Category Archives: Other

Between Noise and Making: Re-Thinking Eco through New Materialisms

2025-11-02 mgupta19

Response to Leadle, Noise versus Knowledge: Umberto Eco on the Internet: https://blogs.ubc.ca/mdia300/archives/category/critical-response.

In their post “Noise versus Knowledge: Umberto Eco on the Internet,” Leadle revisits Eco’s warning that information overload risks turning meaning into mere noise. She connects his critique of digital excess with our own scrolling habits, describing how constant exposure to fragmented posts and updates produces a kind of semiotic overfeeding. I found her reflection especially compelling because it saturates Eco’s theory in lived experience: the daily cycle of consuming, forgetting, and repeating online. Yet Leadle also resists framing technology as purely destructive. Drawing on Renata Kristo and Sherry Turkle, she shows that digital media can both scatter and sustain us, a tension Eco himself recognized when he created Encyclomedia to teach with, rather than against, the web. Her post ends with a call for mindful media use, suggesting that meaning can still be preserved if we approach technology consciously.

This nuanced reading of Eco captures why his ideas feel so urgent today. Still, I think Eco’s distinction between information and knowledge can be expanded using more recent perspectives on new materialism and ecological thinking. Where Eco sees “noise” as the collapse of meaning under too much data, theorists like Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Garber invite us to look at abundance not as loss, but as process, a field of relations where knowledge is continuously made. Their work reframes digital overload as something living and interactive rather than chaotic and destructive. Reading Leadle’s post through this lens helps us move from Eco’s anxiety about excess toward an understanding of media as ecological and participatory.

From Materiality to Materials

Eco’s metaphor of semiotic overfeeding suggests that the digital world saturates us with signs detached from their original context. Leadle develops this by calling the internet a hypertext of our own making, where memory is constantly overwritten. This reminds me of Ingold’s essay Materials Against Materiality (2007), where he argues that scholars have focused too much on the abstract idea of “materiality” rather than on the materials themselves, the substances that flow, shift, and transform. For Ingold, nothing in the world is ever still; every material is caught up in a continual flux of becoming.

If we apply this to Eco, information is not simply a pile of detached signs. It’s more like a stream of interacting materials, images, words, code, pixels, each carrying histories and potentials. From this view, the problem isn’t that there’s too much information, but that we often treat it as static content instead of living matter that requires engagement. Ingold might say that Eco’s fear of noise stems from imagining media as finished objects rather than as ongoing processes of formation. Knowledge doesn’t disappear in movement; it emerges from it.

Leadle’s post resonates with this shift when she describes her laptop as both Eco’s nightmare and Newitz’s dream. That ambivalence, technology as distraction yet also memory, captures exactly what Ingold calls the correspondence between humans and materials. We do not simply use devices; we think through them, shaping and being shaped in return.

Ecology of Meaning

Ingold expands on this idea in Toward an Ecology of Materials (2012), suggesting that materials are perpetually interconnected, forming an ecology rather than a mere assortment of objects. Thinking ecologically involves focusing on the movements of energy, time, and matter that link humans, technologies, and environments. When Leadle expresses feeling overwhelmed by semiotic excess, Ingold might argue that the objective isn’t to escape the current but to learn to navigate it, fostering an awareness of its patterns

This perspective transforms Eco’s noise into something more dynamic. The endless content of the internet becomes a living medium, a shifting landscape of meanings, algorithms, and affects. We might still feel overwhelmed, but the solution is not less information; it’s better correspondence with the materials of information itself. In other words, meaning is ecological: it arises through ongoing adjustment, not control.

Making, Knowing, and Intra-Action

Elizabeth Garber’s “Objects and New Materialisms: A Journey Across Making and Living With Objects” (2019) extends this line of thought. She argues that objects and humans exist in intra-action (a term from Karen Barad), they co-create one another through making. Materials aren’t passive; they have agency that calls for response. Garber writes that “making is a form of knowing,” because working with materials teaches us how they think.

Leadle’s reflection on scrolling, remembering, and forgetting can be reinterpreted through Garber’s framework. When we interact with our devices, we are not just consuming media; we are constantly making meaning with it, arranging feeds, curating profiles, remixing content. Even the so-called noise of the internet might be understood as a collective process of making, where knowledge is distributed across humans and technologies.

This doesn’t erase Eco’s concern about misinformation, but it reframes it. If we see media as active matter rather than as neutral carriers of information, the responsibility shifts from filtering noise to engaging ethically with the ecologies that produce it. Knowledge becomes less about storage and more about relationships, about staying attentive to how our interactions with digital materials shape what and how we know.

Re-evaluating Eco’s “Noise”

Leadle ends her post by saying she wants to think with the media without letting anyone else think for me. That sentiment perfectly captures the bridge between Eco’s skepticism and new materialist optimism. Eco was right that the internet challenges our ability to discern meaning, but Ingold and Garber show that meaning has never been something stable to begin with. It’s always been made through our entanglements with materials, ink, paper, screen, or code.

From this view, noise is not the enemy of knowledge but its condition of possibility. The excess of digital life forces us to negotiate meaning continually, to make and remake understanding in relation to the materials that surround us. Rather than Eco’s image of drowning in information, we might imagine ourselves swimming, sometimes struggling, sometimes graceful, within a sea of ongoing correspondence.

Conclusion

Leadle’s reading of Eco opens a vital conversation about attention, memory, and media saturation. Building on her insights through Ingold and Garber helps us see that the internet’s overflow doesn’t only fragment knowledge; it also sustains new forms of making and thinking. Meaning, like matter, is never still. It moves with us, through our screens, our hands, our networks. The challenge is not to escape the noise but to listen within it, to recognize that even in the clutter of feeds and pixels, the world of materials is still teaching us how to think.

sources used:

Ingold, T. (2012). Toward an ecology of materials. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41(1), 427-442. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145920
Ingold, T. (2007). Materials against materiality. Archaeological Dialogues, 14(1), 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203807002127
Garber, E. (2019). Objects and new materialisms: A journey across making and living with objects. Studies in Art Education, 60(1), 7-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2018.1557454
Clyde Partin, W. (2021). Materialist media theory: An introduction: By G. bollmer, new york & london, bloomsbury academic, 2019, 198 pp., $26.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9781501337093. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2021.1877909

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Extension and Implantation: Where Media Lives in Us

2025-11-01 amaried 1 Comment

Both Alison Landsberg and Yoni Van Eede write from a place of entanglement, where technology is not simply around us, but within us. Each challenges the old mind–matter divide that assumes human thought exists apart from its material and technological conditions. They both see media as more than intermediary; it is what shapes and sustains consciousness itself.

Landsberg’s Prosthetic Memory describes how media , especially cinema, implants emotion and shared experience into the self, while Van Eede’s Extending Extensions explores how technologies form part of the mind, shaping perception and behavior. Between them lies a shared argument that humans are already hybrid, even post-human. What differs is how they imagine our awareness of this condition: Landsberg writes of the emotional pull, while Van Eede turns to its reflective possibilities. If media can implant, extend, and even compose us, how aware are we of that exchange?

Feeling Through Media

Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory captures how mass media allows individuals to feel experiences they have not personally lived. Watching a historical film, for example, implants the emotional memory of an event the viewer never witnessed. Through this process, media acts like a prosthesis — attaching memory, empathy, and identification to those otherwise disconnected from an experience.

“Because the movie experience decenters lived experience, it, too, might alter or construct identity. Emotional possession has implications for both the future and the past of the individual under its sway.” (Blumer as qtd. by Landsberg, 180)

Memory, for Landsberg, is not just psychological; it is technological. The screen becomes an external “organ” that creates the illusion of personal memory and belonging. By exploring that distance between subject and medium, she challenges mind–body dualism: memory is not solely internal, but mediated by other (external) sources.

Yet, both authors understand that the process is mostly unconscious. Media does something to us — it enters, implants, and transforms. Landsberg’s tone is both hopeful and cautious, arguing that while prosthetic memories can build empathy and awareness, they can also shape collective identity without our explicit recognition. Media’s influence, for her, is affective first and reflective only later, if at all.

Extending Consciousness

Van Eede begins where Landsberg ends, with the realization that technology is not external but “technologies make up a part of consciousness” (154). Building on McLuhan’s idea of media as extensions of man, Van Eede redefines extension as a loop: technologies don’t just reach outward, they circle back, structuring how we perceive and behave.

Self-tracking, nudging, and algorithmic feedback are examples of this recursive relationship. The device doesn’t merely record behavior; it co-produces it. “Technologies are not neutral instruments,” Van Eede writes, “they help to reveal and conceal facts of human life” (156). Each medium highlights certain aspects of our existence while obscuring others.

Most importantly, he argues that “we perceive technologies as foreign material… and remain oblivious of the fact that they really hail ‘from us’” (157–158). Our tools feel external, but they are built from our own human desires — for efficiency, connection, knowledge. Van Eede reframes agency: technology acts with us, not on us. Awareness becomes an ethical act — recognizing our own reflection in the systems we use.

Implant and Extension

Both writers dismantle the notion of technological neutrality. Media are not inert intermediaries but active parts of the human condition. Yet their models of mediation differ.

Landsberg’s prosthesis functions through insertion: media implants experience and emotion, working from the outside in. Van Eede’s extension functions through reflection: media emerges from us and reshapes us in return. The first is affective, the second cognitive. One emphasizes empathy, the other awareness.

In this way, Landsberg’s subject is moved by media — affected, sometimes unknowingly. Van Eede’s subject participates in mediation — aware, though not entirely in control. Read together, they map a full circuit: media enters us, becomes part of us, and then returns to influence how we act and think.

This in-between space is where our current digital condition resides. We feel history through film and news cycles, while our devices quietly record and respond to those feelings. The prosthetic and the extended coexist. They are emotional absorption paired with technological reflexivity.

Learning

For media theorists, comparing Landsberg and Van Eede reveals how mediation moves beyond representation to become constitutive of selfhood. Each challenges the fantasy of separation between human and machine.

McLuhan’s claim that media are extensions of man is deepened by both thinkers: Landsberg shows how extension enters the emotional register, while Van Eede shows how it rewires thought itself. Hayles’s posthumanism has a stake here, too, describing the human as a system already distributed across biological and technological forms. And Bollmer’s notion of technological agency is a vital part of the conclusions of both Landsberg and Van Eede; media are not neutral but co-actors in creating and influencing media.

If Landsberg gives us feeling without full consciousness, Van Eede gives us consciousness without much feeling. Together, they suggest that the ethical study of media must hold both: affect and reflection, empathy and awareness. Prosthetic memory helps us connect to others’ experiences, but Van Eede’s ideas of extensions remind us to question how that connection is structured and to what end.

In other words, Landsberg shows how technology allows us to feel through media; Van Eede shows how it allows us to think with it. One pulls us inward, the other outward, and both redefine what it means to be human in an age where memory and perception are increasingly outsourced to our devices.

The Technologies That Hail From Us

Both writers disagree with the notion that technology stands apart from us. Media no longer just represents or records our lives; they compose them. As Van Eede writes, these technologies “hail from us” — they originate from our own human impulses, even as they change what those impulses mean.

Landsberg captures the emotional weight of that realization; the capacity to feel the world through mediated experience. Van Eede captures its ethical weight; the demand to recognize that our technologies reveal and conceal who we are.

In the end, their work converges on a single idea — that mediation is not something that happens to us or through us, but as us. Our consciousness is already prosthetic, already extended. To live critically in this condition means acknowledging both how media makes us feel and how it quietly teaches us to think and behave. Only then can we begin to see the technologies that shape us as what they’ve been all along: reflections of ourselves, and always changing.

Works Cited

Bollmer, Grant David. Introduction to Media Studies: Concepts, Theories, and Methods. Routledge, 2019.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Landsberg, Alison. “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner.” Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, edited by Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, SAGE Publications, 1995, pp. 175–186.

Van Den Eede, Yoni. “Extending ‘Extension’: A Reappraisal of the Technology-as-Extension Idea through the Case of Self-Tracking Technologies.” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, edited by Pieter Vermaas, Peter-Paul Verbeek, and Anthonie Meijers, Lexington Books, 2014, pp. 151–164.

Written by Allie Demetrick

Image sourced from A Clockwork Orange 1971

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What Alison Landsberg and Van Den Eede Teach Us About Technology

2025-10-31 Aubrey Ventura 2 Comments

Nowadays, we are seeing emerging technologies like the Apple Vision Pro, Fitbits, and Oura Rings, which are making our senses increasingly extended and reshaped by digital media. This begs the question as to whether or not our senses are being strengthened or even manipulated due to technology. Alison Landsberg, in “Prosthetic Memory” (1995) and Yoni Van Den Eede in “Extending Extension” (2014), question how we understand the relationship between humans and media. Landsberg sees media as a “prosthetic”, technology that inserts itself into ourselves, affecting our mind and body (Landsberg 175). On the other hand, Van Den Eede sees media as an extension that expands and redefines what it means for us to be “human” (Van Den Eede, 151). Though their ideas are slightly different, each reveals how media and technology may not be neutral tools, presenting media as the active players in shaping us as modern humans. In an increasingly mediated world, their discussions depict how representation and interface influence our identity, control, and perception in an increasingly mediated world.

Landsberg: Prosthetic Memory

In “Prosthetic Memory,” Allison Landsberg begins by presenting the idea that cinema and mass media can implant memories in audience members and viewers, reshaping their identity, even though these recollections never truly occurred to them in real life. Landsberg defines these as “memories which do not come from a person’s lived experience in any strict sense”, but are still real nonetheless (175). The media we consume, including film, television, and social media content, can make us feel as if we are living in someone else’s experiences rather than just following their narrative. As Landsberg explains, cinema is “aware of its ability to generate experiences and to install memories of them ― memories which become experiences that film consumers both possess and feel possessed by” (176). Landsberg explained this idea using the film The Thieving Hand (1908), a story that follows a one-armed man who is given an artificial limb that causes him to steal from people against his will (175). Just like how technology can create and amplify our experiences, oftentimes, it is extended too far, where there is a loss of control. In this case, media can write images, feelings, and experiences into our minds that were never ours. Now, our screens can edit our sense of who we are, rewritten by the cultural technologies we consume, whether we like it or not. Especially where the algorithm feeds AI content, Landsberg’s argument that media “implants” memories is a cautionary tale that every image or video we encounter, real or fake, has the possibility to rewire who we think we are.

Eede: Critical Awareness towards “Extension”

In Extending “Extension”, Eede mainly discusses the relationship between technology and the human being by applying the idea proposed by Marshall McLuhan – technology is the extension of the human being – and uses this as a way to call on the public to perceive technology in a more critical way.

Eede points out that modern researchers often look at technology under an “external” context: “technologies and humans are seen here as independent entities, and the relation between them—the extension—as an external supplement to both.”(Eede, 156) This approach only leads to two extreme directions in which one side relies on technology blindly while the other side completely rejects it.

To look at technology in a more practical sense one needs to accept that technology is not only “simple intermediaries” or a tool for humans to use but also acts as a source of influence that co-shapes human beings. To internally approach technology, one has to accept that we have already intertwined with technology, though one should remember to trust their own thinking rather than technology, despite its convenience in many aspects. At the same time, according to Eede, technology is also self-tracking and constantly shifting its position in the human-technological relationship and the boundaries between it and humans. This goes back to Eede’s promotion in critical thinking in a time when everyone needs to have awareness when it comes to treating technology.

Common ground and relations

Eede and Landsburg both made similar statements along with their main ideas when it comes to human-media relations. Eede emphasized on the fact that technology and media can influence and co-shape human beings, and that technology today should be seen as an internal element for humans since they can reflect and intervene with what people think they originally thought. The idea similar, or even can be considered an continual to “extending the mind through technology” can be found in Landsburg’s works, in which he describes how human memories can be influenced by what they watch on different media outlets and so “tricking” the mind to accept them as part of reality – consciously or subconsciously. In both works, the authors try to raise the awareness amongst the public to see media and technology in a more critical way.

Main differences

While both thinkers see media as a force that is entangled with human experiences, they approach these ideas from different perspectives. Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory depicts media entering our bodies and creating emotional memories that are not ours. On the other hand, Eede focuses on media as an entity that is “an extension of ourselves” (151), rather than media being inserted into us. His perspective is loyal to McLuhan’s thinking about media as “technology is an extension of the human being, of human organs, body parts, senses, capabilities, and so on. ” (153). For Eede, media stretches and reshapes our sensory boundaries; it changes the way we move, see, and act in the world.

Landsberg emphasizes how media implants memories and emotions, while Eede is concerned in how media transforms our abilities in perception and our abilities as humans. Lansberg approaches media with more regard for its ability to emotionally penetrate ourselves with new memories, producing empathy and identity through what she calls the “unsettled boundaries between real and simulated ones” (174). In contrast, Eede’s priority in his thinking is not about emotional manipulation but about our loss of understanding of how media shape us while we use them, which is becoming increasingly unclear. Eede mentions technology itself creates a “fog to distort our sight; a blindness we are victim to or, even more precisely, an inability to assess the “why” and the ‘how’ of technologies in an immediate and direct way, at a glance so to speak.” (168).

Contextualizing in Media Theory

Landsberg and Eede remind us that media are not just things that we consume, because it is a heavy influence on how we think, feel, and behave. We’ve often returned to McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message.” Van Den Eede explicitly extends this saying, while Landsberg adds by presenting the implantation of memories and emotion. This shows that modern media can impact us from many directions, both outward and inward.

Even further, Ingold’s mention of correspondence in Making or Gibson’s “education of attention” also applies here. According to Ingold, our perception arises through actively interacting with materials. Then, for Gibson, we observe affordances that invite us to act. Landsberg’s ideas similarly lean toward feeling through film’s affordances, while Van Den Eede’s extensions demand continual adaptation to technology.

Conclusion

Both of the readings emphasized on the importance of critical thinking with media and technology, and in a society filled with advertisements, new technology and implementations of various ideas from billions of people, critical awareness and consideration to accepting these information are indeed of vital importance. Meanwhile, not easily accepting the provided ideas also extends to the researching grounds – taking in the ideas and reminders from Eede and Landsburg, implementing them as an “extension” to our own thoughts and memories entirely without critical consideration is probably not what the authors would like to see, either. Indeed, our knowledge should come from our own interactions with materials, and this should be kept in mind in both interactions with the passages by Eede and Landsburg as well as with media and technology in our daily lives.

References

Landsberg, Alison. “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner.” Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, edited by Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, SAGE Publications, 1995, pp. 175–186.

Image: Pierznik, Christopher. “Our Brains Can’t Handle Technology.” Medium, 5 June 2019, https://medium.com/the-passion-of-christopher-pierznik-books-rhymes/our-brains-cant-handle-technology-8dfabe90505d

Contributers:

Siming Liao, Aubrey Ventura

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When the Screen Disappears: Understanding Smartphone Absence through Bollmer’s Materialist Media Theory

2025-10-30 mgupta19 3 Comments

By- Meha Gupta

https://static0.anpoimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/a-google-pixel-pro-fold-10-lying-on-a-desk-surrounded-by-smoke-and-burn-marks.png?fit=crop&h=900&w=1600

Introduction: Making the “Immaterial” Visible

We tend to think of our phones as portals to something immaterial, a glowing window into the digital world. Yet what happens when that window closes? Grant Bollmer’s Materialist Media Theory (2019) insists that media are never weightless or neutral: they are physical systems that shape our experience, perception, and even thought itself. Rosenberg and Blondheim’s “What (Missing) the Smartphone Means” (2025) explores this claim from the opposite direction. Their study of young people who lived without smartphones for a week exposes how deeply the device’s material presence structures our daily rhythms and relationships.

Reading Rosenberg and Blondheim through Bollmer’s framework shows that the smartphone is not just a screen we look at but a medium we live through, one that organizes space, time, and emotion. Together, the two texts reveal that when the immaterial digital layer is stripped away, what remains is the material mediation of the body itself.

Bollmer’s Rejection of the Immaterial Myth

Bollmer opens with a straightforward argument: all media are material. From paper to pixels, each medium has weight, texture, and infrastructure that determine what can be expressed through it. He calls this “performative materiality,” borrowing from Judith Butler and Karen Barad to describe how representation itself is a material act. Meaning isn’t just transmitted through media; it’s made by them.

In his five-chapter structure, Bollmer moves from inscriptions (how media record and store information) to spatiotemporal materiality (how they reorganize time and space) and finally to neurocognitive materialism, which claims that we can’t think about media; we only think in media. For him, even thought is technologically mediated. Each device we use alters how we perceive the world, just as earlier media, from stone tablets to telegraphs, rearranged social and sensory experience.

Crucially, Bollmer links these processes to power. The politics of media, he writes, cannot be reduced to representation; they emerge through the material arrangements that enable or restrict communication. Server farms, lithium mines, and touchscreens all participate in shaping who can speak, move, and remember. In this sense, materiality is never just physical, it’s social, economic, and embodied.

Rosenberg & Blondheim: The Smartphone as Prosthesis

Rosenberg and Blondheim’s 2025 study begins with a deceptively simple experiment: remove the smartphone from daily life. Eighty teenagers in Israel gave up their devices for a week and recorded their thoughts and behaviours. The researchers call the smartphone a portable, personal, and prosthetic medium, describing it as an extension of perception and identity rather than a mere communication tool.

The participants’ responses confirm Bollmer’s claim that media are inseparable from being. Without their phones, teens reported spatial disorientation (“I kept reaching for something that wasn’t there”) and temporal anxiety (“I lost track of when things were happening”). The device had become a kind of externalized nervous system, a way of structuring presence in time and space.

Interestingly, many participants described phantom sensations: checking imaginary vibrations, feeling their pockets buzz, or seeing the absent screen in their mind’s eye. Rosenberg and Blondheim interpret this as evidence of embodied mediation, the phone’s material routines inscribed into muscle memory. For Bollmer, these moments illustrate performative materiality in action: the medium has literally trained the body to perform its presence.

Spatiotemporal Materiality: Living in the Device’s Time

Bollmer’s chapter on Spaces and Times argues that each medium produces its own spatiotemporal regime. Some media are time-biased (durable but immobile, like stone), while others are space-biased (mobile but ephemeral, like digital screens). Smartphones epitomize this duality: they collapse distance yet demand constant, real-time attention.

Rosenberg and Blondheim’s study demonstrates this collapse empirically. Participants reported that, without their phones, the world suddenly felt larger and slower. Conversations stretched, waiting returned, and physical travel regained significance. One teen wrote that taking the bus felt longer than it used to, like the world was farther away.

Bollmer would read this as a recalibration of the media-organized present. The smartphone’s material infrastructure, notifications, clocks, GPS, produces an artificial sense of immediacy that shapes social life. When that infrastructure is removed, users don’t simply feel disconnected; they experience time differently. What seems like emotional withdrawal is actually a shift in the underlying temporal architecture that the medium had been performing all along.

Thinking in Media: Cognition and Dependency

In Bodies and Brains, Bollmer challenges the idea that thought is internal. Instead, thinking is distributed across brains, tools, and environments, a concept he calls neurocognitive materialism. Rosenberg and Blondheim’s participants reveal this distributed cognition clearly: many struggled to navigate cities or remember schedules without their phones.

The loss was not just informational but cognitive. One participant admitted, “I felt stupid, like my brain had shrunk.” Another described reaching for her phone during conversations to “remember what to say.” Bollmer would argue that such dependency is not weakness but proof that the smartphone functions as part of our mental apparatus. It externalizes memory, calculation, and even emotional regulation.

By treating cognition as materially extended, Bollmer reframes addiction as a structural condition of mediation. Rosenberg and Blondheim’s work makes that condition visible: removing the device reveals how thinking has already been offloaded into the object. The emptiness people feel in its absence isn’t purely psychological; it’s a physical reorganization of cognition.

The Affective Charge of Absence

Bollmer’s final chapter, Objects and Affects, integrates new materialism with affect theory, suggesting that objects exert power through feeling as much as function. Media generate affective atmospheres, anticipation, anxiety, comfort, that circulate between users and devices.

Rosenberg and Blondheim observe the same phenomenon through what they call the affective residue of the smartphone. Even when absent, the phone’s emotional trace lingers: participants felt safer or calmer when they imagined it nearby, and some placed a notebook or another object in its place. The phone’s materiality thus persists as affective potential, a relationship of comfort and dependence.

Here, the two texts converge on a subtle insight: materiality is not limited to touchable matter. It also includes the emotional and sensory forces that bind users to technologies. The smartphone’s affective pull is as real as its circuitry. Bollmer’s theory helps explain why detachment feels physically uncomfortable, because the body and the medium have already co-produced each other’s rhythms.

Extending Bollmer: From Theory to Lived Materiality

While Rosenberg and Blondheim largely confirm Bollmer’s framework, their empirical method also extends it beyond abstraction. Bollmer writes from a philosophical standpoint, tracing ideas from McLuhan, Innis, and Barad to argue that media perform material politics. Rosenberg and Blondheim turn that theory into lived observation, showing how materiality operates through habit, gesture, and loss.

Their work suggests that absence is itself a mode of mediation. By examining what happens when a medium is missing, they reveal how its material functions persist as ghostly behaviours, phantom vibrations, re-enacted swipes, and disrupted routines. This approach complicates Bollmer’s call to think in media by showing that even when the medium is removed, thinking still bears its imprint.

In other words, Rosenberg and Blondheim bring Bollmer’s ideas down to the level of the everyday. Their findings demonstrate that materialist media theory is not only about wires and circuits but about how bodies internalize those circuits through repetition and desire.

Why Materiality Matters for Screen-Based Media

Both texts ultimately challenge the class’s guiding question: Does the distinction between the material and immaterial even make sense for digital media? Bollmer would say no, digital media depend on physical infrastructures and embodied practices. Rosenberg and Blondheim confirm this empirically: when you remove the device, you don’t escape mediation; you only expose its depth.

For students studying media today, this matters because it reframes how we think about online life. Our feeds, chats, and screens aren’t weightless flows of data; they’re material entanglements involving cobalt mines, cloud servers, hands, and habits. Understanding that entanglement means recognizing our participation in a broader system of technological dependence, one that is physical, affective, and political.

Conclusion: Feeling the Weight of the Immaterial

When Rosenberg and Blondheim’s participants reached for absent phones, they enacted exactly what Bollmer describes: the body thinking through media, even when the medium is gone. Their week of deprivation made visible what normally stays invisible, the smartphone’s role as a prosthetic extension of perception, memory, and emotion.

Bollmer gives us the theory; Rosenberg and Blondheim give us the proof. Together, they show that materiality in the digital age isn’t about choosing between body and screen but about acknowledging their fusion. The smartphone doesn’t just connect us to the world, it constitutes the world we inhabit. To study media, then, is to study the very conditions of being human in a technological environment that has already rewired how we feel, think, and move.

Work Cited:

Clyde Partin, W. (2021). Materialist media theory: An introduction: By G. bollmer, new york & london, bloomsbury academic, 2019, 198 pp., $26.95 (paperback), ISBN: 9781501337093. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2021.1877909
Rosenberg & Blondheim (2025)

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Recon-figured: exploring the real versus the authentic in posthumans

2025-10-30 nbrown14 2 Comments

Click on the link below to listen to my mini-podcast for the Critical Comparison of Texts assignment, entitled “Recon-figured” . Credit to Bridghet Wood and Hanna Rudelich for voicing Allison Landberg and Emily McArthur, respectively.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BVNQmvftuHK9J3oZCgdZNmBIHjt47lAR/view?

Works Cited

Landberg, Allison. “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Bladerunner.” Cyberspace/ Cyberbodies/ Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, SAGE Publications, London, 1995, pp. 175–187.

McArthur, Emily. “The iPhone Erfahrung.” Design, Mediations & the Posthuman, Lexington Books, Lanham , Maryland, 2014, pp. 113–125.

Image for poster from scientificamerican.com

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Hey! I Saw Them Live*

2025-10-29 mkingsle 7 Comments

Introduction

Alison Landsberg’s discussion of prosthetic memory and Yoni Van Den Eede’s concept of mediational extensions form a comprehensive analysis of how we interact with media in the modern day, and how this media ultimately impacts us and our sense of identities. This dynamic relationship, and the complexities it introduces into our lives, is applicable in our modern entertainment scene, particularly through studying how concerts and live performances have been transformed with the introduction of smartphones and personal digital recording devices. Laura Glitsos delineates the role of documentation in live music, and how this aspect of concerts has mutated as technology develops. These sources work together to provide an explanation for how these concepts work with one another and how they can be applied to situations in our modern world.

Media Extensions and Prosthetic Memories

Landsberg’s writing centres on memory and its place in our lives. Memories “validate our experiences” as by simply having a memory, one logically has the experience that it represents (176). However, Landsberg contradicts this notion of memory through her article’s primary focus: prosthetic memory. Prosthetic memories “do not come from a person’s lived experience in any strict sense”, and are instead the product of reliance on third-party influence to create the illusion of experience and memory (Landsberg 175). These third-parties are often technologies or media used as extensions of a person’s selfhood. Van Den Eede’s writings support Landsberg’s definition of prosthetic memory, explicitly describing technology as “an extension of the human being, of human organs, body parts, senses, capabilities, and so on”(153). As an extension of humanity, technology immediately becomes a form of prosthesis and, by effect, an integral asset in creating prosthetic memories. These “technologies [that] structure and circumscribe experience” texturize and dramaticize the contents of prosthetic memories, and are, at their core, vessels for communication (Landsberg 176).

In his discussion of media as an extension of humans, Van Den Eede continuously cites Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan emphasizes the roles of “rhetoric, grammar, and logic”, arguing that media “are linguistic entities that “translate one thing, that is, a human function, into another, that is, an artifact”(Van Den Eede 159). This theory corroborates both the process of mediation described in Tim Ingold’s, Making, and Gregory Bateson’s definition of language as a structure dependent on its context. As dictated by McLuhan, media communicates rhetoric using grammar that is understood through logic, mirroring the semiotic processes Tim Ingold uses to describe the process of making. Like Ingold, McLuhan views media as a sort of transducer, representing ideas in material form, enabling communication in our societies, and effectively acting as “the glue that binds our human reality together”(Ingold 102, Van Den Eede 159). Memories are the base of our realities, making this communication indescribably important in our lives.

Building off this semiotic model, McLuhan further describes media as “translations of us, the users, from one form into another form: metaphors”(Van Den Eede 159). He implores us to reconsider what language is, evoking Bateson’s definition of language as a “digital system” wherein “signs have no correspondence of magnitude” and thus the differences between these signs can only hold meaning “determined by reference to a larger system of rules within which that difference functions”(Wolfe 235). Per Bateson, language only holds meaning because of its structure, just as McLuhan’s definition of media holds that the true impact or meaning of media can only be understood within the larger context in which it is situated. Similarly, without context, our memories–natural and prosthetic–would be unintelligible and meaningless.

Effectively, prosthetic memories cannot exist without considering technology and media as an extension of ourselves, just as language is arguably an extension of ourselves. Landsberg and Van Den Eede’s works form a reciprocal relationship in the theories they espouse: as an extension of humanity, media becomes a vessel for prosthetic memory, while the creation of prosthetic memories give these media extensions a purpose.

Our Memories and Time

An interesting instance of Landsberg and Van Den Eede’s theories in practice is the increasing prevalence of digital recording technology in concert and live music spaces. Recording has long been an integral aspect of live music performances, to the extent that “the live performance is produced through the processes of recording” defining it as a cultural artefact “entwined with the aspects of that production”(Glitsos 35). However, the advent of the smartphone revolutionizes this aspect of concerts as users “not only view moving images but also [create] them”(Glitsos 36). This provides the viewer total agency over the narration of their experience, and thus the memories they create.

Landsberg categorizes memories as “a domain of the present” whose primary purpose is to construct strategies in the now through which someone can live in the future (176). In practice, concert-goers record videos and photographs as a precursor to potential memory lapse, effectively visuallizing a future wherein they forget the experience of the concert. However, in that process, we corrupt the experience of the concert with the documentation of the videos. The memories of the experience take precedence over the experience itself.

Related to this phenomenon, Fredric Jameson declared that we see “the waning of our historicity, of our lived possibility of experiencing history in some active way”(Landsberg 177). Essentially, in the age of post-modernity–increasingly so as the digital age progresses–true experience is dead. Instead, prosthetic memory has so thoroughly complicated the relationship between memory and experience that media is used to record our experiences to an extent that effectively transforms potential ‘real’ memories into prosthetic ones. Instead of watching the artists live and living truly in the present, we concern ourselves with the future, opting to watch the show through the screen of whatever recording device we brought.

A Dependance on Documentation

A byproduct of this relationship between extensions and prosthetic memories is the “unsettled boundaries between real and simulated [memories]” and the subsequent disruption “of the human body” and “its subjective autonomy”(Landsberg 175). Van Den Eede notes these disruptions, expanding on how “the technological extension of a human function produces a heightening of intensity within that function, body part or sense”(158). By exacerbating the strength of a human function, these technologies highlight the fallacies of the organic human form, including our ability to retain memories. Technology expedites the act of recording–a process that has traditionally been performed by a person and their memory–making it a readily available form of memory prosthesis. This immediacy of personal technologies facilitates a reliance on them, one that would ultimately be both a cause and effect of a general decline to our organic memories. For example, “the camera phone augments the drive to collect and save live music experiences” with the recordings’ ultimate purpose is to act as a preservation of the experience that can be repeated (Glitsos 37). We have access to our phones, so we use them in place of our eyes, experiencing a concert through a screen instead of in real-time.

Essentially: if there is an opportunity to record memories elsewhere, why would we rely on our fallible minds?

Prosthetic Emotions

Despite the questionable ways in which they are ultimately experienced, live music and concerts remain popular, speaking to a “popular longing to experience history in a personal and even bodily way”(Landsberg 178). Evidently, people still have a desire to create these memories of experiences even if their authenticity is debateable. This desire to “create experiences and to implant memories” of “[experiences] of which we have never lived” is motivated by how these memories become experiences that “consumers both possess and feel possessed by”(Landsberg 176). Prosthetic memories have a comparable impact on our selfhoods and identities to ‘real’ memories. Regardless of how they were ultimately created and recorded, the experiences feel real, and impact us accordingly. Though Landsberg’s example of films differentiates more distinctly between the prosthetic and the truly experienced, her concept is applicable to live performances as well. Concert-goers watch through their phones, corrupting the true experience, but the ultimate emotional impact of the experience “might be as significant in constructing, or deconstructing, the spectator’s identity as any experience that s/he actually lived through”(Landsberg 180).

The proportional impact that prosthetic memories have on our selves when compared to traditional memories suggests an eventual era when “we might no longer be able to distinguish prosthetic or ‘unnatural’ memories from ‘real’ ones”(Landsberg 180). Evidently, Landsberg views us and our media extensions as two distinctly separate entities. By contrast, Van Den Eede specifies that technology and media compensate for our own deficiencies “by taking action, more specifically by deploying tools and prostheses”(154). This definition is complicit in establishing a reliance on media that facilitates a codependent relationship between humans and their mediational extensions, yet the intended purpose of these extensions is to achieve things that we cannot perform organically. Through this relationship, the era of differentiation between prosthetic and ‘real’ memories has arguably already come to an end.

The allure of media extensions and their impact on the creation of memories is explicitly displayed in their superfluous use in live performance settings. Through our smartphones–the extensions and facilitators of prosthetic memories in this context–concert-goers become “both hero and narrator of their own epic”(Glitsos 40). The aforementioned agency provided by smartphones offers their users a form through which they can insert themselves into the recorded moment. This particular concept is ironic considering someone must be present to an experience to properly record it. However, these recordings give the user a point through which they can insert themselves once more in the moment once it has passed, further reinforcing Landsberg’s emphasis of memory as a function of the present.

Conclusion

Landsberg and Van Den Eede indirectly highlight a reciprocal relationship between the media extensions we use, and the prosthetic memories their use creates. These sources reformulate concepts we have discussed in class, further exemplifying language as defined by Bateson, and offering another layer of complexity to the theories proposed by Ingold through their dual citation of McLuhan. The complicated relationship between humans and their media extensions represent a transition into a new media era, and the prosthetic memories created through this relationship are symbols of the potential obsolescence of ‘real’ memory. These relationships and their consequences can be observed through our habitual use of smartphones in concerts and how they reflect many of the concepts that both Landsberg and Van Den Eede describe.

Works Cited

Glitsos, Laura. “The Camera Phoen in the Concert Space: Live Music and Moving Images on the Screen.” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, vol. 12, no. 1, 2018, pp. 33-52. https://doi.org/10.3828/msmi.2018.2.

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

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

Van Den Eede, Yoni. “Extending “Extension”: A Reappraisal of the Technology-as-Extension idea through the Case of Self-Tracking Technologies.” Design Mediation & The Posthuman, Lexington Books, 2014, pp. 151-172.

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.

Image by Molly Kingsley

Written by Molly Kingsley

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General Media Theory Blog Post (2)

2025-10-29 mgupta19

aerial photography of mountain ranges during daytime

Everyday objects as mediators of thought, our digital and material environments think with us.

Thinking with Objects in a Digital World

When Sherry Turkle writes that “we think with objects,” I keep looking around my desk. My phone sits face-down beside a half-open laptop, an empty coffee cup, and a sketchbook I haven’t touched in weeks. Each of these things quietly mediates how I move through the day, how I focus, communicate, and even remember. The more I notice them, the more I realize that none of my thoughts or habits exist outside of objects. They frame what I can see and feel. This week I’ve been wondering: if, as Turkle suggests, our inner lives are shaped through the objects we live with, what happens when those objects become almost entirely digital?

Turkle’s idea of evocative objects positions things as psychological mediators, tools that help us think, not just things we think about. Her examples are tactile: a computer mouse, a stuffed animal, a family photo. But our current objects are often immaterial, apps, tabs, files, feeds. We can’t hold a TikTok algorithm the way we can hold a childhood toy, yet it clearly organizes our perception and attention. I started to realize that what counts as an “object” has shifted from the physical to the infrastructural. A For You Page isn’t an item in space; it’s an environment of ongoing mediation.

This connects closely to J. J. Gibson’s idea of affordances that we discussed in lecture. Every medium or environment, he said, offers both possibilities and constraints. The air affords breathing and speech; the screen affords scrolling and swiping. What fascinates me is how easily those affordances become invisible. I don’t usually think about how my phone affords distraction, how its notifications structure my attention before I consciously decide what to notice. Gibson’s ecological language helps me see the phone not as a tool I use, but as the medium I inhabit, one that sets the conditions for what I can do and think.

Tim Ingold’s critique of methodological individualism adds another layer here. He argues that understanding doesn’t come from analyzing isolated parts, people, tools, media, but from tracing the correspondence between them. In practice, that means I can’t study my digital habits separately from the interfaces, algorithms, and social expectations that co-produce them. My notes app isn’t just storage for my ideas; it shapes the rhythm of how I write. The medium literally participates in the thought. Ingold’s idea reframes Turkle’s thinking with objects into a more dynamic process: we and our technologies are always thinking together.

Grant Bollmer’s materialist media theory extends this even further. He claims that media aren’t just channels that represent the world, they perform it. Representation is a material act, not a symbolic one. When I post a photo or write a caption, I’m not simply expressing myself through a medium; I’m performing selfhood through a set of technological, aesthetic, and cultural constraints. The interface decides what counts as a postable image, what ratios fit, which emotions trend. Bollmer’s framework helps me see social media less as a window into identity and more as a factory that produces it.

If Turkle invites us to notice our attachments to objects, Bollmer makes us confront how those attachments are structured by power and design. He reminds us that the digital “object” isn’t neutral, it’s materialized through code, servers, and labour. A selfie on Instagram depends on rare minerals mined for phone batteries, content moderators filtering trauma, and algorithms optimizing engagement. When he says media are performative agents, I hear an ethical call: our digital gestures participate in vast systems of material consequence.

These theories start to converge around a single tension, presence and absence. Turkle’s “evocative object” bridges self and world; Ingold’s correspondence links body and environment; Bollmer’s materialism collapses the gap entirely. Yet in each case, mediation comes with loss. McLuhan called it amputation: every extension of our senses reduces some other capacity. The phone extends my reach but amputates my patience. The cloud preserves my photos but dulls my memory. I used to think of these as trade-offs; now I see them as conditions of being mediated.

A small example: last week my phone storage filled up, so I moved thousands of pictures onto Google Drive. Instantly my camera roll felt lighter, almost empty. I caught myself scrolling through old screenshots I didn’t even like, proof that my sense of self had become tangled with the device’s archive. Eco’s distinction between memory and information suddenly made sense: I had data, not memories. Offloading my photos felt like offloading part of my brain. The technology didn’t just store my experiences; it quietly changed what counted as an experience worth keeping.

Throughout the course, we’ve returned to the idea that media are environments, not just tools. Turkle’s desk objects, Gibson’s ecological mediums, Ingold’s correspondences, and Bollmer’s performative materiality all suggest that mediation is how being itself happens. I find this both comforting and unsettling. Comforting, because it means our entanglement with technology isn’t new, it’s just the latest form of human-object reciprocity. Unsettling, because recognizing this doesn’t free us from it. The point isn’t to escape mediation but to understand its affordances and costs.

Sometimes I wonder if the digital age has made mediation too smooth. The interfaces are so seamless that the in-between disappears. We rarely experience lag, friction, or texture, the qualities that remind us something is being mediated. Maybe that’s why nostalgia filters and vintage aesthetics feel satisfying; they re-introduce the sense of distance, the material grain that digital media often erase. Bollmer would probably call that a longing for the visible performance of mediation, a desire to feel the medium again.

So what does it mean to “think with objects” today? For me, it’s less about choosing the right tool and more about staying aware of how the tool thinks back. The phone on my desk isn’t just reflecting my habits; it’s helping to script them. Each notification, algorithmic suggestion, or design choice participates in shaping my attention, my memory, and even my sense of time. Recognizing that doesn’t make me less dependent on technology, but it might make the dependency more conscious, less automatic.

I’d love to hear how others in the class notice this in their own routines. Do certain objects, digital or physical, change how you feel yourself thinking? Are there moments when a medium suddenly becomes visible again, when you sense the in-between that usually disappears? Maybe paying attention to those moments is the first step toward what Ingold calls correspondence: learning to move with our media, rather than through them.

image link: https://unsplash.com/photos/aerial-photography-of-mountain-ranges-during-daytime-Y8lCoTRgHPE

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Ingold and Michael Polanyi on ‘telling’ and the ‘personal knowledge’ iceberg

2025-10-29 OwenMenning 4 Comments

In the second-to-last chapter of Tim Ingold’s Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture, Ingold centres around the idea of ‘the hand’ and brings up philosopher Michael Polanyi in his opening statements to highlight ideas of ‘telling’, ‘articulating’, and ‘knowing’. Ingold believes that while everything can be told, not everything can be articulated, and to strengthen his argument he uses one of Polanyi’s notable pieces of work, the book The Tacit Dimension, as a framework for what Ingold believes about knowledge and how it is communicated.

Background on Michael Polanyi

Michael Polanyi was a physicist, chemist, and philosopher who was born in 1891 and passed away in 1976. He lived through both world wars, even migrating from Germany when Nazis took power, and his philosophical work that he developed later in life was heavily influenced by living through those global events, as well as the rise of totalitarianism as a whole (The Polanyi Society).

The book that Ingold refers to, The Tacit Dimension, was published in 1967 and introduces Polanyi’s idea of “we know more than we can tell” (Ingold 109). I was not able to access Polanyi’s full book via the UBC Library or the internet, so I am citing its mention in Ingold’s Making.

Formal vs. Personal Knowledge

Polanyi’s view on thinking and knowledge was that ‘we know more than we can tell’ (Ingold 109), and he classified knowledge into two camps: personal and formal. Formal knowledge is knowledge that can be specifically articulated and explained clearly to someone else, whereas personal knowledge cannot. Personal knowledge, to Polanyi, is the type of ‘know-how’ that only comes from the experience and practice that an individual goes through, whether it be perfecting a craft or learning how to hunt. It is not able to be articulated and thus, it cannot be taught. It is also important to note that Polanyi defines ‘telling’ as requiring “specification and articulation” (Ingold 109), and Ingold bases his views on that definition. Ingold very much disagrees with Polanyi’s sentiment about personal knowledge being ‘untellable’ and argues, for example, that the idea that the age-old example of a craftsman being suddenly unable to explain how they do what they do when asked, is unfounded (Ingold 109). Ingold argues that people are absolutely able to communicate and “tell” others what they do, no matter how innate or personal it may seem. However the telling is not necessarily verbal, but it can be shown and demonstrated. This ties into Ingold’s belief that people correspond with the world and think through making. Polanyi’s perspective doesn’t make sense through Ingold’s lens, because if unspoken stuff or lessons couldn’t be taught since they were ‘personal’, then no one could learn through making, and learning through doing is a well-established fact of life.

Ways of Telling

To further help prove his point, Ingold in this chapter highlights the different forms of ‘telling’ to both debunk Polanyi’s ideas, and set up Ingold’s overall argument, which is that everything can be ‘told’. Ingold talks about storytelling, which is a form of telling where a narrative is told that includes lessons and patterns, and then there is ‘telling’, which is the more discernible approach where people search for ‘tells’ in others. For example, studying someone’s face while playing poker is a ‘tell’, since you are using environmental clues such as the furrowing of their brow and the tapping of their fingers on the table to make a judgement for yourself about what is really going on. Ingold brings up an example of being able to tell the tone in which a handwritten note was meant (or not meant) to be received, based on the inflection marks on the letters (Ingold 110). These two methods of telling come together in storytelling as well, but if Polanyi’s method of thinking on ‘tells’ were accurate, Ingold states that that would mean all stories would have the same exact meanings or lessons because of how rigid Polanyi’s ‘formal’ and ‘personal’ knowledge perspective functions. Stories do not work that way though, as they are purposely told with a degree of open-endedness so that the audience can bring about their own meaning and takeaways from it. As an example, Little Red Riding Hood is a classic tale that, in effect, teaches children about stranger danger. The story does not set out to literally warn children of actual wolves that can eat one’s grandparent, but it is close enough to a real example of a wolf being a shady stranger that readers can figure out the lessons behind the words. For Ingold, the lessons that stories give are less of an ‘answer’ and more of a path or trail that one can follow (Ingold 110), and from there everyone gets something unique out of it. It should be noted that Ingold does cite Polanyi’s work during this chapter, so while I did not access the direct text that Ingold did, using the information gathered from the Polanyi Society website helped fill in gaps that I think are useful, which I will get into shortly.

Ways of Thinking

To close out his argument regarding Polanyi’s words specifically, Ingold refers back to Polanyi’s definition of what is required for telling, which are specification and articulation. Ingold talks about ‘articulate thinking’, which is the process of thinking about one’s words before speaking them, organizing them in the brain all in advance before sharing the thoughts with anyone else. He argues that if every time people thought it were ‘articulated’, no thinking or ‘making’ would happen because everything would have to be thought of in advance, which goes against the learning-through-doing that Ingold has mentioned in the past. While Polanyi sees the ideas of formal and personal thinking as an iceberg nearly completely submerged in water, with only the formal tip of the ice peeking out of the water (Ingold 109), Ingold sees it as a series of islands that water flows freely around, knowledge being a mix of the two (Ingold 111), instead of a cut-and-dry one or the other. Ingold highlights the fact that in Chapter 1 of Making, he also talks about the idea of ‘knowing’ and ‘telling’ being the same thing, and he argues now that Polanyi is wrong because to know is to tell (Ingold 111), and so to suggest that people possess knowledge that cannot be conveyed is preposterous. Once again, this is not to say that everything ‘told’ will be in a neat verbal package, but rather that everything a person does is telling something in some way. So while not every scholar can articulate their knowledge, they can all tell it (Ingold 111). In short, Ingold uses Polanyi’s ideas on ‘telling’ and ‘personal knowledge’ to highlight how his own perspective is correct, because to know is to tell, and even if it’s something as simple as a mechanic tuning up a car or a person knitting a sweater, even without step-by-step instructions they are wholly able to tell what they are doing to others. While I agree with Ingold’s perspective, I can also see how Polanyi growing up and experiencing the enormous world events that he did could lead someone to think more rigidly about the human experience, as the idea of ‘always telling’ is a bit daunting.

Works Cited

(apologies for the formatting, was difficult to figure out on wordpress)

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture. 1st ed., Routledge, 2013, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203559055. Accessed 27 October 2025.

The Polanyi Society. “Michael Polanyi.” The Polanyi Society, https://polanyisociety.org/michael-polanyi/. Accessed 28 October 2025.

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From Ingold And Clark: An Explanation On Making And Mind

2025-10-28 micahsz 1 Comment

By Micah Sébastien Zhang

So…Ingold……

Tim Ingold, the author of the book Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, has presented an innovative perspective into media studies, especially the realm of production. Rather than viewing the production as a fixated, point-to-point linear path, Ingold sees production as a cumulative process that goes beyond the traditional, distinct boundaries between the creators and the creations. To further define that, Ingold thinks that the creation, or "making" as suggested by this book’s title, is a self-evolving process that entwines with the materiality and thought within creation itself.

This view into creation and media can be peeked within the chapter 7 — Bodies On The Run, in which he explored his topic deeper on the concept of body. Upon reviewing the two sculptures shown in the figures — in which one of them (Simon Starling, Infestation Piece (Musselled Moore)) was covered with mussels — he critically compares the forms between the original sculpture, Warrior with Shield by Henry Moore, and the modified piece and claims "where the former is a movement of opening" while "the latter is bent on closure" (Ingold p.94). His explanation is that the infested piece with mussels denoted a fact that "its surfaces have opened up to the surrounding medium" rather than being "wrapped up in itself that any residue of animate life has been stilled" (Ingold p.94). Drawing from the theorist Joshua Pollard, Ingold argues that the process of "making" takes similarity between the relationship between objects, subjects, and things as they "can exist only in a world already thrown, already cast in fixed and final forms; things, by contrast, are in the throwing – they do not exist so much as carry on" (Ingold p.94). Within this process, people are also "processes, brought into being through production, embroiled in ongoing social projects, and requiring attentive engagement" (Ingold p.94 via Pollard 2004: 60).¹

Of course we have bodies – indeed we are our bodies. But we are not wrapped up in them. The body is not a package, nor – to invoke another common analogy – a sink into which movements settle like sediment in a ditch. It is rather a tumult of unfolding activity.

—— Tim Ingold, p.94

Nevertheless, this article’s focus is not on Pollard or any other theorists. The focus will be on the arguments proposed by Tim Ingold and Andy Clark, and we will see how their views come close together.

So Who’s Andy Clark (out of all the names from the reference list)?

Andy Clark (he/him/they) is a cognitive philosophy professor from the University of Sussex at United Kingdom. According to his biography page, his research interests include artificial intelligence, embodied and extended cognition, robotics, and computational neuroscience. He has proposed the idea of "the extended mind" and co-wrote the article The Extended Mind — the article that Ingold has also cited² — with the Australian cognitive scientist David Chalmers.

So What Did They Say?

Clark and Chalmers argued in their article that the cognitive process does not completely rely on an internal process, but rather having external environments as attributes that constantly play a role in cognitive processes. They have made a pretty straightforward and summative description on this idea at the start of their article, in which they " advocate a very different sort of externalism: an active externalism, based on the active role of the environment in driving cognitive processes" (Clark and Chalmers p.7). Ingold has personally described that their theory "postulates that the mind, far from being coextensive with the brain, routinely spills out into the environment, enlisting all manner of extra-somatic objects and artefacts in the conduct of its operations" (Ingold p.97).

We propose to take things a step further. While some mental states, such as experiences, may be determined internally, there are other cases in which external factors make a significant contribution. In particular, we will argue that beliefs can be constituted partly by features of the environment, when those features play the right sort of role in driving cognitive processes. If so, the mind extends into the world.

—— Clark and Chalmers, p.12

We can take a look at a simple way to comprehend Clark and Chalmers’ theory by examining the example they gave in their The Extended Mind article. In their example (Clark and Chalmers p.12-14), an exhibition is happening at the Museum of Modern Art at 53rd Street. One person, Inga, recalls in her mind that the museum is at 53rd Street, so she successfully goes to the right place. Another person, Otto, suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and can’t recall the museum’s location in his head, but he also successfully arrives at the museum by looking at the note of the museum’s location from his notebook. Inga used memory retrival to get the information from her mind, and Otto did the same thing by retriving the same information from his notebook. Clark and Chalmers argue that since they achieved a congruent result even while retriving information in a physical and tangible or cognitive and non-tangible way, Otto’s notebook in this case can be recognized as the congruent component to a cognitive mind, as "the information in the notebook functions just like the information constituting an ordinary non-occurrent belief" (Clark and Chalmers p.13). Considering that Otto constantly uses his notebook, it can be viewed as "central to his actions in all sorts of contexts, in the way that an ordinary memory is central in an ordinary life" (Clark and Chalmers p.13).

And So How Do They Connect To Ingold?

Both viewpoints from Clark and Ingold presented an acknowledgement to the nuances and complexities lying within the process of mediation. Considering that both Clark and Chalmers have worked as cognitive scientists, we, in my humble opinion, might be safe to assume that they started off their idea on a more scientific approach, in which their theory draws more similarities and explanations from natural sciences than humanities.

However, Ingold proposed to push the idea further and more expanded in the realms of humanities and mediation. He argues that the sole "interactions" between the mind and materialistic objects do not fully constitute as the integral process of making (Ingold p.98). He argues that this general idea focuses too much on the external materialistic attributes to constitute or to define the whole cognition experience of engaging with the world. Rather than embracing this idea, Ingold was drawn more to the concept that regards thinking as more of a kinetic and dynamic flow, which reflects on another opinion by Sheets-Johnstone (Ingold p.98).

My Own Thoughts?

Even though we could see some differences between Ingold and Clark’s ideas, their theories and interpretations still provide some abundant insights to explain media studies in some more innovative perspectives. Personally, I found that their ideas are sufficient enough to explain my thought of interpreting mediation as a dimensional perspective. This idea will be further explained and discussed in my upcoming blog article here.

Thank you so much for your attention.

Works Consulted

“Andy Clark.” University of Sussex, profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p493-andy-clark. Accessed 27 Oct. 2025.

Clark, Andy, and David Chalmers. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis, vol. 58, no. 1, 1998, pp. 7–19. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3328150.

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge, 2013.

Media Usage Statement

The feature image in this article was published under the CC0 Public Domain License. The source of the image can be found here.

Footnotes

Here’s the original citation of Pollard provided in Ingold’s book: Pollard, J. 2004. The art of decay and the transformation of substance. In Substance, Memory, Display, eds. C. Renfrew, C. Gosden and E. DeMarrais. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, pp. 47–62. ↩
The book’s original citation: Clark, A. and D. Chalmers 1998. The extended mind. Analysis 58: 7–19. ↩

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Scrolling: The Regression of the Hand and the Decline of Material Correspondence

2025-10-27 inshaa 2 Comments

‘Scroll’ in its most literal sense refers to a rolled up sheet of paper or, more commonly, parchment, which was used for documentation. However, the word ‘scroll’ is now more commonly used as a verb rather than a noun, referring to the action of moving the display of a screen up and down. Moreover, apart from the gesture of moving one’s hand up and down a screen, the range of movement that can take place on the tiny phone screen is limited, yet it can still produce significant effects. The process of drumming one’s fingers seems to be completely unrelated to the forms that appear on the screen in the form of text or image. The physical movement of the hand on the screen does not directly translate into the form that is produced on the screen. This phenomenon relates to what Ingold refers to as the ‘regression of the hand’—the decline of the tactility and relations between manual movement and the material traces it yields.

I would like to explore the ways in which the actions involved in being on the phone lead to processes of creation and, most importantly, communication. Furthermore, I am interested in how modern electronic devices, particularly those with touch screen interfaces, challenge or even defy André Leroi-Gourhan’s idea of graphism. Leroi-Gourhan defines graphism as “relatively durable traces of dextrous manual gestures”(Ingold 116). In simpler terms, this refers to the marks that serve as a record of actions.

Heidegger, in commenting on the typewriter, expresses distaste for it and discusses how this device transformed the nature of writing (122). The transition from typewriter to computer keyboard intensified this separation. Unlike the typewriter, which immediately imprinted letters onto paper, the computer displays words on a screen separate from the physical act of typing. If the text displayed on a computer screen is eventually printed, the act of inscribing it onto a material medium is credited not to the one who typed but to the machinge, the printer.

With cell phones, this separation becomes even more complex. The keyboard itself is no longer a an individual, physical machine but one of many virtual functions of the device. Ingold argues that the act of typing leads to a disruption in the process of transduction, wherein the ‘ductus’—the actual kinaesthetic action does not directly correspond with the form that appears on the screen (Ingold 122). Ingold’s transduction refers to the process through which gestural action produces a transformation in material form (102). In the case of touch screen devices, this relationship is fractured. The physical action required is minimal, and the materiality of the medium being operated upon is ambiguous. The material that the hand comes into contact with is the surface of the phone, yet the change that takes place is in the code that exists in a virtual realm. This change in code is then represented by images and icons displayed on screen, giving the user an illusion of interacting with the material within the digital realm.

Grip and Gestures

While using a phone, a person typically grips the device between the pinky finger and the thumb, with the back of the phone resting against the other fingers and balanced on the pinky. The thumb, which helps to secure the phone, also performs most of the navigational movements on the screen. Though the position of the hands often changes depending on the activity being performed, the actions being done on the screen are all done by the fingers. In particular, the tips of the fingers. This is in line with Ingold’s idea that the progress of technology is characterized by the shift from use of hands to fingers (123). In using a cell phone the tasks of typing, editing, clicking pictures are carried out as the fingers move across the surface of the screen. But the actual content being produced through these actions exists within the screen. The fingers make contact with the surface, yet the resultant forms remain entirely virtual. When you pinch to zoom in, the visual content on the screen enlarges, but the physical scale of the screen itself does not change.

Ingold discusses how repetitive manual actions during the process of creation physically affect the hand in ways that contribute to or even enhance the process of making (117). He gives the example of string makers and cello players: their hands become coarser and develop calluses. The hardened skin protects the fingers from pain, allowing the musician to play longer and the craftsperson to produce better strings. Thusm these injuries, far from being a hindrance, actually facilitate the craft. In such cases, the deformation of the hand becomes integral to the process of creation.

In the case of operating touch-screen devices such as phones, however, this relationship between bodily transformation and creative process becomes disrupted. The body still undergoes change; users experience repetitive strain injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome, the so-called ‘iPhone pinky,’ where the pinky finger becomes bent from supporting the device, and even soreness in the thumbs from constant scrolling or typing. However, unlike the callused hands of the craftsman or musician, this alteration in the hand of the phone user does not affect the process of making in any way.

This is because the gestures required by touch-screen devices are minimal and effortless. On a touch-screen interface, the physical gestures enacted by hands such as toggling, swiping, or pinching, are reduced to nothing more than pre-programmed features. Though these features are derived from bodily gestures, when incorporated into digital devices they become standardized features designed to trigger certain responses on the screen. This is in line with Ingold’s analysis that such actions have become metaphorical rather than genuinely physical or material (124). The gestures no longer result in real manipulation of substance but instead, represent symbolic actions whose effects are purely virtual.

This transformation creates a kind of simulacrum, in which gestures acquire meaning only through their digital consequences rather than through any tangible engagement with the material. The hand’s action ceases to produce traces in the Leroi-Gourhanian sense of graphism, instead reducing manual gesture into a sort of abstraction.

Human and Posthuman Writing

Heidegger suggests that the typed word lacks the humanity of handwriting. Ingold argues that the perfect, mechanical typescript robs the writing of any traces of being produced by a human, and reduces it to a mere means of communication rather than a way of telling (Ingold 122). In this light, the movement of the hand is what imbues the produced handwriting with its humanistic dimension.

Ingold, drawing on Leroi-Gourhan, argues that while machines can extend human capacities and enhance certain forms of production, they also subtract something essential (122). The integration of mechanical devices into human action pushes us toward what he describes as a ‘posthuman‘ condition. He argues that even the simple act of pressing a button removes part of the humanity from the process, reducing it to an interaction with an intermediary rather a correspondence with material. Leroi-Gourhan’s argument raises the question: what happens when the entire process consists of nothing but pressing buttons? And those buttons are not even physical? On touch screens, the buttons are mere visual representations of electronic codes designed to simulate real-life, tactile surfaces. The gestures we perform do not affect real objects; they activate digital representations that mimic the appearance of materiality. The result is a detachment between human movement and material change.

Moreover, the rise and incorporation of Generative Artificial Intelligence into many applications has further flattened the process of creation. The art of inquiry, the ‘thinking through the making’, that Ingold propogates in ‘Making’ ceases to occur, as creation is increasingly reduced to typing short prompts for AI systems that generate text, images, or designs automatically (6). The hand’s role shifts from making to merely initiating a command.

All that remains now is scrolling. Most app interfaces are designed for endless scrolling, condensing all human interaction into a single repetitive gesture. Earlier in the essay, we discussed how effortlessness has become the priority in technological design. Yet it is precisely in effort that the humanism of creation lies. By removing friction between the hand and the material, we move further and further away from genuine making. As Ingold says, “It is precisely where the reach of the imagination meets the friction of materials, or where the forces of ambition rub up against the rough edges of the world, that human life is lived” (Ingold 73).

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203559055