Category Archives: General Media Theory

General Media Theory

The Paradox of the Female Gaze

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The term female gaze has become increasingly visible across pop-culture and media discourse. Generally, it is understood as a perspective shaped by women—either directed toward the self or toward the world. While the male gaze is classically sexual and objectifying of women, the female gaze is liberating– women taking ownership of their perception (as its colloquially understood). Across film, media, and social media, the female gaze is becoming an increasing popular phenomenon that both invites a larger female audience to claim female presence in viewership counts, and give stage to female artists to depict this gaze.

Importantly, this term circulates with a mostly descriptive neutrality: it names an orientation without yet assigning moral or analytical weight. In popular usage, the female gaze is often associated with alternative modes of looking, dressing, storytelling, and relating, distinct from the traditionally dominant male gaze. However, pockets of the internet pedestalize creators who embody the female gaze as opposed to the male gaze. What follows is an overview of how this concept has entered contemporary culture before examining its deeper implications. I describe the rise and implications of the idea of “female gaze” before overall concluding that that within the constraints of a patriarchal society, the female gaze, simply, cannot exist.

The Rise of the Term “Female Gaze” in Pop Culture

On platforms such as TikTok, creators use the “female gaze” to describe a particular aesthetic: gender-fluid, androgynous, or subtly expressive rather than overtly sexualized. The male gaze is typically invoked to characterize older or more traditional fashion trends that emphasize sexual appeal (take the Kardashian, Fashion Nova craze of the 2010s), while newer stylistic choices (trad wife, Sophia Richie-core) are framed as embodiments of the female gaze. Both male and female creators participate in this categorization, suggesting that the term has come to function as a stylistic shorthand rather than a strictly gendered epistemology.

This compilation encapsulates what the audience views as male vs. female gaze in today’s landscape.
In film culture, the female gaze is used to denote a woman’s perspective behind the camera and within narrative design. This often involves an emphasis on emotional intelligence, relational nuance, and inclusivity—of genders, identities, and casting choices. Films such as Pride and Prejudice or the Twilight series are positioned as examples of “feminine” direction and characterization, partly because they foreground interiority and portray male characters through a lens shaped by feminine desire and affective depth.

Let’s Start with the Male Gaze…

Film theorist Laura Mulvey argues that the unconscious of a patriarchal society shapes filmic structures, granting principle agency to men. Psychoanalysis becomes useful because, as she writes, it renders “the frustration experienced under the phallocentric order,” allowing feminists to approach the roots of their oppression. Freud’s notion of castration anxiety—the fear of losing masculine power—underpins the fetishistic fixation on women’s bodies in film.

This manifests as objectification: women are positioned to be “looked at and displayed,” their appearances “coded for strong visual and erotic impact” that connotes to-be-looked-at-ness. The woman becomes the erotic spectacle; her purpose is visual consumption. John Berger succinctly articulates this dynamic:

Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight.

– John Berger


Cinema extends this relation through literal mechanics—the camera follows the man’s gaze, panning on men’s desires and capturing what they want to possess in sight and materially. Film becomes a vessel for masculine fantasy, even though in ordinary life, femininity may be demeaned or vilified. For male audiences, film offers escape; for female audiences, it offers a mirror in which they see themselves molded for male desire.

The theoretical foundation of the female gaze emerges as a response to Laura Mulvey’s formulation of the male gaze. Mulvey’s psychoanalytic analysis of film argues that cinematic form is structured around a masculine unconscious: women become objects of visual pleasure, positioned as passive recipients of a male viewer’s desire. Because the female gaze arises in contradistinction to this framework, it is not an omnipresent or dominant perspective. It operates as a compensatory idea—an attempt to name what sits outside or against the masculine framework. This responsive nature is essential, as it underscores the argument that the female gaze cannot be fully disentangled from the male one.

Universality of the Male Gaze

Examples saturate mainstream cinema: fast-paced action franchises, prestige dramas, comedies, and even workplace shows all rely on visual tropes such as unnecessary nudity, slow pans across female bodies, tight or impractical clothing, and narrative structures where women function only as lovers, sexual objects, or maternal figures. The failure to pass the Bechdel test is not incidental, it reflects a broader diminishment of women’s emotional and intellectual presence. Crucially, the male gaze is not simply how men see the world. It is: how society is presented to us, how women see other women, and how women come to see themselves.

Internalizing the Male Gaze

Berger describes the internal split within women: the surveyor (male) and the surveyed (female). From childhood, women are taught to track their own appearance, evaluating themselves from the vantage point of male approval. This produces a perpetual self-monitoring—walking, weeping, speaking, even existing—under the imagined scrutiny of an internalized watcher.

Mulvey’s conclusions fold into Margaret Atwood’s framing of male fantasy: whether pedestalized or degraded, women remain positioned within narratives authored by masculine desire. Even rejecting or resisting the fantasy becomes another version of it. Women become their own voyeurs.

Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.

Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride

The Era of the Female Gaze

But gone are the days that media and life let men’s pesky gaze rule women’s perception… right? Entering this era of female gaze sits on one paradigm: telling women to dress for men is corrupting and disenfranchising (which I agree with). What it also says is that telling women not to dress for men is good.

In 2024, Julia Fox proclaimed that she is no longer dressing for the male gaze after realizing how internalized her internal voyeur had gotten. New York Fashion writer Leandra Medine pens a new term that would soon symbolize a sub-group of gen-z fashion: man repelling which she describes as

…outfitting oneself in a sartorially offensive mode that may result in repelling members of the opposite sex. Such garments include, but are not limited to, harem pants, boyfriend jeans, overalls, shoulder pads, full length jumpsuits, jewelry that resembles violent weaponry, and clogs

Unlike the male gaze, which was intended for film theory, the female gaze has transcended media spaces and has become a cultural zeitgeist. The female gaze is often defined by negation– what it is not. The female gaze is not attracting men, it is not dressing in the articles of clothing men often describe as desirable. Or perhaps, what would men hate? It provides a mechanism for women to discover personal style beyond wanting to be viewed as an object of attraction.

Reframing the Female Gaze

However, at the centre of the female gaze narrative still lies the very oppressive force that the male gaze imposes: catering to and considering men. It is hardly any more liberating to not dress for men, as it is to dress for them because we are still viewing ourselves thorough the lens of the man.

Not to mention, one of the second order effects of the ‘female gaze’ trend being a virtue signalling amongst women where some women claim to be ‘better feminists’ because they don’t dress for women while assuming others do. This often manifests in vicious, hostile comments, deriding women for their choices under the assumption of their intention to appear attractive to a male audience. In doing so, the liberation that the female gaze had intended to seek gets diluted into a memetic game. Furthermore, the virtue signallers too are viewing themselves and the other women through the male gaze to make this judgement. I believe this is only natural.

Given this pervasive adoption of the male gaze, the concept of a female gaze becomes complicated. If women are their own voyeurs, shaped by the same frameworks that mythologize and objectify them, then the female gaze cannot emerge fully autonomous. Its circulation in trend cycles reveals this: what is now described as female-gaze fashion is largely a resurgence of 90s styles filtered through contemporary values such as sustainability or gender fluidity. The gaze itself is not new– only the language is. The female gaze, as popularly understood, attempts to name a perspective beyond the male gaze. Yet, because it emerges as a response and because the male gaze structures not only film but socialization, embodiment, and desire, the female gaze cannot exist independently. It participates in a cyclical relationship in which its meaning is shaped by the very thing it seeks to counter. The paradox lies here: in trying to articulate an alternative, the female gaze reveals the extent to which the male gaze has already defined the terms.

General Media Theory

Digital Surveillance: Body & Power

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Introduction:

Our phones are constantly surveilling us, although we often fail to notice it. In this era of digital technology, we have grown accustomed to our devices requesting access to our data, our location, and ultimately our private lives. We have become accustomed to saying “yes” to breaches of our privacy without considering the repercussions and what these companies plan to do with our data. This passive willingness has kept us unaware of the larger political and economic systems that are at play. As society has become more polarized and capitalist, it is essential to be aware of the dangers inherent in digital surveillance. Companies are actively collecting, commercializing, and selling intimate data without informing the users. Lindsay Balfour’s Surveillance, Biopower, and Unsettling Intimacies discusses the dangers of surveillance of women’s intimate needs in the overturning of Roe v Wade. Balfour’s work reminds us of the hysteria that occurred after the overturning and the fear of period tracking apps selling our data to the United States government. In this era of political control of people’s bodies, especially marginalized communities, it is crucial that we stay aware of these dangers. These concerns become even more prevalent with the newly introduced government-funded AI-driven surveillance system to help ICE profile and hunt down immigrants across social media. This military grade surveillance system is being used to perpetuate fear and discrimination. Balfour’s analysis of intimate data and ICE’s extreme monitoring practices demonstrates how surveillance functions as a tool of power that aims to control the body and society. 

Biopower & Intimate Data:

After the overturning of Roe v Wade, I remember feeling worried about my menstrual application and the data it held. Before these political implementations, I had been utilizing a US-based company, Flo, before switching to Clue, a UK-based company that explicitly claimed that it would protect user’s health information. Looking back, this choice was more significant than I realized. Balfour discusses that in 2021, Flo reached a settlement with the FTC (Federal Trade Commission)  after being accused of sharing intimate health data of over 100 million users to third-party companies. Although Flo still claims they never sold this data, and that this settlement was “save time”, they were accused again in 2025 for collecting data and utilizing it for advising. This example demonstrates how easily our most intimate bodily data can be packaged, commodified, and circulated without our consent. While it may seem harmless for advertisers to have access to this information, the stakes become higher when such data can be accessed by the government or law enforcement. 

Through Balfour’s discussion of biopower, it becomes evident that these methods of surveillance do not simply observe the body; they regulate it. Balfour references Michel Foucault’s theory on biopower from Biopower: Foucault and Beyond, which is defined as a form of political power that regulates bodies and population by collecting and surveilling, ultimately working towards making a society that serves the government’s interest. Balfour reminds us that through collecting reproductive data that tracks cycles, predicts pregnancies, and perhaps informs about complications or personal choices, these platforms lose their neutrality. They participate in a political system that wants to govern bodies at a biological level. Balfour argues that “Platforms are no longer things outside or adjacent to us, whether hand-held or screen mediated; instead they are now embedded, both literally and figuratively in our lives and bodies”(60). The intersection between these digital platforms and our bodies can be dangerous when we understand its political consequences. With the increasingly strict regulations surrounding abortion and gender affirming care, choices that were meant to be private are being monitored without our consent. This is an attempt by the political system to limit self expression and autonomy, having society adhere to their values or be punished for deviation. We can see how the monitoring of our personal information is being used against us, putting our bodies and livelihoods at risk.

State Surveillance & Social Control:

This era of surveillance is not limited to regulating our bodies; it’s being increasingly used to control the population and immigration. As reported by The Lever, the Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) has purchased a 5.7 million AI social media surveillance software that is designed to read over 8 billion social media posts a day. Although ICE claims that this software is meant to “detect threats,” there has been no public consent from social media users whose information is being run through this program. It becomes clear that the government is using digital surveillance to control and classify people as “dangerous” or “threatening” without proper investigation. This raises major concerns in this current polarized political climate, as many pro-Palestine activists have been targeted by immigration authorities after being doxxed (having their private information exposed). With the increase in anti-Latino immigration rhetoric, it is worrying how this technology will further perpetuate systems of violence. These surveillance methods work to silence political expression and place vulnerable communities at even more risk. This surveillance technology is extremely alarming, as there is a lot of secrecy surrounding it. Even after searching online, there was a surprising lack of articles on the topic. This lack of transparency demonstrates erasure of consent on digital platforms. Social Media companies that once promised to protect users’ privacy are easily allowing government access to their information without permission or warning. Serious matters such as immigration are being reduced to the qualifications of AI technology and “digital footprint”. With the rise of digital surveillance, it’s becoming clear how easily our autonomy is being stripped away, leaving our private information at risk. 

Conclusion:

As digital surveillance increases, it becomes more important than ever for us to be self-aware of our data and the breaches of our privacy. As mentioned by Foucault, systems of power use surveillance to control our bodies and population. These power structures want to silence our voices and limit our choices through surveillance and punishment. It’s crucial we acknowledge that these platforms that say they will protect our data are often taking hidden contracts that commodify our information, caring more about money than our safety. Although privacy issues around menstruation and immigration data occurred in the United States. These problems are not confined to only one country, as digital surveillance expands globally, and many countries are turning more conservative. This use of intimate data to control, silence, and discipline the masses is becoming normalized. It’s crucial as Media Studies students and users of the internet that we recognize the danger of surveillance. This topic is extremely important to us as media creators, as we are often using digital platforms to speak our minds. We must acknowledge that our art, our words, and our values may be surveilled and used against us. This is why we must take the time to analyze and consider the repercussions before passively saying “yes” to tracking or sharing data. We can only begin to resist these systems of oppression once we truly understand them and their consequences.

Works Cited: 

Balfour, Lindsay Anne. “Surveillance, Biopower, and Unsettling Intimacies in Reproductive Tracking Platforms.” TOPIA, vol. 48, 1 Mar. 2024, pp. 58–75, doi:10.3138/topia-2023-0025. 

Cisney, Vernon W., and Nicolae Morar. Biopower: Foucault and Beyond. The University of Chicago Press, 2016. Schwenk, Katya. “Ice Just Bought a Social Media Surveillance Bot.” The Lever, 21 Nov. 2025, www.levernews.com/ice-just-bought-a-social-media-surveillance-botice-just-bought-a-social-media-surveillance-bot/. Accessed 10 Dec. 2025.

Written by Aminata Chipembere

General Media Theory

Mediating the Idol Body: K-Pop Femininity Through the Lens of Media Theory

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Early Bodily Discipline

I used to sit on the counter while my mother made breakfast, watching her move through the same quiet routine every morning. She cracked eggs with a small flick of her wrist, wiped the table in slow circles, and shifted between silence and conversation with a rhythm I somehow fell into. I learned when to swing my legs and when to stay still, when a question would be welcomed and when it would feel out of place. None of this was ever explained. My body just mirrored the atmosphere，the clatter of dishes, the steady breathing, the sense that everything should move smoothly without interruption. Back then, it simply felt like comfort. Only later did I realize how early the body starts practicing things it doesn’t yet have words for.

Foucault reminds us that discipline settles into the body through repetition rather than force, long before we have the language to name it (Foucault 1977). Bordo adds that habits feel “natural” not because they originate within us, but because they are practiced until they seem inevitable (Bordo 1993). I didn’t know any of this then. I only knew that the “good” body was the one that blended in, the one that didn’t interrupt the rhythm, the one that stayed neatly within the frame drawn for it. And perhaps that is why Bollmer’s idea of the body as media materiality stays with me. Even as children, we were already being tuned for legibility, for smooth circulation, for being seen in the “right” way (Bollmer 2016). Long before I encountered pop culture or performance, I had already absorbed something: that the body becomes visible only after it has learned how not to disturb the picture.

Algorithmic K-Pop Visibility

The visual language of K-pop girl groups has become one of the most globally recognizable media phenomena of the past decade. Even for people who pay little attention to K-pop, its images still appear constantly in the background of online life.  They show up not because users seek them out, but because the algorithms that structure digital platforms treat these visuals as universally recognizable and easy to distribute. Over time, this steady, almost passive exposure creates a sense of familiarity, as if the look and rhythm of K-pop girlhood were something we already understood, even when we know very little about the cultural or industrial context that produced it. They appear in TikTok edits, airport fashion compilations, Spotify banners, Vogue covers, and YouTube recommendations. In this way, K-pop girlhood has become a global aesthetic shorthand for “Asian femininity,” detached from its origins and recontextualized through international media flows.

Industrial Origins of Idol Femininity

Scholars point out that the figure of the female idol did not emerge organically: it is rooted in South Korea’s rapid industrialization during the 1960s–1980s, when Confucian patriarchal management structures and the exploitation of young female labor shaped how women’s bodies were disciplined, displayed, and commodified in public culture (Gooyong 2017). The choreography of cuteness and submission that defined early K-pop was far more than a stylistic choice; it crystallized the broader sociopolitical conditions that cast women simultaneously as disciplined laborers and as consumable cultural commodities.

The Marketed Shift to “Crush” Empowerment

More recently, the industry has embraced the so-called “crush girl” aesthetic,confident, charismatic, emotionally restrained, aligned with global discourses of empowerment (Sun, Paje’, & Lee 2023). Blackpink has become the emblem of this shift, their public personas marketed as the definitive repudiation of earlier girlhood tropes. The dominant narrative circulating online suggests that Korean femininity has undergone a genuine transformation: that the cute-to-powerful arc signifies increased autonomy, feminist progress, or ideological change. However, as media theorists remind us, visibility is not synonymous with liberation. When empowerment becomes an easily exportable aesthetic, packaged for global consumption, it becomes difficult to distinguish structural change from a strategic recalibration of marketable femininity. What forms of feminine subjectivity are being legitimized through these hyper-mediated performances, and which possibilities are being constrained, erased, or rendered unimaginable?

Discipline as Affective Technique

When we look at the bodies of contemporary girl-group idols, it is tempting to treat what we see as a kind of distilled personality, confidence, coolness, a stylistic refusal of vulnerability. But the media theories we’ve worked with suggest something more complicated: what feels like a “self” on screen is often the afterimage of systems that have already moved through the body long before it appears in front of a camera.Foucault gives us the vocabulary for this calibration. Discipline, he writes, works not by coercion but by embedding micro-habits: the turn of the chin, the straightened spine, the practiced smile (Foucault 1977). What seems voluntary is often the sediment of countless corrections. Bordo extends this insight by observing that once such corrections settle into muscle memory, we mistake them for personal inclination (Bordo 1993). A particular walk, a particular emotional poise, a particular restraint begins to feel “natural,” not because it arises from the self but because it has been rehearsed until it replaces whatever existed before.

The Body as Media Materiality

This is precisely where Bollmer becomes crucial. For Bollmer, the body is not merely disciplined by media, it becomes a medium, a material surface optimized for circulation and readability within a given cultural system (Bollmer 2016). The gestures we associate with the “crush girl” aesthetic, cool confidence, perfectly metered charisma, emotional containment, are not spontaneous expressions. They are industrial techniques that render the body legible within a global visual economy. The body is trained to be smooth, efficient, and expressive in highly specific ways because these qualities travel well across platforms. A certain tilt of the head or unbothered gaze becomes a replicable template, not an authentic disclosure of subjectivity.

The Limits of Distant Vision

Sometimes I think about how vision itself is organized in East Asian media cultures. In glossy MVs and perfectly lit close-ups, the idol’s face does not simply appear; it is delivered to us already curated, polished, legible, engineered for instant recognition. But real women’s lives never arrive in that state. They require nearness, texture, and time, forms of attention that cannot be automated or algorithmically scaled. You have to move closer before anything becomes truly visible. Media theory teaches us that distance is one of capital’s most effective visual strategies: it offers the appearance of empowerment while softening, even silencing, the voices that underwrite the image. The farther the image travels, the quieter the body becomes. So the question is not only whether East Asia is distant from “real” empowerment, but what our eyes have been trained to perceive from afar, and what becomes audible only when that distance is refused.

Works Cited

Bollmer, Grant. Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. University of California Press, 1993.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1977.

Gooyong, Kim. “Cute but Deadly: The Commodification of Female Labor in Early K-pop.” Journal of Korean Popular Culture, vol. 5, no. 2, 2017, pp. 15–32.

Sun, Wanning, D. Paje’, and Haein Lee. “Rebranding Femininity: The ‘Crush Girl’ Aesthetic in Contemporary K-pop.” Media & Culture Review, vol. 12, no. 1, 2023, pp. 44–62.

General Media Theory

AI Isn’t Being Regulated and I’m Sick of It

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Growing up in the digital age and with constant technological advancements happening left and right, it’s easy to become numb to the frequent sayings of “this is inevitable” or “everyone’s using it so you better get used to it”, or anything related to normalizing the rapid progress that tech receives. This particularly applies to Artificial Intelligence, as AI has become the central focus of not just young people, but the global economy as a whole, with OpenAI desperately trying to keep the bubble from bursting as companies send each other billions of dollars worth of “IOU’s”. Corporations and billionaires need AI to succeed, but governments seem to be sleeping at the wheel when it comes to actually regulating it, with the laws written either being outdated or nearly prevented from being made outright (Brown). I’ve written about AI a lot this semester, and in this blog post I am going to pull from various sources I used from this term to make the argument for why it needs strict regulation.

There have been countless news stories of people being scammed via fake AI voices of family members, to deepfakes and other image-generation technology used to sextort young individuals, and while the acts themselves are illegal, it’s still just as easy to go on a website and generate an image of someone without their consent as it was a few years ago. The only thing that’s actually gotten better is the tech itself, not the laws or guidelines surrounding it. Emily McArthur’s article, The IPhone Erfahrung: Siri, the Auditory Unconscious, and Walter Benjamin’s “Aura”, talks about technology when it comes to extension but it also highlights the responsibility that is shared between technology users and makers (McArthur). This is particularly applicable to AI today, since while obviously the users of the tech who use it for nefarious and illegal reasons should be punished, the creators of the tech itself should also be held accountable. There was a recent example of a teenager who committed suicide after a conversation with ChatGPT encouraged him to, and the parent company, OpenAI, denied responsibility because the teen had ‘misused’ the AI (Yang). If their response to a teenager killing themselves after being encouraged to by their product is “sorry, you weren’t authorized to talk to it that way”, there is clearly something extremely wrong with the way that the technology was created to begin with for this outcome to even have happened.

Another strong reason to support the increased regulation of AI is that our history depends on it. Photographic evidence and video evidence is a crucial part of our society and how we function as a people, how lessons are taught in school and how people are determined to be guilty or innocent in a court of law. The fact that those concrete forms of information are now at risk of being questioned forever should be an alarm bell for anyone who cares about truth. In Tony Horava’s article, eBooks and McLuhan: The Medium is Still the Message, Horava talks about how we can interpret and process the same information differently depending on the medium in which we consume it. The concept directly relates to AI images and videos, since a video made by a trusted source on a subject will be given more weight than an AI-generated version, even if it draws upon the same sources and delivers the same information. People already distrust AI videos since all we’ve seen them used for is memes and making fun of others, and so naturally if someone were to be accused of robbing a store for example, who’s to say that the security footage is even real to begin with. AI video and images only create distrust in the real, secure versions, so regulation needs to be in place to either limit or prohibit using the likeness of a real person, or ensure that any generated material has a permanent watermark that is easily visible or accessible. The alternative is that misinformation will only continue to spread at levels never seen before.

Relating to the believability of existing materials and physical media, Ingold in Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture discussed Michael Polanyi’s concept of ‘tacit knowledge’, and it talked about how Ingold did believe that all knowledge could be communicated or that even innate knowledge could be communicated (Ingold 111). I bring this up because when it comes to discerning whether or not an AI-generated creation is real or not, outside of the more obvious tells that sometimes appear, like messed up fingers or inconsistent patterns, people like to think that they can ‘tell’ when something is real or not. The whole concept of the uncanny valley is dedicated to this, the idea that people are able to tell when something looks off, or not human. Up until recently I was of the opinion that laws would come in place before AI-generation got to the point where it was impossible to tell what was real and what wasn’t, but Google’s most recent Nano Banana Pro model is already at that point, and the population isn’t ready. This technology threatens to make us lose our innate ability to tell between truth and fiction, to the point where trying to find irregularities may not be possible to communicate, which goes against Ingold’s thinking but as of this moment in AI history, it’s what appears to be the case.

While I have little faith that meaningful laws and regulations will be put into effect any time soon, I am still hopeful for the future and for the idea that AI will eventually exist in a limited capacity, driven by rules that prohibit stealing others’ likenesses, and ensuring that a permanent watermark resides on every piece of generated material.

Works Cited

Brown, Matt. “Senate pulls AI regulatory ban from GOP bill after complaints from states.” PBS, 1 July 2025, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/senate-pulls-ai-regulatory-ban-from-gop-bill-after-complaints-from-states. Accessed 5 December 2025.

Horava, Tony. “eBooks and McLuhan: The Medium is Still the Message.” Against the Grain, vol. 28, no. 4, 2016, pp. 62-64. Library and Information Science Commons. Accessed 16 November 2025.

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture. 1st ed., Routledge, 2013, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203559055. Accessed 4 December 2025.

McArthur, Emily. “The Iphone Erfahrung: Siri, the Auditory Unconscious, and Walter Benjamin’s “Aura”.” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman. Ed. Dennis M. Weiss Ed. Amy D. Propen Ed. Colbey Emmerson Reid Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. 113–128. Postphenomenology and the Philosophy of Technology. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 1 Dec. 2025. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781666993851.ch-006>.

Yang, Angela. “OpenAI denies allegations that ChatGPT is to blame for a teenager’s suicide.” NBC News, 25 November 2025, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/openai-denies-allegation-chatgpt-teenagers-death-adam-raine-lawsuit-rcna245946. Accessed 5 December 2025.

General Media Theory, Other

Why We Fight Online: Environmental Polarization in Digital Media

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Introduction

Even though everyone has come to realize that internet has always been a medium of chaos and conflict, but it has always been mildly confusing for us that while verbal sparring in reality is a relatively mild and civilized form of exchanging viewpoints, online it becomes a genuine battlefield—strangers clash fiercely over differing opinions, or sometimes simply to provoke, with conflicts erupting openly for all to see. I’ve also seen many ordinary content creators who share their daily lives eventually forced to turn off private messages after gaining attention, because clearly, many people use such channels like random assailants, aiming only to wound without reason. 

If aliens studying Earth were to witness the spectacle of online discourse, they might be astounded by the stark contrast with the polite and respectful demeanor most people display in real life. What causes such a clear divide in behavior between the online and offline worlds for the same individuals? Does the digital environment inherently make people more irritable, less tolerant, and unwilling to understand others? In this article, we will explore this very question—specifically, the causes of environmental polarization and the role the media plays in it.

Network Polarization and the Online Environment 

Network polarization refers to the phenomenon where issues that might be understandable in real life are continuously amplified and fixated upon by online communities to the point of harsh criticism. People become less tolerant of differing viewpoints online, while growing increasingly exclusive within their own labeled groups—even if their so-called “allies” might struggle to hold a two-sentence conversation with them in real life. Environmental polarization makes everyone more sensitive and defensive. In this climate of pervasive insecurity, individuals seek solace in groups, yet this very process only deepens the divides between people. While cooperation and understanding thrive offline, online, certain opinions are immediately branded as heresy worthy of burning at the stake—judged with absolute, uncompromising harshness.

If we look back at the online environment around 2000, although media technology was far less efficient and accessible than today, the atmosphere of communication was generally much healthier than the current state, where a single comment can rapidly poison a community. Does this mean the advancement of media technology is not truly a positive development? Perhaps, as Umberto Eco wrote in Chronicles of a Liquid Society (2017), “Progress doesn’t necessarily involve going forward at all costs.” While Eco was mainly discussing the unnecessary “diversification” of physical inventions that replace what already exists, I suspect he would also disapprove of today’s digital landscape.

Potential Reasons Behind Network Polarization and the Influence of Media

To understand why online environments intensify conflict, we can turn to Gibson’s ecological perspective, which helps explain why digital environments intensify conflict and relies on what the environment makes available to us. Applied to online usage, this suggests that when people use social and online platforms, they shape the exact platform they are using while the platform itself simultaneously shapes them. 

In The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Gibson emphasizes that the “animal and the environment make an inseparable pair” (p. 8). Gibson writes that the perceiver is always surrounded by “the medium in which animals can move about (and in which objects can be moved about) is at the same time the medium for light, sound, and odor coming from sources in the environment.” (p. 13), meaning that perception is shaped by whatever information the environment supplies.

One major factor of polarization is selective perception. Our online feeds are not a neutral environment, as algorithms curate and amplify content that they assume the user appears to be “looking for.” This makes polarization feel natural and unavoidable because the environment reinforces the observer. Online, this means users often search for confirmation validation that aligns with existing emotions and beliefs.

Gibson also reminds us that perception is active, not passive. He states, “we must perceive in order to move, but we must also move in order to perceive. ” (p. 213). Online, there is constant “movement” in scrolling, liking, and reposting, which affects what the users perceive next based on the algorithm. The environment is always refreshing, adjusting to user behaviour. This repeated cycle then boosts reactions and reinforces patterns, making it easier for polarization to become a way of interacting.

Looking into Media: a Tool or an Amplifier?

Concluding from Gibson, we can say that the internet we are looking into is not a neutral environment, and media does not only act as a tool for our voices. Depending on algorithms, the pages shown to everyone are different, designed for our own taste. By manipulating what people perceive, media and the internet can easily influence the opinions of people, and the information cocoon will naturally feed towards the minds of the opinions already there, making the opinions increasingly polarized and entrenched. People use the internet to voice themselves, but the internet will also amplify what they are saying to other people’s ears. 

Sources:

Eco, Umberto. “Have we really invented so much?”. Chronicles of a Liquid Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2017. https://archive.org/details/chroniclesofliqu0000ecou 

Gibson, James. J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Psychology Press

. 2015. https://library.uniq.edu.iq/storage/books/file/The%20Ecological%20Approach%20to%20Visual%20Perception%20Approach/1667383098The%20Ecological%20Approach%20to%20Visual%20Perception%20Classic%20Edition%20(James%20J.%20Gibson)%20(z-lib.org)%20(1).pdf

Törnberg, K.P. (Petter). “Social media polarize politics for a different reason than you might think”. University of Amsterdam. 2022.https://www.uva.nl/en/shared-content/faculteiten/en/faculteit-der-maatschappij-en-gedragswetenschappen/news/2022/10/social-media-polarize-politics-for-a-different-reason-than-you-might-think.html?cb

Collaborators:

Siming Liao, Aubrey Ventura

General Media Theory

Landsberg to Lain: Power in Prosthetic Memories

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Introduction

Serial Experiments Lain is a 1998 cyberpunk anime which follows a girl called Lain in a world where the boundary between the physical realm and the Wired – a fictionalized version of what we know as the Internet – progressively becomes more blurred. Lain grapples with confronting her digital alter egos and trying to make sense of her ever-shifting reality. While the series quickly spirals into surreality and confusion, the themes of memory, identity and mass media ring clear. The specific concept of prosthetic memories comes into view when it is revealed that the world’s chaos can be traced back to a digitally-omnipresent antagonist named Eiri, whose ability to manipulate collective memory can shape reality.  

Hence, I found that this series resonates heavily with Alison Landsberg’s 1995 paper Prosthetic Memories, in which she defines such memories as ones that are implanted instead of coming from lived experiences. While her discussion focuses on prosthetic memories as experienced through film and mass media, my blog post explores how Serial Experiments Lain extends her ideas to the modern age of the internet and social media. I go further to argue that the late-90s series prophetically illustrates how the internet is used as a powerful tool for systems of power to manipulate memory, alter reality and reshape history to the detriment of society. 

Prosthetic memories through social media

Landsberg explains that the mass media is a site for the production of prosthetic memories, with cinema in particular. As a medium that makes images available for mass consumption, it creates experiences and implants memories “which become experiences that film consumers both possess and feel possessed by” (176). Spectators witness memories depicted on screen that they have not actually lived through, prosthetically experiencing the histories of a collective past. Landsberg suggests that this complicates identity formation and results in the creation of “partial identities” (179).

Similarly, Lain is a figure whose identity is fragmented and shaped by prosthetic memories. Midway through the series, a mind-bending twist reveals that Lain is a digital entity entirely constructed by Eiri with the purpose of bridging the gap between the real world and the Wired. She grows to become a figure whose identity is shaped by the human collective unconscious present in the Wired, resulting in different “Lains” who are constructed by various people’s experiences and memories. While the Wired presents an exaggerated, more advanced version of how the Internet functions in real life, Lain’s experiences with partial identities is reflective of how our identities are shaped online. Beyond the images depicted in films as discussed by Landsberg, social media has made it so that users can easily upload documentations of their memories to the digital realm, readily accessible for others to prosthetically experience these histories and internalize them as their own.

Perception becomes reality

Landsberg explains that what is real and what is not becomes blurred when an individual’s identity is affected by prosthetic memories. She asks the question “What might it mean to say that those memories are ‘just’ from a movie?”, arguing against any attempt to distinguish between prosthetic memories and “real” ones, since anything that we experience to be real becomes our reality regardless of the source. Serial Experiments Lain echoes this point by positing that perception becomes reality, and extends this discussion to the realm of collective memories and the act of memory erasure.

“A memory is only a record. You just have to rewrite that record.” – Lain

While the series explores Landsberg’s ideas of experiencing additional memories outside of one’s own lived experience, it also explores what happens when memory is erased. As Lain becomes a powerful, God-like being that crosses between planes of reality, she grows to realize the detrimental impacts of her abilities, and uses memory manipulation as a positive force to remove herself from society’s collective memory. She continues to live on, but in a peaceful world where she was never remembered, and thus the impacts of her existence are no longer present. This bittersweet ending highlights a central idea that ripples throughout the episodes: that people only have substance within the memories of other people.

Memory as shaped by power

Following this idea that people only have substance within memories of others, could this also apply to global issues or events? Our collective memory and experience of reality is largely shaped by our engagement with social media and the images that we see online. If something is documented less or hidden from public view, society becomes prone to forgetting it, which essentially removes it from our perception, and thus our reality.

Adriaansen and Smit explain how platformization reshapes the act of remembering and forgetting through algorithmic curation. They define platformization as the way in which our pasts are actively and continuously reshaped by the infrastructures of digital platforms. They use the example of Facebook and Apple’s “Memory” features that algorithmically select old posts to surface as memories based on engagement metrics and positive content. These features strategically reconstructs individual’s memories into tailored narratives that highlight certain moments while erasing those deemed less desirable. Adriaansen and Smit also explain how, on a collective scale, algorithms aid in the dissemination of content throughout social networks, with algorithmic bias playing a part in determining which narratives gain visibility and credibility. This proliferates the spread of “fake news”, leading to collective yet false memories about public events that become part of our perceived reality and experiences (2).

Serial Experiments Lain extends Landsberg concept of prosthetic memories to the modern age of the Internet, and illustrates how social media is a prominent site for memory construction and the shaping of our collective reality. The power of memory manipulation that Eiri, and consequently Lain, hold, make them figures that are allegorical of these systems of power and regimes that enforce censorship in attempts to make us remember and forget. While there is no God-like entity that can literally extract and implant memories into the minds of individuals (hopefully), the erasure and fabrication of narratives happen all the time, subtly but surely. Hence, it remains important for us to look through the cracks and think critically about the information we engage with online so that we don’t fall into a perception of reality that blinds us from truth.

By: Adela Lynge

References

Adriaansen, Robbert-Jan, and Rik Smit. “Collective memory and social media.” Current Opinion in Psychology, vol. 65, Oct. 2025, pp. 1–4,

Landsberg, Alison. “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner.” Body & Society, 1995. pp. 175-189.



General Media Theory

What Papers, Please tells us about governed bodies and inscription

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By: Christine Choi

When trying to make sense of the oppressive systems and structures in place, video games may not be the first to come to mind when it comes to examining the system in place. Yet, the video game Papers, Please, provides an interesting insight and commentary on what it means to put in a position of performing that status quo. The concepts in Grant Bollmer’s book Materialist Media Theory provided foundational groundwork with relevant ideas in this game. As a result, it brought attention to the following: what kind of context do video games provide for us when it comes to understanding the representation of bodies as well as the inscription of such bodies? As much as Papers, Please exaggerates and parodizes the border control and immigration systems, it simultaneously reveals the biases of the immigration system as well as the player themselves. 

Papers, Please, is an indie game where you play as an immigration inspector for the fictional country “Arstotzka.” Throughout the game, you make decisions to let them cross the border based on people’s “validity” of their documentation, which determines whether they are permitted to enter the country. The laws that determine what counts as a valid document continue to grow more and more convoluted as the game progresses, which makes detecting discrepancies even more difficult. Depending on if their documentations are all correct, their passports get stamped with “approved” or “denied” accordingly. The premise itself already highlights how we, as bodies living under the legal institutions that define us, have forced us into the inscription of legal documents that indicate our right to exist as well as our subscription to performing such practices.  

Inscription Using Documents

As the immigration inspector, you are already assigned to the act of inscribing into each entrant’s document via stamping in their passports. However, each body and the inscriptions that represent said body (i.e. the passports, entry permits, etc.) have much more than what is inscribed (or is not inscribed) in their documents. For whatever reason each entrant was unable to provide the correct details in their documents, they each had their own lives that brought them to the border—details which cannot be inscribed within their very legal documents. It makes Bollmer’s argument about analyzing the “margins,” a space in which we can find “traces of a history that this barbarism worked to exclude from existence,” all the more relevant in contextualizing their presence at the border (54). You, the player, can make the decision on whether you do perform that very duty that this authoritarian institution has tasked you with through the institutional practices of inscribing. Doing so, however, means that you have made the inherent decision to push these people into the “margins.”

Performativity in Papers, Please

The game’s mechanic of finding “discrepancies” in the information in the documentation also happens to be one of the ways that illustrates how “legible bodies”—bodies that are “produced by legal, medical, and psychological practices of writing and documentation”—are rendered illegible by the immigration system (Bollmer, 67). The game appears to task the player with a relatively simple task: to carry out, or rather, “perform,” the laws that govern our bodies. As a result, the bodies perform the act of being a legal entrant to Arstotzka by carrying and presenting with valid documentation—or at least attempt to. Failing to find the discrepancy results in citations for violating protocol—get three of these, and it will be deducted from your salary. Even with the presence of the repressive state apparatus—the agreement to obey the laws due to the “threat of police violence, or in this case, the government representatives—the game incites as well as punishes the player for acting against them (Bollmer, 27). Throughout the gameplay, there will be several characters that ask you to approve the entry of those who do not carry valid documents and deny the entry of those who do, citing reasons such as wanting to stay with their family or the fear for their safety if certain individuals are let in. This is how the game presents the player with the agency of whether they want to perform within the legal and governmental practices or perform outside of them, even if that results in a protocol violation.

Game-sensing Systemic Marginalization of Bodies

But why analyze the legibility of bodies and the inscription of documentation through a video game? When trying to understand the systemic challenges that arise from the documentation of our very being, one helpful framework to understand it is through the perspective of “game-sensing.” “Game-sensing” refers to how gamers “attune to a game system” which often takes form in navigating through the game’s mechanics and environments (Guillermo 156-157). Kawika Guillermo, in their book Of Floating Isles, described how video games are able to show the ways in which we game-sense the racialized systems that we co-exist in (157). The game-sensing of Papers, Please, as stated by Guillermo, “attunes us to the violences of nationalist othering by revealing the overlapping practices of border security with state-enforced racism” (162). Despite the seemingly immateriality of the bodies in digital video games, Papers, Please exemplified how studying these media objects through the media theoretical lens.

The notion that video games, as media that are viewed as inherently self-serving and pleasure-seeking, are unable to delve deeper into the real-world oppression that are inscribed within society, has been frequently countered with the recent emergence of indie games such as Papers, Please. It shows us how games can in fact materialize the immateriality of systemic marginalization of immigrants. In the game, the laws behind who gets to enter Arstotzka quickly change following a terrorist attack at the border. We see this parallel real-life events, such as the formation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) as a response to the terrorist attack that occurred on September 11th, 2001 throughout the United States (“TSA History”). Games such as these can illuminate on how the TSA operates has been racialized by using the actions of extremist groups as reason to further marginalize racial groups. By contextualizing these games to the media theories that we continue to study, we can do more than just game-sense the systemic racialized injustices: we can challenge the existing hegemony in place and maybe eventually, see it lead to political change (Bollmer, 32). 

Works Cited

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

Guillermo, Kawika. Of Floating Isles: On Growing Pains and Video Games. Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025.

Papers, Please. Directed by Lucas Pope, 3909, 2013.

“TSA History | Transportation Security Administration.” Transportation Security Administration, www.tsa.gov/history. Accessed 3 Dec. 2025. 

General Media Theory

Can a Film Give You False Memories? Prosthetic Memory in Monster

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I was about forty minutes into watching Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 2023 film, Monster, when my understanding of the film completely altered. The pieces seemed to fit together so seamlessly, so inevitably. I was certain I had a grasp of who the monster was in the film until the film restarted and the same scenes were depicted through different lenses. The feelings I felt while the tone of the narrative shifted encapsulate why this film is now one of my all-time favourites. The uncomfortable, almost physical sensation of a memory changing was beautifully illustrated once the first part of the film closed out and began again with a new perspective. Not just my understanding, but my actual recollection of what I had witnessed had completely changed—the scenes I had experienced as sinister now carried entirely different emotional weight.

This unsettling experience is precisely what media theorist Alison Landsberg describes as “prosthetic memory,” where the memories we acquire do not come from lived experiences, but rather through cinema and mass media while still feeling deeply personal and emotionally resonant with our physical bodies. Landsberg argues that prosthetic memories allow us experiential access to the lives and perspectives that we haven’t lived through cinema.

Cinema has the powerful capability of building empathy across social, cultural, and historical divides. Following Benjamin and Kracauer, Landsberg claims that the cinematic experience “has an individual, bodily component at the same time that it is circumscribed by its collectivity.” (Landsberg, 180) The publicity of cinema allows individual bodies to form new means of collectivity through prostheses and prosthetic memories. Oftentimes, what we witness on film actually becomes part of one’s “personal archive of experience,” (Landsberg, 179) and can alter our overall sentiments towards the film and the movie-watching experience altogether. Monster take advantage of our memory. It doesn’t just give access to unfamiliar experiences, but forces us in participating in the very stigmatization the film ultimately condemns. What if the real power of Kore-eda’s film lies not in revealing who the “monster” actually is, but in making us feel what it’s like to have named one?

Landsberg discusses the concept of ‘emotional possession,’ where an individual identifies with the plot so much that they are carried away from the usual trend of conduct (Landsberg, 179) to describe the potential cinema has in emotionally resonating with individuals. Monster’s three part structure reveals different perspectives of the same event, first from the perspective of mother, Saori, then from teacher, Mr. Hori, and finally from the perspective of her son and his friend, Minato and Yori. The film takes advantage of traditional film technique, the Rashomon Effect, to reveal different aspects of the truth as the film progresses. This technique takes advantage of the idea of the unreliable narrator, where notions of memory and the truth are blurred based on differing perspectives and subjective views of one central event (Prince). By following one character per act, each section allows audiences to emotionally connect with the section’s protagonist, investing their emotional possession on that one character as that is the narrative they are initially exposed to. It is easy for movie-watchers to immediately assume what they first watch is true, thanks to imaginative identification, where audiences often project themselves on to the film’s protagonist (Landsberg, 179). The initial emotional investment in the first character, Saori, in the first act weighs more as the movie progresses and more perspectives and truths unravel. Further more, it makes the tone switch as the perspectives change more impactful, as it brings tension and surprise when it is revealed that nothing is really what it seems. Each retelling of the event doesn’t just add information, but it overwrites our experiential memory of what truly happened. What we first see from the perspective of Saori now becomes completely different in the eyes of Mr. Hori. We don’t understand the truth until we follow the children’s lenses, which even ends ambiguously. Because of the realism in Monster’s narrative, it becomes even more difficult for audiences to distinguish between truth and fiction, between the cinematic world and our society. The film deals with topics of intimacy, self-discovery, and innocence through perspective and memories. Upon my first screening of this film, it was compelling to see how the initial mystery of a teacher hitting a schoolboy unravelled into an exploration of two young children’s relationship with themselves, each other, and their surroundings. It was something I could have anticipated, when looking through the narrative from only one set of memories. 

This form of prosthesis extends viewers’ relationship to the film itself, rather than just the content and the watcher. As Landsberg emphasises, the nature of cinema gives us access to experiential knowledge and perspectives that we would otherwise not have access to. Unlike traditional flashback scenes, Kore-eda forces us to relive these moments through multiple different characters. By forcing us to “remember” the same scenes with different emotional contexts, audiences are given a bodily, highly sensory experience of having the wrong assumption about someone. What we knew at the end of the first act is never the lasting impression we have once the film ends. Oftentimes, the ‘truth’ lies within adults, those who are mature and of sound mind and children’s perspectives are ignored or seen through a childish lens. Monster plays with the idea of children as the truth and as critics. As children are more capable of being influenced by the world around us, and have little to no filters at a young age, this critique comes from innocence and wonder. Kore-eda gives us prosthetic access to these children’s perspectives, which are the very perspectives that the past two acts have misinterpreted.

As director Kore-eda explains, the poster features the two children ‘looking our way and they’re evaluating us adults and they’re saying, “Hey you’re creating this world with monsters everywhere and that’s our world.”‘ (Fernandes) This is the political power of prosthetic memory that Landsberg describes: by literally making us experience what we’ve been missing. By witnessing the third and final act, we are able to feel the consequences of that exclusion. We carry the prosthetic memory of having participated in a world that creates monsters by refusing to see through children’s eyes.

The prosthetic memory that Monster implants in us is not just the children’s stories of what they witness, but the experiential knowledge of what we dismiss, damage, and mislabel as ‘monstrous.’ It forces us to use this movie and apply it to our own society and how we are so quick to critique others based on one perspective—but more than that, we now carry a memory of having done exactly that, of having gotten it wrong, that feels as real and uncomfortable as our own lived mistakes.

Sources

Fernandes, Marriska. “Monster’s Hirokazu Kore-Eda on the Two Entities in His Films: ‘Children and Dead People.’” Toronto Film Critics Association, 25 Sept. 2023, torontofilmcritics.com/features/monsters-hirokazu-kore-eda-on-the-two-entities-in-his-films-children-and-dead-people/.

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

Prince, Stephen. The Rashomon Effect | Current | The Criterion Collection, 6 Nov. 2012, www.criterion.com/current/posts/195-the-rashomon-effect.

General Media Theory

Oxford Word Of The Year In 2025 Is “Rage Bait” — And What?

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By Micah Sébastien Zhang

Sometimes I think human thoughts and patterns are strange — sometimes even blatantly strange and intellectually-defunct. My mind often circles back to this wild statement after much observation as a new generation person breed by perpetual online content.

Quite recently, Oxford University Press has chosen the term "rage bait" as the Word of the Year of 2025. The term "rage bait" is "online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content" as defined by their given explanation. Their presented graphic showed that the usage of the term has been sharply rising since around June of 2024.

This wasn’t the first time that Oxford UP decided to bring in significant attention to rapidly developing internet jargons. Last year, the term "brain rot" was selected as the Word of the Year in 2024. A technical definition for this term would be about meaningless pieces of low-effort content circulating on the internet, yet a figurative definition would be an alarming symbolism that marks the downfall of communications and record-keeping of the humanity.

My growth as a 2005-born Millennial defined my intertwining love-hate relationship with the internet, and now my current identity as a media studies student is adding a touch of sour taste to recognizing the reality. My early days of internet exploration around 2016 opened myself up to the massive culmination of mankind knowledge (whether it’s good or bad); the sense of novelty was lingering among the majority of good-faith online communities (I missed the days watching DanTDM as a child). Yet now coming to the end of 2025 as a (questionable) self-functioning adult after learning three years of formal media jargons, this sense of novelty was eventually replaced with subtle nausea on overwhelming effects of emotions transmitting throughout the internet.

On a deeper reflective level, this feeling now feels more like a side effect of internet or mass communication as expected from media richness theory, which was developed by Richard L. Daft and Robert H. Lengel in the 1980s. The theory developed a framework to assess different means of communications depending on their "richness" — the ability to accurately convey information with as minimum misintepretations as possible.

A core of the internet relies on mass communication and digitization of traditional humanistic experiences, and the concepts within the media richness theory seem to alarm us of a possible outcome. Concepts mentioned in the media richness theory, such as paralanguage, social cues, and social presence — which are all heavily present in in-person communications — are mostly-to-always compressed and distorted during the transformation to digitized spaces. A simple "I love you" to a person could be reprinted and reproduced numerous times on language-prevalent platforms like Twitter and Facebook; the cues brought by tone, body languages, and facial expressions were, however, obliterated by the digital presence, despite the fact that they’re heavily influential on conveying deep meanings.

Rage bait could be pretty much interpreted as the direct result of phenomenon. The social media’s lessening capacity to hold long-form discussions is leading to a tendency of encouraging primal flirts to trigger simple emotions, yet ironically speaking, keeping content forms simple for social media seems like a popular solution for a social media platform to thrive. It might seems just easy for us to randomly post anything on Twitter within a 140-word limit, preferably with some pictures to spice up your content. The ultimate outcome we often hope for from posting would be engagement and acknowledgements, whether it could be simple as a like or retweet or as complex as a well-written and formatted reply. But the mediation of language itself is inevitable (and I would personally call it as the curse of language); it’s almost impossible to mirror a specific segment of your personal, in-real-life experience onto a short amount of text and expect other people can feel your same experience through the text. On topics such as debates over ideas and opinions that would often take an insurmountable effort form proper engagements and arguments, the text itself on those topics over social media doesn’t just represent a description, but rather a much dwindled tag of primal humanistic emotions.

What lies the real danger here is that the delivery format of social media is driving such engagements — exchanges of primal humanistic emotions. The root of conflicts inside mankind could be just coming from a small misunderstanding. If one day the boundaries between online and real-life interactions blurred, I must say that I’m not highly optimistic of what might be the outcome.

Sure, you can say it’s primal humanistic emotions again. ("We’re just humans, right?") Just don’t think that I’ll take all those norms in peace.

Works Consulted

Heaton, Benedict. “‘Brain Rot’ Named Oxford Word of the Year 2024.” Oxford University Press, 2 Dec. 2024, corp.oup.com/news/brain-rot-named-oxford-word-of-the-year-2024.

Heaton, Benedict. “The Oxford Word of the Year 2025 Is Rage Bait.” Oxford University Press, 1 Dec. 2025, corp.oup.com/news/the-oxford-word-of-the-year-2025-is-rage-bait.

“Media Richness Theory | Research Starters | EBSCO Research.” EBSCO, www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/media-richness-theory#terms-&-concepts.

Copyright Acknowledgement

Cover feature image by Dmitry Vechorko on Unsplash.

General Media Theory

Media makes us STUPID? When internet slangs become your only mean of expression…

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The more deeply I engage with media—especially while studying in a program centered on media itself—the more I notice how easily it shapes my perception, attention, and even my habits of thought. This course has made me confront something I never really questioned before: what does it mean to maintain a healthy distance from the media systems that structure so much of our daily life? And what happens when we don’t? Will constantly scrolling through short videos or fragmented content make us less intelligent? If so, how?

Since middle school, teachers told me that I used too many vague pronouns in my writing, which affects my precision. They frequently remind me to avoid using “this” or “that” in my writing. “If you can’t find suitable words, it means your language isn’t keeping up with your thinking.” This indicates that you lack language as a tool to deeply form your own understanding and thoughts. If medium shapes cognition (McLuhan), how is constant scrolling reorganizing our ability to think? Many people intuitively think that short videos make us “dumber”, but the reasons are often misinterpreted. The issue isn’t that watching TikTok directly lowers intelligence. Instead, these platforms cultivate a discourse environment that is extremely homogeneous and structurally limited (Loupessis and Intahchomphoo). You may seem to be exposed to a lot of content every day, but in reality, it’s all just a repetitive corpus of viral phrases.

According to the article “What the Sigma?: The Sociolinguistic Applications of Gen Alpha Slang in the Digital Era,” scholars, based on Generation Alpha’s own digital slang research, cataloged 46 different examples of Gen Alpha slang and grouped them into five categories: Fresh & Creative, Flippant, Imitative, Acronym/Clipping, and more (Rodriguez). Most of those slang terms fall under the “Fresh & Creative” category — that is, they are newly coined, playful, and often tied to visual-media or short-form video contexts like “Skibidi,” “rizz,” “fanum tax,” etc. This suggests that the linguistic repertoire of Gen Alpha is not being recycled from older generations but is instead expanding—producing new vocabulary at a very fast pace and restructuring how younger people communicate.

In contrast with the more stable, formal language, this dynamic and rapidly shifting slang ecosystem emphasizes my concern: as everyday expression is increasingly shaped by fleeting memes and platform-specific references, so the linguistic resource on which thoughtfully reflective, precise expression diminishes, limiting how wide or deep our conceptual world can become.

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

In light of our course discussions, this feels connected to Wittgenstein’s insight that language structures the world we can inhabit conceptually. If, as McLuhan suggests, media environments reshape attention and cognition, then a restricted linguistic repertoire not only reflects that shift. It reinforces it, narrowing the range of ideas we are capable of forming in the first place. The convenient yet biased categorization of things, the crude grouping of people and events, the choosing of sides, and the imposition of stereotypes are often caused by the inertia of language. When language divides the world, it limits how our brains organize knowledge.

This brings me back to our discussions of Bollmer and materiality: the problem isn’t just what content says, but how platforms structure the kinds of expression that feel natural. TikTok discourse often feels “vast,” but structurally it’s incredibly limited. We scroll through thousands of videos that appear diverse but repeat the same linguistic templates, emotional beats, and forms of reaction. The result is what Adorno might call pseudo-individuality: a sense of originality inside a fundamentally homogenized system (Theodore Adorno). So my emerging argument is this: Homogenized media environments don’t just limit what we see—they limit the language we have available to describe our own experiences. And when language narrows, thought narrows.

The topic of how language shapes thought is a well-worn one, and it’s also a frequently discussed binary proposition in philosophy. A comparable concern arises in George Orwell’s notion of “Newspeak” in 1984, wherein the state deliberately reduces vocabulary so that citizens become literally incapable of forming rebellious or complex thoughts (“Language in 1984 and the Concept of Newspeak”). While our contemporary situation is not governed by authoritarian language control, the basic mechanism is similar in a way that is almost unbelievable: when available vocabulary shrinks, so shrinks the range of imaginable ideas. Neil Postman extends this argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death, contending that societies dominated by entertainment-centered media lose the capacity for sustained, rational discourse (Postman). For Postman, the danger is not censorship through force, but through distraction—when a culture becomes saturated with quick, shallow, emotionally stimulating content, people lose the cognitive habits required for critique. Both Orwell and Postman offer useful parallels to what we have discussed in class: media environments shape not only what we think about, but the very conditions under which thinking is possible. When we combine their insights with McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” and Bollmer’s claim on media materiality, a clearer pattern emerges–media forms that privilege speed, simplification, and entertainment tend to produce linguistic environments where nuance atrophies, and with it, the capacity for deeper political, ethical, and intellectual reflection.

How can we improve our expression and critical thinking skills? Read more serious books and works, or listen to insights that aren’t mass-produced. Strive for greater precision in word choice, try to describe feelings more specifically, find a precise word for vague thoughts, and then replace it with more of these words to expand your vocabulary. The vastness of our thinking is only limited by our limited language. In reality, our thoughts are incredibly vast; given better language tools, we can go much further.

Reference:

Loupessis, Iliana, and Channarong Intahchomphoo. “Framing the climate: How Tiktok’s algorithm shapes environmental discourse.” Telematics and Informatics, vol. 102, Oct. 2025, p. 102329, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2025.102329.

“Language in 1984 and the Concept of Newspeak.” Teddybarbier.Com, www.llceranglais.fr/language-in-1984-and-the-concept-of-newspeak.html#:~:text=What%20is%20Newspeak%20?,in%20totalitarian%20countries%20and%20organisations. Accessed 5 Dec. 2025.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Pearson Education, 2007

Rodriguez, Sophia Marie. What the Sigma?: The Sociolinguistic Applications of Gen Alpha Slang in the Digital Era | by Sophia Marie Rodriguez | Medium, medium.com/@sophiamarie.rodriguez/what-the-sigma-the-sociolinguistic-applications-of-gen-alpha-slang-in-the-digital-era-b7ef7e489af0. Accessed 5 Dec. 2025.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, mariabuszek.com/mariabuszek/kcai/PoMoSeminar/Readings/AdornoHork.pdf. Accessed 5 Dec. 2025.

Cover: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/784752303855969869/

Written by Gina Chang