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What’s The INFO On Information?

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This chapter proves that information is never neutral or stable. It is a common denominator across multiple forms, and each form reveals how we understand systems, communication, and the meaning behind them. The chapter explores virtuality, language, entropy, noise, and feedback, which highlight that information, along with being stored, also reshapes the environments that carry it. Even though information sometimes fades or persists, most often, it transforms. Theories from Saussure, Shannon, Boltzmann, and Bateson prove that information is defined less by permanence and more by probability, relation, and adaptation. Information demonstrates itself to be both constrained and filled with endless possibilities, whether through the structural logic of language, the physical principles of entropy, or the creative possibilities of noise and feedback.

​​​​​​Information: Everywhere and Nowhere

We found that one of the most intriguing parts of the chapter on virtuality is the contrast in how information was stored in the past compared to today. Physical traces such as carvings and manuscripts have been left behind and have survived for centuries. Contrastingly, digital information is extremely fragile. For example, a file can be duplicated without limitation, but it can also disappear with a click or even a forgotten password. As such, information is both everywhere and nowhere. It doesn’t necessarily have weight or size, yet it structures the way in which we perceive the world. This is where its power lies. Information can be re-coded or transformed to fit new contexts instantly. This reminds us of how much of what we create only exists temporarily; examples include Snapchat stories or disappearing messages. Blake’s idea of how these moments still carry meaning even if they don’t have a lasting trace can be applied here. What matters isn’t necessarily permanence but the way information can adapt and reshape systems.

Communication and Language

The most striking aspect of the “Language” chapter was the comparison between Shannon and Weaver’s theory of communication and Saussure’s theory of language. Despite being completely different theories, they still both show that systems matter more than the individual messages. Meaning essentially appears from the structures that shape it. Shannon and Weaver’s model treats information in terms of probability. The focus is on how predictable or unpredictable a message is within the system. Saussure also makes a similar point, as speech only makes sense in the context of the larger structure of language. This is where words have value through their position in relation to each other. For example, in the text, English is mentioned as 50% statistically predictable. Even though redundancy would sound like a flaw, it is actually what makes communication work. If every word were unpredictable, we wouldn’t be able to follow along. Even though the system constrains us, this constraint is what gives meaning and clarity.

What is Entropy? How its Connected To Energy?

Looking at how information has a significant connection to physical systems, the theorist Ludwig Boltzmann demonstrated that entropy, which measures disorder, is a physical property of a system.  Over time, systems tend towards maximum entropy, which means more disorder and less usable energy. Ordered systems are low in entropy and contain more information and less unusable energy. Using the example of a scenario of finding a hot cup of coffee on a table in a cool room instead of the usual situation of finding a cup at room temperature to explain entropy. The hot coffee in the cold room is low-entropy because the coffee won’t stay hot for long, making it an unusual situation. In contrast, a cup at room temperature is a more probable and expected state.  Boltzmann wanted to define the entropy of a physical system as a function of possible energetic configurations, the number of different possible ways to distribute more configurations and produce a random high entropy.  Boltzmann quantification of the entropy law, creating the equation S = k log P, with S standing for the entropy and P being the number of different possibilities.

How We Use Entropy in Communication Systems

Looking further at the link with statistical mechanics, Shannon defined information as the mathematical inverse of probability. The more surprising it is, the more information it contains. For example, choosing from a binary set (yes/no, on/off) provides one bit of information, but not a lot, because the options at the source are very limited. In this way, the value of information is calculated: the more choices a sender has, the more information the message carries. In the approach to calculate the value of information, considering how many choices the sender has and how much information the message may contain, Shannon created a mathematical formulation of information H = –∑ pi log pi. Pi being the probability of choice, H is if the choice is predictable. Information theory explains how unlikely order shifts to probable disorder in physical systems, distinguishing between signals (useful) and noise (waste) in communication. In physical systems, thermodynamic entropy is the amount of energy unavailable for further work, or “wasted”. In communication systems, the informational entropy of a message measures the message probabilities from different perspectives

– The source: how many choices are possible

– The channel: the amount of signal transmitted versus the amount lost in noise

– The destination: how much uncertainty the message resolves for the receiver.

Through the development of reception theory, reader response theory and cognitive science, which have focused on how people interpret information through different ways of communication. 

Media Systems and Noise

The author, Bruce Clarke, positions media not as neutral tools for transmission but as dynamic systems embedded in material and environmental contexts. His liking for systems theory is evident in the way the chapter frames all meaningful communication as occurring within cycles of transmission and reception, where signals and noise are always present. Noise is defined as anything in a received message that was not originally sent. It was first treated as an obstacle to efficiency, described by Shannon as random interference that disrupts productivity. However, he and Weaver also recognized that noise introduces new probabilities into the system and can be understood as information itself. Gregory Bateson sharpened this point with his definition of information as “[…] a difference that makes a difference”(165). Noise unsettles transmitted messages, creating the potential for new forms and information to emerge.

Norbert Wiener’s definition of cybernetics as the study of messages and control highlights why noise matters. Both machines and biological organisms regulate themselves through circuits of transmission and feedback. Signals travelling through these circuits are never perfectly stable; real-world channels, be that nerves or telephone wires, always contain random fluctuations or noise. Just as thermodynamic systems lend themselves toward entropy, communication systems face the inevitability of noise. What begins as a problem of error or interruption can quickly become a creative opportunity: systems learn and evolve because they must adapt to noise.

This is most clearly visible in media arts. What engineers once feared as breakdowns or flaws often became the raw material for innovation. Musicians like Jimi Hendrix transformed screeching feedback into controlled musical enhancements, while tape manipulation and distortion gave artists like the Beatles new expressive vocabularies. In these cases, noise was not a loss but a generative supplement to the message. Visual media can carry similar outcomes: glitches in video or digital photography can become aesthetic choices, reframing errors as features. Media art reveals that meaning is often made through the manipulation of noise, not its elimination.

Early communication systems, such as the telegraph and telephone, prioritize noiseless transmission, aiming to reduce distortion, while inscription media such as the phonograph or photograph captured and preserved both signal and noise. Friedrich Kittler shows how these technologies disrupted the dominance of writing, which reduces speech to 26 symbols (letters) and filters out the messy world of accidental sound. In contrast, sound recording and photography preserved continuous reality, complete with its imperfections. This created a conceptual divide: symbolic systems that treat information as immaterial code, and material systems that capture the world’s natural, noisy textures. However, symbolic and material systems are never fully separate. Information only comes into being when it takes material form, whether in carved stone or cloud servers. The qualities of these materials determine what endures, what decays, and what remains accessible.

Noise is not the enemy of communication but a structural feature of it. Sometimes it destroys order, but just as often it enables creativity, adaptation, and novelty. Media systems are ecological: they consist of signals, noise, and the environments that sustain them. Recognizing this prepares us for the cybernetic concept of feedback, where noise and uncertainty are not filtered out but re-circulated through the system, enabling regulation, adaptation, and, at times, the discovery of entirely new patterns.

Introduction of Feedback in Information Systems

Information has shifted not just to store or transmit, but to be used to create a new function of feedback. Noting that information theories define information as a mathematically inverse function of the probability of a predictable message. Bateson stated that noise is the only possible source of new patterns or information, highlighting how noise always carries meaning, even if it seems meaningless to the audience. During the 1940s, as computers were being developed, feedback became a crucial part of control mechanisms. With certain sensors, both input and output can be managed by converting them into a circuit, creating a feedback loop that uses its own output as an input. This results in either negative feedback, which stabilizes order, or positive feedback, which leads to growth or disorder. Uncertainties about messages allowed noise to serve as a source of additional information, introducing unexpected patterns useful for creative or adaptive purposes. Feedback transforms transmission into a dynamic process that enables systems to self-regulate, discover new patterns, and produce art.

Key Takeaways

Media should be understood not merely as channels for transmitting information, but as dynamic systems in which signals and noise interact within material and environmental contexts. Clarke emphasizes that meaning arises from relationships within these systems, what Bateson calls the “context principle”, and that communication is impossible without context. Information is never neutral. It moves, transforms, and reshapes the systems it inhabits. Media are not just channels for messages but dynamic, ecological systems where signals and noise coexist, and new meaning emerges from the appearance of noise. Noise is not simply interference but a generative force that shapes, disrupts, and enriches meaning. By situating media within ecological systems, Clarke challenges the notion of isolated tools and instead presents them as active participants that both shape and are shaped by the information around them.

Work Cited

Title cover and Images created in Canva By Alisha and Sam

Clarke, Bruce. “Information.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 157-171. Accessed 1 October 2025.


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Art and Reproducing the Human Experience

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How do we consider a piece to be a work of art? 

How do we differentiate between mass media and fine art? 

Is it the time and effort put into the piece? 

Is it the materials used? 

Or, is it the meanings and interpretations that surround the work? 

These are all questions American scholar Johanna Drucker tackles in her chapter from Critical Terms for Media Studies. 

Art has long been recognized as a concept that is difficult to define. We often hear the saying “art is subjective,” and that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” So, if the term “art” is so complex and personal, why attempt to define it at all? In an era of mass media and reproduction, it is important for us, as media studies students, to understand what makes art valuable.

The methods by which modern artists create are very distant from what was originally used to classify works as pieces of art. These previous conventions included: 

  1. Art as a Set of Practices and a Class of Objects 

Modern artists are no longer limiting themselves to traditional materials and methods once used to create art. Instead of using paint or clay to create a piece, artists are now incorporating digital media into their work. This means art can no longer be classified solely on the basis of its making. 

  1. Mass Media vs Fine Art

Before, there was a clear boundary between “fine art” and “mass media.” Now that we are living in an age where reproduction is limitless and our access to images is immediate, those lines have now become blurred. Iconography, themes, and technology that are largely associated with “popular culture” or “commercial media” have now made their way into contemporary art practices.

  1. The Idea of an “Artist”

In the past, the classical idea of an “artist” revolved around being some sort of genius. They were trained professionals with formal skills who adhered to traditional notions of beauty, harmony, and proportion. However, these skills are no longer required to be given the title of an “artist.” Present-day artists instead explore diverse media and forms, not needing conventional skills. 

  1.  The Role of Fine Art

Art no longer has to establish aspirations toward “higher” values (spiritual messages or moral grandeur). Now art is no longer conforming to fixed genres, just as it is no longer being crafted from elite materials. 

Drucker starts off the chapter with a quote by Charles Ogden from The Foundations of Aesthetics: “Art is the exploitation of the medium.” Beginning the chapter with this quote establishes the important role media plays when defining art. The definition of art, as Drucker suggests, is never going to be fixed; it will shift along with the media through which they are expressed.

History of the Term “Art”: 

In the foundational understanding of art, the medium allows for the very existence of art. 

Image credit

As the chapter unfolds, the author guides us through the evolution of the definition of “art” across different time periods. As art expanded beyond technical perfection to embrace ideas and personal expression, the meaning of its media expanded as well.

The Classical Period shows us an art form that was primarily associated with applied skill. At this stage, individual talent wasn’t connected to personal expression. Instead, form followed a strict sense of aesthetic, and we can see this clearly in the work of sculptors like Praxiteles in the 4th century BCE.

Moving into the Medieval Period, we see artistic skills applied to more specialized tasks – things like illumination, calligraphy, painting, drawing, and bookbinding. Importantly, art was not yet recognized as a separate domain in itself, but rather as a craft embedded in other practices.

The Renaissance is where the idea of the artist as a gifted individual really emerges. Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, published in 1550, cemented the notion of the artist as a kind of genius. Figures like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo embody this new artistic ideal, where personal vision and technical skill were celebrated together.

During the Romantic Period, the emphasis shifted toward imagination and emotion. William Blake, for instance, highlighted art’s power to open “doors of perception.” Art was no longer just about beauty or mastery – it became a way to challenge the rationality of the Enlightenment (Adorno, anyone?).

Finally, in the Modern and Postmodern periods, we see radical shifts in how art relates to media. Pablo Picasso disrupted traditional artistic representation with collage. Marcel Duchamp pushed even further with conceptual art, famously exhibiting a porcelain urinal as artwork. And Andy Warhol brought mass media and popular culture into frame, blurring the lines between high art and commercial imagery.

Through these shifts, the chapter shows how the definition of art and its relationship to media have continually evolved, reflecting broader cultural values and reshaping what we consider art to be.

Defining Art

As the chapter progresses, Drucker starts to formulate two key definitions of art, both of which directly correlate with the evolutions of art’s role, technical definition, and position of the artist themself. 

The first is art as autonomous, first introduced by philosophers of the Frankfurt School in the early 20th century- most notably, Walter Benjamin. His 1937 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, expands on this idea by introducing the concept of “aura,” a unique, unintelligible quality an original work holds, and cannot be replicated by mass media reproductions. This idea of aura was then expanded upon as a method of preserving older values through defamiliarization, the idea of not viewing a work through its original context, but informing a newer audience of the time and space it was conceptualized in. 

This theory was not only employed by Benjamin and his contemporaries such as Adorno and Horkheimer, but also by the cultural critic Clement Greenberg. In his essay, Avant Garde and Kitsch, he argued that fine art was to be used as a preservation of civilization in the fight against mass culture, insisting that the visual flatness of art was characteristic of its autonomy, in its ability to separate past capsules of time through art from ever evolving, ever shifting ideology.

Although Greenberg’s writings championed experimental fine art as the perfect cocktail of aesthetics and values to capture the present, his insistence of visuality was criticized as being despotic in its desire to critique ideological references and narrative qualities. Through this criticism, another definition was born- Art as conceptual, based not on formal principles and technicality, but on the individual ideas and concepts the artists employed. The origination of this school of thought can be traced back to Duchamp, in his work’s suggestion that art is not founded off of technical ability or formal principles, but off of conventions of thought and ideology. However, this definition started to go mainstream in the 50s and 60s, with artists and writers equally examining the concepts behind a piece as much as its material form. 

A quote that may encapsulate this definition best is Sol LeWitt’s, “An idea is a machine that makes art,” written in a 1967 essay, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art. Critic Lucy Lippard expanded on this further, observing the concepts of dematerialization within the art of the day- noting that artists were viewing material form as secondary to the work’s concept. Media that otherwise would not be used in a work started to be introduced in wanting to represent the artist’s ideas and concepts as purely as possible. Most audaciously- in the case of Yves Klein’s exhibition Void (1958), where he famously showed it was not the medium, but rather the lack thereof that made a piece luminous in its conceptuality- making it possible to enforce his ideas of direct, tangible presence and concept without the burden of medium.

This definition was not free without criticism, however. In one of her earliest works from 1966, Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag argued that modern art criticism was too focused with attempting to decode a work’s concepts, meaning, and ideas, sacrificing the fostering of direct, felt, sensuous experience in the attempt to make art decomposition an intellectual exercise of translation. But today, exemplified in contemporary art’s ideals of unorthodox media and materials, a colliding definition of fine art and mass production, and an emphasis on conceptual expression over strict formalism, the definition of art as conceptual lives on.

Takeaways 

The meaning of art and media will never be fixed; it shifts as culture evolves and as we, the audience, reshape what we consider “art.” 

In the modern and contemporary periods, our perception of media has moved on from being at the service of art to becoming the very subject and substance of artistic creations. In other words, instead of merely carrying the artist’s message, the medium began to gain recognition as an artistic presence in itself.

In the final pages of the chapter, Johanna invites us to reinterpret the chapter’s opening claim, “Art is the exploitation of the medium”. 

“‘Medium is a message.’ But it is the art coefficient that provokes wonder and seduces us into consideration of the way it inflects and shapes meaning”. By identifying art as the ‘coefficient’ of the medium rather than the central figure of the piece, the traditional hierarchy between art and medium is redefined. In this sense, art can be understood as a ‘meta-medium’: a tool that engages the audience and invites them to consider the potential and power of the medium itself.

Her final statement, “Art becomes a way of paying attention”, ties it all together beautifully. Art is now defined less by its materials or composition, and more by the way it is interpreted as being tangibly different from an everyday product of a different cultural industry, marked by its uniqueness to the artist and its context.Since our existence as humans is mediated by perception, shaped by personal and cultural backgrounds, art really is everywhere. It emerges whenever we choose to slow down, pay attention, and wherever we find beauty and meaning.

Sources:

Mitchell, W. J. T., Hansen, M. B. N., & Drucker, J. (2010). Art. In Critical terms for media studies. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226532660.001.0001

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Not Just Messages: How Communication Creates Meaning

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Introduction 

Ever find yourself filling out a job application with a drop-down menu to select your major — scrolling down and down until you find it — ‘Communications & Media Studies?’ Employers and schools alike tend to click together the terms, whether for ease of pairing the two related terms or for a lack of understanding into the nuances that define the disciplines. Are there even differences if those who confer degrees write them on the same line?

Realistically, communications is both a critical dimension & point of study for media studies and also an entirely separate field. It’s why Bruce Clarke uses his chapter on Communication in Critical Terms for Media Studies to both introduce how the word and concept shapes the two disciplines (2010).s

A Definition to Work With

Communication — as a word, not a discipline —  is derived from the Latin word communicare, referring to the act of imparting or making something common. The Oxford English Dictionary builds their definition from this; “the imparting, conveying, or exchange of ideas, knowledge, [and] information (OED.”) While the English verb implies the intentional transmission of a conception, the noun word refers instead to the material and spatial object of such an impartation. Put in other words, the object of communication is what a medium is (Clarke 2020). 

Development into Disciplines

Prior to the Industrial revolution of the mid-1800s, the study of communication was otherwise incorporated in other disciplines such as philosophy (Peters 1999). Mechanical technology flourished unprecedentedly and expanded human’s intellectual, spatial, and temporal boundaries similarly. Foreign colonies and countries became connected by their media, transitioning the globe into a community through innovations like telegraphs, phones, and radios. Around a century later, Marshall McLuhan argued the two as distinct realms of study, both equally deserving of attention. To the time of Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver (1949) formalizing their namesake transmission-reception model of communication — a system built around media having their meanings embedded and static until received  —  McLuhan wrote such media are vessels of “information movement” in a society, constituting “extension[s] of man” in the physical world (1994, 89-90).

Published during a period when television became common in households, McLuhan’s attention to mediums themselves proved inspiring to those fascinated by the abundance of these multisensory devices. Contemporaries began conceiving contrasting frameworks, presenting one with meanings driven by reflexive aspects instead of solely by messages encoded (Craig, 2001). This constitutive model, defined by its recognition of social factors, opposes the media-focussed model. With this said, the line between communication studies and media can be said as focus being paid to these social factors in the former and to the technology and formal contents itself. 

Transmission as a Framework of Control

The transmission model is often simplified to the movement of information from one place to another, but this understanding is too narrow. As McLuhan reminded us, every medium not only carries content but also subtly reshapes the roles of the sender and receiver, altering the structures of power and control. From this perspective, transmission is not merely about delivering a message—it organizes the entire process of communication by establishing expectations for clarity, directionality, and authority. It is precisely this organizing function that enables institutions like journalism, education, and the military to treat communication as something that can be standardized and managed.

Transmission in Everyday Communication

When you send a text message to a friend, you compose the message, press send, and wait for it to appear on their phone. If the message is successfully delivered, communication is considered to have succeeded. If it does not arrive, for example, due to signal failure, it is regarded as a breakdown. This simple process reflects the logic of the transmission model, in which communication is viewed as the creation, sending, and receiving of a message.

As Chang points out, this model has limitations. It gives the impression that communication only succeeds when the receiver gets the message exactly as the sender intended. However, in real life, messages are often interpreted in different ways. Even a simple text can be misunderstood depending on tone or context. Chang reminds us that the transmission model values perfect sameness, but actual communication is often full of small differences. This gap reveals both the usefulness and the limitations of transmission in explaining how we connect with each other.

Linking Communication and Media

The transmission model also clearly reveals the intrinsic coupling between communication and media: communication is the act of sending and receiving information, while media is the technical means that enables this act. In practice, the two are inseparable. Whether it is print, telegraph, or digital platforms, the chosen channel not only determines the reach and speed of information dissemination but also fundamentally shapes the form of communication. Thus, the media is by no means a passive or neutral conduit—it actively defines the patterns and boundaries of communication.

Constitutive Model — MEANING is not “SENT” but “CREATED” 

In the previous chapter, we pursued an idea of communication, which is  “a sender sends a message, a receiver receives it.” However, Clarke’s approach explains the quite different communication from this ── “Constitutive Model.” This model fundamentally challenges this premise and offers a perspective that interprets communication itself as a process of creating reality and constructing meaning. In other words, rather than viewing communication as the “transmission of a fixed meaning,” he emphasizes “what is created through communicative interactions.”

Example of Constitutive Model

In this blog post, I would like to explain an example I couldn’t explain in my presentation to make  the “Constitutive Model” easier to understand. One example is news reporting. When considering a news report, even if it appears to convey the same facts in all press, interpretations can vary greatly depending on the choice of vocabulary, context, and audience, and social relationships are shaped accordingly. In other words, even if it appears to convey the facts, the meaning can change significantly depending on the choice of expression.

Thus, in the constitutive model, the sender, receiver, and message are not pre-fixed but are reconstructed within the act of communication itself. This model has been proposed as an alternative framework by contemporary theorists such as Robert Craig (1999). Researchers such as Craig have positioned communication as a reflective and dynamic process.

Communication and Digital Media

What I wanted to add to this constitutive model is an insight into communication and digital media. Real-time communication technologies such as telephone and television enable instant interaction. On the other hand, storage media such as text and video preserve information for later reference. Amid the emergence of these media, it has been argued that digital media possessed the characteristics of both.

Considering this in conjunction with Craig’s constitutive model, we can conclude that digital media enable the simultaneous transmission and preservation of information, with meanings constantly changing during the communication process.

Communication in Larger Society 

Subsequently in this chapter, we are introduced to Jürgen Habermas’ theories by Bruce Clarke, along with those of Briankle Chang and Niklas Luhmann. These were not presented as merely scholarly differences but as methods of framing a deeper question around how we could possibly understand communication within society in general. In our presentation, we were only able to present a brief overview due to time limitations, but here I would like to dig a little deeper.

Habermas and the Public Sphere

Habermas’s communicative rationality theory is especially important as a foundation for democratic public spheres. In Habermas’s opinion, people use language to exchange ideas, critique each other and bargain for mutual understanding. This goes beyond individual subjectivity and aims to create common rationality in public life. We did touch on this during our presentation but did not get a chance to connect it to the digital public sphere. On social media, the people of today now criticize and quarrel with each other in real time, but at the same time, these platforms tend to break down into echo chambers and polarization. The gap between Habermas’s idea of consensus and the fragmented reality of discussion online is worth noting.

Chang and the Limits of Intersubjectivity

Chang’s own critique of intersubjectivity must also be addressed with some additional attention. He asserts that communication can’t be a copying of ideas from mind to mind. Instead there is always difference, slippage and ambiguity between understanding. In our presentation we have only alluded to his claim that intersubjectivity is circular. What I would prefer that we had emphasized more is that Chang’s account renders difference a productive resource. Meaning lies not in sameness but in difference. News reporting is one such area. Facts are the same but interpretation varies based on vocabulary, framing and audience. These generate new discourse and not shut them off.

Luhmann and Social Systems

Luhmann develops this concept further with his theory of social systems. Society, he states, is not a space of shared meaning but is the ever-present continuation of communication itself. Only communication can communicate, he states. Messages in this model are not transmitted whole from one brain to another. Instead each system generates meaning internally. Communication goes on as long as one message produces another. Misunderstanding or conflict does not stop society, it keeps it going. We can see this quite clearly in social media arguments, where misunderstanding often gives rise to new rounds of controversy and interpretation.

Connecting to Networks

Here Clarke’s chapter overlaps with another in Critical Terms, Alexander Galloway’s “Networks.” Networks characterize society as a network of nodes and connections, where each message gets its meaning based on how it relates to the others. Based on this perspective Habermas’s aspiration for consensus can only be seen in fragments, and Chang’s emphasis on difference aligns with the diversity of nodes in a network. Luhmann’s chain of communication is consistent with Galloway’s view that decentralized and distributive structures put society in motion. Together, Communication and Networks reveal that meaning is not the fixed transmission of ideas but the ongoing generative process in the web of social relations.

Thank you for reading this blog ⭐️!

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Handwritten Letters: What is Evoked When Kindnesses Endure?

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“Handwritten Letters Sketches Drawings I” by Frida Kahlo, courtesy of Vancouver Fine Art Gallery.

Introduction

In my accordion folder, next to a tab of identification documents and another of printed photographs, I store handwritten letters from friends and family. Specifically, I have kept every letter received– whether in a flashy card or on a plain piece of lined paper– since the summer before I left home for university. I do this because I feel bad letting go of them, but also because they bring comfort to me. When I take out the letters and read the thoughts of people I know (or have known) crystallized into deeply personal messages, I better understand those people. A lot of the time, people are more comfortable writing something than they might be saying it in-person. In this post I will attempt to explain how my sentimentality around these letters is evoked through their materiality, and the thoughts of others contained in them are mediated by writing.

Letters and Materiality

Bill Brown opens his essay on materiality in Critical Terms for Media Studies by questioning the material difference between a thought and a thorn that’s stuck in your finger. The thorn is obviously made up of matter; it is atoms arranged in a way that shapes the thorn. It is the shape of the thorn colliding with the atoms in your finger that causes pain and draws your attention to the urgent material nature of the thorn. It can be argued that thoughts are also material if you choose to look at them as “the effect of synapses within a neural network”, Brown says (49). However, the debate as to whether or not thoughts are material represents the kind of question that is secondary to a discussion of materiality. 

Describing the materiality of something is not an assessment of yes/no on its concreteness. As Brown put it, “When you admire the materiality of a sweater, you’re acknowledging something about its look and feel, not simply its existence as a physical object” (49). So materiality then is a qualitative assessment of something that’s based in the senses. In the case of the sweater, the sense of touch is evoked because of how a sweater makes contact with the body. The sense of sight is also involved, because the clothing we wear is often a signal of personal aesthetics and identity.

Now I’m going to tell you what I like about the materiality of birthday cards, best wishes cards, nice-to-have-gotten-to-know-you cards, and letters of admiration. 

  1. Handwriting. I like that with my grandparents’ handwriting, I have to decipher their cursive almost like I’m reading in a second language. My roommate recently told me that he can not read in cursive, as he was never taught to do so in primary school. There’s something almost antique by now about handwriting which is produced in cursive by default. Reading cursive teaches me patience, and feels like a way of adjusting to a communication practice of my grandparents’ day– even if on the smallest of scales. It reminds me that when I send my grandpa a hasty text message with zero punctuation, he is the one who must adjust to my communication style. Empathy and critical thinking– both ways of looking at the bigger picture– are evoked in me through working to comprehend handwriting.
  2. Voice. Just as people’s writing reflects their inner thoughts and perceptions, the way they communicate in a letter often maps easily to their personality. When I re-read letters from my dad, the voice reading it in my head belongs to him. That a choice of words, tone, or even the content of a message could evoke someone’s speaking voice in the mind I find incredible. Some people are more formal when they write than they are in conversation. In that case, my imagination goes as far as to conjure an image of that person giving a speech that they wrote, in order to find their voice within the writing. Most of the time though, in the context of a hand-written card, someone close to you will write in a way that makes their voice ring clearly through the noise of form.
  3. Persistence. Through the collection of paper– an often ephemeral and disposable material– I feel as though I have trapped in time a series of intimate pieces that any one given letter-writer may never have expected to be a part of. This is the part of the practice of saving letters that is self-serving. The record which was assembled from one-to-one messages becomes an archive of many unrelated notes with one commonality; they are directed towards a single recipient. Is the point of my keeping these notes only for the sake of using them on a rainy day? Another benefit of letter-keeping is that the archive offers a timeline of my personal history, experiences, and milestones by evoking memory. Just as flipping through printed photos facilitates my recollection of events, situations, and time periods, the letters facilitate a process of looking back upon a former time. The notes were written in now-time– yet as I read them today they influence and re-assemble my memory, which mediates the past. The “concreteness” of letters from a bygone time feels paradoxical– almost like they are relics which have survived through time.

Writing as a Medium Today

Each of these aspects of a letter’s materiality can be connected to theoretical frameworks, from language and communication to time and space. However, since their overarching medium is writing, I’ll describe what hand-written letters mediate by extending Lydia Liu’s scholarship on “Writing” in Critical Terms for Media Studies.

When thinking about why we even call non-cursive handwriting “print”, I was introduced to the idea of Print English in Liu’s essay. With the invention of the printing press, the English alphabet was transformed from a 26 character system, to a 27 character system (the new character being a space).  “Printed English is an ideographical alphabet with a definable statistical structure. As a post-phonetic system, it functions as a conceptual interface between natural language and machine language”, Liu explains (318). “The centrality of printed symbols for technology has something to do with the fact that, to use Friedrich A. Kittler’s words, ‘in contrast to the flow of handwriting, we now have discrete elements separated by spaces’” (320). I think there’s something really fascinating about how, if we call non-fluid “print” handwriting an effect of the printing press, people’s handwriting with each generation is coming to resemble (or following) the way that our technologies produce language.

In terms of both the “voice” found in handwritten letters and their persistence as a record through time, the following quote from Lydia Liu applies: 

“In the age of informatics and computer technology, writing increasingly penetrates the biomechanics of human speech to the extent that sound, including speech, is now being turned into an artifact, a notable example being text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. The colossal amount of written and printed record and electronic information stored in data banks, libraries, museums, archival centers, and global communication networks further indicates how much the technologies of writing and print have evolved to shape modern life and the future of humanity” (310).

The first sentence here seems to say that writing is by now such a dominant form of communication that there are tools for converting it back into a “vocalized” form. Of course, text-to-speech has a voice that is de-personalised because it is a machine which speaks through a complex algorithm. This idea can be expanded to include artificial intelligence, which produces extremely generalized writing, to the point that we get an uncanny feeling when a real person delivers an AI-generated speech. Needless to say, the specific way a person we know puts together a sentence– especially given the statistically infinite possibilities– creates the “sound” of their writing. This sensory quality (I’ll extrapolate from Liu) is increasingly the “artifact” in the writing.

Lastly, the sheer amount of communications records we have globally today is a critical infrastructure of daily life. There would be no way to do research, return a package, or quote an old text sent to your grandpa without the storage of data. However, with digitization, physical records are created less and less frequently. Many of the physical documents and artifacts stored within our institutions of record-keeping are only material because of their age. To collect writing done on paper is to maintain a kind of archive of interpersonal connections throughout one’s life. Even the letters from people who are not in my life any longer, or the letter I wrote to myself two years ago during Jumpstart are valuable to me. Their material aspects evoke the people who wrote them, making those people feel real. The letters mediate my knowing people, and their knowing me.

Works Cited

Brown, Bill. “Materiality.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 2010, pp. 49–63.

Liu, Lydia. “Writing.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 2010, pp. 310–326. 

Blog post written by Naomi Brown

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Portal Into my Mind and Barrier to the World. “AirPods”

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My Evocative Object: “AirPods” 

 Humans need ways to be distracted. As a baby you are given rattles to numb the need for mental stimulation and the woes of being a baby. When you clock-out of your nine-to-five you turn on the TV to decompress from your workload. Since childhood I have struggled with chronic anxiety. My thoughts have flooded my mind with seemingly no way to channel (unless I resort to insanity).  The best tools to combat my anxiety have been distractions. I have many hobbies to distract myself from day-to-day. However, as far as I can remember I have had a growing addiction to technological distractions, specifically ones with sound mediators (i.e. dialogue, music, etc.). I would watch a movie, and headphones would allow me to be in my own world. I found that I needed headphones to be able to distract myself while pursuing other distractions. My Spotify playing would be parallel to my drawings, while also having a tv show in the background. Now I cannot even write a paragraph for school without having another stream of noise in my mind. My need for distraction is the reason why I can always be found with my wireless Bluetooth headphones, my AirPods.  

As I step onto the bus to go to class, I am comforted by the little pieces of plastic and wiring in my ears. My small white AirPod case can always be found in the front pocket of my backpack. If I leave my AirPods at home, I am devastated because it is nice to not have to hear my own thoughts. It is almost a necessity if I would like to have a quiet ride. My AirPods allow me to be alone. In Bernadette Wegenstein’s chapter “Body” in the Critical Terms for Media Studies she emphasizes the distinction between body and embodiment. Wegenstein defines embodiment as contextually dependent on the environment in which the physical body is. By this definition of embodiment, Wegenstein also establishes the fracturing of embodiment with the increasing technological use of society. People split into multiple selves when using the various interfaces of technology, the technological barriers somewhat protect people’s dignity thus allowing them to perform.  

Using AirPods, to me, is like a term that was used in Sherry Turkle’s Evocative Object, “brain prosthesis”. The distraction in my mind by the dialogue of whatever is coming from my mind allows me to relax and “perform” in social interactions in a way that is comfortable. The barrier of the media as a constant white noise in my mind protects me from the version of myself in my mind, thus allowing me to be more present in the moments with others. Technology has become an embodiment of myself. My comfort in technology could be an example of a parasitic reliance of new technology, or it could be symbiotic relationship to use technology as tools of self-realization. In my opinion, I believe using media technologies in this reliant form has given me a sense of control over my mind. 

In Caroline Jones’ chapter “Senses” in the Critical Terms for Media Studies, she explains that technology has trained our minds. Endless scrolling has affected our attention span. McLuhan insights in the “Senses” chapter states that media technologies have become extensions of man thus, extending our senses and supplemented our way of thinking. However, one of the dangers of using technology as an extension is the narrow scope that technology has. It is inherently biased because of our own perceptions and for the communities that do not have access. If we solely use technologies, then we are only perceiving reality through the layers of interfaces of technology rather than firsthand experience.  

This isolation of my thoughts using media technologies could be like the Evocative Object “My Laptop” and the attribution of “brain prothesis” the author, Annalee Newitz, gave to her laptop. Wearing AirPods, the Bluetooth aspect allows me to complete my tasks. I am impeded from my tasks without them in my ears; this highlights my need for distraction and the reliance I have already. I have noticed that whatever is playing in my headphones determines my mood and productivity. I even use my AirPods as a channel to convey my emotions to my own body. If I am on the edge of a good mood I will play something that reminds me of a happy moment to supplement my mood. The state of myself in which I feel the most comfortable, is a state where I am an extension of myself who is constrained by a medium.  

A mindset that I use to justify my overuse of this technology is that not only do AirPods allow me to have access to my own knowledge of my mind, but also access to music, and knowledge of others through podcasts. I use these objects as a medium to myself. To me they represent my expression of my feelings to myself. If I am feeling incredibly overwhelmed, the heavy metal in my ears reflects that.  My AirPods have given me the perspective of the world with autonomy over what noise I hear. Perhaps this lack of control I have felt over my own body has inspired my ideology of the importance of autonomy in my own mind. This may have caused my attachment to this technology. My fear of loss of control may have also stemmed from the helplessness I have experienced with my own body. My day-to-day tasks are constantly mediated by AirPods and afforded me focus, however they have also been a barrier for human interaction because I have to tune myself out. Ultimately, AirPods are a medium of communication and perception in a digital interface, however, impedes my perceptions and communication of reality without technological interference.  

Written by Bridghet Wood  

Image by Bridghet Wood 

Citations 

Jones, Caroline. “Senses.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, Chicago [Ill.], 2010. 

Newitz, Annalee. “MY LAPTOP.” Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, The MIT Press, 2007, pp. 86–91. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhg8p.14. Accessed 30 Sept. 2025. 

Wegenstein, Bernadette. “Body.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, Chicago [Ill.], 2010. 

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THE IMAGE: REPRESENTATION, REINCARNATION, REPRODUCTION

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The Inception of the Image

When did we make the first image? Was it two hundred years ago, when Niépce made the first heliograph of the view from the window at Le Gras? Was it sixty-four thousand years ago, when neanderthals hand-stenciled the first paintings in Maltrevieso cave? Or was it the moment we first thought in pictures; the first mental image; the first time we imagined, instead of seeing? 

To make an image is simply to take some part of our world that you saw, and make what it looked like, yourself, so that you can see it again. Centuries ago, with nothing but hands and clay or stone and paint, we first learned to take a part of our world and re-make it ourselves. Before we first painted a boar on the walls of a cave, we thought of a boar not only by its visual appearance, but by its entire presence, face-to-face – the way it looked and sounded, breathed and moved – everything it presented to us. We couldn’t think of a boar only in the abstract; only as what it looked like; we had to think of that time when we had experienced its presence. The moment we could re-make what it looked like as a painting, the boar could become something else. We could see it, even out of its presence; painted on the walls of the cave, or projected in our mind’s eye. We could think of it, not exactly as we had experienced it, but as a visual abstraction. No longer could something we had seen exist to us only as we had experienced it in the world. It could now exist to us as an image.

From the moment we first sculpted a human figure, we changed what it meant to be a person, literally. We could use that word, “person,” to refer to a living man, or to a heap of clay. We could point at a sculpture and call it a person, or point at a painting and call it a boar. Anything we saw could become an image. Anything we saw, we could make ourselves. After seeing a boar, we could see it again by painting it, even before a real one presented itself out in the world again – we could present it ourselves, re-present it, remake it, as a representation.

Image Reproduction and Consumerism

There have been many evolutions to the technical task of image creation. Significant evolutions include the mass production of coins via printmaking, the rise of private patronage of art in the renaissance shifting dominance from public murals to individual, movable property items in the form of oil paintings. These exemplify the commodification of images into individual articles as expressions of wealth. A current example is the development of artificial perspective using scientific processes to create images depicting real things from a humanly inaccessible perspective, marrying science and imagination and separating imagination from creative production. 

These shifts in image production mechanisms affect the element of artist labor, both physical and creative. As images become easier to produce, and further mass-produce, these images become less valuable under Walter Benjamin’s conception of artist labor as the process by which art is imbued with meaning. This perspective is reiterated in modern discourse through the dominant concept that AI art, produced relatively without human labor, is “soulless”. 

When analyzing these evolutions, it is important to avoid characterizing development as linear. Labeling the past as “traditional” or “ancient” and present as “modern” or “postmodern” is arbitrary, that key hypothetical moment in which image production and circulation changed mechanically, radically altering culture, has happened repeatedly throughout history and shall certainly re-occur, and progress does not erase production styles of the past. 

Media theorists apply moral judgements to these advancements, the default position being that mass production is destructive to the soul of the image, decrying many or most modern images as “kitsch” with only aesthetic value. A rebuttal lies in the national differences in image production, despite global access to the same or similar technologies. This demonstrates that the human element guiding the tools is still reflected in the final image, reaffirming a human-centric assessment of image value.

Thus, in an oversaturated world of image-production, the key human interaction from which to ascertain value is the second human transition in mediation: audience reception. An image is valuable for its capacity to elicit a passionate response. There are three active roles in the process of mediation: the artist/author, the image/media, and the audience. The mediation of images is bookended by human influence on both sides of the interaction.

The Paradoxical Relationship of Power

A theme within Wells’ text is the paradoxical relationship between media, images and consumers. He discusses contradictions, situating an image’s status as being everything and nothing. An interpretation of Wells’ arguments follows this paradox, looking at an image’s relationship to power. This paradox stems from an individual’s perception, the resemblance of images, and the relationship between progress and crisis. 

Looking at perception, Wells understands images as tangible objects that can be destroyed and as indestructible impulses of the mind. He argues that the mind can be regarded as a medium for image production, developing the underlying power of the image. He states that images and their power depend on the minds that perceive them and that “alongside images in media we have images of media that we internalise as subjective pictures of our own processes”. This physical process of image consumption is what creates an internalisation of their underlying ideological message. He quotes Hansen, who states that the perception of images can no longer be regarded as physical surfaces but must be seen as a process where information embedded is perceived through embodied experience. 

When looking at Wells’ definition of image as symbols of visual resemblance, there’s a focus on resemblance as the source of this “power”. The closer an image gets to a resemblance, the more powerful the reception is on perception. A resemblance is seen as the embodiment of God on earth or a connection that creates an emotional response.

When looking at images through the scope of consumption, one understands how imagery becomes idolatrous in this nature of resemblance. Images become a resemblance to ideological positivity and communal conformity. He mentions this point when relating images to crisis, where images spread faster when tragedy strikes and fear grows, contrasting the positivity in commercial ideology. In connection, Wells, with his paradox of the academic, sees the image as a constrictive way to reincarnate the masses into “ancient idolaters”. Images reduce individuals to irrationality and mass ornamentation, where the idol becomes consumption and is revered the same way an ancient worshiper sees drought as a message from the Gods. 

When placing the image under this scope of a reverential idolatry, the paradox of power becomes the longing for subversion and a rejection of it. Subversion becomes an inevitable process of fetishising images, hoping they guide individuals on what to think and how to act in ideological comfort. The paradox thus falls to the point of progress. Wells argues that the relationship between humans and images flares up during innovation. Especially when technology challenges the status quo. When new forms of image production emerge, their manipulation affects us like “microbes… infect(ing) the minds of consumers,” leading us to become scared of new idols and forms of subversion we enjoy. Societies take innovation as an organic inevitability when they create their own subversive power. Wells argues that if man was created in God’s image and was destroyed in man’s image, then it makes sense that man brings the end of man and image with the creation of something more powerful, like AI.

Manipulation Through Image

Images, especially photographs, gain this power throughout much of our modern society. They are often represented as explicit truth. This notion allows those in power to manipulate public perception by taking advantage of images. There is a certain image, that I find, represents both manipulation through the actual doctoring of images, and using iconography as a means to show political power. Raising a flag over the Reichstag. Is a photograph taken on May 2, 1945, which shows a soviet soldier flying the Soviet Union’s flag over Berlin after the defeat of the Nazi party in the Battle of Berlin. The image follows the classic imagery of victory in combat; the flying of a large flag, remnants of imagery that were popularized from imagery of the French revolution, for example Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix. 

One interesting thing about this photograph in particular is that the image that is more prominent is the doctored version of the image. In the original photograph, one of the soldiers is wearing two watches, suggesting he looted one of them off of a fallen soldier. Obviously this could cast a shadow on the victorious moment the image was displaying.

I think this image is a great real world example of how images can be used politically to present a certain idea. While also giving us an example of early image manipulation, something that has remained so prevalent, especially with the added, modern context of digital manipulation.

More recently the funeral of Charlie Kirk, ran rampant with all sorts of religious, and American iconography. As a viewer, this event came off as a tacky attempt of manipulation through images. A man carrying a large cross would be a physical feat with obvious biblical ties, if not for the wheels located at the base of the cross. This being said, the privilege of studying media theory is not lost on me as I see the direct influence these images have been having on a large base of the American public. Reproductions of biblical images, being directly associated with politics, a direct opposition to Exodus 20: 4-5, has a major influence on the opinions of an extremely large number of people.

Contributors: Daniel Schatz, Django Mavis, Sydney Wilkins, Matthias von Loebell

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Gaza and the Failure of Mass Media

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Never before has a genocide been both the most documented in history and the first ever livestreamed in real time. And never before has the world scrolled past such unthinkable horror.

Carpet bombing entire residential neighbourhoods, erasing streets, homes, and entire families in seconds.
A boy screaming into the night after Israeli airstrikes wiped out his entire family.
A father collecting the scattered remains of his daughter in a plastic bag because there is no body left to bury.
Premature babies pulled from incubators after hospitals were bombed.
Doctors forced to operate on children without anesthesia, using vinegar and sewing needles because medicine has been cut off.
Hospitals, mosques, and churches bombed to rubble.
UN schools turned into mass graves.
People burning to death because bombs ignited their homes, trapping them under rubble and fire with no way out.
The deliberate murder of journalists, medics, doctors, nurses, UN staff, aid workers.
White phosphorus and other internationally banned chemical weapons raining down on crowded refugee camps.
Children starving to death, due to malnutrition and Israeli-made famine.

They are my family. Many of them have been murdered. Others are still buried under the rubble. And for nearly two years now, my people have been forced to livestream their own genocide to the world.

But this genocide did not begin in 2023. It’s actually the latest chapter in a 77-year Zionist settler-colonialism of Palestine. It’s a continuation of the Nakba of 1948, where 750,000 Palestinains were forcibly expelled and 500 villages destroyed to make way for the creation of the colony of “Israel.” It has carried on through decades of apartheid policies and military occupation of indigenous Palestinian lands.

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A UN ambassador described Gaza as “the most documented genocide in history.” According to the latest UN OCHA update, Gaza’s Ministry of Health reports 65,419 Palestinians killed and 167,160 injured since October 2023. International law is shattered with impunity, and war crimes are committed in plain sight. A genocide carried out by a settler-colonial power, protected and armed by Western governments, and sanitized by Western media institutions. 

That is the contradiction I cannot shake. Billions see it but nothing changes. 

I think this paradox, of hyper-documentation alongside silence, denial, and complicity from institutions of power, is what makes Gaza one of the most urgent media events of our lifetime.

Messages, Means, and Agents Under Attack

To understand this paradox, I turn to John Durham Peters’ chapter on Mass Media in Critical Terms for Media Studies. The author explains that media always involve three things: a message, a means, and agents. The “what,” the “how,” and the “by/to whom” (p, 266)

In Gaza, all three are under attack.

The messages Palestinians send are live footage of their mass murder, but by the time they reach Western newsrooms, they are twisted into biased reporting that flattens, sanitizes, and outright misrepresents the truth. And this in turn, dehumanizes Palestinains to justify occupation and genocide. What is really the genocide of an indigenous population, carried out by a colonial state on illegally stolen land, occupied for 77 years, is reframed as a “conflict.”

The means are our devices and social media platforms. One would expect them to amplify oppressed voices, expose injustice, and make Palestinian suffering impossible to ignore. Yet these very platforms censor, shadowban Palestinian content and suspend accounts, silencing the very voices they should be carrying to the world. In fact, a 2025 report revealed that Meta, under an Israeli-led censorship campaign, complied with 94% of government takedown requests, removing or suppressing over 38 million posts about Palestine. At the same time, Israel has launched coordinated propaganda campaigns, paying influencers up to $7,000 per post to spread pro-Israel narratives.

And the agents, the local Palestinian journalists on the ground who risk everything to document the truth, are being targeted by the illegal Israeli occupation, murdered one after another. The occupation has deliberately murdered over 270 journalists and media workers during this genocide, an unprecedented number in history.

This is a systemic war on truth.

Power as the Ultimate Medium

“Power is perhaps the ultimate mass medium: it speaks to whom it will, multiplies symbols across space and time, and immobilizes audiences” (Peters, p. 278). The colonial state and its Western allies are not only waging war on an indigenous people and their land but also on the narrative itself. What the world sees, and what it is kept from seeing, is shaped by the machinery of power.

“Where mass media are, there is usually power” (p. 277). The myth of neutrality collapses when Western outlets uncritically reproduce and parrot the colonizer’s talking points, from the debunked “40 beheaded babies” claim to justifying the bombing of hospitals as “strikes on Hamas targets.” This is not journalism but propaganda laundering, justifying genocide and the 77-year-long illegal occupation and colonial oppression of Palestinians. Every accusation is a confession. Power multiplies these frames until they dominate the discourse, drowning out the voices of the oppressed.

Peters calls mass media “the playthings of institutions… under the management of the palace, the market, or the temple” (p. 277). In Gaza, the palace is the state power of the illegal Israeli occupation and its Western allies, which provide the political cover and billions of dollars in military aid (funded by our own tax dollars) that supply Israel with the most advanced weapons and military equipments in the world. The market is the military-industrial complex and corporate platforms, where profit is tied to both arms sales and digital control over information flows. The temple is the settler-colonial and ideological narratives that justify the occupation and genocide of Palestinians.

And when truth does break through, power immobilizes. Billions witness livestreamed massacres, children pulled from rubble, and entire neighbourhoods flattened yet visibility yields no action. Audiences are numbed, while those who resist and speak out are harassed, censored, fired, or cancelled. Cancel culture is weaponized against anyone who challenges these narratives, from journalists to students and professors, ensuring that speaking truth to power comes at the cost of their lives and careers.

Gaza exposes mass media as a battlefield where power itself is the ultimate medium, deciding what circulates, what is erased, and how the world responds—or fails to respond—to the most documented genocide in history.

Conclusion: Solidarity & Awareness as the Counter-Medium & Our Responsibility as Media Students

Gaza forces us to confront the failure and limits of the media. Never before has the world been so saturated with real-time evidence of genocide and war against humanity itself, and never before has that evidence been so easily dismissed, reframed, and silenced by those in power.

Yet despite censorship, despite propaganda, the truth is inevitable.

Citizen journalism in Gaza has created an indestructible archive that history will remember and hold power accountable. And global solidarity, from university encampments to mass protests and digital solidarity campaigns, shows that resistance and awareness are growing more than ever, worldwide. 

If mass media are the “playthings” of power, then solidarity and awareness are the counter-medium. It ensures that even when headlines distort and platforms censor, the truth still breaks through, carried by those who refuse silence and ignorance and choose to stand on the right side of history. Gaza teaches us that while mass media can immobilize, it can also mobilize when audiences choose to resist.

As Malcolm X said: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” 

And as media students, that choice is ours. We are not passive observers. We are agents who can decide whether to reproduce power’s narratives or to challenge them. To study media critically is to recognize its dangers but also its possibilities. Our responsibility is agency, and we have the tools to question, to respond, to expose, to resist.

By Maryam Abusamak

Image Credits

  • Photo: AFP – A relative mourns Palestine TV journalist Mohamed Abu Hatab and 11 family members, the day after they were killed in Israel’s bombardment of Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, November 3, 2023.
  • Photo: Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) – Pro-Palestine protest in Dublin, Ireland.
  • Photo: Abdel Kareem Hana / Associated Press – Relatives and colleagues mourn over the bodies of Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza, 2024.
  • Photo: Majdi Fathi / NurPhoto via Getty Images – Palestinian children walk past the rubble of the al-Bukhari mosque in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, March 2, 2024, after an overnight Israeli airstrike.
  • Photo: Anas Baba / AFP via Getty Images – Smoke rises above buildings in Gaza City as Israeli warplanes drop bombs at night.
  • Photo: Ali Jadallah/Anadolu Agency (AA Images) – The body of a Palestinian child after an airstrike.
  • Photo: Ahmed Hasaballah / Getty Images – Palestinian children mourn during the funeral of relatives killed in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza.
  • Cover image: Ashraf Amra / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images – Funeral ceremony held for Palestinian journalists Saeed Al-Taweel and Mohammad Sobh, who were killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza on October 10, 2023, while filming the targeting of a residential building in the Rimal district, western Gaza.

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The Ambiguity of Language

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Introduction

When one thinks about one of the many human languages, it may be easy to look at words as fixed in their meaning, regardless of what tongue is being spoken. Words can be translated and retain their meaning, so why not assume that they can each be neatly defined once and for all? Critical Terms for Media Studies and its chapter concerning language challenges this notion as it spotlights various theorists that emphasize the importance of context that supports language. They assert that meaning does not exist inside words themselves, rather it emerges through the contexts in which words are used. Whether it is a colloquialism shifting over time, systems of communication shaping interpretation, or theories that emphasize the instability of meaning – there exists a strong argument that language only makes sense when placed in relation to a wider social, and perhaps psychological frame. Theorists like Saussure, Luhmann, Derida, and Bateson each highlight this principle with different beliefs, reasoning, and specifications. In this blog post, we will delve into their ideas and examine the significance of context in the realm of language.

Saussure

While Cary Wolfe–our chapter’s author–cites many theorists, he describes Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics as “arguably the most important [linguistic text] of the twentieth century”(233). Saussure’s describes language as comprised of “two fundamental dimensions: the abstract system of rules that constitutes any language system at a given moment in time (langue), and the heterogeneous utterances and speech acts in which individual speakers engage (parole)”(Wolfe, 234). Additionally, Saussure explains how language systems are developed over time, existing solely through the instances of their use while only remaining meaningful because of the context of rules in which they are situated (Wolfe 234). 

This philosophy of language arguably mirrors John Locke’s two-headed approach to communication studies (Communication Presentation, Slide 4). The social aspect of intentionally exchanging ideas that partially defines communication is largely made possible through instances of parole, while the ideas that this communication embodies would not be properly transmittable without the structural understanding of langue. Essentially, Saussure’s two dimensions of language coexist with Locke’s dimensions of communication.

The relationship between language structures and their use is reciprocal. Without parole there would be no use for langue, and without langue there would be no basis for parole. This relationship makes differentiating between the individual and social aspects of language difficult. To do so, Saussure emphasizes the importance of langue, as it is “the norm of all other manifestations of speech” and consequently attributes order to systems that are otherwise relatively ambiguous (Wolfe 234). He objects to an object-centred approach to language–which views words as “derived from their referents”–arguing that if words were to stand for pre-existing concepts, they would directly translate across different languages (Wolfe 234). Instead he proposes a “relational understanding” of language–viewing it as established and dictated by social conventions–and theorizing that language is not complete in, or determined by, any one speaker (Wolfe 234). 

A prime example of this social approach to understanding language is the everchanging meanings of words in slang dialects and colloquialisms. The efficacy of slang lies in the extent to which it is adopted in parole. Our society emphasizes langue, setting semi-stagnant definitions and uses for its words and rules. As such, if only some people are using words intending to mean something outside of their understandings in langue, others will not understand their potential alternate meanings in parole. In this way, the developments of colloquialisms and slang perfectly encapsulate both the functions of langue in everyday life, and Saussure’s idea that language is not complete in any one speaker, but instead a collective effort to reinterpret the meanings of words. 

Ultimately, Saussure highlights the ambiguity of language through his breakdown of its dimensions. By defining language systems through their occurrence in parole, he delineates these systems by the contexts in which they are used. A sentence could mean one thing according to langue, yet have its meaning completely altered in a different instance of parole.

Derrida

Derrida, too, subscribes to the idea of signifiers or “concepts” being referred only as a system of signs, in which it “refers to one another,” hence, being a “chain” of sorts (1982, 11). This, in relation to context, provides evidence for how the necessary context of the chain of concepts is required for the referential nature of language. Unlike Saussure, Derrida insists on the inseparable and “unmediated” existence of “consciousness” and “conceptuality,” largely rejecting the purely psychic perspective of language. For Derrida, the context arguably cannot be taken out of the signified itself. In such discussions regarding the mediation of “psychological” and “communicational” aspects of language, examining Luhmann’s theories will support our exploration of language in its necessary context. 

Infographic created by Christine Choi (made on Canva)

Luhmann’s Theory on Systems of Communication

When examining Cary Wolfe’s chapter on Language, an overarching argument emerges: 

meaning is inherently tied to context; hence, language does not exist in isolation but is shaped by surrounding systems. Language is regulated by the structures in which it operates. Wolfe analyzes the work of Nikolas Luhmann, a German sociologist who developed a theory on systems of communication. Luhmann distinguishes between two systems: the psychic system and the social system. The psychic system is a self regulating system that reproduces itself through perceptions and consciousness. The social system reproduces itself through communication with language serving as its primary medium. He argues that both systems are closed off, meaning that the mind cannot directly transfer thoughts into society, and society cannot directly communicate meaning into one’s consciousness. Within his framework, language does not transmit ideas within a system but works as a medium that makes communication possible through context. 

These ideas are further developed in Bruce Clarke’s chapter on Communication, which 

was touched upon during the presentations. Clarke expands on the connection between Luhmann’s system theory and language. Luhmann claims that  “Communication… takes place only when a difference of utterance and information is first understood. This distinguishes it from a mere perception of others’ behavior.”(Luhmann 2002, 157). In other words, communication does not depend on the transmission of perceptions but on shared ideas of meaning and the context surrounding them. Meaning is seen as a form in which“the actual and the possible can appear simultaneously.”( Luhmann 1995, 63). He argues that language operates through codes, differences, and context that allow humans to have a sense of understanding. For language to function as a medium of communication, humans must depend on the codes that provide the system with meaning.

Luhmann’s work helps reiterate that context provides meaning to language. His work 

states that the psychic system and social system are closed off, which means humans are unable to transfer ideas. Due to this, meaning cannot simply exist in words or be communicated directly. It has to be interpreted within context, which Luhmann refers to as codes and distinctions that are utilized by each system. Luhmann’s argument raises important questions surrounding the media. If these systems are closed off, then the media cannot assure the transmission of an artist’s internal thoughts or intentions. This challenges the idea that the media allows the audience to perceive an artist’s intentionality. It suggests that the media functions more as a medium, similarly to language, having the ability to shape communication, but never fully bridging the gap between internal and external systems. This leaves us with the question: when we create media, are we truly able to express our perceptions, or will these internal thoughts always be reshaped by the context in which they are received? 

Bateson (/Kac)

This brings us back to a broader point: what theorists like Bateson remind us is that language only exists through context, and contemporary artworks like Eduardo Kac’s Genesis make that insight visible in surprising ways. Gregory Bateson defines context as essential by referring to communication via language as “the difference that makes a difference” (Bateson 235). Essentially, he explains that a word or sign only really carries meaning when placed within a specific frame of context that allows humans to interpret it. For example, a phrase that is spoken ironically will communicate something entirely different than the same phrase spoken earnestly. Bateson reminds us that language does not exist in a vacuum – it is always dependent on the situation that surrounds it. Eduardo Kac’s artwork Genesis is a great representation of this idea. Kac began with a biblical verse, translated it into Morse code, then converted it again into genetic code and implanted it into living bacteria. Visitors online could then manipulate the bacteria, which in result, altered the biblical text itself. What began as a scripture became a coded message, then a biological sequence, then an interactive artwork. Its meaning shifted at every stage because of the context in which it appeared. Genesis embodies the central argument that language, whether in everyday conversation or in art form, can only be truly understood within the context it exists in.

Citations

Bateson, Gregory. “Language”, Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T Mitchell and Mark, B.N. Hansen, The University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp 235. 

Clarke, Bruce. “Communciation”, Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T Mitchell and Mark, B.N. Hansen, The University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp 132-144. 

Wolfe, Cary. “Language”,  Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T Mitchell and Mark, B.N. Hansen, The University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 233-248.

Written by: Molly Kingsley, Lea Lavalley, Christine Choi, Aminata Chipembere

Featured Graphic created by Molly Kingsley

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Writing Media Theory

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MDIA 300 is a writing intensive course in media theory. It is not a class in writing for media (in the sense of, eg, journalism), but a class in writing about media—what media is, what media(tion) means, and what media does.

This course uses texts on media theory, from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, to learn about media and mediation, but also to learn how to do such theoretical work effectively ourselves, with an explicit understanding of theoretical work, as a form of research and critical scholarship, that is inherently collaborative.

The practice of media theory is a writing practice, in the sense that it tends to happen in writing and come in the form of written texts. But we might better understand media theory as a social practice of ‘languaging’: words, communication, and the sharing of ideas come in many forms, and ‘writing’ per se can be a fundamental part of the process without necessarily being the form of the end product of theorizing about media and mediation. The ‘writing intensive’ aspect of the course, as revealed on this blog, recognizes writing to be a means of organizing ideas, but encompasses many forms of media theory ‘products’.

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