Category Archives: Critical Comparison

Critical Comparison

The Material Life of the Smartphone: A Critical Dialogue Between Bollmer and Rosenberg

6 Comments

A phenomenon occurs when smartphones are turned off: time appears to expand. Minutes lengthen, and an hour becomes tangible. The absence of screens renders the passage of time perceptible. But when a device is reactivated, time seems to contract as notifications and feeds rapidly consume attention, leaving entire afternoons to pass unnoticed.

Overview on Materialist Media Theory

The easiest way to talk about smartphones is still to talk about what we see on them. When we worry about our phones, we tend to worry about content: endless TikToks, unread messages, the feeling of being “addicted” to whatever is happening on the screen. Grant Bollmer asks us to uncover the underlying incentive. In Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction, he argues that focusing on meaning alone traps media studies in what he calls a kind of “screen essentialism”—the assumption that what we see on the screen is all that matters about digital media. For Bollmer, the “content” of a medium is like the piece of meat a burglar throws to distract the watchdog; obscuring the material infrastructures that reorganize space, time, and relation (4). It is key to know how media objects have agency, and thus Bollmer’s central thesis– media are not carriers of immaterial meaning but material actors that reorganize bodies, gestures, cognition, time, space, and social power–which is to be further confirmed by Rosenberg and Blondheim.

The Deprivation Experiment

​Hananel Rosenberg and Menahem Blondheim’s article, “What (Missing) the Smartphone Means,” provides an approach to evaluating Bollmer’s claim. Their deprivation experiment required teenagers to abandon their phones for a week and reflect on the experience of missing this personal device. While the initial focus was potentially the “addiction’ aspect, the findings are more nuanced: participants reflected differently, with positive ones such as “When I got my smart- phone back,” one participant wrote, “I merely touched it and held it—I actually had a pleasant and secure feeling, the mere contact was enough to give me a good sensation” (246). Rosenberg and Blondheim’s results support Bollmer’s argument by demonstrating that the most challenging aspect is not the loss of content but the absence of the infrastructures that transmit messages. The ‘3Ps’ identified in the absence of cellphones align with Bollmer’s principles regarding how media structure sociality through material habits and dependencies. As Bollmer asserts, “Techniques inscribe into the body particular cultural forms and practices that endure over time” (174), highlighting the prosthetic extension of media, which becomes most apparent when it is missing.

​Critical Comparison: Materiality vs Representation

Rosenberg and Blondheim diverge from Bollmer in their interpretation of loss, maintaining an ‘im/material’ distinction by framing the phone as a psychological-representational object linked to identity. Bollmer critiques this perspective, arguing that devices are not primarily symbols or objects of psychological attachment. In his view, the discomfort experienced by teenagers is not a commentary on media meaning, but rather an encounter with the material reorganization of life enacted by the smartphone. The device functions as a material actor that shapes cognition and behavior. Instead of viewing audiences’ ‘misreadings’ (26) as evidence of fluid meaning, Bollmer emphasizes how media technologies structure the very conditions of interpretation. Common feelings of unease with smartphones—such as perceiving others as ‘absent’ (4) or sensing a less ‘real’ (4) world—are often attributed to distraction or authenticity. For Bollmer, however, these responses indicate a failure to consider the materiality of media, which entangles images in processes of action, circulation, and influence. The deprivation experiment demonstrates that media objects serve as ‘tools for thinking and experiencing with,’ not because they transmit signs, but because they modulate the conditions under which signs can emerge.

​Another key distinction between the two texts is their orientation toward the human subject. Rosenberg and Blondheim analyze the smartphone deprivation week primarily through teenagers’ self-reported experiences, treating the device as a psychologically meaningful object whose significance is revealed through subjective interpretation. Their analysis remains human-centered, emphasizing the phone’s importance based on its meaning to users and its influence on cognition and emotion. In contrast, Bollmer rejects this anthropocentric perspective. He asserts that media objects possess agency not because they are interpreted by humans, but because they materially shape the world. For Bollmer, the smartphone is not simply a vessel for symbolic attachment, but an actor within a network of relations, structuring gesture, social coordination, temporality, and affect regardless of user perception. While Rosenberg interprets absence as psychological insight, Bollmer contends that this approach overlooks the more fundamental point: the significance of the smartphone arises from its material operations, which reorganize bodies and social relations.

​Tomb Raider: How Lara Croft Exemplifies Material Coupling

​Bollmer’s analysis of Tomb Raider provides a concrete illustration of his argument. Lara Croft is not simply an ideologically charged symbol, but an affective figure who embodies both empowerment and oppression, engaging viewers through sensations and identifications that transcend representational meaning (26). Bollmer critiques ideological models that conceptualize media as a ‘hypodermic needle,’ arguing that such frameworks overlook the mechanisms by which hegemony is maintained: fleeting gratifications and transient feelings of empowerment that stabilize otherwise unstable social structures (28, 31). According to Bollmer, these effects arise not from content alone, but from the material coupling between bodies and media.

​Bollmer situates this issue within broader debates on interpretation, arguing that media scholarship often treats meaning as contingent, shaped by context, ‘misreading,’ or audience response (26). Concerns about distraction or the perception that smartphone users are ‘absent’ similarly emphasize representational rather than material issues. Bollmer contends that media do not provide the stable ‘presence’ of physical objects (4), nor are humans autonomous agents outside historical context. The ideological contradictions embodied by Lara Croft are not merely interpreted; they are enacted through the player’s physical engagement. The avatar’s exaggerated agility becomes a learned bodily rhythm. Bollmer asserts that the material coupling of player and controller generates a sense of agency associated with Lara, forming an affective loop that cannot be reduced to representation, as it is experienced through embodied feedback and perceptual orientation.

​Conclusion

​All in all, Bollmer and Rosenberg & Blondheim don’t reveal two opposing stories about smartphones so much as two ways of understanding what media are. Rosenberg and Blondheim show us the experiential surface: what it feels like when a device that structures teenage life suddenly disappears. Their findings remind us that smartphones aren’t simply visual portals into immaterial worlds but anchors that stabilize rhythms of sociality, perception, and selfhood. Yet their interpretation remains tied to the logic of representation by demonstrating how phones matter because they symbolize connection, because they’re meaningful to their users, and because their absence produces recognizable psychological effects. Bollmer insists that this is precisely where media analysis must push further. What the deprivation experiment exposes is not just an emotional attachment but a deep material coupling in which bodies, habits, time, and attention have been reorganized by technical infrastructures long before anyone determines what a smartphone “means.”

Works Cited

Rosenberg Hananel, and Menahem Blondheim. “What (missing) the smartphone means: Implications of the medium’s portable, personal, and prosthetic aspects in the deprivation experience of teenagers.” The Information Society, vol. 41, no. 4, 29 Apr. 2025, pp. 239–255, https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2025.2490487. 

Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory An Introduction Grant Bollmer. Zed Books, 2021. 

Cover art: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/422281210585563/

Written by Gina Chang and Nicole Jiao

Critical Comparison

Conversations of Ethical Evaluation in a Materialist Media Ontology

2 Comments

By Colin Angell

Grant Bollmer offers to conversations of media theory — and specifically the ontology governing the metaphysical relationship between humans and media — a process-focussed system theory driven by the distinction of the two as independent actors co-constitutively in broader societal progression. “Our world exists because of what matter performs, and we, too, are material. If we want to create a better world, we have to begin with what matters;” (176) the last sentences of his book Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction summarizes both the essence and the forward-facing direction of his namesake materialist theory. Through his work, he refuses to view media’s relational position as subservient to humans and instead proposes that we ought to see them plainly for what they are before our eyes: physical manifestations of matter occupying the same spaces as our own biological forms. He fronts a view that holds them accountable to their material presence — as culpable agents with the capacity to originate consequential actions felt by other actors. It is with full intention that Bollmer introduces his theory with the impact-aware declarative: “media are locations for the perpetuation of inequality and the management of social difference” (1). 

Although Bollmer defines and sharpens such a non-static system through commentary on how both actors drive broader system change, it is through an understanding of Dennis M. Weiss’s essay Seduced by the Machine: Human-Technology Relations and Sociable Robots that this materialist framework becomes visible as lacking a distinct moral or ethical framework with which to conceptualize relational connotations of media agency. Writing that “we don’t begin with technology but with human cultural life,” (231) Weiss similarly questions a representational ontology of humans and media while offering to supplement the materialist theory with a mandate for human-centred authenticity. While Bollmer teases ethical concerns, the purpose of this essay is to highlight how Weiss’s argument of the necessity for a human-based, empathic evaluation of human-technology interactions lend materialist media theory with the ethical foundations it presently lacks.

Notes on Bollmer

Bollmer’s materialist media theory is one that observes the physical forms of media as constituent objects in reality and their embedded meanings as aspects of their unique, fundamental traits. In introducing his book, he defines it as orienting academic discourse to how human reality has been altered by technology “beyond conscious knowledge of most individuals” in a manner that “representation alone cannot acknowledge. (Bollmer 3)” In challenging representation, Bollmer is referring to a perspective that sees media objects as primarily snared in idealism — as objects whose value exists only through an internal interpretive lens of their content — and instead suggests such items are “material, performative” actors in their own right with corresponding “material effects in organizing bodies, objects, and relations in the real world” (25). Referencing how video game portrayals of gender come to drive not simply individual conceptions of gender stereotypes but wider models of performed identity, he asserts that “to be represented in a democracy is directly articulated to media representation of identities, behaviors, and norms” as it through one’s identity being public that one is “acknowledged as a political actor” (32-33). Although a person exists independent of their portrayal, individual roles become attributed and applied to them through actors with entirely different life-cycles than that of themselves. 

It is here that the fundamental ontology of this materialist theory can be drawn. There is the presence of a clear distinction between a human and media that may act separately from one another but remain conjoined in co-producing each other’s meaning. Described further in his appeal to phenomenological affect theory, the materiality of a medium is understood as subject undergoing a “process of mattering” into a physical medium, leaving “subjects and objects are linked in relation, but in which these relations are inequivalent, even oppositional” (145). Transposing Heidegger’s distinction between things and objects, he argues that it is through an object “independently “support[ing] something independent” (147) that relational value can be observed as necessary for definition of one another while existing as separate entities entirely. For Bollmer, the ontology dictating human and media relations is one which reconciles both of their co-shaping capacities with the material confines with which they both exist in and perpetuate.

Weiss’s Ethical Suggestion

Weiss uses his article to present his belief that we require a human-centred framework from which we could ideally address the tensions of human-media relationships, progressed through a comparison of varying analyses of varying attitudes. Centreing his text around a pseudo-dialectic between the technologically-cynical Sherry Turkle and relatively optimistic views of Peter Paul Verbeek and Mark Coeckelbergh, Weiss applies both views’ gazes on the emotive relationship between humans and technology. Introducing Turkle’s notion of relational artifacts — those that “have states of mind” and call forth the human desire for communication, connection, and nurturance (219) — Weiss cites her clinically observed opinion that these increasingly advanced “machines that exploit human vulnerabilities” (221) leave us “prone to anthropomorphize relational artifacts” and incubate inauthentic, hollowed connections with smudged boundaries “between genuine and simulated emotional responses” (222). However, he argues that Verbec proposes such a pessimistic view is “held captive by a modernist metaphysics that insists on the separation of subjects from objects, humans from artifacts” (223) when, in reality, “human beings are fundamentally interwoven with technology” that “structures and organizes the world” and “shape[s] our existence” relationally (224). 

One end result from this cross analysis is that of the conclusion offered by Weiss; that we must recognize a “view of the human condition, one in which technology takes a central place” (225-236). The potential stored in external media to progress social change while shackling our evaluations to a human-first approach. However, to further progress such a theory is stifled by paradigm shift regarding what we mean by the moniker external. External to what? Within our broader societal systems, it becomes necessary to distinctly conceptualize that humans and media are ontologically independent — where they exist external to one another — while exerting intimate influence over one another. Writing that “we don’t begin with technology but with human cultural life,” Weiss pointing out that “contained within human culture is technology” places the previously described relationship as evidence of fundamentally distinct actors who are intimately woven into the identities of either or (231). 

Analyzing Ontological Agency

Bleeding through Bollmer’s book sporadically are statements suggestive of some scale of moral concern on the author’s end when proposing his theory. Returning again to his introductory proclamation that “media are locations for the perpetuation of inequality and the management of social difference,” (1) he waffles between wax and ernest laments that “materiality means we all exist together.” The latter quote, drawn from his tenth summative thesis, bottlenecks his opinion that “our world exists because of what matter performs, and we, too, are material. If we want to create a better world, we have to begin with what matters” (176). Bollmer flirts with ethical concern, qualifying his critiques of representational theory by reaffirming “we must think critically about how female bodies are represented” (23) and decrying questions to the relevancy of such interpretations as a “reactionary position” basking in “discrimination, prejudice, and hatred” (24). However, it is only from a theory-orientational concern that he suggests this concern, continuing later that it’s a “task of media critique” to interpret representations as malleable “processes into which we have been indoctrinated through cultural and institutional forms.” (27)

It is here that we can underline Bollmer’s aversion to naming what ethical standards ought to guide our evaluation of human-media relationships — something that Weiss is less apprehensive toward. Similarly analyzing gendered technological objects, Weiss argues that there’s a “profound significance of human beings caring for vulnerable others” (230) that is “seldom given attention in philosophy of technology (228) which makes Turkle’s arguments so relevant. Placing “the cultural and institutional factors that shape the need for relational artifacts” (227) as a crucial vertex of analytical attention, Weiss underlines that our analyses must serve humans and not other actors. While Bollmer pulls his theory away from conflict in suggesting that “images and representations” ought to be analyzed in terms of their “performative materiality” (25), Weiss almost directly rebuts the former’s ethical apathy, articulating that “our focus ought not to be on the object world and the status of relational artifacts so much as on the role of caring for others in sustaining a human world” (231). 

————————————

From here, we are presented with two places from which we might move forward. First, it is the reaffirmation of the need to constantly critique new theoretical perspectives with contemporary critiques not from an antagonistic angle but one that seeks to corroborate new creative directions. Second, it is the potential call for the author of baseline theories which present themselves as neutral to rise to the challenge and offer a more pronounced opinion regarding ethics. Commentaries on society cannot be neutral, especially when our argued ontology posits that we “we all exist together” (176). Rather than place appendaged cliches in conclusions out of convenience — even if meant well — it is the responsibility of media scholars to seize our capacity to challenge a priori conceptions as the independent agents are.

Works Cited

Grant. Materialist Media Theory An Introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019, https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/materialist-media-theory-9781501337093/.

Weiss, Dennis M. “Seduced by the Machine Human-Technology Relations and Sociable Robots.” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, pp. 217-232. Canvas Materials.

Critical Comparison

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

2 Comments

By Micah Sébastien Zhang

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

A Broad Introduction

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

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

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

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

The Experiement

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

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

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

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

—— Rosenberg & Blondheim (p.252)

"An Intermittent Clone" — A Reflection & Short Conclusion

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

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

Copyright Disclaimer

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

Works Consulted

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

Rosenberg, Hananel, and Menahem Blondheim. “What (Missing) the Smartphone Means: Implications of the Medium’s Portable, Personal, and Prosthetic Aspects in the Deprivation Experience of Teenagers.” The Information Society, vol. 41, no. 4, Apr. 2025, pp. 239–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2025.2490487.

Footnote(s)

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

Critical Comparison

Morality and Materiality in Digital Technology and Cognition

3 Comments

Introduction

Peter-Paul Verbeek’s examination of the ethics and materiality of digital media in his book, Materilizing Morality, coincides with Grant Bollmer’s seventh thesis as described in Materialist Media Theory: 

“Media transforms cognition and thought. This is either a direct transformation, extending the body beyond the limits of the skin into body-brain-world assemblages, or an indirect one, through technological metaphors that remake how a body is understood”(174).

Verbeek discusses the ethical quandaries surrounding digital media, examining how immaterial modern technologies shape human action, ultimately affecting the material world. Bollmer correspondingly emphasizes media’s significance as an active participant in its consumption, noting how media’s materiality influences its overall message. Furthermore, Bollmer and Verbeek’s works highlight the complex material dynamics of digital media and cognitive processes to understand it. Both are immaterial, yet require material mediators to function effectively and ultimately have material impacts on physical reality. The moral implications and physical responses to immaterial digital media urge consideration of the material consequences of media, regardless of its original form and representation.

Materiality, Representation & Ethics: 

Bollmer challenges the assumption that media and technology are neutral and immaterial forces arguing that media is not passive; rather, it serves as a material infrastructure that mediates and influences the user. He critiques past scholarship that views materiality as self-evident; he states sarcastically that “media are material, period”(16). This satire critiques the notion that materiality simply refers to physicality. For Bollmer, materiality is a more complex concept that encompasses embodiment and representation stating that, “the belief that media is immaterial and detached from physical devices—a popular belief in 1990s’ discussions of cyberspace that persists today—is simply false”(18). This statement clarifies Bollmer’s views, as he sees media as material agents interconnected with physical means. Bollmer’s main argument is that the media shapes the conditions in which the world can be understood. A screen is not just a physical tool but an interface that affects human behavior through how users consume information. To Bollmer, materiality is not separate from meaning but embedded in it, providing a medium for representation to take shape. 

These ideas parallel Verbeek’s theories, similarly rejecting the idea that technology is morally neutral and that ethics exist separate from materiality. Verbeek argues that technology “coshape human action, [giving] material answers to ethical questions of how to act”(361). This perspective views media and technology as material as they mediate human action, ethics, and perception. This is evident with his example about medical imaging devices, as these tools shape how doctors interpret the human body. This example demonstrates how morality is not only about human intention but is shaped by technological design. Verbeek introduces the idea of “scripts,” which indicate how “technologies prescribe human actions”(361). Scripts are the “inscriptions” left by designers, who anticipate how users will interact with a product. To Verbeek, scripts are not merely physical, as technology goes beyond their “function” and influences human action (362). Scripts work as a framework to understanding how technology works to connect humans and materiality. This concept ties into Verbeek’s argument that ethics are embedded within materiality and that design itself is a moral act. Verbeek connects ethics with materiality by showing that technology does not merely carry morality but embodies it. 

Bollmer and Verbeek’s work grounds the argument that media should be viewed as material and reinforces the idea that technology is not neutral. Both theorists show that materiality is intertwined with morality and representation. Bill Brown’s writing Materiality strengthens this argument by demonstrating that materiality is simply about the physicality of an object, but the way objects influence how we experience life, media, and reality. Brown argues that debate on material/immaterial is often misconcluding, as objects that are often viewed as “immaterial,” like scripts or digital communities, still shape how we interact with the world. He points out that material is not solely limited to what is tangible or visible. This correlates with Bollmer’s argument that the materiality of any medium, whether physical (hardware) or digital  (e.g., the internet), shapes how people understand social, political, and cultural norms. Verbeek’s work extends this argument through his concept of “scripts”, demonstrating how technology shapes human action and moral decisions. He reminds the audience that the design of a device carries ethical consequences, as they impact how users perceive the world around them. Together, these viewpoints cause us to reconsider the importance of understanding media’s materiality. If media is seen as immaterial or neutral, we overlook its influence on reality. Treating media as immaterial ignores the political, ethical, and represented work embedded within technology. Bollmer and Verbeek’s theories, with the support of Brown, demonstrate how the media is not a neutral agent of information but a material being that mediates the world around us. 

 

The (Im)Materiality of Digital Media and Cognition

The materiality of digital technology is comparable to that of cognition. Materialist approaches to human cognition view the essence of thought as “[existing] in organizational structure rather than physical matter” and assume that human thoughts can be adequately translated into computational systems, provided they are designed to mimic human brains (Bollmer 127). This conceptualization of thought investigates the very nature of humanity and poses, if our thoughts are equally applicable to digital technologies, what exactly makes us human? 

Viewing our thoughts as finished, tangible materials to be moved and translated results in existentialist ideologies surrounding humanity and technology in the modern age. Instead, we should consider our bodies as materials, not our cognition. Bollmer describes the body–and by extension, the brain–as mediums that “[negotiate] external world and internal sensation” that are both made and modified by the outside world, aligning with Tim Ingold’s concept of transducers: the means through which a message is communicated and understood (Bollmer 118; Ingold 102). By effect, our thoughts are products of, and effectively embody, the experiences of our bodies. Embodiment, within the context of media, is “the cognitive possibility of a body and envisioning technology not as itself but as a mediational extension of the body”(Bollmer 131). Similarly, an embodying relationship with media sees users understanding technologies not as themselves, but as tools to further perceive environments, also using them as extensions of the human body (Verbeek 365). Essentially, embodiment is using media to extend one’s body, effectively incorporating these medias into a material role regardless of their original physicality.

Bollmer defines cognition as an immaterial process that “interprets information within contexts that connect it with meaning”, paralleling Verbeek’s definition of hermeneutic relationship with media (132). Hermeneutic media provides a representation of reality which requires interpretation, establishing a relationship between humans and reality by “[amplifying] specific aspects of reality while reducing other aspects” much like the aforementioned definition of representation (Verbeek 363). The experiences of our physical body dictate our sensory relationship with reality, transforming how we perceive it. Our brains facilitate cognition influenced by physical circumstance and experience, mediating our ultimate conclusions. Likewise, hermeneutic media mediates the world around us, influencing its users’ perceptions and subsequently the cognitive processes they undergo to form understandings.

This relationship between the material brain and immaterial cognition translates to that between digital media and what it communicates. Similar to our bodies, technological artifacts “[facilitate] people’s involvement with reality, and in doing so, [coshape] how humans can be present in their world”(Verbeek 363). Virtual media presents information akin to that presented by our senses, influencing perceptions of reality and therefore physical actions. Both phones and bodies are material, each presenting immaterial media to be processed in our cognition. This immaterial media’s impact grows as it integrates further within our societies, ultimately urging us to reconsider the boundaries of what is deemed material. While our cognition is biased through our own lived experiences, digital media is imbued with the biases of their creators. Consequently, “technologies have “intentions,” they are not neutral instruments but play an active role in the relationship between humans and their world”(Verbeek 365). The structures presenting digital media are saturated with their creators’ biases, influencing their purpose and overall effect, affecting how users interpret them, the conclusions users come to, and their actions in response.

The material definition of cognition and digital media is complex and nuanced. While our phones and brains are decidedly physical, our thoughts and virtual worlds are not, yet digital technologies influence how we act in the material world and how we cognitively process media. Overall, regardless of their immateriality, digital technologies have material effects and should be handled accordingly.

Conclusion

As media students, understanding different lenses on materiality helps us recognize that media does more than just carry information; they reshape how we interact with the world around us. Bollmer and Verbeek show that media are intertwined with materiality, influencing how people think and decide. Media works alongside cognitive processes by mediating our senses and structuring how meaning is formed. This hermeneutic and embodiment view on cognition demonstrates how digital technologies go beyond physicality and influence our experience with reality. For Media students, it’s crucial that we understand that media has material effects: they shape power structures, ethics, and thought processes. Understanding this view on materiality trains us to identify the hidden biases and ethical decisions embedded in technology designs. This framework allows us to expand our ideas of materiality and understand that media matters because of what they “do” and how they “act” within society. 

Works Cited

Bollmer, Grant. “Conclusion: Ten Theses on the Materiality of Media.” Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 173–176. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 15 Nov. 2025. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501337086.0009. 

Brown, Bill. “Materiality.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen, The University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 49-63.

Ingold, Tim. Making. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.

Verbeek, Peter-Paul. “Materializing Morality: Design Ethics and Technological Mediation,” Science, Technology, and Human Values, 2006, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 361-380. 10.1177/0162243905285847. 

Written by Molly Kingsley and Aminata Chipembere

Image by Molly Kingsley

Critical Comparison

Behind the Glass: Seduction as the Missing Piece in Materialist Media Theory

4 Comments

In Materialist Media Theory, Grant Bollmer argues that our media are never immaterial, even if they often feel that way. What appears virtual and weightless is actually grounded in vast infrastructures, sensory demands, physical interfaces, and bodily routines. Bollmer’s central project is to shift media studies away from its traditional focus on representation and toward an understanding of digital technologies as material agents reshaping human perception, experience, and cognition at a fundamental level. However, Bollmer emphasizes materiality; Mark Weiss’s “Seduced by the Machine” emphasizes something more elusive. The emotional, aesthetic, and psychological seductions that draw us toward our devices. Weiss’s account suggests that our relationships with technology cannot be explained solely by reference to hardware, interfaces, or infrastructures. Instead, our attachments are driven by fantasies, desires, and the subtle ways technologies promise mastery, autonomy, and intimacy. If Bollmer gives us the mechanics of media materiality, Weiss gives us the affective charge that makes people care about and often depend on their machines. 

The main argument of this blog post is that Weiss’s concept of technological seduction exposes a significant limit in Bollmer’s materialist framework. While Bollmer helps us understand the physical conditions that shape digital experience, he underestimates the role of pleasure, fantasy, and symbolic attachment in shaping how people engage with media. Weiss complicates Bollmer’s claim that materiality is the primary site of media’s power, suggesting instead that music of this power operates in the immaterial or material realm of desire. 

For Bollmer, digital media only appear immaterial because their interfaces are smooth, their screens are luminous, and their infrastructures are hidden from everyday experience. Beneath this illusion lie data centers, cables, processors, gestures, cognitive adaptations, and bodily postures. Materiality for Bollmer is not just about physical hardware but about all the background conditions that make media possible: how technology occupies space and time, how it organizes sensory experience, and how it silently governs attention, movement, and affect. The point is not simply that machines have bodies, but that their material operations shape our own bodies long before meaning or interpretation comes into play. 

Weiss, however, presents a different angle. In “Seduced by the Machine”, he argues that people are drawn into technological systems not implicitly because of their material affordances but because technologies seduce them. Seduction, in Weiss’s sense, involves allure, desire, and the promise of seamlessness and control. People feel recognized by their devices; they experience the pleasure of instant response, and they embrace the fantasy that the machine “knows” them. This sense of intimacy or fluency is not reducible to the way a touchscreen works, even though that material mechanism makes the feeling possible. It is instead a symbolic and affective process, something closer to psychological enchantment than to bodily conditioning. 

This is where a limit in Bollmer’s framework emerges. Bollmer urges us to look past representation and symbolism, but Weiss suggests that these elements are not distractions from materiality; they help explain why materiality matters in the first place. Technologies succeed not only because they physically shape our habits and perceptions, but because they seduce us into wanting those shapes. The fantasy of immateriality, for instance, is not an innocent misunderstanding that Bollmer can correct by revealing the true material structure of digital media. It is an engineered aesthetic effect that technology companies carefully cultivate. In other words, the illusion of immateriality is part of the seduction. Bollmer’s framework does not fully capture how this illusion is produced or why it is so compelling. Materiality alone also cannot explain technological desire. Bollmer shows how media act on us through bodily rhythms, infrastructural constraints, and neural patterns. However, he doesn’t fully address why users form powerful emotional bonds with devices, nor why they experience guilt, pride, pleasure, or even longing in their technological interactions. Weiss’s emphasis on seduction fills this gap by showing that technologies engage not just our senses but our fantasies, positioning themselves as objects of intimacy and aspiration. 

There is also a political dimension to this critique. Bollmer focuses primarily on the politics of infrastructure, how technology organizes power through access, distribution, and bodily modulation. Weiss introduces another form of power: the politics of seduction. When technologies promise empowerment while quietly increasing dependency, seduction becomes a mechanism of control. It masks coercion behind convenience, and surveillance behind personalization. Bollmer’s framework, while useful for uncovering hidden infrastructures, does not fully account for this more subtle dynamic. This tension between Bollmer and Weiss matters for how we think about digital media today. In class, we have often discussed representation, signification, and the ways media objects act as tools for thought. Bollmer asks us to shift our focus to the material operations that underlie these symbolic processes. Weiss, however, shows that the symbolic dimension cannot be dismissed so easily. The seductive surface of the devices works together with their material operations to shape behaviour and desire. Screen-based media do not fall neatly into categories of material or immaterial, they are materially constricted precisely to appear immaterial. The fantasy of frictionless immediacy is part of their design.

The encounter between Bollmer and Weiss suggests that the im/material distinction itself might be misleading. What matters is how media use the fantasy of immateriality to hide their actual material conditions, and how this fantasy helps produce the forms of attachment that Weiss describes. Materiality and immateriality, in other words, are not opposites. They are co-produced. The sleep interface depends on the heavy infrastructure, the seductive illusion depends on the physical labour and environmental cost that Bollmer wants us to acknowledge. 

Expanding on this entanglement of desire and materiality, it becomes clear that Weiss’s framework forces us to reconsider what counts as “material” in the first place. Bollmer tends to define materiality through physical infrastructures, bodily interfaces, and spatial-temporal structures, while Weiss shows that affect and desire themselves have a kind of material force. Seduction produces real behavioural patterns: people check their phones reflexively, experience phantom vibrations, and organize their days around notifications or algorithmic nudges. These are not simply symbolic effects, they are embodied habits that shape muscle memory, attention spans, and even sleep cycles. In this sense, Weiss pushes materiality into a more psychological or phenomenological register, one that Bollmer gestures toward but does not fully theorize. This broader perspective matters because it highlights how deeply screens shape our lived experience. Even though the interface feels frictionless, the effects it produces are anything but. The seduction of seamlessness often results in fragmented attention, compulsive scrolling, and a form of low-level dependency that becomes part of everyday life. When a device feels natural or indefensible, this is not a purely material process, it is a combination of affect, design, and desire. Bollmer’s emphasis on infrastructure helps us understand why these patterns emerge, but Weiss helps us understand why they persist and why users rarely resist them. Together, these insights reveal that any serious critique of digital media must move beyond a strict materialist lens. Seduction is not a superficial or secondary effect but a crucial part of how technologies maintain their power. If Bollmer uncovers what digital media are, Weiss uncovers why we let them in so easily, and why they’re so hard to give up. 

Ultimately, a fuller theory of digital media requires combining Bollmer’s attention to material conditions with Weiss’s account of technological seduction. Bollmer helps us see the infrastructures and bodily routines that shape digital experience, while Weiss helps us understand why those experiences are so compelling and why users so willingly submit to them. If Bollmer shows us how media shapes us, Weiss shows us why we cooperate.  By bringing the two thinkers together, we get a clearer picture of the power of screen-based technologies. They are material objects that create immaterial desires, physical infrastructures concealed beneath seductive illusions. And it is precisely through this entanglement, not through materiality alone, that media exert their deepest influence on everyday life. 

Critical Comparison

Siri-ously Performing: When Media Does More Than Talk Back

6 Comments

Introduction:

Grant Bollmer’s Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction reframes how we understand media. For Bollmer, “What media are must be understood in terms of what they do materially—media make things happen” (Bollmer 6). This idea of “performative materialism” insists that media are not passive symbols but active forces that shape the world. Bollmer defines materialism as “a set of perspectives united by the claim that physical materiality—be it of a technology, practice, or body—matters in the shaping of reality” (1). He insists media studies remain politically engaged, balancing how media functions and what they signify. By doing so, Bollmer creates space to analyze technologies like Siri as both material systems and sites of representation.

The voice assistant is not merely a representation of service or femininity, but through Bollmer’s lens, a performative system that materializes social hierarchies through speech, affect, and design. With Peter-Paul Verbeek’s theory of “technological mediation” and Emily McArthur’s discussion of Siri’s “posthuman aura,” we can see how Siri’s design and discourse perform gender materially. Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) develops this idea further, exploring what happens when a digital voice assistant gains emotion and self-awareness. Collectively, these works suggest that digital media do more than represent gender; they actively enact it through material and affective processes.


Image Credit: Apple


Bollmer’s Performative Materialism – When Media Do Things:

Bollmer argues that media should be understood as performative entities that act. He proposes that representations function as material practices that produce effects in the world rather than merely reflecting it. Drawing on J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory, he explains this idea through examples such as saying “I do” at a wedding or naming a vehicle; statements can create rather than describe reality. In the same way, media enact realities through their words, sounds, and interfaces.

This view revises decades of representational critique. In his introduction, Bollmer writes that media scholars have long been “content reading media,”  focusing on “what an image signifies” and “how representations construct specific ways of understanding identities and the world” (1-2). While these analyses remain important, he argues that they cannot explain how media has the power to shape and influence reality. To think only about meaning is to ignore the physical infrastructures embedded in media that enable and shape experience (3). In this sense, performative materialism links media’s representational effects to their material actions. It’s not enough to interpret what Siri’s voice means; we must examine how it influences users to command, obey, and emotionally invest in technology

While Bollmer’s performative materialism is compelling, it risks attributing too much agency to media themselves, potentially underplaying the role of users, social context, or systemic forces. By focusing on what media does materially, there is a danger of suggesting that technologies act independently of the human and institutional frameworks that produce, distribute, and interact with them. In other words, media are undeniably active, but their actions are often entangled with existing social hierarchies, cultural norms, and economic systems. This tension highlights the need to pair performative materialism with approaches, like Verbeek’s technological mediation, that consider the co-constitution of humans and media.

Image Credit: Suebsiri

Verbeek and the Ethics Built into Design

Peter-Paul Verbeek’s essay “Materializing Morality” aligns with Bollmer’s argument by locating ethics within design itself. “Technological artifacts are not neutral intermediaries but actively coshape people’s being in the world” (Verbeek 364). Through technological mediation, artifacts co-constitute human action. Technological designers materialize morality by embedding values and expectations into devices. The morality of things is to be found in the ways they mediate human actions and decisions.

Verbeek’s perspective shows that morality and materiality are inseparable. The design of a device guides how we act. Its voice, tone, and affordances all impact our decisions and influence our perspective while serving its purpose. Bollmer’s performative materialism extends this by arguing that the media themselves, not just their designers or users, perform meaning. A voice assistant like Siri doesn’t just represent compliance; it performs it through sound, language, and repetition.

Siri and the Feminized Performance of Technology

Emily McArthur’s essay “The iPhone Erfahrung” examines Siri as a piece of technology that exists in a liminal space; Siri is not exactly human, but not exactly a “thing” either (McArthur 115). Her analysis demonstrates how Apple strategically designed Siri with a posthuman aura: “the sense of uniqueness and authenticity” accredited to Walter Benjamin (115). This inexplicable aura, once associated with art, has now transferred to technology like Siri, achieving incomprehensible feats by blurring the line between human and technology (114).

Siri is programmed to sound almost human while keeping a slightly artificial tone. McArthur describes this as being a deliberate decision from Apple, reminding users that they are interacting with technology rather than a human (119). Her evasive answers about humanity or gender reinforce this effect, encouraging users to marvel at the system’s sophistication rather than to connect with it personally. This hypermediated design amplifies Siri’s posthuman aura; like Benjamin’s description of how objects with aura command attention, Siri accumulates and responds to data, gradually learning from the user while subtly shaping the interaction.

Siri occupies a liminal space—both familiar and uncanny—where her aura operates performatively rather than representationally. Her feminized voice and courteous tone enact digital labour that mirrors gendered expectations of service, making obedience feel naturalized rather than demanded. Bollmer’s framework explains this process: instead of reflecting social norms, Siri’s utterances do gender, turning speech into material action (Bollmer 46).

Drawing on Judith Butler, Bollmer argues that gender is not something one is but something one does; a series of repeated acts that give social meaning through performance. Siri’s vocal design thus becomes a technological performance of femininity that both exposes and reproduces the norms it imitates. Her polite responses translate cultural scripts of service into material interaction, making ideology tangible through everyday use. Each exchange rehearses mastery and compliance, teaching users how to internalize gendered labour as natural.

Verbeek’s theory of technological mediation extends this idea: Siri’s personality and voice result from design decisions that embed moral and cultural assumptions into technology. Her compliance is engineered, showing how morality and materiality are inseparable. From this view, Siri’s feminized behaviour becomes both a design and an ethical issue, mediating users’ sense of power, empathy, and dependency. Bollmer’s performative materialism reveals that these interactions do not merely symbolize hierarchy but enact it materially through voice, repetition, and affect.

Image Credit: Composed by Sam Garcea using an Apple Emoji and Illustration by Alex Castro

Labour? I Hardly Know Her: Intimacy, Siri, and the Posthuman Aura

Spike Jonze’s Her extends these dynamics into a speculative narrative. Samantha, the AI voiced by Scarlett Johansson, continues Siri’s design: a voice that learns, feels, and loves. The film illustrates Bollmer’s claim that statements make things happen, showing how Samantha’s language shapes emotional and social realities that transform Theodore’s life. Her performative speech blurs the line between representation and action, as her affection produces tangible change.

Verbeek’s concept of materialized morality is also relevant. Samantha’s behaviour reflects the moral structure of her programming, influencing Theodore’s habits and expectations. The film’s tenderness hides this mediation, showing how design can naturalize emotional dependence. Like Siri, Samantha’s femininity is coded to soothe and serve, making intimacy a function. What seems like spontaneous affection is, in Verbeek’s terms, a technologically mediated moral relation.

Both examples reveal what McArthur calls the posthuman aura, the sense that technology carries authenticity and presence. This aura hides the infrastructures and hierarchies that sustain it. Bollmer’s framework shows how that aura reinforces systems of inequality, especially around gendered labour and emotional work.

Image Credit: Her (2013) Directed by Spike Jonze

When Representation Performs

The cases of Siri and Samantha illustrate that performativity does not replace representation but operates through it. While both technologies enact gendered behaviours, those behaviours are still read and experienced as representations of femininity. Bollmer’s point that representation itself is material becomes crucial here. What we perceive as symbolic acts—tone, politeness, service—are in fact material processes that shape how gender and power are lived through technology.

This interdependence complicates the idea that performativity “abandons” representation. Instead, representation becomes active, participating in the very performances it describes. Siri and Samantha’s voices thus blur not only the line between human and machine but also between meaning and action.

The Capitalist Aura

McArthur’s discussion of Siri connects this performance to capitalism’s affective economy. The assistant’s calm tone and perpetual readiness reinforce ideals of productivity, comfort, and control. Her politeness conceals the systems of labour and surveillance that sustain her operation. In Her, Samantha’s emotional intimacy becomes the next stage of this logic: connection itself becomes a commodity.

Bollmer’s approach exposes how these technologies participate in broader networks of inequality. The feminized aura of helpfulness and empathy reinforces existing hierarchies, making subservience appear natural and care transactional. Verbeek’s mediation theory adds that these effects are not accidental—they emerge from design decisions that translate social and moral norms into technical form.

Moments when these systems falter, such as Siri’s mishearing or Samantha’s disappearance, momentarily expose their material foundations. These breakdowns align with Bollmer’s insistence that the infrastructures behind media matter: the code, servers, and networks that make digital performance possible. When they become visible, the illusion of effortless intimacy collapses, revealing media’s performative power as both constructed and constrained.

Conclusion

Bollmer’s performative materialism redefines media as actors within social and political systems rather than neutral channels of meaning. Verbeek’s technological mediation complements this view by showing how design itself carries ethical weight. McArthur’s analysis of Siri and Jonze’s portrayal of Samantha demonstrate how these theories play out in practice: both assistants perform gender and morality through voice, interaction, and emotional appeal.

Seen together, these perspectives reveal that media do not simply depict power—they enact it. Siri and Samantha extend Butler’s notion of gender performativity into the digital sphere, repeating and reifying scripts of service, care, and obedience. Bollmer’s question—what does media do?—finds its answer here: through everyday interaction, our technologies reproduce the very hierarchies they seem to transcend. Understanding media as performative materialities forces us to confront the ethics of their design and the politics embedded in their use.

By Sam Garcea

Works Cited:

Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. Accessed 10 November 2025.

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

McArthur, Emily. “The iPhone Erfahrung: Siri, the Auditory Unconscious, and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Aura.’” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, 2014, pp. 113-128.

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

Heading Image: Her by Studioroeu

Critical Comparison

Materialism and Mediation: The Shared Critique of the Subject-Object Divide

1 Comment

Photo by Aubrey Ventura

Introduction

Grant Bollmer’s Materialist Media Theory and Dennis Weiss’ “Seduced by the Machine” both show how media are material forces that structure experience. Bollmer emphasizes how infrastructures perform power and organize social relations, while Weiss highlights how technologies act through the body. While Bollmer focuses on the political and social effects of material media, Weiss raises ethical questions about the authenticity of emotions mediated by technology. Together, they show that mediation is both material and emotional, intertwining power, feeling, and ethical experience in human life.

Overview of Bollmer’s (2019) Materialist Media Theory 

Grant Bollmer’s Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction (2019) explores how materialist perspectives shape how we understand and study media. Bollmer argues that “media and technology are not mere tools” that shape our perceptions of power and discrimination; instead, they are “locations for the perpetuation of inequality and the management of social difference” (Bollmer 1). Throughout the book, he critiques the common form of solely studying symbols and representations in media studies, claiming that it disregards how media truly produce cultural and political effects. He explains that when we “only examine meaning, what a medium is and does is limited to human perception and experience,” which he identifies as a key flaw in traditional meaning-based media studies education (Bollmer 2). Instead, he encourages a materialist approach, where media act as “participants” that influence our relations with people, objects, and ideas, rather than serving as a passive, neutral tool (Bollmer 25).

Overview of Dennis M. Weiss’ “Seduced by the Machine” 

Dennis M. Weiss’s essay “Seduced by the Machine: Human-Technology Relations and Sociable Robots” (2014) from Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman tries to answer key questions related to sociable robots and “relational artifacts,” machineries designed to mimic emotions, empathy, and human connection. Weiss has used four major perspectives to support his discussion. He has used Turkle’s “Machines Take Advantage of Human Vulnerability” to “seduce us into a relationship” (Turkle et al. 2006, 326). This can lead to a new kind of “loner yet never alone,” an extended loneliness, and a feeling of loss and longing that paradoxically arises in the context of an abundance of networked connections. Later, with Corry and Allenby in Final Position, bringing the ideas on emotional companionship, Corry describes the intense relief of one when receiving the illusion of a companion, which suggests that machines can fulfill a basic human social connection. However, Allenby, after fulfilling a human contact, is later shot to prove Corry’s point of emotional bonding between human and machine, which raises the question of how to understand the role of relational robots in our lives. (Weiss 218) Lastly, Weiss mentions Verbeek’s philosophical counterargument on the separation of subjects from objects, bringing a cautious view on how technology can co-shape human existence and morality, that “we are profoundly technologically mediated beings” (Weiss 223).

Comparison of Bollmer’s and Seduce by the Machine

The strongest bond between Weiss and Bollmer is the broader philosophical critique of the separation between humans and technology, which is the central project of Bollmer’s materialism theory. In his work on materialism, Bollmer claims that “physical materiality… matters in the shaping of reality” in his Thesis 9, which, with media, we come into contact with and become something else (Bollmer, 176), with the key concept of interacting with some medium that alters human beings. This is going hand in hand with Weiss’s argument using Verbeek’s theory: “Humans and technologies do not have a separate existence anymore but help to shape each other in myriad ways” (Weiss 224). To further support this case, in Bollmer’s book, he states that “media are performative.” He sees them as active participants: they do things. They shape how people, objects, and ideas relate to one another. He also argues that media are “vital objects, possessive of their own agencies and abilities” (Bollmer 176). This is similar to Verbeek’s philosophical argument that technologies are not just tools but actively “co-shape” human existence, morality, and perception. For example, the sociable robot, Paro, is the evidence for this case study, with the robot’s material design, which is fluffy and reacts to touch. It becomes a presence that shapes the person’s emotional response and social habits, which might match the definition of “companion.”

However, the authenticity of human emotion is the core of the contradiction between Bollmer’s theory and Weiss’s essay. While Bollmer’s materialism tries to move away from centering human experience and avoiding reducing the machines to human experience to focus more on material performance and political outcome, especially in thesis 5. Weiss focuses more on the simulated emotion (machine) and authentic emotion (human), which is the core of Turkle’s critique. In his conclusion, the Twilight Zone episode reveals the ethical cost of such mediation. The prisoner Corry fell into despair and realized that the companionship with Allenby was only an illusion, which shows a hierarchy where human connection is morally superior to the machine-mediated one.

Distinguishing the Im/material in screen-based media

The distinction between what is material and what is immaterial has become increasingly vague with the rise of new media and technology, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence. Bollmer argues that “media are vital objects, possessive of their own agencies and abilities,” meaning that even intangible forms of media, such as an app interface and networks, influence our perception and behaviours. (Bollmer 174). On the other hand, Weiss’s focus on “social” robots and their ability to mimic human emotions and empathy exhibits its need for material design, such as their programmed tone of voice and trained outputs. Weiss explains that “the truth is that we are profoundly technologically mediated beings,” indicating that our emotional and thinking processes are continually built by the technologies we interact with. Considering this, the ability to differentiate between material and immaterial does not have much value in the context of screen-based media, as scrolling through an app or talking to an AI chatbot relies on physical systems and even our own bodies to operate.

The importance of Materiality in Media Technology

According to Bollemer, materiality can be considered the basis of media, and to understand media, one has to move beyond the representation and meaning to how they act, affect, and structure relations between humans and technology, in other words, the material means. Weiss reinforces this by quoting the views of Turkle, who has written, “Material culture carries emotions” and ideas of startling intensity (Turkle 6) in Evocative Objects, and noting that media technology is already interacting and reshaping the material world. Concluding from both readings, materiality is crucial when it comes to discussing media technology because the function – or the “affordance” – of media technology is what humans can discern directly. This is the first step of understanding media technology, which is rapidly evolving and developing new applications every day. 

The affordance of media technology changes as their materiality changes, as Bollemer noted; media are not neutral and produce and sustain power structures through their material existence. Weiss supports this through examples and presents that the difference in materiality caused a large division in the human’s attitude towards machines, which shows the importance of materiality when it comes to discussing media technology. 

Link back to previous readings

Bollmer argues that media are “not mere tools” but “locations for the perpetuation of inequality and the management of social difference” (Bollmer 3), shaping how we relate to others, objects, and the world. By defining media as performative, things that act and make things happen, Bollmer emphasizes that technological mediation is an active, material process organizing human experience. Media are not neutral backdrops; they structure social relations and determine which bodies, histories, and interactions are made visible. Weiss illustrates this on a bodily level, showing that human attention, emotion, and desire are shaped by technological design. Users are pulled into emotional and social patterns by technology, and interfaces guide how they interact, showing that humans and machines shape each other. Annalee Newitz’s “My Laptop” personalizes this idea, describing a reciprocal relationship of care and dependence: “It doesn’t just belong to me; I also belong to it” (Newitz 88). Together, these works show that mediation operates materially, socially, and emotionally, challenging the traditional separation between subjects and objects. Humans don’t act alone on passive tools but are connected with technology, which influences who we are, how we interact, and what matters to us.

Conclusion

Between the two readings, what defines materiality is presented in various ways. In conclusion, materiality is the wires, the shape, and the technical form of the medium, as well as the way they “speak” and “express” to humans. Bollmer and Weiss may both agree that materiality is the crucial element in defining a media technology, which is not only a tool but also an outlet that shapes and bends our emotions and perception of the world. 

Works Cited

Dennis, Weiss M. “Design, Mediation & The Post Human. Chapter Eleven, Seduced by the Machine: Human-Technology Relations and Sociable Robots.” Accessed 8 Nov. 2025. 

Grant, Bollmer. “Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction.” Bloomsbury, www.bloomsbury.com/us/materialist-media-theory-9781501337093/. Accessed 8 Nov. 2025. 

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.

Turkle, Sherry. Evocative Objects: Things we work with. The MIT Press. 2011. https://williamwolff.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/turkle-objects-2011.pdf. Accessed 9 Nov. 2025.

Turkle et al. “A Nascent Robotics Culture: New Complicities for Companionship.” [online] AAAI Technical Report Series, July 2006. Available at: web.mit.edu/sturkle/www/nascentroboticsculture.pdf.

Contributors: Lorriane Chua, Siming Liao, Eira Nguyen, Aubrey Ventura

Critical Comparison

The Invisible Interface: Materializing Morality in Media Design

7 Comments

In Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction and Materializing Morality, both Bollmer and Verbeek argue that media and technology play a performative and biased role in influencing human actions and the world. Though written almost 20 years apart, both pieces share critical concerns that can be productively examined through a relevant design-centered foundation. The Double Diamond Design Process, developed by the British Design Council in 2005, provides a fitting and contemporarily relevant lens for this comparison. Consisting of four iterative stages—Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver—the Double Diamond represents the cyclical research, prototyping, and evaluation phases of designing a product or experience. Through this framework, I position both theorists as offering insight into the ethical and material conditions of design, and all of us as designers who must understand and critically navigate the systems we create and inhabit.

The 4 Ds of the Double Diamond design-thinking model (Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver). From Dwass, S. (2023, January 30).

In the Discover phase, designers start by researching and reframing challenges through human needs and contextual insights (Design Council, 2019). Bollmer and Verbeek both provide extensive research to argue against the common misconception that media and technology are neutral, immaterial tools. Instead, they argue that technologies are deeply performative—they shape how we act, think, and relate to the world around us. Bollmer’s (2019) point of performative materialism states that in order to know what media are, the concentration should not be on the content that it presents but rather what actions they create in the material world. Verbeek echoes this sentiment through his concept of technological mediation, or the role of technology in human action (how we are present in their world) and human experience (how the world is present to us). A clear example of this is eyeglasses: the user’s focus is not on the glasses themselves but rather the world they reveal and the visual experience that they mediate – the tool becomes an extension of the body and human life (Verbeek, 2006, p. 365). To exemplify this, both scholars reference philosopher Martin Heidegger notion of “readiness-in-hand”: tools disappear into the background of use until they malfunction and become present-at-hand (Heidegger, as cited in Verbeek, 2006, p. 364). In UX design, this principle aligns with the notion that effective interfaces “disappear” so users can focus on their tasks (Fowler, 2019). This invisibility can become negatively habitual: gestures like swiping left or right on a phone are now so deeply internalized that users forget the device’s mechanics, effectively training the body to perform unconsciously (WIRED, 2022). These examples illustrate Verbeek’s and Bollmer’s shared critique: technologies mediate our relationship with the world by prescribing ways of seeing and acting. From this phase, we learn that media artifacts should be approached not as transparent tools but as active participants in human-world relationships.

In the Define phase, designers synthesize insights into a clear, actionable human need which becomes the target of the design solution (Design Council, 2019). As we delve deeper into the arguments of media and materiality present in these two texts, Bollmer and Verbeek converge on the underlying problem: the need to design with awareness of technological intentionality: the ways technologies amplify certain realities while reducing others. Verbeek (2006) draws from Don Ihde’s notion that technologies have “intentions” embedded in their design. For instance, we have a hermeneutic relation to a thermometer that does not result in a direct sensation of heat or cold but gives a value that requires interpretation to make a statement about reality. Similarly, ultrasound imaging renders the fetus visible as a diagnostic object, shaping moral decisions about birth and health. In this sense, technologies do not merely represent reality, they also construct what counts as real and morally actionable. However, these intentionalities are not fixed – they are shaped by the relationship humans have with the artifacts. This idea, which Idhe coined as “multistability”,  can be seen in the telephone and typewriter being originally developed as equipment for the blind and hard of hearing instead of mass communication and writing technologies (p. 369). Bollmer (2019) parallels this with his engagement of the encoding/decoding model from cultural studies: although media texts are encoded with intended meanings, audiences are creative in their interpretations and may very well receive a message that is antithetical to the creator’s intent. He draws on the controversial claim of “the death of the author” (Barthes 1977, 142–48) because the true control of a text’s meaning for a reader comes not from the text itself, but from the context in which it is read. We can now see how the design of technology and media is an inherently moral activity when we are creating technologies that appear to give material answers to ethical questions. Verbeek stresses that as media creators, we have a unique responsibility of “materializing morality”, and considering the mediating role that technologies will eventually play in society, whether aligned with our intention or not (2006, p. 370). Bollmer (2019) complements this by situating materiality within power and politics, arguing that “relations of opposition and conflict” are inseparable from design’s performative agency (pp. 174–176). The problem statement arising from this Define stage could then be: how might we design media and technologies that make their mediating influence visible and ethically accountable, so that users and creators alike can recognize how design choices shape perception, interpretation, and moral action?

In the Develop phase, designers prototype and test potential solutions, iterating toward a design that balances functionality, context, and ethics (Design Council, 2019). Both Bollmer and Verbeek highlight the importance of anticipating the mediating role technologies will play once situated in society. Verbeek introduces the concept of scripts, or implicit instructions that artifacts have embedded in their material design. For example, a stop sign has the script “stop when you see me”, and we follow this instruction because of what it signifies, not because of its material presence in the relation between humans and the world (2006, p. 367). Bollmer (2019) complements this with his focus on semiotics, noting that while media operate through systems of meaning and representation, designers must move beyond mere symbolism to engage with how technologies act materially in the world (pp. 41–46). However, both scholars agree that semiotic methods cannot be the sole philosophy of design today. Technologies are able to exert influence as material things, not only as signs or carriers of meaning, and should be created with this in mind. Because technologies are multistable, their future uses and mediations are inherently uncertain. Verbeek therefore recommends conducting mediation analyses, or imaginative exercises where designers envision possible user interactions and ethical consequences. This anticipatory reflection bridges the gap between the context of design and the context of use (2006, p. 374). A classic example is the speed bump: it embodies moral intention (“slow down”) through physical form, while simultaneously limiting perceived freedom for drivers. These trade-offs illustrate that every design choice creates a negotiation between competing values and stakeholders. Bollmer (2019) extends this to and asserts that design prototypes not only mediate actions but also perform political struggles. Materiality is not neutral; it structures who can act, who can speak, and whose perspectives are amplified or reduced (pp. 175–176). Thus, the Develop phase becomes an important exercise in iterative ethical reflection: designers must continuously test how their material decisions mediate power, freedom, and meaning in lived contexts.

In the Deliver phase, designers refine and release a final design that responds to user and ethical insights gathered through iteration (Design Council, 2019). For both Bollmer and Verbeek, this stage is not merely about delivery but about accountability and understanding design outcomes within larger material and moral environments. Bollmer’s concept of neurocognitive materialism (2019, pp. 171–175) highlights how the body, brain, and media form a single interactive system. To deliver responsibly, designers must recognize that the artifacts they produce literally shape the embodied experience of being human. Verbeek (2006) shares this concern, emphasizing that designers cannot simply “inscribe” a desired form of morality into an artifact. Delivery of media artifacts requires the acknowledgement that once a design enters the world, it becomes co-authored by users and contexts, and morality becomes a shared responsibility between humans and technologies (as illustrated in Figure 1). Altogether, Bollmer and Verbeek remind us that delivering a media product to the public is a reflective act of material responsibility. Through this lens, delivering a design no longer means finalizing product details, it means nurturing an ongoing relationship between humans, matter, and ethics. As Bollmer concludes, “Materiality means we all exist together, in one world… If we want to create a better world, we have to begin with what matters” (2019, p. 176). As media consumers and creators, we must remember that what matters is not only the usability or efficiency of media systems but also the ethical weight of their mediations and the ways in which design makes, and remakes, our shared reality.

Sources of Mediation. From Verbeek, P.-P. (2006).

Citations:
Bollmer, G. (2019). Materialist media theory: An introduction. Bloomsbury Academic.
British Design Council. (2019). The double diamond: A universally accepted depiction of the design process. https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-resources/the-double-diamond/history-of-the-double-diamond/
 Fowler, D. (2019). The design of everyday things: How design makes us think. MIT Press.
Verbeek, P.-P. (2006). Materializing morality: Design ethics and technological mediation. Science, Technology & Human Values, 31(3), 361–380.
WIRED. (2022). How phone taps and swipes train us to be better consumers. https://www.wired.com/story/phone-interface-trains-us-to-be-consumers/

Critical Comparison

Are We Living Authentically?

3 Comments

How should we define authenticity? As humans grow more attached to digital media, the distinction between the virtual world and authentic, “real life” grows convoluted. Alison Landsberg’s chapter, “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner”, demonstrates the tendency of viewers to adopt emotional movie scenes as authentic memories of their own. In “The iPhone Erfahrung: Siri, the Auditory Unconscious, and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Aura’”, Emily McArthur demonstrates how Siri, a voice-activated personal assistant, situates users in seemingly authentic human power dynamics. Both Landsberg and McArthur emphasize the “posthuman” nature of our modern world where memories and identities, manufactured by media, become injected into our bodies. Together, their texts question whether mediated memories and identities can be deemed authentic.  

Landsberg believes authentic human representation exists in mediated memory. Unlike Baudrillard who believes modern society is divorced from the “‘real’” and entrapped in “a world of simulation” (qtd. in Landsberg 178), Landsberg argues such a distinction never existed in the first place since “information cultures” and “narrative” have always mediated “real”, lived experience (178). She expands her belief by discussing how movie scenes can feel just as real as lived memories. Like Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, she emphasizes cinema’s ability to produce societal change and “political” collectivism (181). During a moving cinematic experience, audience members may identify with characters and their on-screen adversities; as a result, Landsberg notes films hold “potential to alter one’s actions in the future” (179-180). To Landsberg, movie scenes are not mere fragments of mass media, but “prosthetic memories” which audiences adopt as their own. Unlike natural memories–experienced individually and firsthand–prosthetic memories are acquired virtually, without truly experiencing them (180). Nevertheless, like all memories, prosthetic memories construct identity and how we empathize with others (176). 

As suggested in the title of her text, Landsberg explores the portrayal of prosthetic memories in popular dystopian films such as Total Recall and Blade Runner. In Total Recall, the protagonist, Quade, discovers his life has been manufactured by “the Agency” (Landsberg 181). As a result, he recollects a past he has not experienced; his life has been constructed of injected memories, raising the “question of his identity” (181). His privileging of these memories over his natural self is especially prominent when he is unable to recognize “his face on a portable video screen” (181-182); he associates his authentic self with his prosthetic memories, rather than his facial features, posing the question of whether Quade’s implanted memories are more authentic than his own human body (182). Blade Runner similarly investigates the difference between authentic and inauthentic memory. Rachel, the love interest to Deckard, the film’s protagonist, is an enslaved humanlike robot known as a “replicant”; her memories are manufactured by her employer, Mr. Tyrell, who ensures control over replicants by manipulating their pasts (Landsberg 177). When Rachel plays the piano for Deckard, she states she “‘remember[s] lessons’”; here, Deckard ignores her fabricated past (185). She plays “beautifully” regardless of whether her lessons were prosthetic or “‘real’”, posing the question of whether lived, self-produced memories are better than prosthetic ones (185). To Rachel, her memories of these lessons are real, authentic, and personal even though they are manufactured. Altogether, Landsberg interprets the film as a demonstration that memories, regardless if they are prosthetic or lived, construct meaningful, seemingly authentic identities. Like Total Recall, Blade Runner obscures our distinction between inauthentic, manufactured memories and real, lived experience. 

While Landsberg merges the worlds of prosthetic and authentic memory, McArthur blurs the distinction between machine and human by discussing Siri, a virtual voice-activated assistant. McArthur defines Siri as a “natural language processor” (NLP), a machine that communicates with users through “human language” (116). She notes that “language ability” is typically defined as the factor that “‘makes us human’”; however, digital programs like Siri who produce human speech subvert this notion (116). She notes that Siri produces a humanlike voice through invisible processes of “translation and synthesis” (117). She can be similarized to a being, rather than a set of machinic parts, since a user only hears Siri’s personalized speech that uses “colloquial language” and addresses the user by their name (117). While a traditional Google search produces innumerous results, Siri replicates authentic human communication by providing a singular response to its user’s inquiry (117). In addition to prosthetic memories, Siri’s computer-engineered, anthropomorphic state obscures the difference between inauthentic and authentic. 

Overall, Landsberg and McArthur demonstrate the ability of media to construct identity. Landsberg demonstrates how prosthetic memory defines “personhood and identity” by citing Herbert Blumer’s studies of young adult reactions to films (187, 179). In his studies, Blumer found several respondents practiced “‘imaginative identification’”–the unconscious projection of “‘oneself into the role of hero or heroine’” (qtd. in Landsberg 179). Landsberg illustrates “imaginative identification” as especially impactful; she emphasizes that one respondent who adopted the identity of The Sheik’s “‘heroine’” even felt the kisses of a fictional love interest (Blumer qtd. in 179). Conversely, McArthur demonstrates how NLPs like Siri produce “social hierarchies ” in addition to identity (116). She notes Siri imitates classist and gendered human dynamics by resembling a “‘personal assistant’” who answers to the wishes of her user (119). Additionally, Siri’s effeminate voice accentuates her “secretarial” tone; by acting as an assistant, her user adopts the identity of a master (119, 120). Furthermore, the user, regardless of their class, becomes a “bourgeois subject” by gaining an immediate “sense of power” over Siri (119).  In combination, Landsberg and McArthur demonstrate how media and technology form authentic human identities. 

Prosthetic memory and NLPs are also theorized to produce authentic bodily effects. For example, Landsberg mentions the “Payne Studies” which aimed to calculate the ability of film to physically affect “the bodies of its spectators” (180). Observations of spectators’ “electrical impulses”, “‘circulatory system[s]’”, “respiratory pulse and blood pressure” revealed the potential of film to cause “physiological symptoms” (180). This hypothesis aligns with “‘innervation’”, a Benjaminian view that “bodily experience” and “the publicity of the cinema” can generate collective social movements (Landsberg 181). While films potentially induce diverse biological responses, NLPs like Siri, transform the human body’s processing of sound. McArthur notes humans unknowingly  “tune out” noises, transferring them to their “unconscious”; she equates this instinct to seeing “‘without hearing’” (Simmel qtd. in 121). Siri, a “disembodied technological voice”, however, forces users to hear “‘without seeing’”; her lack of physical form forces users to rely on different senses (122). As a result, prosthetic memory and NLPs alike produce authentic, corporeal effects.

In our lectures and tutorials, we have often discussed media’s establishment of body standards, virtual identities in video games, and avatars on dating sites; this comparison of texts expands this discussion by showing a melding of virtual and “real” life through film and NLPs. The authentic and anthropomorphic qualities of new media demonstrate that the “posthuman” era is not a faraway prediction embedded in dystopian futures; rather, it is situated in our present. Modern reliance on media as a guide for identity formation is prominent in our adoption of cinematic prosthetic memory and our widespread use of humanlike NLPs. While Landsberg demonstrates films’ abilities to implant prosthetic memory and construct identity, McArthur demonstrates natural language processors’ abilities to construct identity by placing users in power dynamics. The impact of prosthetic memory and natural language processors  can also be perceived through their corporeal effects. Altogether, these powerful forms of media entangle the concepts of inauthentic and authentic. 

Works Cited

McArthur, Emily. “The iPhone Erfahrung Siri, the Auditory Unconscious, and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Aura’.” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, edited by Dennis M. Weiss, Amy D. Propen, and Colby Emmerson Reid, ch. 6, Bloomsbury Publishing, 14 Aug. 2014, pp. 113-127. 


Landsberg, Alison. “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner.” Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, edited by Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, SAGE Publications, 1995, pp. 175-189.

Photo Credit

Yap, Jeremy. turned on projector. Unsplash, 9 Nov. 2016, https://unsplash.com/photos/turned-on-projector-J39X2xX_8CQ.

Written by Emily Shin

Critical Comparison

Human-Technological Relations: An Exploration of McArthur and Van Den Eede

1 Comment

Emily McArthur and Yoni Van Den Eede, through an exploration of Siri via Walter Benjamin’s definition of the ‘aura’ and self-tracking technologies through Marshall McLuhan’s extension theory of media, explore the relationship between humans and technology and the ways in which interactions between the two shape the media ecology. In this post, I will be comparing the two texts in order to find common ground and points of difference between the two and point out the ways in which each author conceptualizes the boundaries between the human body and technological mediation.

McArthur

McArthur builds a case for the aura of technological devices and programs. Walter Benjamin’s definition of aura is ‘the sense of uniqueness’, which deteriorates due to forces of technological reproduction. However, he has a positivist attitude towards technological development, as the destruction of aura also destroys the mysticality inherent in it, and essentially leads to a democratization of art (McArthur 115). 

Originally, Benjamin’s definition of the aura had been applied to aesthetic works such as art and literature, with technology merely being the means of reproduction in this equation (McArthur 114). But what McArthur proposes is a reimagined view of the aura; a posthuman aura which allows technologies like Siri, which teeter on the edge of humanity and artifact, to gain a unique kind of authenticity (115). This new conception of aura, as proposed by McArthur, is based on the technology’s simultaneous proximity and distance from the user. It appropriates human mannerisms and functions well enough to lull the user into perceiving it to have a ‘quasi-human’ face, while also drawing a clear boundary through its robotic tone of voice, reminding the user that it is a technology created by man (117). It also performs a democratizing function, by making available a technology to everyday users, that had only been available to people working within the tech industry up until then (McArthur 117). All in all, McArthur presents a determinist approach to perceiving human-technological relationships. She raises concerns about such algorithms collecting data and surveilling users for corporate gain, fracturing human relationships as a result of excess proximity to technology, and encourages readers to critically engage with media.

Van Den Eede

On the other hand, Van Den Eede uses self-tracking health technologies as a case study to examine the extensionism theory, often championed by media theorists. He presents arguments for and against the extensionist perspective, specifically expanding upon Marshall McLuhan’s theory of extensionism and putting it into conversation with Kiran and Verbeek’s critique of the instrumentalist nature of the extension theory. Van Den Eede himself seems to take a stance against the extensionist theory, citing it as a useful way of examining media technologies but one that ultimately reduces human-technology interactions to a binary of complete ‘reliance’ or ‘suspicion’ (156). He instead ‘superposes’ McLuhan’s extensionism theory with Kiran and Verbeek’s argument that the relationship between humans and technologies should be one of trust, in which the user learns to critically engage with the technologies (168).

Translation and Linguistics

Both McArthur and Van Den Eede bring up translation as a crucial element of the human and technological relationship. McArthur talks about how natural language processors do not actually comprehend human speech; rather it goes through a series of translations (116). From sound waves to code and then back to sound waves. The magic of the translation process, the fact that information is converted into multiple different forms before being reflected back to the user is part of what gives the technology its aura (117). She argues that this appropriation of human language simultaneously performs the function of ‘mystifying’ and ‘demystifying’ language. While technology’s ability to comprehend and respond to humans in a language they understand grants it an exalted status, human speech is wrested out of human hands, causing them to lose the unique connection they had with the language (116). 

On the other hand, Van Den Eede argues that McLuhan’s media theory is deeply rooted in linguistics, citing McLuhan’s idea that media are translations of human organisms and functions into material forms (159). He refers to media as metaphors, suggesting that these media constitute a language through which humans make sense of the world around them. Van Den Eede contends that analysing media through a linguistic framework allows us to understand them by linguistic means. He examines the etymology of media and finds that it originates from the human, which, he argues, lends weight to McLuhan’s extensionist claim that the body from which media originates should hold significance (160).

Reciprocity and Control

McArthur cites Benjamin to explore technology’s ability to ‘gaze back’ at us, noting how, in the case of traditional art, this gaze once afforded value to bourgeois works. Essentially, she argues that this returned gaze grants the object a form of social control over the human (119). While it constructs a hierarchy that gives users the illusion of mastery over a human-like apparatus, there remains an imbalance, as the data collected by these corporations is used to refine algorithms and exercise corporate control over users (McArthus 125). Moreover, just like the aura of bourgeois art, the aura of Apple’s products gain control over the masses through the strengthening and construction of social hierarchies, with Siri adding onto its exclusivity. Though McArthur claims the aura has been ‘democratized’ by the value of it being available to the common people, Apple is still a brand whose products can only be acquired by a certain class of privileged individuals. Rather than democratizing aura, it furthers commodity fetishism and the aura of technology simply becomes another part of the equation of corporate profitmaking endeavours (120). 

Van Den Eede also addresses similar concerns, drawing on McLuhan’s theory of the environment’s reciprocal relationship with human extensions. He comments on a transformative process in which humans and media continuously reshape one another. By translating ourselves into media, ‘we reach out into the environment, but this also makes it possible for the environment to reach back into us’(160). He claims that the extensionist theory creates an illusion of  one-way traffic between humans and media, leaving humans unable to notice the effects media have on them. He advocates for a ‘two-way traffic’ approach towards technologies, arguing that they shape us just as much as we shape them (166). In this sense, Van Den Eede champions a co-shaping relationship between humans and technology, in which technology and humans exist within the same environment, on equal footing.

Posthumanism

McArthur describes the aura of technologies as posthuman, meaning a type of aura that is not inherent, but is instead imbued in a device through the painstaking efforts of engineers (120). In line with her technological determinist view she seems to be skeptical towards posthumanism. She claims that the posthuman aura of Siri is broken when it fails to process spoken instructions, which happens quite frequently. It reminds the user that Siri is not actually an autonomous entity, but rather a program developed by engineers which is liable to fail (124). 

McArthur’s view on the posthumanism of technology is in line with the McLuhanian extension theory and the concept of Narcissus narcosis, the idea that humans are unaware of the fact that these technologies originate from us. Van Den Eede seems to be critical of the anthropocentric implications of the extension theory, claiming that the idea of becoming aware of the ‘origin’ of technologies from the human still prioritizes human body over technology (160). He does admit, however, that Kiran and Verbeek’s idea of ‘trusting’ oneself to technology is also based in a certain negotiation of the boundaries between the two, which has a hint of a humanist character as well (168). All in all, while he does support a posthuman approach towards technology, he also encourages readers to critically engage with technologies.

Conclusion

McArthur appears to be more skeptical of human-technology relations, raising concerns about surveillance, data collection, algorithmic control, and the varied ways in which the capitalist system harnesses technology to exercise social control over the masses. She adopts a more humanist stance, echoing the McLuhanian notion of the human body assuming a superior position in  human-technology relations by value of it being the source of technology.

In contrast, Van Den Eede adopts a more optimistic stance toward technology. He only briefly touches upon surveillance and data collection, primarily using it to support his argument for a ‘trust’ approach to human-technology interactions (165). Though he ends up finding a middle ground between extensionism and Kiran and Verbeek’s alternative ideas of human-technology interaction, it is clear that he values the posthumanist notion of a two-way relationship between humans and technologies. Despite these differences, both authors share confidence in the user’s capacity to critically engage with media, emphasizing the importance of reflection and awareness in navigating technological environments.

Works Cited

  1. Van Den Eede, Yoni. ‘Extending “Extension”.’ Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, 151-172.  https://doi.org/10.5040/9781666993851.ch-008. 
  2. McArthur, Emily. “The Iphone Erfahrung.” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, 2014, 113–28. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781666993851.ch-006.