Category Archives: Critical Response

Critical Response

When I Die, Please Let Me Die.

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Spoilers for the show Pantheon and Upload

Throughout Allie Demetrick’s blog post titled, “ Pantheon: Authenticity, Perception, and Embodiment” there is an exploration of definitions and potential human authenticity of digitally uploaded consciousness. In this critical response post, I will be comparing Allie’s insights of the show Pantheon with various plot points from the show Upload. Thus, ultimately deriving a potential answer to Allie’s question of “if our consciousness is not attached to the material, what still matters?”

The Amazon Prime series, Upload, similarly to Pantheon, explores the implications of a digital afterlife, where human consciousness can be uploaded to a technological interface to elongate their life on Earth. Allie analyzed Walter Benjamin’s idea of aura and mechanical reproduction of which to upload someone to the digital afterlife, their physical body is destroyed. Thus, reproducing the human and destroying its natural aura. This manipulation of the natural to live in a simulated life, parallel to reality, is by definition means to live inauthentically. Thus, resulting in the conclusion that these “uploads” are not real, they are artificial experiences, mutable, and simulated. 

The evidence of the extreme mutability of these digitized consciousnesses is the malleability of time, as described in Allie’s analysis. As George Orwell states in his book 1984, “Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”  In Pantheon, Allie’s blog post describes time as flexible, where the perception of time can be manipulated. Digital humans can experience a year in a day or a day in a year. These false perceptions of time are evidence that these uploads have lost a stable perception of reality, thus having an artificial perception. The capitalization of time represents an extreme control of power over these digital people. This results in a complete loss of agency over the perceptions of the Patheon uploads’ environment.

In Upload, characters have a somewhat static purview of time. This point is emphasized by the lack of evolution the characters face. For example, a plot point in Upload was about a 10 year old boy, who had died and was uploaded. The boy’s parents decided to never upgrade the image of his body thus keeping his physical appearance as a 10 year old. In the show he had been uploaded for eight years, meaning his mental age was eighteen. The boy grew frustrated over his lack of growth and seeing his peers who were still alive pass him by affecting his mental health. This lack of autonomy over one’s own body resembles the character Claudia from the book Interview with a Vampire; an adult woman trapped in the body of a five year old. These characters grew distressed, angry, and discouraged about living, because there was no guaranteed end to their suffering or variety to their lives. There was no foreseeable change that they would experience physically and were surrounded by people who were growing older. Thus, the uploads were essentially objectified, expected to stay as they are. This led the capitalists of the series to strategize that these digital consciousnesses are just objects that can be used for their own gain, digital slavery.

Though I established that these digital uploads were not human because they lacked agency and evolution, I did not argue that they were not conscious. These digital consciousness have thoughts, and feelings that can develop relationships because they have the context and memory to grow them. This is one of the only real human characteristics these digital beings have. It is what makes people vulnerable to attachment to a simulated version of their loved one. 

In the show Upload, there was an evolution of relationships, Nathan Brown (the main character of Upload) experienced a blossoming love story with a woman who was alive, Nora. Yet, his relationship was only tested when there was a risk of it being lost. Nathan’s consciousness was almost erased on several occasions. After each close-call or rebooted memory, Nathan always chose to love his partner, Nora, again. Xelena Ilon brought up a great quote in her final presentation that contributes to a definition of AI and consciousness: 

“That’s what AI can’t yet offer: the friction that fuels growth, the silence that begs understanding, the feeling of being loved by someone who could walk away, but doesn’t because they choose you day in and day out.” – Cathy Hackl 

Nathan not only fought for Nora when he was at risk of being lost, Nora fought for him. Their relationship was not a confirmation of Nora’s being or opinions, the couple grew to understand each other and truly love each other. Thus differentiating Nathan from AI. 

So if these digital consciousnesses are not human, but not really generated AI, what are they? 

Well, what does it mean to be a digital conscientiousness, are we still that person even if we are digitized? The aspect that makes a human conscious, human, is the mortality of consciousness. Mortality is what makes people human. A looming presence of death makes people want to live. In digital spaces that is not an expectation that is guaranteed. If one’s consciousness is digitized it is presumed that it will be there forever, or at least well beyond their kin’s lives. It is not until the digital landscape is at risk, that there is realization of mortality again. In conclusion, it is not the immateriality, necessarily, that makes a human experience not authentic, it is if there is a  looming sense of death or a complete agency of one’s perception of their environment. 

Citations

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Penguin Classics, 2021.

Rice, Anne. Interview With the Vampire. Ballantine Books, 1997.

Critical Response

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

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

Introduction

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

Power Masquerades as Comfort

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

Emotional Labour by Design, Desire, and Delegation

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

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

Gender as an Interactive Script

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

When Intimacy Forgets to Resist

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

Works Cited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written by Nicole Jiao

Critical Response

We Don’t Just Watch Disney—We Become it

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In Bridghet’s blog post Guys, He’s Literally Me, the author writes about how prosthetic memories, proposed by Alison Landsberg, can be imagined through films to shape identities that lived memories do. The article further argues how this mechanism may also enforce confirmation bias when being uncritical about who they identify with. Referencing to American Psycho and the modern “Sigma Male” trend, the author shows that viewers do not always empathize with the intended subject of the film, instead adopting the film as a means of validating misogyny, narcissistic masculinity, and entitlement. Thus, films double in their effects: they have the capacity to build empathy and understanding, but they can also maintain oppressive social narratives and reproduce damaging identities when audiences misread them or internalize them selectively .This dynamic is not unique to American Psycho or Sigma Male culture.

“We’re promoting merchandise to adults as well as little girls,” said the company’s director of licensing in 1987, referring to products that had been created for the 50th anniversary of Snow White (Tait). I couldn’t help but wonder, do we grow out of Disney—or does Disney simply grow into us? 91% self-identified “Disney adults” expected to remain Disney adults for life, showing how prosthetic memory and identity production by media is structural, not individual. It is not simply just building a nostalgic childhood, as one may naturally think. It is an actual lived, long-lasting identity.

Disney films have been producing similar “prosthetic identities” for decades—often in ways that also affirm harmful cultural scripts. Disney’s narratives generate extraordinarily powerful memories in childhood audiences: for many people, these films become their earliest emotional templates for love, heroism, gender, and belonging. If Landesberg argues that films allow us to “construct narratives for ourselves,”(186) Disney arguably teaches us who we are supposed to want to become.

Take the “princess” narrative: Disney’s heroines repeatedly enact the prosthetic memory of transformation-an ordinary girl becomes the chosen one, love is fate, goodness is destiny. Children adopt those feelings, internalize the desire, and carry that prosthetic memory into adulthood. But, like the men who selectively identify with Bateman, audiences often internalize the surface fantasy and neglect the critique. For example, the early Disney canon accidentally supports the fantasy of male entitlement and female reward: the prince’s perseverance is framed as love, not stubbornness, and the princess’s silence or sacrifice becomes virtue, not constraint. The audiences “remember” these roles even without living them. The result can be the same confirmation bias, except directed toward romance, gender norms, happiness, and competition.

Disney has also perfected the art of extending these memories beyond the screen and into everyday consumption. Through theme parks, merchandise, streaming platforms, and curated nostalgia, Disney provides an entire ecosystem where these identities are reinforced repeatedly. Visiting Disneyland becomes a ritual–wearing themed dresses, buying branded products becomes an act of belonging, and nostalgia becomes a commodity that is constantly renewed. In the same manner that Sigma Males “perform” masculinity through imitation, Disney fans perform their identity through participation in a shared fantasy world that blurs the line between media and lived memory. This shows that prosthetic identity is not just emotional or psychological. It is economic, cultural, and social, quietly infiltrating every aspect of our community.

Interestingly enough, Disney has recently attempted to revise this prosthetic memory. Films like Frozen and Moana actively resist the earlier narratives of entitlement or rescue (Mendelson). In other words, Disney knows that people don’t just watch princess movies—they model themselves after them. Disney has had to become aware of film’s power not just to teach empathy, but to reinforce bias.

Taking the author’s argument further, the problem isn’t just that audiences identify with Bateman incorrectly–it’s that culture conditions us to look for ourselves in the narratives to confirm the scripts we already carry, whether that’s the Sigma Male fantasy, the Nice Guy narrative, or the Disney princess myth. Prosthetic memories can produce empathy, but they also produce archetypes that get recycled across media and across identity.

What Bridghet’s post reveals—and what Disney makes even clearer—is that prosthetic memory is not neutral. It can produce empathy, or entitlement. It can create community, or isolation. Perhaps the task for filmmakers and audiences isn’t to stop identifying with characters, but to become more aware of what we are being trained to desire in the first place. So I agree with the author’s conclusion that film produces identity as much as emotion. Still, I would add that even the most seemingly innocuous films, especially Disney films, have always been doing the same kind of cultural work that American Psycho does: shaping what we think we are, who we think is heroic, and what futures we believe we deserve.

Works Cited

Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner.

Mendelson, Scott. “Why ‘little Mermaid’ May Mark the End of Disney’s Remake Factory Hits: Analysis.” TheWrap, 1 June 2023, www.thewrap.com/disney-remake-little-mermaid-moana-frozen/.

Tait, Amelia. “The ‘Disney Adult’ Industrial Complex.” New Statesman, New Statesman, 26 Feb. 2024, www.newstatesman.com/culture/2024/02/disney-adult-superfan-industrial-complex#:~:text=Far%20more%20common%20answers%20include,%E2%80%9Cmakes%20me%20feel%20happy%E2%80%9D.

Cover art: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/118430665278991259/

Written by Gina Chang

Critical Response

What Can Image Gen-AI Models Teach Us About Image Perceptions?

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A Critical Response Post to THE IMAGE: REPRESENTATION, REINCARNATION, REPRODUCTION by Matthias von Loebell, Danial Schatz, Django Mavis, and Sydney Wilkins.

By Micah Sébastien Zhang

A few days ago, I have stumbled across a work by some of my peers — Matthias von Loebell, Daniel Schatz, Django Mavis, and Sydney Wilkins — on the class blog, in which they talked about the significance of images in media, and how can the manipulation of images affect people’s perception. The blog article rolled out smoothly as it took us from the early and general form and definition of images at the start, then to the connections between theories, and it all falls back to the general summary of how is their whole thesis point playing out in the modern, contemporary field of world.

The article chose a sociological point of view when comes to the analysis of images and their effects, which is a proper move in my opinion. Similar perspectives and ways of research could never get old as the time and world are shifting forward. What I found particularly agreeing is their opinion on the essence of images, as they quote it as "a visual abstraction." Through this piece of thought, we can fairly arbitrate the concept of image falling within the classical frame of media mediation, in which images serve as a mediation to a summary of thought(s).

However, in this critical response post, I would like to take a step back and make my way to a summit that grants a holistic and figurative perspective on the conception of images, notably through a rather unusual example — text-to-image generative AI models.

How come? The reason why I’m proposing this peculiar perspective approach is that I personally found the technical process of text-to-image generative AI is similar to the humanistic experience of image perception. Yet before we can go into the comparable details of it, we should first understand how do text-to-image generative AI models usually work.

A research guide from the University of Toronto gave us a pretty comprehensive outlook of the technical process, yet for the sake of convenience, a summary will be also provided below. To be technically focused and more concise, I will only focus on the process for diffusion models.

Diffusion model is a common type among image generative AI models; both Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s DALL•E are categorized as diffusion models. Inspired from thermodynamic diffusion, the technical process of a diffusion model includes two methods. The first method — forward diffusion — will declutter and scatter (or "diffuse" according to the manual) the pixels of a normal image into random noises. The machine is learning to recreate the image by reconstructing a normal image from a randomized, noisy version. That is, for example, a normal image of an apple will be diffused into randomized noise and given with the "apple" tag, then from the tagged noisy images, the machine will recreate the normal images upon requests from prompts. Each creation of the image comes from the synthesis of noises, and this will result in different image outputs even with the same prompts.

Through this process, we can partly mirror this to a general humanistic perception of images if we consider images as a mediation to higher-level information. The creation of actual, in-real-life images comes from the diffusion of the higher-level knowledge in our brains; those pieces of higher-level knowledges are, in my opinion, properly stored as a culmination of humanistic experiences since one’s birth. Upon perceiving an image, we’re essentially transforming a two-dimensional plane of "diffused noise" (this could be any form of visual representation) as pieces of higher-level knowledges in our brain, yet they could be deviated from the original intention and meaning.

On this note, images are indeed better compared to pure texts. In this example, if I put the word "apple" here, my viewers could have different perceptions to the term: maybe it’s a red apple; maybe it’s a green one; maybe it’s even Apple Inc. that made iPhones. Images can provide a more directional rectification towards transmitting higher-level thoughts and concpets. Nevertheless, it is still incomparable to direct transmissions of higher-level thoughts as it falls within the constraints of diffusion of thoughts.

Going back to the article by my peers, one of their claims is that the values of images are diminishing along with the mass production of them. Quoting from the Frankfurt School thinker Walter Benjamin, their claim is reflecting on his claim that viewing artist labour "as the process by which art is imbued with meaning." Reflecting to my claim in this article, the mass production of images may symbolize technological advancements on means of media production and the media industry itself, yet considering this holistic overview, it may also make the transmission of information into a more chaotic stage where the mass produced images bear incomplete representations of higher-level informations.

As new media studies scholars, it is important to note down the challenges currently faced by our field of study, yet having new perspectives that challenge pre-constructed perceptions may provide us more beneficial insights to shape our field of study — and sometimes it could mean taking a step back and seeing things as a whole to find general patterns.

Works Consulted

“Research Guides: Artificial Intelligence for Image Research: How Generative AI Models Work.” University of Toronto Libraries, guides.library.utoronto.ca/image-gen-ai. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.

Von Loebell, Matthias, et al. THE IMAGE: REPRESENTATION, REINCARNATION, REPRODUCTION | Approaches to Writing for Media Studies. 29 Sept. 2025, blogs.ubc.ca/mdia300/archives/115. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.

Image Acknowledgement

The header image was produced by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash.

Critical Response

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

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

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

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

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

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Critical Response

The Living Library: Mediating Morality in Books

In early October, Ela Chua published a response to Umberto Eco: A Library of the World and intertwined its themes with Tim Ingold’s Making. Though we have since moved past Eco’s work in our course, I continue to reflect on the combination of ideas that Ela illustrated. Most notably, the concepts of “vegetal memory” and physical media become newly relevant when seen through Bollmer and Verbeek’s insights on materializing media and morality.

Ela’s original post analyzes Umberto Eco: A Library of the World as a meditation on the relationship between media, materiality, and knowledge. She draws parallels between Eco’s physical engagement with books and Ingold’s concept of “making,” emphasizing that media are living things, not static objects. Her discussion of Eco’s notion of “vegetal memory” positions books as dynamic participants in collective knowledge rather than mere commodities. I would argue that Umberto Eco: A Library of the World represents one of the most pivotal moments in our course for connecting abstract concepts in media theory with tangible examples from material culture. Ela effectively reframes reading and archiving as material practices that blur the boundaries between mind, media, and memory, and while she beautifully captures the idea of a living and ever-changing archive, my recent engagement with Bollmer (2019) and Verbeek (2006) has inspired me to extend this conversation into the realm of design and mediation. Through their frameworks, I reinterpret Eco’s cherished books – and his broader “library of the world” – as a technological system that performs ethical and cognitive mediation, revealing how books themselves reconfigure and deliver information in ways that shape our collective morality and behaviour.

Ela adeptly presents Eco’s library as a living archive that mediates the relationship between media and memory, providing insights into how books shape thought, culture, and history. However, on a higher level, I argue that Eco’s “library of the world” acts as designed systems of mediation that directly influence a user’s perception of information and subsequent actions. Both Bollmer and Verbeek argue against the common misconception that media and technology are neutral, immaterial tools, and instead posit 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). For example, cataloguing systems such as the Dewey Decimal system or Eco’s personal organization shape what readers see as “related knowledge.” Bollmer (2019)’s idea that “relations of opposition and conflict” are inseparable from design’s performative agency (pp. 174–176) is relevant when we consider the political implications of archival organization, such as the separation of “national” and “local” history based on the dominant ethnic groups (Brown & Davis-Brown, 1998). The mediation in this technological system occurs not only through absorbing the content presented by the books themselves but through the way information is structured and retrieved. 

Eco’s focus on physical media and the surrounding space of library archives displays the unique expectations and material effects that translate from the archival system to human behaviour. Verbeek (2006) draws from Don Ihde’s notion that technologies have “intentions” embedded in their design to argue that media artifacts are able to influence moral human decisions. He introduces the concept of scripts, or implicit instructions that artifacts have immersed in their material design (p. 367). For example, books have the script “flip my pages slowly so they don’t rip”, and we follow this instruction because of what it signifies, not because of its material presence in the relation between humans and the world. This inherent prescription encourages ethical learning through slowness and touch. Bollmer’s concept of neurocognitive materialism (2019, pp. 171–175) highlights how the body, brain, and media form a single interactive system, and speak to the physical relationship Eco holds with his books. Eco demonstrates how media reconfigures human cognition and sensation with his refusal to put on gloves to preserve a book’s material, rather letting it decay, breathe, and live in its environment. In comparison to digital systems, the tangible experience that libraries create for users also directs certain actions and behaviours from its users. For example, a Google search flattens knowledge into relevance rankings and a convenient AI summary, whereas Eco’s physical search forces conscientiousness and slowness, changing the ethical and cognitive nature of how we “find” information. Eco’s books literally embody moral mediation by encouraging reflective engagement rather than passive consumption. Thus, it is clear that the library, as a system, trains perception and shapes patterns of thought just as modern interfaces (such as smartphone swipes) train behavioral habits. Overall, Verbeek and Bollmer stress that as media consumers and creators, we must recognize that these artifacts literally shape the embodied experience of being human.

This added perspective of design mediating morality shifts the conversation of media theory past the immaterial/material binary and a physical vs. digital debate to show that media, regardless of the form it takes, always performs important ethical work by shaping perception and behaviour. Overall, my own reflection has inspired some questions for us as media students and creators: how might digital design learn from Eco’s tactile ethics of reading? Can we design interfaces that nurture moral reflection rather than automate it? Whether through pages or pixels, designers and users alike participate in the ongoing ethical mediation of knowledge. As Bollmer (2019) concludes, “If we want to create a better world, we have to begin with what matters.” 

Citations:

Bollmer, G. (2019). Materialist media theory: An introduction. Bloomsbury Academic.

Brown, R. H., & Davis-Brown, B. (1998). The making of memory: The politics of archives, libraries and museums in the construction of national consciousness. History of the Human Sciences, 11(4), 17–32. https://doi.org/10.1177/095269519801100402

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. Routledge.

Ferrario, D. (Director). (2022). Umberto Eco: A library of the world [Film]. Stefilm, Altara Films.

Verbeek, P.-P. (2006). Materializing morality: Design ethics and technological mediation. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 31(3), 361–380. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243905285847

Critical Response

Making… In a Silent Search

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Tactility and silence are essential conditions of meaningful learning. The blog post, “In a Silent Search: Reflection on Umberto Eco’s Library of the World”, by Maryam Abusamak, is a film analysis of the documentary, Umberto Eco: A Library of the World (2022), directed by Davide Ferrario. In this blog post, Abusamak summarizes the core themes of the documentary; she demonstrates how the library of the famous philosopher, Umberto Eco, acts as a meaningful tool of knowledge production. She proves that in an information-saturated world, this biographical film demonstrates the importance of learning slowly and selectively. To extend her analysis, I propose that this film also exemplifies the cruciality of knowing through being, a concept explained in Tim Ingold’s book, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture. Through connecting Abusamak’s analysis to Ingold’s framework, I aim to show the importance of learning independently and critically through slow-paced and tactile methods; this message is especially important in a world where mis- and disinformation is instantaneously available through simple clicks.

Both Eco and Ingold illustrate inanimate objects as living beings. Interacting with these beings achieves meaningful knowledge production. I place emphasis on the word “with”, as Ingold repeatedly encourages the reader to not think “of” but “with” objects (8). Abusamak perceives Eco’s library, as presented in the documentary, as a “living organism” that “binds matter, meaning, and mediation”. In each book, “matter and meaning are inseparable”, demonstrating Ingold’s view that knowledge is made “in correspondence” with a material rather than extracted “from” it (94, 8). To Ingold, objects are alive due to their everchanging state; a building is never fully completed, as it will experience reconstructions, mold removal, and repainting over time (48), and a statue changes continuously, as it is chiseled by its artist and eventually “worn down by rain” (22). Abusamak’s interpretation of Eco’s library exemplifies this concept metaphorically and physically. She describes his library as a “living system of technical memory”, as well as “living matter” made of “ink” and “paper” (Abusamak). As a result, the individual who peruses this library acts as a maker of knowledge among a collection of living beings. Therefore, Eco’s library exemplifies Ingold’s view by acting as a “world of active materials” in which the maker is a “participant” (Ingold 21).

Furthermore, Eco’s library exemplifies Ingold’s view that tactile mediums enable nonconformist learning. Within her blog post, Abusamak claims the library exemplifies Stiegler’s concept of  “epiphylogenesis”–the recording of human evolution through “tools, marks and traces we create” (qtd. in Abusamak). These physical traces externalize memories which survive “across generations” (Abusamak). While Eco favours tactile media consumption, Ingold favours tactile media-making; he believes handwriting, handdrawing, “weaving, lacemaking and embroidery” portray “the stories of the world” (112). He states that human knowledge production should replicate the “ongoing movement of” handdrawn and handwritten lines (Ingold 140). Furthermore, he does not praise “straight-line people” who run from point “A to B” (Ingold 140), but instead promotes “pack-donkey people” who “wander” and learn through “self-discovery” (140, 141). Rather than pursuing a linear path leading from “idea” to “action”, he embraces learning through instinct and curiosity (Ingold 140). This idea is upheld by Eco’s library, which “resists the linear order and embraces the chaos of curiosity” (Abusamak). Altogether, Eco’s library promotes knowing through being; its collection of non-chronological memories embraces the whimsical, unconventional learning promoted by Ingold.

Lastly,  Eco’s library and Ingold’s theory express skepticism towards virtual learning. According to Eco, “clicking a button” brings about a “bibliography of 10,000 titles” that is “worthless” due to its sheer ubiquity; however, if one discovered three library books, they “would read them… and learn something” (qtd. in Abusamak). Ingold agrees with this statement; he believes modern consumers abandon learning as soon as they “[fill] [their] bags” with information (5). Like Eco, he condemns the mindless clicks produced by our fingers. He states that when ubiquitous information “is at our fingertips” it is simultaneously “out of our hands” (122). Additionally, he promotes Heidegger’s views of the “hand” as a symbol of sentience; when it writes with pen, “it tells” (Ingold 122). Therefore, he argues traditional penmen produce emotional “gesture and inscription”, while modern typists do not “feel” their “letters” (Ingold 122, 123).  He shows that in order to generate true making, we must engage the entire human hand, rather than press buttons that enable machinic processes. To Ingold and Eco, technological advancement, sensitive to the touch of our fingertips, has decimated emotionally-engaged learning and impactful media consumption.

In a distracting, information-saturated world, Eco and Ingold emphasize the importance of learning through instinctual, nonconformist, and tactile means. Rather than gathering ubiquitous information through a mindless press of a button, individuals must attentively engage with physical materials to produce meaningful knowledge. As Abusamak states, Eco’s philosophy “challenges the illusion that more information equals more knowledge”; instead he attributes intellect to thinking slowly and selectively. According to Abusamak, Eco’s library relates to our curriculum through its transformation of media theory into “something we can see and feel”; her physical description of Eco’s library and its ability to evoke curiosity demonstrates the importance of slow, tactile learning. As a result, Eco’s library is an example of a tool that enacts Ingold’s concept of “knowing” occurring “at the heart of being” (6). Instead of instantaneously summoning innumerous sources of digestible information, we can engage directly with a physical environment, such as that of a library, to independently conceive truth.

Works Cited

Abusamak, Maryam. In a Silent Search: Reflection on Umberto Eco’s Library of the World, UBC Blogs, 9 Oct 2025, https://blogs.ubc.ca/mdia300/archives/394 .


Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203559055.

Image Taken by Emily Shin (Page 83 of George Orwell’s 1984)

Post Written by Emily Shin

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.