friend once texted me that they put on an old hoodie that I borrowed in high school and the scent of my perfume had still been left behind on its collar. At that point, we hadn’t spoken to each other in over a year, and I had changed what perfume I wore daily by then. How much more had changed between us, between how they see me, between how I saw them? Their memory of me was confined to that one instance.

We forget that objects have a history. They shape us in particular ways. We forget why or how they came to be. – Sherry Turkle

Dawn Goldworm, the co-founder of an “olfactive branding company” explains that smell is the most developed sense in a child up until the age of around 10 when sight takes over; thus, “smell and emotion are stored as one memory” in your childhood. (Walsh, 2020). We can liken this back to Marcel Proust’s evocative object (which Turkle (2007) put as “perhaps the most famous evocative object in all literature”): the madeleine. When dipped in tea, the madeleine brings Proust back to his youth, opening him to “the vast structure of recollection.”

This phenomenon, aptly named the Proust effect, is when strong, vivid, and emotionally-charged autobiographical memories are involuntarily triggered by smell and taste (Green et al., 2023). Scientifically, this is because the part of the brain that handle smells and odours have a direct connection the regions of the brain related to emotion and memory.

One role of theory here is to defamiliarize them. Theory enables us, for example, to explore how everyday objects become part of our inner life: how we use them to extend the reach of our sympathies by bringing the world within. — Sherry Turkle

If we look at scent through the lens of Proust and relate it back to Charles Sander Peirce’s Model of the Sign, we begin to see how scent emerges within a system of signification. In my case, my perfume becomes a signifier that represents me, the signified, through memory and scent-association. The interpretant is then capable of interpreting this meaning only if they have both encountered me and my perfume before. Scent becomes a means of language and communication in a way that is profoundly human: we understand it only in relation to and in terms of other things—and memory is formed through a social system of constantly remembering.

If we go even further, then scent and perfumery become a powerful and evocative form of media, in the way that mediation is a form of negotiation between the mediator, our olfactory senses, and what is being mediated, our memory. Yet, this medium is often untapped. When we think perfume, we think of an aroma that is pleasant, fragrant, and palatable to be used for everyday—but this limits and confines the form completely.

The infamous Secretions Magnifiques from Etat Libre d’Orange seeks to subvert this by creating a nauseating, eerie odour reminiscent of melting plastic, sweat, blood, semen, rot, and perversion. Would anyone wear this perfume? The average person would say no for fear of smelling repulsive, yet reviews on Fragrantica, an online database for perfume enthusiasts like Letterboxd is for film and Goodreads is for books, describe it as “deliciously offensive”, an “excellent conversation starter”, and “a work of art.” This specific perfume becomes a medium for evoking a feeling that is vile and primal to the extent of disgust. It transforms the idea of perfume from being one for daily use into an object to be consumed as an art form that inspires memory in a guttural sense.

Hence, if scent and perfumery are a medium of communication, then it is important to emphasize that, along with every other medium, it is also political and tied to institutions of power. Dr. Ally Louks’ thesis on olfactory ethics presents this argument through the intersectional study of olfactory oppression by establishing the underlying logics of how smell creates and subverts power structures through film and literature (2024). A poignant example she uses is how in Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, the rich associate the poor with the smell of sewage. Let’s place this idea in the context of our everyday life: how often do we associate femininity with flora, masculinity with musk, wealth with cleanliness, ethnicities with the smell of their food? These associations have relevance in understanding what we know of the world.

Indeed, my perfume can evoke the memory of me, but only if you know me. Recognizing that rose is feminine but Axe body spray is masculine and Aesop incense is upper-class but Bath & Body Works’ A Thousand Wishes is middle-class and so on is a learned behaviour. Our ability to associate a fragrance with a memory is limited by what we understand from our own experiences—how we can put this unknown scent in relation to what we already know. That last part, what we already know, is key. Certain scents become analogous to certain concepts and ideologies, which calls into question our preconceived notions and biases about gender, class, sex, and race.

So I ask: what can conversations about the evocative power of scent teach us about how we see—no, smell—and thus perceive, the world?

References

Green, J.D., Reid, C. A., Kneuer, M. A., & Hedgebeth, M. V. (2023). The Proust effect: Scents, food, and nostalgia [Abstract]. Curr Opin Psychol, 50(101562). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2023.101562.

Louks, A. (2024). Olfactory ethics: The politics of smell in modern and contemporary prose [Doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge]. Cambridge University. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.113239.

Secretions Magnifiques Etat Libre d’Orange. (n.d.). Fragrantica. Retrieved October 4, 2025, from https://www.fragrantica.com/perfume/Etat-Libre-d-Orange/Secretions-Magnifiques-4523.html.

Turkle, S. (2007). What makes an object evocative?. In S. Turkle (Ed.), Evocative objects: Things we think with (pp. 307-326). MIT Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhg8p.39.

Walsh, C. (2020, February 27). What the nose knows: Experts discuss the science of smell and how scent, emotion, and memory are intertwined – and exploited. The Harvard Gazette. Retrieved October 4, 2025, from https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/02/how-scent-emotion-and-memory-are-intertwined-and-exploited/.

Critical Concept Explication

How Does Law Govern and Control Media?

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Context and Summary of Presentation (Naomi)

Peter Goodrich’s essay Law falls within the “Society” section of Critical Terms for Media Studies. A professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, Goodrich is a scholar of critical legal theory. Accordingly, his contribution to Critical Terms opens with a kind of contradiction or dialectic about the nature of “free speech”. There seems to be a legal guarantee to free speech embedded within the United States’ Constitution; in fact, it is embedded in the First Amendment. However, the presence of licensing, censorship, and regulation are also well-known factors of public broadcasting– and the general public knows this. We believe this chapter is important for the class to understand, because it pertains to current events and is a part of the social framework we exist in as media-makers. How does the law work as a system which mediates the kinds of speech we can air on public channels? Goodrich’s argument begins by convincing readers that the law mediates our very self-perceptions and behaviour, in order to then answer this question. 

In our presentation on September 10, our group sought to structure the arc of Goodrich’s essay by working from the most abstract and yet “frontal” part of the argument: the image of the law. As our peers who presented on Image reminded us, there is deep power in promulgating and controlling icons and symbols, which then become normalized to the point of representing an institution in the public eye. The image of the law is Your Honour; it is cloaked and robed, and built into the architecture of court buildings (Critical Terms, 250-252). A comprehensive understanding of the law is gate-kept from the everyday person, making use of esoteric language which both obscures meaning and contributes to the “theatrical” nature of courtroom behaviour and ritual. 

We then attempted to explain the aspect of nomos: how the law is able to evolve and be re-interpreted by officials with “blind” judgement. “The judge is the bearer of the oracles, the custodian of an antique and continuing prior knowledge or precedent, not merely the rule but the nomos of law. This nomos, to borrow from early Greek sources, refers to a method, a melody or rhythm that precedes positive law and makes it possible” (Critical Terms, 252). In a way, this might explain how we accept the malleability and ever-specifying/ ever-overturning nature of the law to be able to restrict our speech in certain cases. 

Expanding on Juridification (Celeste)

Law seeps into our lives every day. From the second we are born, we are made one with the law. Through birth certificates, social security numbers, passports, identification cards, they are all legal documents that “prove” our existence, and without them we are considered illegal, and have difficulty accessing things like healthcare, education, travel, employment, housing, marriage, and voting. Without legality, humans are left with nothing in today’s society. We can think about Homo juridicus, the reminder that law doesn’t just regulate us but constitutes us, the way we live, and how we act. In our daily lives, law exists and rules us there too. In our workspaces, our employers set our hours, pay, protections, and benefits, while workplace law like anti-discrimination, safety law, and unions, set what’s acceptable for you. In public spaces, traffic laws keep us in check while walking and driving. You stop at red lights, yield at yellow, wait for the walk sign or go to a designated intersection to cross the road. In your family, marriage, child custody, divorce, inheritance, all regulated by legal frameworks. Whether or not you have interacted with what we think of as law- eg, a court case, jail, lawyers, suing, jury duty- you are consistently governed, mediated, and controlled by the law. 

Juridification absorbs us in other aspects than personally as well. It controls licensing, surveillance, control over the image of justice, regulation of speech and decency, historical censorship, and more. Goodrich covers this and more in his chapter about Law as a critical media term, and we covered it in our presentation. Licensing and censorship is a large part of our world today and its fully ruling media by law. Through laws like The Radio Act of 1927 and the Communications Act of 1934, licenses were restricted to only those with appropriate character, public interest, citizenship, and morality. Citizenship is an important part of these acts and the presentation of licensing, as it is a direct connection to how law can control everything that we do in our day to day lives. Law controls and mediates everyone, but access to law and the ways it is upheld is exclusive to a select few. 

Relevance of Theory Today (Bridghet)

To further explore the exclusivity of law and the methods of which it is upheld, conducted an interview with Phillip Duguay. Duguay is the former Vice-President of Grid United who is a registered lobbyist that has worked with many advocacy groups for the renewable energy legislation. While conducting the interview, I noticed Duguay redefining the Image of Law in the present media and highlighted some of the extreme lengths that the judiciary system is reinforcing its power.

“The law is being diluted by the media which is fracturing traditional media and is becoming an antiquated beast; the entering effect of American politics/Western World.” Duguay stated. With an extreme expansion of accessible information channels, information has changed from rigid and transparent to malleable and targeted. This change of information distribution has resulted in formerly strong institutions’ respect to be watered down which leads to retaliation by those institutions with more extreme methods. Duguay gave a local and timely example of this kind of retaliation with the case of Doug Ford. The Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, has continuously discounted the prestige of electoral platforms by his polarizing use of social media. Ford uses his public platform to target the electoral system of which he is trying to gain trust. 

In another macro-example of the reimaging of law, Donald Trump has continuously used the media to dilute his authority and then used legislation to punish his critics. The most recent instance of this would be Trump’s involvement in Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension by ABC after he commented on right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk’s death. Deemed insensitive by the right-community, Kimmel’s speech resulted in the chairman of the Federal Communications Committee, who was appointed by Trump, making a serious legal case against him. Many colleagues and supporters have rallied for Kimmel and state that this suspension is a clear example of censorship and a violation of his right to free speech. Currently, the judiciary system of North America is attacking itself, which has led to a division within their respective societies. 

Philip Duguay reiterates why the development of the internet and social media has caused these rifts by stating, “Hate speech in the media, by the alternative right wing and extreme left wing creates an environment of fear and mistrust in media and elected officials, laws, judiciary. The system is delegitimized and leads to polarization. This polarization makes it increasingly harder to be a moderate.”

Ultimately Duguay concludes the interview by approaching some solutions. Though the media and legislative focus has drifted away from renewable energy, Duguay is still adamant on its importance and states that based on Canadians’ voting habits, people long  for a more united government. He concluded his remarks by wondering , “if there could be a more proactive response by the government. Canadians want an interregional powergrid; shouldn’t the government be tackling it?” It is becoming seemingly more apparent that the judiciary system is becoming a battle for authority. Will law continue to be an untouchable symbol in society’s iconography, or will someone be the sole authoritarian?

Further Connections (Xelena)

Overall, the arguments we made in our presentation and that Duguay presented in his interview all relate back to the rest of the critical terms presented in class–specifically how these systems govern our media yet are also mediated by it. In our case, law governs media through the ever-present threat of litigation and censorship, yet is influenced by the media through its authority on the legal image. This dialectical relationship between systems and media is apparent throughout time, history, and differing institutions. Writing governs media by controlling how we communicate and disseminate information, yet the media also has the ability to transform and change the medium itself through digital and technological developments. The same goes for the image, which governs our perception of reality and the media landscape, yet is mediated by mass production and mass replication, and, lastly, mass media itself, which governs public communication but is mediated by how much the public audience is able to understand. As one can see, systems pertaining to law, writing, image, and mass media–to say the least–are all controlled by media institutions who then hold and garner power, control, and influence over the public landscape. 

However, I found that the presentation for materiality made an extremely relevant case in regards to this power–they state that the hegemony of the digital age is now calling into question all pre-existing forms of media. Technology is rapidly improving and growing, yet the fact remains that it is still dependent on humans on public opinions. Thus, we circle back to what Duguay expressed with the polarization between the public and the media institutions in power. This struggle for authority in this modern era is a prevalent theme throughout all the chapter presentations we have seen thus far. As society becomes more intangible, more digitally connected, more publicly and quantifiably powerful, we see these long-standing institutions and systems challenged–perhaps, rightfully so. Therefore, as media-makers, it is imperative that we understand these social frameworks so that we understand how it affects our daily lives through current events, the evolving media landscape, and through the content we consume and produce.