Category Archives: Critical Concept Explication

Critical Concept Explication, Critical Response, Other

Noise versus Knowledge: Umberto Eco on the Internet

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Throughout his time on earth, Umberto Eco was renowned for his great ideas, works, and qualities — he was an Italian semiotician, novelist, media theorist, philosopher, and, perhaps above all, a critic of the internet. As the internet and digital media rose rapidly in development and public use in the late 90s and early 2000s, Eco addressed this upsurge with the statement that “information can damage knowledge, because it is too much… noise, and that noise is not knowledge” (Umberto Eco: La biblioteca del mondo). Eco vocalized criticism of the way in which information is overly-accessible online, and its detriment to materiality and genuine knowledge. Using Eco’s thoughts to think about digital media nowadays is especially relevant, as we suffer from a paradox: we have never had more access to information with the internet, yet we struggle to turn it into understanding. Amid misinformation, algorithmic feeds, and social media noise, Eco’s ideas feel urgent today. His reflections on digital media reveal that information abundance without critical literacy leads to collective amnesia. His work pushes us to see media as objects that shape, and sometimes distort, how we learn, remember, and communicate.

I recognize myself and my own habits in Eco’s warnings. Everyday, I scroll through my phone and I consume a littany of posts that I forget moments later. It’s as though my attention is on shuffle. Eco might say I am lost in “semiotic overfeeding,” a term he used to describe being bombarded by information without the ability to filter it (Kristo 55). He compared this to a kind of social Alzheimer’s, where the abundance of data infringes on our ability to remember meaningfully. I feel this when I can recall countless fragments, like a certain headline, tweet, or meme, but I still struggle to string them together into concrete knowledge. Still, I don’t see the internet as purely destructive. It connects me to art, ideas, and communities I would never have known otherwise. Eco himself understood this potential: even while critiquing digital excess, he created Encyclomedia, a multimedia platform designed to link history, literature, and culture through the web (Kristo 56). He was not anti-technology; he simply demanded we use it consciously, with care.

In 2000, Eco Umberto contributed a commentary piece on Project Syndicate’s website called “The Virtual Imagination”, which one must make an account to access. In his writing, Eco anticipated the world we live in now: anyone can be a writer, editor, or storyteller via the internet. He described how computers and hypertext were transforming the reading process, allowing users to “ask for all the cases in which the name of Napoleon is linked with Kant” instantly (Eco, “Virtual Imagination”). This, he wrote, would change literacy itself. But he also worried that such “boundless hypertextual structures” would dissolve the boundaries that give stories meaning. If every reader can rewrite War and Peace, he mused, “everyone is Tolstoy” (Eco, “Virtual Imagination”). His distinction between systems (language’s infinite possibilities) and texts (closed, crafted worlds) speaks to our current internet condition, as it is an endless system of signs where meaning is endlessly deferred and interpreted, never settled. In that sense, Eco saw digital media as both a marvel and a mirror. It can reflect the human urge to create while also carrying the chaos of infinite interpretation (Eco, “Virtual Imagination”).

Renata Martini Kristo’s essay Umberto Eco and Emotions in the Time of Internet helps contextualize Eco’s critique in the era of social media. Kristo reminds us that Eco’s famous “legions of idiots” comment — a jab towards the platforms that are now accessible to supposed idiots — was not elitist frustration, but rather a demand for education. Essentially, Eco argued that the real problem wasn’t speech itself, but the lack of filtering and critical thinking. If society lacks the ability or simply overlooks the importance of evaluating the information that is fed to them, society risks drowning in its own noise (Kristo 52-53). Kristo expands on Eco’s view that schools should teach students “how to filter the immense information found in the Internet,” since even teachers, Eco stated, often lack the skills to do so (57). This idea feels strikingly modern; today, our digital environments rely more on algorithmic curation than human criticality. Eco would likely view our For You Pages as dangerous precisely because they mimic discernment while erasing the effort of it. His solution was not disconnection but education, a “discipline of memory,” as Kristo calls it, one that reintroduces intentionality and consciousness to our engagement with and consumption of media.

The AHEH article “Umberto Eco on Culture, Media, and the Internet” extends this by situating Eco’s thought within his semiotic framework of open and closed texts. Open texts invite interpretation, dialogue, and multiplicity; closed texts fix meaning and manipulate perception. Eco admired open systems such as art, literature, or media that provoke critical engagement, but he feared how digital culture could turn open texts into closed circuits of misinformation. He saw mass media as a double-edged sword as it is capable of democratizing knowledge but equally prone to ideological control. In our digital world, both dynamics coexist. The internet can amplify marginalized voices and communities, yet it also fuels misinformation on the daily when its power is placed in the wrong hands. Eco’s cautious middle-ground position calls for media literacy as a form of semiotic resistance. To understand media as objects, in Eco’s sense, is to recognize that every platform, post, and interface is encoded with a certain view and message (AHEH).

Sherry Turkle’s Evocative Objects collection offers a lens through which to humanize Eco’s theories. In Annalee Newitz’s chapter “My Laptop,” the computer becomes a literal extension of the self, Newitz referring to it as “a brain prosthesis” (Newitz 88). She writes about the emotional intimacy people build with their machines, describing her laptop as both tool and companion, worn down by her hands and filled with her history. Reading Newitz alongside Eco reveals a paradox: where Eco warns that digital media externalize memory and fragment attention, Newitz embraces technology as a vessel of emotional and intellectual connection. Her computer is an “apparatus for the realization of inner-human possibilities,” echoing Vilém Flusser’s idea at the start of the chapter that technology helps us create alternative worlds. This emotional relationship to media complicates Eco’s cautionary stance. The internet may scatter our focus, but it also holds our loves, friendships, and creative selves.

When I think about my own laptop, it feels like both Eco’s nightmare and Newitz’s much happier dream. My laptop contains every essay I’ve written, photos I’ve taken, and countless conversations with friends who live thousands of kilometres away. However, it’s also the source of my distraction — I do love it, but it tires me. Eco might say that I’m caught in a hypertext of my own making, while Newitz would remind me that this machine is an “evocative object,” one that shapes who I am and how I remember. The key, perhaps, is not to reject the medium but to use it mindfully and to build a relationship with technology that honours its materiality rather than erases it. Just as Eco defended the tactile book for its “dog-ears and underlines,” we can reclaim the digital object by using it deliberately, slowing down our consumption to preserve meaning (Umberto Eco: La biblioteca del mondo).

Ultimately, Eco’s work teaches us that media, whether a book or a screen, are not neutral vessels. They embody choices, values, and modes of thought. The danger lies not in technology itself but in our passive use of it. So, when I enter the realm of social media each night, I will try to remember Eco’s message that information without human reflection is just noise. But, I will also keep in mind Newitz’s tenderness towards her laptop, and that our devices can hold love, memory, and imagination. Somewhere between the noise and the meaning, between Eco’s library and Newitz’s laptop, lies the task of our generation as we move forward: to learn how to think with our media without letting anyone else think for us.

Sources

Aheh. “Umberto Eco on Culture, Media, and the Internet.” AHEH, 27 Aug. 2025, www.artshumanitieshub.eu/news/umberto-eco-on-culture-media-internet/.

Eco, Umberto. “The Virtual Imagination.” Project Syndicate, 7 Nov. 2000, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-virtual-imagination.

Kristo, Renata Martini. “Umberto Eco and Emotions in the Time of Internet.” International Journal of Social and Educational Innovation, vol. 4, no. 7, 2017, pp. 51–58.

Newitz, Annalee. “My Laptop.” Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, The MIT Press, 2007, pp. 87–91.

Umberto Eco: La biblioteca del mondo. Directed by Davide Ferrario, 2018.

Critical Concept Explication, Other

The Real in the Virtual and the Virtual in Reality:

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Since the 19th century, there have been numerous attempts at what we now know as “virtual reality”, including the concept of the stereoscope, to the more modern “Sensorama” invented by Cinematographer Morton Heilig in the latter half of the 20th century. However, the age of VR only came into existence later, in the 2010s, with the commercialisation of VR headsets from Oculus and Hive. The concept of “virtual reality” aims to replicate a multi-sensory experience of reality through the projection of a 3D environment, paired with surround sound and, often, controllers that allow players to control the movements of their characters by moving around themselves. 

Thus, arises the question, to what extent is VR real and to what extent is our reality nowadays considered virtual? In accordance with the critical concept of “senses”, we will aim to make this question clear through the lens of critical media theory. 

Throughout the world’s historical development, Ancient Greek thinkers regarded philosophical reasoning as the way to truly understand reality, most famously, Plato, with his Allegory of the Cave. Where he presented a prisoner shackled to the walls of a cave, where the prisoners perceive the projected shadows of objects as the objects themselves, for they can not turn around, and thus, they are unaware of the illusion being carried out.

In this sense, I propose a thought experiment to better explicate the implications of VR on our senses. Imagine a child, from the moment that it is born up to adulthood, has its head bound to a VR set and, as such, experiences reality through the mediation of the device. With its sense of hearing and sight greatly blinded to the truth of reality, as in the case of the prisoner in Plato’s cave. 

For this person, their perception of reality would be greatly shaped by their immediate experience via the headset, and thus, we must concede that the supposedly “virtual” would have to qualify as the “real” in this case, for this is the person’s only real experience of their world from a first-person perspective. Now, let us dive into a second experiment: what if we are in a simulation – as Descartes famously asked, how would we know on grounds of our senses that we are not in a dream? Then, would it not be logical to regard the world as we know it as something unreal and ultimately virtual? Through these thought experiments, it is thus reasonable to agree with Plato’s criticism of the dependency of the 5 senses to make sense of one’s reality, as we are easily deceived by them without the human faculty to reason. 

With technological advancements quickly growing, especially of VR headsets, the line between reality and virtuality is increasingly blurred day by day. Our sense of the world is greatly mediated and, in effect, somewhat virtual. According to Kittler’s technological determinism approach, which is also backed by Karl Marx’s argument. It is theorised that the media changes our senses. That is our personal interaction with the world, the ways our senses come into contact with the technology and political economies shape who we are.

In accordance with our main interest, VR can be seen to have greatly redefined and influenced our perception of the concept of reality and virtuality by blurring the line between them. Smartphones are also a more direct and immediate representation of this concept. In modern days, smartphone culture has literally rewired our brains biologically, as our eye pattern adapts to the constant scroll and scanning. The ways we perceive connections and communication have also changed. As we engage in social media culture, we are part of a virtual sphere of human interaction that is undeniably real, only that it is not physical. We are thus qualitatively changing into a species that now has technology – virtuality intertwined within its existence, and must also concede that our reality is also somewhat virtual.

In extending the many theories of senses into a media scape like virtual reality, the line between McLuhan and Kittler’s arguments is complicated. On one hand, VR creates a barrier within  Marshall McLuhan’s idea that the human body extends its senses through media. The notion that our senses can be extended through VR is a bit hard to support when considering that only our vision and often touch is supported into this medium. Additionally it’s hard to accept the surreality of it all, as mentioned earlier, it blurs our perception of reality, quite literally. 

Through our other theorist, Friedrich Kittler, we can consider VR a process of shaping our senses. For example, our vision, rather than VR extending it, the virtuality is changing what we understand as our senses, most effectively, our vision. As media shapes what we understand as sight, VR has dramatically warped this. Understanding through our experiences of combining the senses with sight to interact with our world, the communication of these functions has been fundamentally reshaped.

In conclusion, it is undeniable that the historical development of media has now led us to a present and future where virtuality finally dances with reality in a waltz; consider their performance our experience of life. Acknowledging the limitations of our senses and the endless possibilities that VR has to offer, the moment reality fails to catch up with its partner is when we, the audience, lose track of the dance. The waltz can be interpreted as a balance that must be maintained, as the audience may very well fail to properly appraise the solo performance that virtuality has to offer and thus, never be able to make sense of their lives. 

Nam Pham & Maxine Gray

Critical Concept Explication

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Critical Concept Explication

Do We Sense The World… Or Does it Sense Us?

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As we navigate the world, our perception is shaped through our touch, taste, sight, sound, and smell.

But how do we understand these experiences and how does mediation play into this interaction?

In the chapter Senses, Caroline Jones explores two contrasting answers to this question. Through Friedrich Kittler and Marshall McLuhan, we can begin to understand the complexities of how our senses interpret media and the surrounding world.

Starting with our first theorist, Kittler believes that our senses are radically shaped by the media around us. His idea is fairly synonymous with ideas about technological determinism. On the opposite end of the spectrum, McLuhan insists that human senses are grounded in the body and simply extend their reach through or using media. By dissecting these opposing ideas, Jones extends these ideas to explain how media and the senses interact.

Jones’s main argument is that the senses are not natural or unchanging, but are always shaped and reshaped by media. As she puts it: “The senses both constitute our ‘sense’ of unmediated knowledge and are the first medium with which consciousness must contend.” (p. 88) While Media delivers content to our existing senses, they actively reorganize how we experience the world through touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight.

Building on the work of the two earlier thinkers, Friedrich Kittler and Marshall McLuhan, Kittler argued that media fundamentally produce and change the senses. We see this currently when smartphones reshape our attention span and even eye movement patterns from the constant flicking and scanning our eyes do, while also restructuring how we process information.

To compare, McLuhan argues that media are extensions of our senses. Take for instance, the telephone extends hearing, but our senses remain grounded in our body. Jones takes this further by showing that, across history, from ancient philosophy to modern capitalism, our senses have always been shaped by outside forces. For example, we have been conditioned to associate smell to the terms “Pine Forest” and “Country Fresh” to a clean, hygienic home.

As for vision, society has often treated sight as the most important path to truth. According to Jones, vision became privileged because philosophers, starting with Plato, saw it as the most objective sense that could reach truth from a distance. Over time, philosophy and art reinforced this by treating sight as the ‘pure’ path to knowledge, while pushing touch, taste, and smell aside as “too bodily” or “animal”.

But this ranking of sight above touch, smell, and taste is not natural because it’s something created by media and culture. Her main point is that the media are not solely neutral tools that show us the world. Instead, they actively change our senses, reshaping what we know is true and also how we actually experience reality through our bodies. And to study media, we need to perceive senses as the very ways of shaping our sense of reality.

Through the course of philosophy’s historical developments, we’ve seen a lot of fluctuations as to what counts as knowledge and the ways in which one may truly “know” something. From the philosophers of Ancient Greece – Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, who regarded philosophical reasoning as the way to gain a true sight of reality. to modern-day thinkers, most infamously Hume, who rejected the concept of “universal laws”, favouring sensory experience to understand the world.

In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Plato presented prisoners shackled to the walls of a cave, where the prisoners perceive the projected shadows of objects as the objects themselves, for they can not turn around, and thus, they are unaware of the illusion being carried out. In this case, the eyes are seeing, yet the prisoner is effectively blind to the truth of reality. Their “senses” have effectively failed to distinguish between a representation of reality, its fabrication and reality itself.  Plato attributes this blindness to a lack of philosophical reasoning. Critiquing the dependency on the five senses to understand reality, and as a means to achieve true knowledge. He then proceeds to provide the remedy for this, in which the prisoner is required to be willing to be blinded once again, this time by the volitional blinding light of reality. Shown in the allegory as the eyes having to adjust to the bright sun after spending a whole life in the darkness of the cave. 

Fast-forwarding into the Enlightenment period, we have John Locke and, famously, David Hume, with his Problem of Induction, arguing that we can not know for sure that something has happened until it has happened; his idea of reality is one which can only be validated by our senses, such as the eyes or ears.

Hume argues that it is only a force of habit and custom that we assume to “know” things. For example, we do not have all the empirical data of history and the future to accurately claim that a sound is produced when we clap our hands. Human reasoning, consequently, is argued to be a cumulative process based on data from sensory experience, and this is the primary way in which we understand the world.

In concluding the chapter’s philosophical basis, Jones’ main idea that “our senses are not fixed” is strongly reinforced by a modern thinker, Karl Marx and his argument that the way our senses interact with technology and political economies form us as humans. This idea of technological determinism claims our senses are formed externally by the historical development of the world rather than internally within ourselves. Our senses are in a constant state of change and adaptation, in relation to our experience of the world.

Taking a step back to Hume, which considers media as a tool for gathering or promoting information for the senses, and is not only “the bridge in the middle” but also something that shapes and influences how people use and reconsider their senses and the world experienced through them. Media not only “outputs”, but also “inputs” through our senses. The chapter shifts our understanding of media as solely information we consume but also the force that transforms our human senses that we use to experience the world.

While the media shapes people’s perception of reality and the way we interpret our own senses, the media itself is also ever changing and replaced by new inventions and technologies. Our senses, when mediated, shift with it, and so does our conversation with the world around us. In such a context, the ability to independently think while understanding how our senses interact with media is the key of guiding us out of the cave.

Maxine Gray, Betty Liao, Nam Pham, Aubrey Ventura

Critical Concept Explication

Writing Is Infrastructure: From Clay Tablets to Code

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What would our world look like without writing? From establishing communities to the endless scrolls of texts on our phones, it is easy to overlook that writing has an insurmountable presence in our everyday lives. Media theorist Lydia H. Liu’s chapter, Writing, reminds us that writing is more than a writing tool for recording speech. It is a material technology and symbolic system, tracing its influence from the rise of civilisations to the digital age. In her discussion, Liu poses six central questions: the origins of writing, its role in governance, the relationship between scripts and systems, its evolution across different media, writing as a visual representation of speech, and its place in the digital age, to highlight how writing expands beyond being a tool for speech. The chapter ultimately demonstrates how deeply writing is intertwined with power, communication, and human imagination.

Origins of writing

Liu first focuses on the discourse on the ‘origins’ of writing to explain the first influences of writing in social systems and innovation. The first traces of scripts were found to have been invented separately in four different parts of the world, where each was characterised by urbanisation, division of labour, and a surplus economy. It is clear that writing was not just a product of culture, but also a practical innovation that emerged out of increasingly complex societies.

Each script is tied to material media (such as clay tablets, petroglyphs, and papyrus), highlighting how writing is also deeply technological and evolving alongside infrastructures of communication. Before these early scriptures, however, emerged semasiographs, or the use of iconic signs as a means of writing and communication. These forms of communication were first disregarded as writing by German linguist Florian Coulmas, who argued that all forms of graphic meaning, such as visual movement, syntax-like patterns, or rhythm, were not considered as being tied to writing. However, this classification evolved through the widespread use of the rebus principle, where a picture can be used to represent the sound of its name, rather than the object itself, marking a conceptual progression to non-language instances of illustration as writing. The chapter thus argues that there is no exact origin point of writing.

However, it is clear through early scripture that writing has evolved out of broader conditions of labour and communication. French archaeologist Andrè Leroi-Gourhan’s palaeontology of writing best supports Liu’s argument. In Gesture and Speech, Leroi-Gourhan studies early human ancestors to understand how their behaviour may relate to language. Here, he emphasises the neurological connection that the same parts of the brain are involved in tactile activities and using tools and also in the face and language. He uses the term ‘graphism’ to highlight this tactile, non-verbal form of communication to conclude that tool-making and language evolve alongside each other within human social life, where gesture and speech are intertwined, rather than being mutually exclusive.  

Writing in Governance

Connecting to Liu’s previous argument, it is clear that the early development of writing enabled new forms of organisation beyond oral traditions, easily seen as a symbol of knowledge and power across civilisations. Even early forms of storytelling prove that early civilisations understood the significance of writing through myths, legends and religion. Stories would characterise it as a ‘magical power,’ which later came to fruition as those who were literate and had access to writing held a monopoly on religious and political power in the form of Priests of the church. With this power, writing often allowed for the creation of new spatial and temporal configurations, as empires could easily sustain large colonies across far distances through written communication. This type of mass media production, as mentioned previously also in Chapter 18, ‘Mass Media’, can be seen in the monarchies of Egypt, Persia, and the Roman Empire. China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang of the Qin Dynasty, first proclaimed power through writing and scripture, where he imposed a standard script, orthography, and bureaucratic procedures for centralised rule. This started China’s long imperial history, and clearly would not have been possible if standard written script systems had not supported imperial rulers. 

Writing & Mathematics 

The development of ancient writing had strong early ties to predate methods for accurate tracking of numerical notation and record keeping, including weights, measures, and currency. Within the means of predated numerical notation, the earliest recorded transactions, dating back thousands of years, used pebbles, tallies, tokens, and clay containers or “bullae” — used in ancient Mesopotamia to show the marks of sealings indicating ownership to anything that was attached to it. In turn, this has led theorists to consider mathematics as the earliest precursor to writing. 

Though the consensus remains that writing has gone from pictographic to syllabic, and then to phoneticization, there remains the possibility that writing systems may have come from more semiotic scenarios rather than solely to record human speech. The etymology of the Phoenician word “spr” traces back to the English word “scribe.” The early meaning of the Phoenician word meant “to count”, but only later did it adopt the meaning of “to write.” The mutual ancestry between these words suggests that the alphabet and alphanumerical systems were the same. The ancient Greeks’  alphabet was already made up on the foundation of mathematics with its 24-letter system plus 3 alphanumeric signs of “digamma, koppi, and sampi” as well. 

The Global Evolution of Writing

Throughout time, the concept of writing has undergone extraordinarily vast changes from what we knew of it then to now: going back from using natural materials such as bronze, shells, or papyrus to the invention of print or electronic chips. Examining the global evolution of writing can be divided into the various empires throughout history. For instance, Ancient Egypt’s hieroglyphs were chiselled decoratively onto stone monuments, whereas writing on papyrus allowed for cursive of hieratic forms for quicker writing — the latter writing medium causing a large change in manuscript culture that shifted the forms of political organisation in history. The Roman Empire’s tradition of using papyrus “supported an emphasis on centralised bureaucratic administration,” whereas parchment in medieval Europe “helped give the church a monopoly of knowledge through monasticism,” according to Harold A. Innis. 

In Ancient China, the spread of Buddhism in the nation also prompted the invention of woodblock printing in the eighth century, where the mass production of printed books assisted in global socioeconomic transformation. Around the eleventh century, movable type was invented, a technology adopted in the printing of the earliest paper currency, which was used to hold control over the early economy in Asia as a whole. Over in Europe, around the fourteenth century, block printing and paper manufacturing came about as a result of the Mongol Empire’s westward expansion. This breakthrough translated into a rise in universal literacy, newspapers, advertising, and new forms of politics. 

Marshall McLuhan had observed the grand impact of printing on life in Europe and beyond, writing in the Gutenberg Galaxy, “the invention of typography confirmed and extended the new visual stress of applied knowledge, providing the first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly line, and the first mass-production.” Thus, writing, in a sense, was the catalyst for all industrial practices to come after it, from its process of repetition to create a product for mass distribution.

Counting, notation, procedure: the road to algorithms

A second origin runs through numbers. Place-value numerals and operator symbols compress messy realities into portable strings. That compression invites procedures, do-this-then-that recipes someone else can repeat. In Liu’s telling, counting and inscribing were never far apart; even the word histories of “scribe” and “to count” cross. The point isn’t romantic; it’s practical: notation is writing tuned for calculation, a crucial bridge from tablets to code.

Materials change the message: paper, print, silicon

Writing’s substrates, bone, clay, papyrus, parchment, paper, type, and chips, aren’t background scenery. They reset speed, cost, and sameness, and with them, institutions. Paper and printing (in different historical paths) widened access; movable type accelerated repeatable precision and the rise of news, advertising, and mass politics. In the digital turn, text becomes addressable strings: searchable, sortable, and automatable, governed by file schemas, encodings, and protocols rather than just by clerks and courts.

Code is written—with machine readers

Alphabets loosely map signs to sounds; code maps signs to exact machine actions. In digital systems, a letter like “A” is an encoded value that can be copied without drift, checked for error, and executed in logic. Liu shows how modern information theory recasts “writing” as a statistical alphabet (including “space”) that machines can transmit and transform. Once marks are standardised for machines, the politics of writing shifts toward standards and interfaces, which set the fields, defaults, and labels that shape what’s sayable and searchable.

Tensions & connections (what ties the theories together) 

Speech-first vs. writing’s autonomy. A familiar hierarchy puts speech above writing. Our line, following Liu, flips the emphasis: writing has its own powers, coordination, inscription, calculability, that don’t depend on sounding like talk. This helps explain why ledgers, forms, and code can rearrange life without saying a word aloud.

Meaning vs. transmission. Engineering models treat writing as signals under noise, so messages travel reliably. That’s perfect for networks but thin on meaning; the trade-off is that standards (encodings, protocols, moderation rules) become the new chokepoints. The connection: what keeps symbols moving also decides which symbols move.

Media materials vs. institutions. Tools and substrates (brush, type, chip) shape what can be stored and processed; institutions harden around those capacities (schools, archives, platforms). This links McLuhan/Kittler-style media arguments to Liu’s core claim: writing is a world-building technology, not a transparent mirror.

Why this matters now

Change the format and you change the world: a new field on a platform form, a new label in a database, a tweak to an encoding, all are tiny acts of infrastructural authorship that decide what appears, what counts, and who gets heard. That’s writing’s power, from clay to code.

Summary: 

  • No single origin. Writing didn’t just copy speech; it stabilised agreements and memories so complex societies could form.
  • Power needs paperwork. Standard scripts and formats make populations legible—and governable.
  • Notation –  procedure – algorithms. Compression invites repeatable methods; that’s the seed of software.
  • Media matters. Substrate shifts (paper, print, silicon) rewire institutions and publics.
  • Code extends writing. Machine-readable marks turn literacy into a fight over standards, schemas, and interfaces.
Critical Concept Explication

Materiality and the Resurgence of Physical Media

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By Bara and Allie

On the Author, Bill Brown

The author of our chapter, Bill Brown, is a critical theory scholar and professor of English language and literature. His major theoretical work is on Thing theory that makes a distinction between a thing and an object, and observes their roles in modern culture. In his book “A Sense of Things”, Brown focuses on how objects are represented in 19th century American literature. For his chapter on materiality, he focuses on the physicality of media and the effects of our conversion to the abstract.

On Materiality

Materiality, to put it simply, is not something easy to define concretely, but we can view it as a diverse spectrum. For example, to say your new sweater ‘lacks the materiality’ of your previous one, it doesn’t assert the sweater’s intangibility. More likely, we mean that the new sweater may be somewhat stiff and doesn’t smell like our laundry detergent, or is made of 100% wool, which is itchy and uncomfortable (that’s why we prefer a wool mix). 

Materiality is defined by far more than just the tangibility of an object – it is also about the physical qualities of this object, about how we experience it and life in general. We know life, says Bill Brown, only as it is mediated by the senses. This means life is in the smell of a freshly bought book, in your controller vibrating after you finish a level in Lego Star Wars, and in when you squat in front of a painting to see it at a different angle because now the light is different.

Digitization is in opposition to materiality by turning the tangible into the intangible. Some media theorists are concerned that the digitization of media can compromise its tangibility and therefore our physical experience of it. To help visualize, Bill Brown quotes Friedrich Kittler’s passage where he declares digitalization erases the differences between individual media, since inside the computer, everything is reduced to numbers. In his “The Last Mixtape”, Seth Long describes how the music industry went through the process of gradual digitization with the development of newer technologies. Later, he also recalls how the way people related to music fundamentally changed after the switch due to the difference in mediums’ affordabilities: physical media created challenges (in finding, curating, listening to music) that allowed for a deeper emotional relation to the process. Listening to music became less intentional, less personal, and less ritualistic once it became digital.

Why care?

Next time as you are creating or analysing media, ask yourself: If the medium is the message, how does the message change depending on the materiality of the media? How does the experience of reading a web-comic differ from reading a physical copy? Does digital media feel ‘less real’ due to its immateriality, or does the physical experience lure us away from objectivity?

The Conversion to the Digital

The chapter discusses the idea that the evolution of our material surroundings and the relationships we have with them have become less tangible; this is the “digital threat”, or the fear of “abstraction” in our modernizing age. 

As we have revolutionized technology, Colin Renfrew suggests there has been a separation of “communication and substance”, or rather, that our conversion towards the digital is making our world less tangible, and thereby, our associations to “meaning” are threatened. If you, for example, were to take a picture of your childhood stuffed animal, upload it to a program and model it exactly as it is in real life, there is no symbolic relationship between you and the object any longer, as it exists digitally. We can even understand “touch” as being a privileged way in which we as humans interact with the world around us. 

Will stripping our society away from its physical qualities not abstract our relationships, our culture, our lives? While these concerns are within our human nature, so are now our relationship with the intangible, be it Tamagochi or the Sewaddle I caught in Pokemon Go last week. Media evolves because of us, alongside us, and even evolves us back.

The author invokes the ideas of both Marx and Benjamin in order to explain; as human relationships have become increasingly complex with their interactions with media, the relationships between previously privileged elements such as “form” and “substance” have been abstracted. For example, systems of money have become increasingly distinct from their material forms. Photography has long been “divorcing form from matter”. To some, this sounds like an understandable threat. However, even Benjamin believed that these new technologies can enrich our perception and reveal to us truths hidden to the human eye. Even as most forms of media are being “homogenized” into the digital, this is an incredibly complex and interdependent relationship that means humans are evolving in a way, too. 

Body and Meaning 

In the closing section of “Materiality” from Critical Terms for Media Theory, Bill Brown turns to the body as the ultimate site where materiality asserts itself. Throughout the chapter, he stresses that materiality is what resists or exceeds meaning—the stubborn “stuff” that literary, cultural, and media theory often try to interpret away. By ending with the body, Brown emphasizes that it is not simply an object to be represented, but both a medium of representation and a lived, physical thing, which is explored deeper by our colleagues’ report on the Biomedia chapter. 

Drawing on Merleau-Ponty and Kant, Brown highlights the body as the very ground of perception, the pre-condition for experiencing and making sense of the world. This leads him to the idea of the human as a kind of network of information; the body provides the “framing function” that gives form to otherwise formless data. In this sense, the human body becomes the source for giving “body” to digital media. Information, whether sensory or computational, only becomes meaningful through embodied experience.

Yet Brown warns against reducing the body to mere signification. He points to how technology pervades embodiment, blurring any clear divide between body and media. You can think of a person using a smartphone’s health tracker; the body’s steps, heartbeat, and sleep patterns are turned into data, while the body itself is shaped by that data—prompted to walk more, rest differently, or change behaviors in other ways. Here, body and technology are inseparable, each creating meaning and as such, meaningful action, for the other.

The general idea, then, is that materiality is not opposed to meaning, but is that which 

meaning depends on and yet cannot fully contain. The body is transitional and evolving: it is both medium and a message, symbol and substance. Brown emphasizes that materiality is not simply “out there” as physical or tangible things, but is embedded in lived experiences that challenges and reshapes how we define media and media relationships.

Resurgence of Physical Media 

In recent years, public interest in physical media rose: you might have (or be) a friend collecting DVDs or burning your own CDs. One of my closest friends bought herself a Nintendo DS this summer, preferring it to the digital emulators. Businesses slowly but surely feel this tendency and acted accordingly: Sony has recently come out with a new Blu-Ray player – the first in over five years. 

“The Last Mixtape”, by Seth Long, describes the difference between physical media as ‘allowing for ownership’ and digital media as ‘allowing access’. When we as a society trusted digital subscriptions to provide us with media, we did not expect them to take our favourite movies down. But in these later years, more and more streaming services have failed to renew licensing agreements for many beloved movies: in fact, last month, iconic movies like The Notebook, Anchorman franchise and, worst of all, the Bee Movie, left Netflix. People are paying the same subscription price, but have access to content they don’t care about. In most of these cases, the solution for this would be to own the movie yourself. Having a DVD of your favourite movie is a tangible experience of ownership, while a Netflix subscription doesn’t provide the same level of accessibility anymore. 

Another factor in the rise of physical media is, of course, nostalgia. Early 2000s trends are all the rage again, bringing back skirts over jeans, butterfly clips and flipphones. When we dissect this fallback to trending fashion of the early millennium, we uncover that this style embodies a specific feeling, a set of approaches and attitudes of the times. This, of course, includes the now forgotten due to AI-powered oversaturation feeling of excitement over technology. Not technology like cybertruck, but tech focused on entertainment – like an iPod, a furby or… literally anything in clear plastic casing. In the early 2000s, media technologies were going through massive transformations, both exciting and physical: people bedazzled their flipphones and rented movies on DVDs for the weekends from the same places they borrowed cassettes from in the 90s. From these observations we can conclude that people who feel nostalgic about a certain time or period of their lives will seek the same feelings and experiences of interaction through physical media.

While digital media has a vast potential for user’s experience, tangible media will always be able to offer different affordances. The smell of a book you left notes in, the safety of spacious, but your own DVDs collection, the little imperfections of vinyl that make your ABBA sound a little different from your mom’s.

Similarly, businesses based on physical media continue to thrive thanks to the experiences unavailable to digital users. In their article “Death by streaming or vinyl revival?” Hracs and Jansson explore how independent record shops in Stockholm use the physicality of their spaces to their business advantage. These stores curate their collections, cultivate the in-store experience filled with meanings and rituals and create value through product rotation – something that would’ve been impossible to engage on the same level with in the digital realm. Hracs and Jansson emphasize: these stores are still open because of their mediums affordances, not despite them. 

If we know life by how it is mediated through our senses, a material media will be more memorable, more real, and even more lovable than its digital counterpart. 

So what?

Both physical and digital media and experiences have their own affordances, and it is important for us as media theorists to keep in mind the role of physical media, even (or especially) if their digital counterparts seem more convenient, more modern and more global. Material media is not dead, but an important tool that allows us to consider and critique the conversion of our world to the abstract, and understand how this affects our human experience. 

Keywords and Definitions

Abstraction: in the context of this article, abstraction refers to the idea that our relationship with media (such as communication technologies) has evolved to become less physical and tangible, and more so based on abstract understandings.

Dematerialization hypothesis: the idea that digital conversion is affecting the meaningful relationships between humans and tangible experiences. 

Hegemony of the digital: the conversion of medias into digital forms.

Materiality: … did you read the piece? We recommend the start, middle, and end.

Source Materials

 Brown, B. (2010). Materiality. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for Media Studies (pp. 49-65). The University of Chicago Press.

Long, S. (2025). The last mixtape: Physical media and nostalgic cycles (1st ed.). University of Chicago Press.

Hracs, B. J., & Jansson, J. (2017). Death by streaming or vinyl revival? Exploring the spatial dynamics and value-creating strategies of independent record shops in Stockholm. Journal of Consumer Culture, 20(4), 478-497. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540517745703 (Original work published 2020)

Cover Image created by Bara, Written by Bara and Allie

Critical Concept Explication

Negotiating the Body: Between Expression and Control

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Our group presented our analysis and explication through a podcast: https://on.soundcloud.com/mqPJiyJwTVvtSuQgM4

Our perceptions of the human body evolve across time periods and diversify across cultures. As technology advances, artificial intelligence and the ability to have multiple online personas complexify our view of the body as a mode for self-expression. Some even theorize the body will be replaced by “computational or other machinic embodiment”; this could appear as “brain layers” being transferred to “hard drives” in order to streamline knowledge exchange (Wegenstein 27). In these times of “disembodiment”, we must critically examine the importance of the tangible human body as a mode of communication (27). At first, our group was confused by the concept of being detached from the body; this prediction by Wegenstein and several theorists felt dystopian and unrealistic. However, we later realized this is exactly what Wegenstein aims to convey; she hopes to demonstrate the “frightening”, “posthuman’”, and “antihumanist” nature of this prediction (27). 

Connections with other Critical Terms

After watching other groups’ presentations, I found our chapter connected to the presentation on Chapter 12: New Media. The presenters noted that all media is in a sense “new”, as media of all ages has always had moments of “newness”. Although our chapter heavily focuses on defining the body as a medium, I believe the body can also constitute “new media”, as it is always being reinvented due to cultural precedents. Here, Hansen’s emphasis on affect and bodily experience of computation in “New Media”  underwrites Wegenstein’s claim that the body is not post-media but in media. Because of the heavily politicized nature in which bodies have existed through centuries, our chapter also connects to the “Law” chapter which emphasizes how legal codes inscribe and regulate bodies i.e determining which bodies are visible, legitimate, or deviant. Hence, we see the connection that the media produces bodies as aw policies. A striking example of this is cosmetic surgery–a regulated practice (with you can cut what is allowed and malpractice frameworks). Here we see the interplay of law and bodies as mediums of production. 

Podcast Brief

Through this podcast, we explore the discussion of ‘The Body’ chapter through summary, analysis, and drawing connection to our experiences and other media. We seek to answer the following questions: 

  1. If the body is always already mediated, is there such a thing as an “authentic” body at all?
  2. How does the body influence culture and how does culture influence the body?
  3. If the body is our first medium, what is one way you consciously use your body to communicate or express identity?

Our exploration of Wegenstein’s Body highlights how embodiment is never static but continually shaped by technology, culture, and law. Although it initially felt dystopian to explore the idea of disembodiment and machinic embodiment, we now see how it becomes predictive once we recognize it as a provocation to think critically about what makes the body meaningful. By situating the body alongside “new media” and legal frameworks, we see it not only as a vessel of self expression but also as a contested site of regulation, reinvention, and power. 

Podcast link: https://on.soundcloud.com/mqPJiyJwTVvtSuQgM4

Contributors: Stuti Sharma, Dea Yu, Emily Shin, Kimchi Tran

Works Cited

Wegenstein, Bernadette. “Body.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen, U of Chicago P, 2010, pp. 19-34.

StrawberryJello. “A Cold but Warm Winter ~Snow World~.”, SoundCloud, no. 8, 2016, https://soundcloud.com/strawberryjello/008-snow-world-yume-nikki-ost.

Critical Concept Explication

Mass Media is Never Neutral

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What does it really mean to speak to the masses? From kings carving words into stone to TikTok clips spreading across the globe, people have always tried to push their voices further than the moment in front of them.

Mass media, as John Durham Peters explains in Critical Terms for Media Studies (Mitchell & Hansen, 2010), is part of this long history of communication across distance and time. In our group’s presentation, we looked at how mass media reshape communication, power, and culture. Peters (2010) explains this through a triad: the message (content), the means (delivery), and the agents (authors and audiences). Together, these form an ecosystem of media. 

Mass Media has transformed from speaking face-to-face, to broadcasting for unknown audiences in three main features:

  1. Generalization, where the content is made for public standards and interests rather than tailor for specific individual needs. 
  2. Spatiotemporal Reach, which enables communication across space and time. 
  3. Elective Participation, related to the targeted audiences’ availability in time and the method of access.

Classic Theorists on Media & Power

These three aspects allow the media to become “mass” by expanding its audience while addressing them as strangers.

Classic theorists like McLuhan and Innis deepen this argument. 

  1. “The Medium is the Message”, one of Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrases, on how the form of media covers more meaningful information than the content it carries. 
  2. Harold Innis shows a different perspective on power and different media forms, proved  by the space-binding media like images, prints and audios serve better in Commerce, while time-binding media like oral traditions and scripture sustain Religious and Cultural authorities. 

These key arguments of the chapter highlight why media matters while showing how mass media has always been tied to structures of power while still leaving room for audiences to interpret and resist.

Media’s Reach & The Power of Audiences

Our chapter on Mass Media looks at media through a general lens that broadly covers concepts about its development and reception. It begins by discussing how “any form of communication has potential for spillage,” meaning that any form of communication, but most significantly word of mouth/face-to-face communication, may not be limited to being understood by the target audience. For example, a conversation, a speech, or a broadcast always has the potential to be overheard by an external audience that the content is not intended for. 

The second point, which the chapter elaborates on most extensively, is crucial to understanding the presence and efficacy of mass media: the Spatiotemporal Range. This basically refers to the presence of a media object across time and space, and how it maintains permanence through this.

The spoken word is a temporary form of communication. It addresses only a finite audience. Even though it can address large audiences at once, it cannot be passed on across cities or countries or years in the exact same way. In these terms, writing has a better spatiotemporal range. With the printing press, the written word could be replicated multiple times, which gives it permanence and the ability to be transported across landscapes. This becomes even easier with the internet and, in today’s age, social media. Now, ideas can be communicated instantly, reach an indefinitely large audience, and be preserved over decades effortlessly.

Lastly, the writer addresses the fact that interaction isn’t always two-sided. The way a piece of media is interpreted, and by whom, lies mainly in the hands of the audience/ consumers. Creators, authors, and speakers can curate their content to address a specific group of people and ensure it is understood in a certain way. However, the actual engagement with that content can always differ from the intended outcome. 

These sections lead us to understand the place of mass media in culture and through its evolution, eventually guiding us to a main argument, which, according to Peters is that “power is perhaps the ultimate mass medium.” Keeping this in mind, we think that the most crucial point that the readers can latch onto is that, despite Mass Media being centered around institutions of power, ultimately, the power to choose what influences people resides with us as audiences and consumers of media. Or in simple words: audiences have agency. 

This chapter is especially important and relevant now, when every individual has the ability to create independently, as well as easy access to any form of media through the internet. In such a digital environment, people of power can spread messages farther than ever. At the same time, this amplification of the spatiotemporal range, also amplifies the ability for audiences to reinterpret, resist, boycott, or support these messages and spread their own individual ideas. The vastness and accessibility of the internet allow the audience to do more than just accept or reject dominant ideas, which adds fragility to power. 

Connecting the Dots: Finding Common Ground in Media Theory

While this chapter looks at mass media through a broad lens, we found that other groups’ presentations had many overlapping themes with ours and were able to dive deeper into certain concepts to provide further insight into areas of media. 

For instance, though our presentation used the term ‘communication’ loosely, the group that presented on communication further explained how it works and the systems within it. They compared two models of communication: the transmission model, which focuses on the one-way transfer of information, and the constitutive model, which views communication as a dynamic, reflexive process. The latter describes how meanings are not fixed and are instead created during interaction, as the decoding of a message by a receiver heavily relies on social and contextual factors. We found that the constitutive model is similar to our chapter’s discussion of mass media’s indefinite form of address, in which it is explained that different audiences outside of the target group can interpret the same piece of information differently and thus change the original meaning. 

Furthermore, we emphasised the significance of power in mass media, which is a theme that runs through many other chapter presentations. The presentation on image talked about how we as humans heavily rely on images to act as tangible representations of concepts, which is why religious imagery, such as paintings, has such a strong influence on audience perceptions. The group that covered writing detailed different forms of writing such as recordkeeping or numerical notion for trade, and how the ability to write distinguishes those who have access to knowledge, and therefore power and control. Thus, image, writing, religion and art are some of the many chapters that relate back to our chapter’s argument that media is always tied to institutions of power, which makes mass media a tool of global influence.

Reflective Conclusion

Looking back on our presentation, we think there are a few things we could have done differently. One main thing we wish we had included was more examples, both from the author’s text and from our own media experiences. The chapter itself is filled with vivid illustrations from medieval manuscripts to modern broadcasting, and bringing more of those into the presentation might have made the theory feel less abstract. Even more importantly, connecting the ideas directly to examples familiar to us as BMS students, maybe like current events, pop culture or how we consume global media. We think this could have made it more interactive and relatable for our audience.

What we found challenging about this chapter was its sheer scope. The author moves from ancient kings and religious sermons to radio and television, and at first it was difficult to pin down what exactly he meant by “mass media.” Was it a modern invention or a timeless human practice? Eventually, we came to see that his answer is both: the urge to reach the many, to preserve messages across space and time, has always been central to communication. Even face-to-face speech, the author argues, carries the potential for mass communication because words inevitably spill beyond their intended audience. That realization reshaped how we think about communication itself, it is never fully contained.

Preparing this presentation also taught us something valuable that we think matters for the rest of the class: the importance of studying media historically and critically. It’s easy to treat mass media as something that began with the printing press or exploded with radio, television, and the Internet. Still, the author shows us that the logic of mass communication is much older. Religious texts, oral performances, decrees, even monuments, all functioned as forms of mass media long before the digital era. For us, that was a crucial takeaway. Mass media is always entangled with institutions of power but it has also always been reshaped by the audiences who interpret and respond to it.

If we had to summarize our own takeaway, it’s that mass media is never neutral. It carries with it histories of power, control, and institutions, yet it is never completely one-sided. Audiences always bring their own interpretations and agency, whether that’s through critique, resistance, or creative re-use. That tension, between institutional influence and human response, is what makes studying media so relevant to us today. In a world where media can both oppress and liberate, the responsibility falls on us to recognize its power, challenge its narratives and imagine new possibilities for how stories are told.

Contributors: Maryam Abusamak, Adela Lynge, Minh Ha Nguyen (Eira), Kenisha Sukhwal

Reference: Peters, J. D. (2010). Mass media. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies (pp. 267–280). University of Chicago Press.

Critical Concept Explication

How Does Law Govern and Control Media?

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Context and Summary of Presentation (Naomi)

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

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

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

Expanding on Juridification (Celeste)

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

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

Relevance of Theory Today (Bridghet)

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

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

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

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

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

Further Connections (Xelena)

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

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