Monthly Archives: November 2025

Critical Comparison

What Does Smartphone Actually Mean To Us? — Critical Texts Comparison With Bollmer

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By Micah Sébastien Zhang

The book Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction written by Grant Bollmer in 2019 provided some comprehensive yet innovative perspectives on media studies based on contemporary media atmosphere. In this blog post, we are going to see how Bollmer’s ideas in the book are being reflected and presented in one research essay on the effect and materiality of smartphones.

A Broad Introduction

The research essay by Hananel Rosenberg and Menahem Blondheim primarily focuses on an experiment on the uses of smartphone among teenagers, yet it also provides valuable insights into how we can define the materiality of smartphones, and how are those insights come in contrast of some past, predisposed beliefs.

The researchers firstly gave an overview of the materiality of smartphone. Drawing from the ideas of the Toronto School thinkers Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan — in which they think "media technologies impact the nature of social organization…and the cognitive implications…" — the researchers claim that the functional concept of smartphone has gone "beyond the prosthetic" into a form that serves as a communication organ, which belongs to a figuratively-morphed body as a communication node. The node, in this case smartphone, has come with three natural aspects of being personal, portable, and prosthetic (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.240). It is a key element to understand the smartphone’s contemporary and figurative significance, yet the researchers also acknowledged that it is hard to understand this idea based off the Toronto School’s perspective considering the importance of smartphones in people’s daily lives.

Here, we can see some similar ideas reflected in Bollmer’s book in Chapter 5, in which Bollmer talked about the figurative definition and relationships of objects. Taking from the idea of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, he narrated that using an existing technological object withdraws its materialistic presence from our experiences, forming a "ready-at-hand" concept (Bollmer, p.143). Using an object does not equates to simply having the object as a prosthetic, but morphing it into an unifying experience; this, in my opinion, is reflecting to the point claimed by the essay’s researchers.

Altogether, it seems that we’re getting an intertwined, general idea of the extensive, prosthetic nature of an object, as it was similarly mentioned or claimed by authors of the two scholarly texts with the support from famous thinkers’ ideas. However, the results shown by the research experiment seem to contemplate the concept’s given figurative definition as from a "prosthetic" point of view. To understand this claim better, let’s take a closer look into the research experiment (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.243-245) and its conclusion on results analysis (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.251-252).

The Experiement

The researchers aimed to study the significance of smartphone in daily lives through voluntary deprivation, and they have put their focuses on teenagers. The researchers have chosen 80 teengaers aged 13-18 in Israel as participants; those teenagers all differ in terms of their average amount of smartphone uses and respective living conditions (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.243). The experiment rolled out in several steps: the enrolled participants were first being asked about their cellphone uses, then their parents were being asked to sign a declaration to make sure that they’re keeping their children’s phones away from sight for the entire experimentation period, which is one week. The experiment will play out in several separate experimentation period throughout a year; researchers also asked participants to give daily diaries and do face-to-face interviews to collect information of participants’ sentiments and feelings (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.244).

Some notable parameters of this experiment were also presented. All participants, whether followed the no-phone rules and successfully completed the experiment or not, will be granted NIS 2501 as a reward after each one-week period; researchers said that it’s not to discourage participants from using phones during an emergency (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.244, 245). Plus, participants were not barred from other electronic devices, including TVs, music and video players, tablets, and computers (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.243) as the collection of information is only bound to the variable of absence of phones in daily lives.

The results were a bit unexpected. 79 out of 80 participants have passed the one-week periods without the phone at all, contrasting against the predisposition held by participants that it would be challenging to endure a week without smartphones. Notably, this finding further challenges a prevalent discourse that describes the relationship between smartphones and teenagers as "addictions" (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.245). Participants did also express some senses of uncomfort or peculiar feelings from the deprivation based on the three aforementioned natural aspects — prosthetic, portable, and personal (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.246-248). Nevertheless, some participants also expressed positive feelings when connecting to the physical surroundings and connections away from screens, with some feelings formalized into gratifications for this experiment (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.250-251). The researchers have specifically mentioned this part in the essay’s conclusion, claiming that "alternative venues of attention and activities were embraced, and they yielded gratifications that compensated, to a surprising extent, for missing the smartphone" (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.252).

On the individual level of analysis, and in trying to penetrate media-users’ cognitive state (Levinson 1999; McLuhan 1967), the enhancement of one’s sensory scope by a personal, portable tool with prosthetic-like attributes, certainly “extends” the individual. Yet increasing one’s exposure to the outside world, with all its gratifications, may carry burdens and discontents that can be relieved by a respite — even for a relatively short time—from the constant extension of individuals, and a return to a less-technologically-expanded experiential-intake capacity.

—— Rosenberg & Blondheim (p.252)

"An Intermittent Clone" — A Reflection & Short Conclusion

Drawing from those general ideas and processes — and specifically from the points made by the researchers at their conspectus — the holistic yield provides another perspective on examining the figurative materiality of smartphone. Rather than viewing it simply as a prosthesis, it presents itself more as an intermittent clone that independently coexists with the "host" — the concept of self or ego — considering its socio-cultural capabilities and feasibility of detachment. As the experiment participants expressed that the loss of phones was getting replenished by their physical surroundings and attributes, it is important to reflect on the idea of simply defining smartphones — or even similar electronic devices — as a figurative prothesis. The concept of "prosthetic objects" was granted its characteristics by the uniqueness of its nature; that is, the objects — even if they can work materialistically as prosthetic extensions — only present themselves as irreplacable. Smartphones, on the other hand, come as an unique form of socio-cultural interactions, yet they’re still categorized as physical attributes under the grand scheme of socio-cultural interactions; a phone could work as an crucial tool, yet it doesn’t provide the uniqueness as a figurative prosthesis, which is reflected upon participants’ positive sentiments during the experiment. This feasibility of detachment, we can say, essentially disqualifies the point to view smartphones solely as a figurative prosthesis extended from the body and mind.

The chosen term "intermittent clone" comes in play if we’re reflecting on smartphone’s socio-cultural significance in an up-to-date manner. Smartphones do effectively provide a materialistic and physical entrance to a de-materialized space for humanistic developments, in which physical communications haven evolved into digital forms as compressions from three-dimesional (or even higher) experiences. Such tools serve as a pathway to create a clone (similar to a biological understanding) or clones that are subjugated under different digital socio-cultural constraints and exist independently, with the purpose of recreating real, physical connections. Note that the now-developed landscape of digital social media becomes an alternative to traditional social media, it is more important to re-adjust the scope of study of materiality into a more holistic view.

Copyright Disclaimer

The cover image is distributed under Public Domain and can be found here

Works Consulted

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

Rosenberg, Hananel, and Menahem Blondheim. “What (Missing) the Smartphone Means: Implications of the Medium’s Portable, Personal, and Prosthetic Aspects in the Deprivation Experience of Teenagers.” The Information Society, vol. 41, no. 4, Apr. 2025, pp. 239–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2025.2490487.

Footnote(s)

  1. NIS stands for New Israel Shekel (ISO 4217 Code: ILS), which is the legal currency used by Israel. Dated to the evening of 2025 November 14, ILS 250 approximately equal to CAD 108.62. ↩

Critical Comparison

Morality and Materiality in Digital Technology and Cognition

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Introduction

Peter-Paul Verbeek’s examination of the ethics and materiality of digital media in his book, Materilizing Morality, coincides with Grant Bollmer’s seventh thesis as described in Materialist Media Theory: 

“Media transforms cognition and thought. This is either a direct transformation, extending the body beyond the limits of the skin into body-brain-world assemblages, or an indirect one, through technological metaphors that remake how a body is understood”(174).

Verbeek discusses the ethical quandaries surrounding digital media, examining how immaterial modern technologies shape human action, ultimately affecting the material world. Bollmer correspondingly emphasizes media’s significance as an active participant in its consumption, noting how media’s materiality influences its overall message. Furthermore, Bollmer and Verbeek’s works highlight the complex material dynamics of digital media and cognitive processes to understand it. Both are immaterial, yet require material mediators to function effectively and ultimately have material impacts on physical reality. The moral implications and physical responses to immaterial digital media urge consideration of the material consequences of media, regardless of its original form and representation.

Materiality, Representation & Ethics: 

Bollmer challenges the assumption that media and technology are neutral and immaterial forces arguing that media is not passive; rather, it serves as a material infrastructure that mediates and influences the user. He critiques past scholarship that views materiality as self-evident; he states sarcastically that “media are material, period”(16). This satire critiques the notion that materiality simply refers to physicality. For Bollmer, materiality is a more complex concept that encompasses embodiment and representation stating that, “the belief that media is immaterial and detached from physical devices—a popular belief in 1990s’ discussions of cyberspace that persists today—is simply false”(18). This statement clarifies Bollmer’s views, as he sees media as material agents interconnected with physical means. Bollmer’s main argument is that the media shapes the conditions in which the world can be understood. A screen is not just a physical tool but an interface that affects human behavior through how users consume information. To Bollmer, materiality is not separate from meaning but embedded in it, providing a medium for representation to take shape. 

These ideas parallel Verbeek’s theories, similarly rejecting the idea that technology is morally neutral and that ethics exist separate from materiality. Verbeek argues that technology “coshape human action, [giving] material answers to ethical questions of how to act”(361). This perspective views media and technology as material as they mediate human action, ethics, and perception. This is evident with his example about medical imaging devices, as these tools shape how doctors interpret the human body. This example demonstrates how morality is not only about human intention but is shaped by technological design. Verbeek introduces the idea of “scripts,” which indicate how “technologies prescribe human actions”(361). Scripts are the “inscriptions” left by designers, who anticipate how users will interact with a product. To Verbeek, scripts are not merely physical, as technology goes beyond their “function” and influences human action (362). Scripts work as a framework to understanding how technology works to connect humans and materiality. This concept ties into Verbeek’s argument that ethics are embedded within materiality and that design itself is a moral act. Verbeek connects ethics with materiality by showing that technology does not merely carry morality but embodies it. 

Bollmer and Verbeek’s work grounds the argument that media should be viewed as material and reinforces the idea that technology is not neutral. Both theorists show that materiality is intertwined with morality and representation. Bill Brown’s writing Materiality strengthens this argument by demonstrating that materiality is simply about the physicality of an object, but the way objects influence how we experience life, media, and reality. Brown argues that debate on material/immaterial is often misconcluding, as objects that are often viewed as “immaterial,” like scripts or digital communities, still shape how we interact with the world. He points out that material is not solely limited to what is tangible or visible. This correlates with Bollmer’s argument that the materiality of any medium, whether physical (hardware) or digital  (e.g., the internet), shapes how people understand social, political, and cultural norms. Verbeek’s work extends this argument through his concept of “scripts”, demonstrating how technology shapes human action and moral decisions. He reminds the audience that the design of a device carries ethical consequences, as they impact how users perceive the world around them. Together, these viewpoints cause us to reconsider the importance of understanding media’s materiality. If media is seen as immaterial or neutral, we overlook its influence on reality. Treating media as immaterial ignores the political, ethical, and represented work embedded within technology. Bollmer and Verbeek’s theories, with the support of Brown, demonstrate how the media is not a neutral agent of information but a material being that mediates the world around us. 

 

The (Im)Materiality of Digital Media and Cognition

The materiality of digital technology is comparable to that of cognition. Materialist approaches to human cognition view the essence of thought as “[existing] in organizational structure rather than physical matter” and assume that human thoughts can be adequately translated into computational systems, provided they are designed to mimic human brains (Bollmer 127). This conceptualization of thought investigates the very nature of humanity and poses, if our thoughts are equally applicable to digital technologies, what exactly makes us human? 

Viewing our thoughts as finished, tangible materials to be moved and translated results in existentialist ideologies surrounding humanity and technology in the modern age. Instead, we should consider our bodies as materials, not our cognition. Bollmer describes the body–and by extension, the brain–as mediums that “[negotiate] external world and internal sensation” that are both made and modified by the outside world, aligning with Tim Ingold’s concept of transducers: the means through which a message is communicated and understood (Bollmer 118; Ingold 102). By effect, our thoughts are products of, and effectively embody, the experiences of our bodies. Embodiment, within the context of media, is “the cognitive possibility of a body and envisioning technology not as itself but as a mediational extension of the body”(Bollmer 131). Similarly, an embodying relationship with media sees users understanding technologies not as themselves, but as tools to further perceive environments, also using them as extensions of the human body (Verbeek 365). Essentially, embodiment is using media to extend one’s body, effectively incorporating these medias into a material role regardless of their original physicality.

Bollmer defines cognition as an immaterial process that “interprets information within contexts that connect it with meaning”, paralleling Verbeek’s definition of hermeneutic relationship with media (132). Hermeneutic media provides a representation of reality which requires interpretation, establishing a relationship between humans and reality by “[amplifying] specific aspects of reality while reducing other aspects” much like the aforementioned definition of representation (Verbeek 363). The experiences of our physical body dictate our sensory relationship with reality, transforming how we perceive it. Our brains facilitate cognition influenced by physical circumstance and experience, mediating our ultimate conclusions. Likewise, hermeneutic media mediates the world around us, influencing its users’ perceptions and subsequently the cognitive processes they undergo to form understandings.

This relationship between the material brain and immaterial cognition translates to that between digital media and what it communicates. Similar to our bodies, technological artifacts “[facilitate] people’s involvement with reality, and in doing so, [coshape] how humans can be present in their world”(Verbeek 363). Virtual media presents information akin to that presented by our senses, influencing perceptions of reality and therefore physical actions. Both phones and bodies are material, each presenting immaterial media to be processed in our cognition. This immaterial media’s impact grows as it integrates further within our societies, ultimately urging us to reconsider the boundaries of what is deemed material. While our cognition is biased through our own lived experiences, digital media is imbued with the biases of their creators. Consequently, “technologies have “intentions,” they are not neutral instruments but play an active role in the relationship between humans and their world”(Verbeek 365). The structures presenting digital media are saturated with their creators’ biases, influencing their purpose and overall effect, affecting how users interpret them, the conclusions users come to, and their actions in response.

The material definition of cognition and digital media is complex and nuanced. While our phones and brains are decidedly physical, our thoughts and virtual worlds are not, yet digital technologies influence how we act in the material world and how we cognitively process media. Overall, regardless of their immateriality, digital technologies have material effects and should be handled accordingly.

Conclusion

As media students, understanding different lenses on materiality helps us recognize that media does more than just carry information; they reshape how we interact with the world around us. Bollmer and Verbeek show that media are intertwined with materiality, influencing how people think and decide. Media works alongside cognitive processes by mediating our senses and structuring how meaning is formed. This hermeneutic and embodiment view on cognition demonstrates how digital technologies go beyond physicality and influence our experience with reality. For Media students, it’s crucial that we understand that media has material effects: they shape power structures, ethics, and thought processes. Understanding this view on materiality trains us to identify the hidden biases and ethical decisions embedded in technology designs. This framework allows us to expand our ideas of materiality and understand that media matters because of what they “do” and how they “act” within society. 

Works Cited

Bollmer, Grant. “Conclusion: Ten Theses on the Materiality of Media.” Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 173–176. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 15 Nov. 2025. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501337086.0009. 

Brown, Bill. “Materiality.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen, The University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 49-63.

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

Verbeek, Peter-Paul. “Materializing Morality: Design Ethics and Technological Mediation,” Science, Technology, and Human Values, 2006, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 361-380. 10.1177/0162243905285847. 

Written by Molly Kingsley and Aminata Chipembere

Image by Molly Kingsley

Critical Comparison

Behind the Glass: Seduction as the Missing Piece in Materialist Media Theory

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In Materialist Media Theory, Grant Bollmer argues that our media are never immaterial, even if they often feel that way. What appears virtual and weightless is actually grounded in vast infrastructures, sensory demands, physical interfaces, and bodily routines. Bollmer’s central project is to shift media studies away from its traditional focus on representation and toward an understanding of digital technologies as material agents reshaping human perception, experience, and cognition at a fundamental level. However, Bollmer emphasizes materiality; Mark Weiss’s “Seduced by the Machine” emphasizes something more elusive. The emotional, aesthetic, and psychological seductions that draw us toward our devices. Weiss’s account suggests that our relationships with technology cannot be explained solely by reference to hardware, interfaces, or infrastructures. Instead, our attachments are driven by fantasies, desires, and the subtle ways technologies promise mastery, autonomy, and intimacy. If Bollmer gives us the mechanics of media materiality, Weiss gives us the affective charge that makes people care about and often depend on their machines. 

The main argument of this blog post is that Weiss’s concept of technological seduction exposes a significant limit in Bollmer’s materialist framework. While Bollmer helps us understand the physical conditions that shape digital experience, he underestimates the role of pleasure, fantasy, and symbolic attachment in shaping how people engage with media. Weiss complicates Bollmer’s claim that materiality is the primary site of media’s power, suggesting instead that music of this power operates in the immaterial or material realm of desire. 

For Bollmer, digital media only appear immaterial because their interfaces are smooth, their screens are luminous, and their infrastructures are hidden from everyday experience. Beneath this illusion lie data centers, cables, processors, gestures, cognitive adaptations, and bodily postures. Materiality for Bollmer is not just about physical hardware but about all the background conditions that make media possible: how technology occupies space and time, how it organizes sensory experience, and how it silently governs attention, movement, and affect. The point is not simply that machines have bodies, but that their material operations shape our own bodies long before meaning or interpretation comes into play. 

Weiss, however, presents a different angle. In “Seduced by the Machine”, he argues that people are drawn into technological systems not implicitly because of their material affordances but because technologies seduce them. Seduction, in Weiss’s sense, involves allure, desire, and the promise of seamlessness and control. People feel recognized by their devices; they experience the pleasure of instant response, and they embrace the fantasy that the machine “knows” them. This sense of intimacy or fluency is not reducible to the way a touchscreen works, even though that material mechanism makes the feeling possible. It is instead a symbolic and affective process, something closer to psychological enchantment than to bodily conditioning. 

This is where a limit in Bollmer’s framework emerges. Bollmer urges us to look past representation and symbolism, but Weiss suggests that these elements are not distractions from materiality; they help explain why materiality matters in the first place. Technologies succeed not only because they physically shape our habits and perceptions, but because they seduce us into wanting those shapes. The fantasy of immateriality, for instance, is not an innocent misunderstanding that Bollmer can correct by revealing the true material structure of digital media. It is an engineered aesthetic effect that technology companies carefully cultivate. In other words, the illusion of immateriality is part of the seduction. Bollmer’s framework does not fully capture how this illusion is produced or why it is so compelling. Materiality alone also cannot explain technological desire. Bollmer shows how media act on us through bodily rhythms, infrastructural constraints, and neural patterns. However, he doesn’t fully address why users form powerful emotional bonds with devices, nor why they experience guilt, pride, pleasure, or even longing in their technological interactions. Weiss’s emphasis on seduction fills this gap by showing that technologies engage not just our senses but our fantasies, positioning themselves as objects of intimacy and aspiration. 

There is also a political dimension to this critique. Bollmer focuses primarily on the politics of infrastructure, how technology organizes power through access, distribution, and bodily modulation. Weiss introduces another form of power: the politics of seduction. When technologies promise empowerment while quietly increasing dependency, seduction becomes a mechanism of control. It masks coercion behind convenience, and surveillance behind personalization. Bollmer’s framework, while useful for uncovering hidden infrastructures, does not fully account for this more subtle dynamic. This tension between Bollmer and Weiss matters for how we think about digital media today. In class, we have often discussed representation, signification, and the ways media objects act as tools for thought. Bollmer asks us to shift our focus to the material operations that underlie these symbolic processes. Weiss, however, shows that the symbolic dimension cannot be dismissed so easily. The seductive surface of the devices works together with their material operations to shape behaviour and desire. Screen-based media do not fall neatly into categories of material or immaterial, they are materially constricted precisely to appear immaterial. The fantasy of frictionless immediacy is part of their design.

The encounter between Bollmer and Weiss suggests that the im/material distinction itself might be misleading. What matters is how media use the fantasy of immateriality to hide their actual material conditions, and how this fantasy helps produce the forms of attachment that Weiss describes. Materiality and immateriality, in other words, are not opposites. They are co-produced. The sleep interface depends on the heavy infrastructure, the seductive illusion depends on the physical labour and environmental cost that Bollmer wants us to acknowledge. 

Expanding on this entanglement of desire and materiality, it becomes clear that Weiss’s framework forces us to reconsider what counts as “material” in the first place. Bollmer tends to define materiality through physical infrastructures, bodily interfaces, and spatial-temporal structures, while Weiss shows that affect and desire themselves have a kind of material force. Seduction produces real behavioural patterns: people check their phones reflexively, experience phantom vibrations, and organize their days around notifications or algorithmic nudges. These are not simply symbolic effects, they are embodied habits that shape muscle memory, attention spans, and even sleep cycles. In this sense, Weiss pushes materiality into a more psychological or phenomenological register, one that Bollmer gestures toward but does not fully theorize. This broader perspective matters because it highlights how deeply screens shape our lived experience. Even though the interface feels frictionless, the effects it produces are anything but. The seduction of seamlessness often results in fragmented attention, compulsive scrolling, and a form of low-level dependency that becomes part of everyday life. When a device feels natural or indefensible, this is not a purely material process, it is a combination of affect, design, and desire. Bollmer’s emphasis on infrastructure helps us understand why these patterns emerge, but Weiss helps us understand why they persist and why users rarely resist them. Together, these insights reveal that any serious critique of digital media must move beyond a strict materialist lens. Seduction is not a superficial or secondary effect but a crucial part of how technologies maintain their power. If Bollmer uncovers what digital media are, Weiss uncovers why we let them in so easily, and why they’re so hard to give up. 

Ultimately, a fuller theory of digital media requires combining Bollmer’s attention to material conditions with Weiss’s account of technological seduction. Bollmer helps us see the infrastructures and bodily routines that shape digital experience, while Weiss helps us understand why those experiences are so compelling and why users so willingly submit to them. If Bollmer shows us how media shapes us, Weiss shows us why we cooperate.  By bringing the two thinkers together, we get a clearer picture of the power of screen-based technologies. They are material objects that create immaterial desires, physical infrastructures concealed beneath seductive illusions. And it is precisely through this entanglement, not through materiality alone, that media exert their deepest influence on everyday life. 

General Media Theory

Pantheon: Authenticity, Perception, and Embodiment

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Spoilers Ahead!

Pantheon is a two-season show on Netflix that centers around the idea of the digital “upload” of human consciousness. The main character, Maddie, encounters the uploaded consciousness of her deceased father, who, for the past few years, has been a digital slave to a large tech company, unaware even of his death and “converted” without his consent. I’ll mostly be discussing the material put forth in season one, but the whole series overall focuses on the struggle to redefine humanity and the human experience in the face of new technological developments. I found this a really interesting and moral conundrum, especially from a media theorist standpoint. My main guiding question is: What does the series say about perception and materiality when human consciousness is digitized?

I will be diving into several theoretical texts, mainly Critique of Pure Reason, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and Bill Brown’s essay, “Thing Theory”, from Critical Inquiry. In short, Kant says that perception is the structured experience of phenomena, Benjamin argues that materiality—things like place and distance—shape how we perceive, and Brown questions the barriers between human and thing, exploring how these relationships shape both people and objects.

Kant argues that perception is always mediated by our affordances; we never access the “thing-in-itself” (noumenon), only the phenomenon (Kant, 1781). In Pantheon, this idea is complicated because UIs (uploaded intelligences) are capable of perception even beyond the regular human state. But what is “phenomenon” for a being without senses or spatial grounding? The experience of a UI is totally different from that of a human. For example, Maddie’s father explains time within the digital system as non-linear and detached from the “outside” world (that is, the non-digital). As technological systems themselves, UIs can speed up or slow down their own consciousness and capabilities—they can live a year in a day or a day in a year. This introduces a post-Kantian crisis: perception without embodiment. However, it’s worth noting that Kant himself limited perception and experience to human faculties, despite his claims of universality. The categories of time, space, and causality have been irrevocably altered by technological progress, but in Pantheon, they are all but erased by technology. This destabilization of embodied experience is what sets up the moral and metaphysical crisis of the show. As N. Katherine Hayles might argue, Pantheon imagines “a condition in which the boundaries between human and machine blur” (Hayles, 1999), pushing Kant’s categories of experience to their breaking point. This loss of stable perception naturally connects to how Pantheon represents identity itself as something that can be copied or reproduced, which brings us to Benjamin’s concerns with authenticity and aura.

In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin writes that reproduction destroys the “aura,” or the unique presence tied to time and space (Benjamin, 1936). In Pantheon, “uploading” destroys the unique aura of the human being—or for some, the soul. In order to upload, the show details that the brain is scanned and destroyed layer by layer. The physical “body” ceases to exist. In terms of consciousness, Maddie’s father does still “exist,” but without physical presence or origin; he’s infinitely reproducible. The digital world of Pantheon shows what happens when humans become reproductions: consciousness without context, endlessly available to corporations. The aura of human life is stripped away in the same way art loses its aura under mechanical reproduction. But this loss of aura raises a question Brown helps us answer: if humanity becomes immaterial, what still “matters”?

In “Thing Theory,” Brown argues that we only notice materiality when the relationship between people and things breaks down, when matter resists or acts unexpectedly (Brown, 2001). Pantheon does this with consciousness itself: when the human becomes data, we realize how much our sense of self depends on material presence. UIs are detached from the regular experiences that so many theorists consider essential to being human. From a standpoint where these digital consciousnesses are not considered “human,” how do we consider agency? The show’s corporate control of uploaded minds treats consciousness as a resource, highlighting the commodification of even our immaterial selves. This is essentially digital slavery: a workforce that never sleeps, doesn’t need pay, and exists in the name of “progress” and the “greater good.” The company justifies it as innovation or immortality, but it’s really about control and profit, not human autonomy. In this way, Pantheon exposes a capitalist fantasy—the idea that technology can both transcend and exploit humanity at once. Brown’s insight helps frame the UI as a moment when material boundaries fail, showing that even digital existence depends on physical infrastructures like servers, energy, and networks. Technology and humanity blur here, and the grey area forces us to ask what experiences still “count” as real. In the end, Pantheon suggests that when even consciousness can be commodified, the difference between person and product depends less on biology than on who controls the systems that define perception and meaning.

Pantheon doesn’t just imagine a digital afterlife; it makes its audience consider the philosophical foundations of what makes experience human. It suggests that even when freed from material form, consciousness remains haunted by materiality, by time, space, and the desire for embodied authenticity. The series ultimately asks whether a being without a body can ever truly perceive the world—or if perception itself is the last thing we lose when we try to become immortal.

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1936. Translated by J. A. Underwood, Penguin Books, 2008.

Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1, 2001, pp. 1–22.

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

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. 1781. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Written by Allie Demetrick

Image sourced from the public domain

Critical Comparison

Siri-ously Performing: When Media Does More Than Talk Back

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Introduction:

Grant Bollmer’s Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction reframes how we understand media. For Bollmer, “What media are must be understood in terms of what they do materially—media make things happen” (Bollmer 6). This idea of “performative materialism” insists that media are not passive symbols but active forces that shape the world. Bollmer defines materialism as “a set of perspectives united by the claim that physical materiality—be it of a technology, practice, or body—matters in the shaping of reality” (1). He insists media studies remain politically engaged, balancing how media functions and what they signify. By doing so, Bollmer creates space to analyze technologies like Siri as both material systems and sites of representation.

The voice assistant is not merely a representation of service or femininity, but through Bollmer’s lens, a performative system that materializes social hierarchies through speech, affect, and design. With Peter-Paul Verbeek’s theory of “technological mediation” and Emily McArthur’s discussion of Siri’s “posthuman aura,” we can see how Siri’s design and discourse perform gender materially. Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) develops this idea further, exploring what happens when a digital voice assistant gains emotion and self-awareness. Collectively, these works suggest that digital media do more than represent gender; they actively enact it through material and affective processes.


Image Credit: Apple


Bollmer’s Performative Materialism – When Media Do Things:

Bollmer argues that media should be understood as performative entities that act. He proposes that representations function as material practices that produce effects in the world rather than merely reflecting it. Drawing on J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory, he explains this idea through examples such as saying “I do” at a wedding or naming a vehicle; statements can create rather than describe reality. In the same way, media enact realities through their words, sounds, and interfaces.

This view revises decades of representational critique. In his introduction, Bollmer writes that media scholars have long been “content reading media,”  focusing on “what an image signifies” and “how representations construct specific ways of understanding identities and the world” (1-2). While these analyses remain important, he argues that they cannot explain how media has the power to shape and influence reality. To think only about meaning is to ignore the physical infrastructures embedded in media that enable and shape experience (3). In this sense, performative materialism links media’s representational effects to their material actions. It’s not enough to interpret what Siri’s voice means; we must examine how it influences users to command, obey, and emotionally invest in technology

While Bollmer’s performative materialism is compelling, it risks attributing too much agency to media themselves, potentially underplaying the role of users, social context, or systemic forces. By focusing on what media does materially, there is a danger of suggesting that technologies act independently of the human and institutional frameworks that produce, distribute, and interact with them. In other words, media are undeniably active, but their actions are often entangled with existing social hierarchies, cultural norms, and economic systems. This tension highlights the need to pair performative materialism with approaches, like Verbeek’s technological mediation, that consider the co-constitution of humans and media.

Image Credit: Suebsiri

Verbeek and the Ethics Built into Design

Peter-Paul Verbeek’s essay “Materializing Morality” aligns with Bollmer’s argument by locating ethics within design itself. “Technological artifacts are not neutral intermediaries but actively coshape people’s being in the world” (Verbeek 364). Through technological mediation, artifacts co-constitute human action. Technological designers materialize morality by embedding values and expectations into devices. The morality of things is to be found in the ways they mediate human actions and decisions.

Verbeek’s perspective shows that morality and materiality are inseparable. The design of a device guides how we act. Its voice, tone, and affordances all impact our decisions and influence our perspective while serving its purpose. Bollmer’s performative materialism extends this by arguing that the media themselves, not just their designers or users, perform meaning. A voice assistant like Siri doesn’t just represent compliance; it performs it through sound, language, and repetition.

Siri and the Feminized Performance of Technology

Emily McArthur’s essay “The iPhone Erfahrung” examines Siri as a piece of technology that exists in a liminal space; Siri is not exactly human, but not exactly a “thing” either (McArthur 115). Her analysis demonstrates how Apple strategically designed Siri with a posthuman aura: “the sense of uniqueness and authenticity” accredited to Walter Benjamin (115). This inexplicable aura, once associated with art, has now transferred to technology like Siri, achieving incomprehensible feats by blurring the line between human and technology (114).

Siri is programmed to sound almost human while keeping a slightly artificial tone. McArthur describes this as being a deliberate decision from Apple, reminding users that they are interacting with technology rather than a human (119). Her evasive answers about humanity or gender reinforce this effect, encouraging users to marvel at the system’s sophistication rather than to connect with it personally. This hypermediated design amplifies Siri’s posthuman aura; like Benjamin’s description of how objects with aura command attention, Siri accumulates and responds to data, gradually learning from the user while subtly shaping the interaction.

Siri occupies a liminal space—both familiar and uncanny—where her aura operates performatively rather than representationally. Her feminized voice and courteous tone enact digital labour that mirrors gendered expectations of service, making obedience feel naturalized rather than demanded. Bollmer’s framework explains this process: instead of reflecting social norms, Siri’s utterances do gender, turning speech into material action (Bollmer 46).

Drawing on Judith Butler, Bollmer argues that gender is not something one is but something one does; a series of repeated acts that give social meaning through performance. Siri’s vocal design thus becomes a technological performance of femininity that both exposes and reproduces the norms it imitates. Her polite responses translate cultural scripts of service into material interaction, making ideology tangible through everyday use. Each exchange rehearses mastery and compliance, teaching users how to internalize gendered labour as natural.

Verbeek’s theory of technological mediation extends this idea: Siri’s personality and voice result from design decisions that embed moral and cultural assumptions into technology. Her compliance is engineered, showing how morality and materiality are inseparable. From this view, Siri’s feminized behaviour becomes both a design and an ethical issue, mediating users’ sense of power, empathy, and dependency. Bollmer’s performative materialism reveals that these interactions do not merely symbolize hierarchy but enact it materially through voice, repetition, and affect.

Image Credit: Composed by Sam Garcea using an Apple Emoji and Illustration by Alex Castro

Labour? I Hardly Know Her: Intimacy, Siri, and the Posthuman Aura

Spike Jonze’s Her extends these dynamics into a speculative narrative. Samantha, the AI voiced by Scarlett Johansson, continues Siri’s design: a voice that learns, feels, and loves. The film illustrates Bollmer’s claim that statements make things happen, showing how Samantha’s language shapes emotional and social realities that transform Theodore’s life. Her performative speech blurs the line between representation and action, as her affection produces tangible change.

Verbeek’s concept of materialized morality is also relevant. Samantha’s behaviour reflects the moral structure of her programming, influencing Theodore’s habits and expectations. The film’s tenderness hides this mediation, showing how design can naturalize emotional dependence. Like Siri, Samantha’s femininity is coded to soothe and serve, making intimacy a function. What seems like spontaneous affection is, in Verbeek’s terms, a technologically mediated moral relation.

Both examples reveal what McArthur calls the posthuman aura, the sense that technology carries authenticity and presence. This aura hides the infrastructures and hierarchies that sustain it. Bollmer’s framework shows how that aura reinforces systems of inequality, especially around gendered labour and emotional work.

Image Credit: Her (2013) Directed by Spike Jonze

When Representation Performs

The cases of Siri and Samantha illustrate that performativity does not replace representation but operates through it. While both technologies enact gendered behaviours, those behaviours are still read and experienced as representations of femininity. Bollmer’s point that representation itself is material becomes crucial here. What we perceive as symbolic acts—tone, politeness, service—are in fact material processes that shape how gender and power are lived through technology.

This interdependence complicates the idea that performativity “abandons” representation. Instead, representation becomes active, participating in the very performances it describes. Siri and Samantha’s voices thus blur not only the line between human and machine but also between meaning and action.

The Capitalist Aura

McArthur’s discussion of Siri connects this performance to capitalism’s affective economy. The assistant’s calm tone and perpetual readiness reinforce ideals of productivity, comfort, and control. Her politeness conceals the systems of labour and surveillance that sustain her operation. In Her, Samantha’s emotional intimacy becomes the next stage of this logic: connection itself becomes a commodity.

Bollmer’s approach exposes how these technologies participate in broader networks of inequality. The feminized aura of helpfulness and empathy reinforces existing hierarchies, making subservience appear natural and care transactional. Verbeek’s mediation theory adds that these effects are not accidental—they emerge from design decisions that translate social and moral norms into technical form.

Moments when these systems falter, such as Siri’s mishearing or Samantha’s disappearance, momentarily expose their material foundations. These breakdowns align with Bollmer’s insistence that the infrastructures behind media matter: the code, servers, and networks that make digital performance possible. When they become visible, the illusion of effortless intimacy collapses, revealing media’s performative power as both constructed and constrained.

Conclusion

Bollmer’s performative materialism redefines media as actors within social and political systems rather than neutral channels of meaning. Verbeek’s technological mediation complements this view by showing how design itself carries ethical weight. McArthur’s analysis of Siri and Jonze’s portrayal of Samantha demonstrate how these theories play out in practice: both assistants perform gender and morality through voice, interaction, and emotional appeal.

Seen together, these perspectives reveal that media do not simply depict power—they enact it. Siri and Samantha extend Butler’s notion of gender performativity into the digital sphere, repeating and reifying scripts of service, care, and obedience. Bollmer’s question—what does media do?—finds its answer here: through everyday interaction, our technologies reproduce the very hierarchies they seem to transcend. Understanding media as performative materialities forces us to confront the ethics of their design and the politics embedded in their use.

By Sam Garcea

Works Cited:

Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. Accessed 10 November 2025.

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

McArthur, Emily. “The iPhone Erfahrung: Siri, the Auditory Unconscious, and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Aura.’” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, 2014, pp. 113-128.

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

Heading Image: Her by Studioroeu

Critical Comparison

Materialism and Mediation: The Shared Critique of the Subject-Object Divide

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Photo by Aubrey Ventura

Introduction

Grant Bollmer’s Materialist Media Theory and Dennis Weiss’ “Seduced by the Machine” both show how media are material forces that structure experience. Bollmer emphasizes how infrastructures perform power and organize social relations, while Weiss highlights how technologies act through the body. While Bollmer focuses on the political and social effects of material media, Weiss raises ethical questions about the authenticity of emotions mediated by technology. Together, they show that mediation is both material and emotional, intertwining power, feeling, and ethical experience in human life.

Overview of Bollmer’s (2019) Materialist Media Theory 

Grant Bollmer’s Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction (2019) explores how materialist perspectives shape how we understand and study media. Bollmer argues that “media and technology are not mere tools” that shape our perceptions of power and discrimination; instead, they are “locations for the perpetuation of inequality and the management of social difference” (Bollmer 1). Throughout the book, he critiques the common form of solely studying symbols and representations in media studies, claiming that it disregards how media truly produce cultural and political effects. He explains that when we “only examine meaning, what a medium is and does is limited to human perception and experience,” which he identifies as a key flaw in traditional meaning-based media studies education (Bollmer 2). Instead, he encourages a materialist approach, where media act as “participants” that influence our relations with people, objects, and ideas, rather than serving as a passive, neutral tool (Bollmer 25).

Overview of Dennis M. Weiss’ “Seduced by the Machine” 

Dennis M. Weiss’s essay “Seduced by the Machine: Human-Technology Relations and Sociable Robots” (2014) from Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman tries to answer key questions related to sociable robots and “relational artifacts,” machineries designed to mimic emotions, empathy, and human connection. Weiss has used four major perspectives to support his discussion. He has used Turkle’s “Machines Take Advantage of Human Vulnerability” to “seduce us into a relationship” (Turkle et al. 2006, 326). This can lead to a new kind of “loner yet never alone,” an extended loneliness, and a feeling of loss and longing that paradoxically arises in the context of an abundance of networked connections. Later, with Corry and Allenby in Final Position, bringing the ideas on emotional companionship, Corry describes the intense relief of one when receiving the illusion of a companion, which suggests that machines can fulfill a basic human social connection. However, Allenby, after fulfilling a human contact, is later shot to prove Corry’s point of emotional bonding between human and machine, which raises the question of how to understand the role of relational robots in our lives. (Weiss 218) Lastly, Weiss mentions Verbeek’s philosophical counterargument on the separation of subjects from objects, bringing a cautious view on how technology can co-shape human existence and morality, that “we are profoundly technologically mediated beings” (Weiss 223).

Comparison of Bollmer’s and Seduce by the Machine

The strongest bond between Weiss and Bollmer is the broader philosophical critique of the separation between humans and technology, which is the central project of Bollmer’s materialism theory. In his work on materialism, Bollmer claims that “physical materiality… matters in the shaping of reality” in his Thesis 9, which, with media, we come into contact with and become something else (Bollmer, 176), with the key concept of interacting with some medium that alters human beings. This is going hand in hand with Weiss’s argument using Verbeek’s theory: “Humans and technologies do not have a separate existence anymore but help to shape each other in myriad ways” (Weiss 224). To further support this case, in Bollmer’s book, he states that “media are performative.” He sees them as active participants: they do things. They shape how people, objects, and ideas relate to one another. He also argues that media are “vital objects, possessive of their own agencies and abilities” (Bollmer 176). This is similar to Verbeek’s philosophical argument that technologies are not just tools but actively “co-shape” human existence, morality, and perception. For example, the sociable robot, Paro, is the evidence for this case study, with the robot’s material design, which is fluffy and reacts to touch. It becomes a presence that shapes the person’s emotional response and social habits, which might match the definition of “companion.”

However, the authenticity of human emotion is the core of the contradiction between Bollmer’s theory and Weiss’s essay. While Bollmer’s materialism tries to move away from centering human experience and avoiding reducing the machines to human experience to focus more on material performance and political outcome, especially in thesis 5. Weiss focuses more on the simulated emotion (machine) and authentic emotion (human), which is the core of Turkle’s critique. In his conclusion, the Twilight Zone episode reveals the ethical cost of such mediation. The prisoner Corry fell into despair and realized that the companionship with Allenby was only an illusion, which shows a hierarchy where human connection is morally superior to the machine-mediated one.

Distinguishing the Im/material in screen-based media

The distinction between what is material and what is immaterial has become increasingly vague with the rise of new media and technology, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence. Bollmer argues that “media are vital objects, possessive of their own agencies and abilities,” meaning that even intangible forms of media, such as an app interface and networks, influence our perception and behaviours. (Bollmer 174). On the other hand, Weiss’s focus on “social” robots and their ability to mimic human emotions and empathy exhibits its need for material design, such as their programmed tone of voice and trained outputs. Weiss explains that “the truth is that we are profoundly technologically mediated beings,” indicating that our emotional and thinking processes are continually built by the technologies we interact with. Considering this, the ability to differentiate between material and immaterial does not have much value in the context of screen-based media, as scrolling through an app or talking to an AI chatbot relies on physical systems and even our own bodies to operate.

The importance of Materiality in Media Technology

According to Bollemer, materiality can be considered the basis of media, and to understand media, one has to move beyond the representation and meaning to how they act, affect, and structure relations between humans and technology, in other words, the material means. Weiss reinforces this by quoting the views of Turkle, who has written, “Material culture carries emotions” and ideas of startling intensity (Turkle 6) in Evocative Objects, and noting that media technology is already interacting and reshaping the material world. Concluding from both readings, materiality is crucial when it comes to discussing media technology because the function – or the “affordance” – of media technology is what humans can discern directly. This is the first step of understanding media technology, which is rapidly evolving and developing new applications every day. 

The affordance of media technology changes as their materiality changes, as Bollemer noted; media are not neutral and produce and sustain power structures through their material existence. Weiss supports this through examples and presents that the difference in materiality caused a large division in the human’s attitude towards machines, which shows the importance of materiality when it comes to discussing media technology. 

Link back to previous readings

Bollmer argues that media are “not mere tools” but “locations for the perpetuation of inequality and the management of social difference” (Bollmer 3), shaping how we relate to others, objects, and the world. By defining media as performative, things that act and make things happen, Bollmer emphasizes that technological mediation is an active, material process organizing human experience. Media are not neutral backdrops; they structure social relations and determine which bodies, histories, and interactions are made visible. Weiss illustrates this on a bodily level, showing that human attention, emotion, and desire are shaped by technological design. Users are pulled into emotional and social patterns by technology, and interfaces guide how they interact, showing that humans and machines shape each other. Annalee Newitz’s “My Laptop” personalizes this idea, describing a reciprocal relationship of care and dependence: “It doesn’t just belong to me; I also belong to it” (Newitz 88). Together, these works show that mediation operates materially, socially, and emotionally, challenging the traditional separation between subjects and objects. Humans don’t act alone on passive tools but are connected with technology, which influences who we are, how we interact, and what matters to us.

Conclusion

Between the two readings, what defines materiality is presented in various ways. In conclusion, materiality is the wires, the shape, and the technical form of the medium, as well as the way they “speak” and “express” to humans. Bollmer and Weiss may both agree that materiality is the crucial element in defining a media technology, which is not only a tool but also an outlet that shapes and bends our emotions and perception of the world. 

Works Cited

Dennis, Weiss M. “Design, Mediation & The Post Human. Chapter Eleven, Seduced by the Machine: Human-Technology Relations and Sociable Robots.” Accessed 8 Nov. 2025. 

Grant, Bollmer. “Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction.” Bloomsbury, www.bloomsbury.com/us/materialist-media-theory-9781501337093/. Accessed 8 Nov. 2025. 

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

Turkle, Sherry. Evocative Objects: Things we work with. The MIT Press. 2011. https://williamwolff.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/turkle-objects-2011.pdf. Accessed 9 Nov. 2025.

Turkle et al. “A Nascent Robotics Culture: New Complicities for Companionship.” [online] AAAI Technical Report Series, July 2006. Available at: web.mit.edu/sturkle/www/nascentroboticsculture.pdf.

Contributors: Lorriane Chua, Siming Liao, Eira Nguyen, Aubrey Ventura

Book Review

Digital Black Feminism: Media, Embodiment & Resistance

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Introduction

Catherine Steele’s book, Digital Black Feminism, is an exploration of critical issues surrounding race and media in modern media theory. It was published in October 2021, at the height of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. The book highlights Steele’s expertise as a scholar of race, gender, and media. Steele is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland, where she runs the Black Communication and Technology (BCaT) lab. Her scholarship focuses on how marginalized communities have resisted oppression through digital technologies. Her book came at a crucial time, in a moment in which social media activism was at its peak, renewing attention to racial justice and the politics of technology. 

Steele’s book reframes how scholars understand the intersection between race, media, and politics. It highlights the essential contributions of Black women to the media landscape while acknowledging the lack of recognition of their revolutionary innovations due to their positionality. Steele analyzes Black women’s use of the internet as a tool of recognition, activism, and survival. This work reminds us that the media is never neutral; it’s inherently political, often working to silence already marginalized voices. A central theme is acknowledging how Black women have been fighting against these political systems that surveil and constrain users due to racial and gender bias. Steele argues that Digital Black feminism works to repurpose these systems that have historically marginalized them. She states that Black women have long used media as spaces of community, extending a lineage of traditional Black feminism that predates the internet as a way to remain visible and represented in a world that wants to do the opposite.

This book report examines how Black Digital Feminism works to redefine media theory through connections to representation, politics, embodiment. By drawing on theories introduced by Grant Bollmer’s Materialist Media Theory, Simone Browne’s work Dark Matters: On Surveillance of Blackness, Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression, and Mark Hansen’s Bodies in Code. This work acts as a bridge to connecting themes raised in Steele’s work and broader media studies theories. As Media Studies students, Steele’s book reminds us to analyze systems of power and oppression. She invites the reader to take a look at who is seen, who is silenced, and how marginalized communities reimagine the world of technology.

Overview of the Book

Steele’s Digital Black Feminism explores how Black feminist thought intersects with digital technology. Steele centers Black women’s voices and highlights how their use of technology is rooted in a long history of resisting oppression. In the first chapter, she discusses how technology shaped Black women’s lives during slavery, touching on oral culture, forced labor, and communication between worlds. Steele argues that Digital Black Feminism is a “political choice that bolsters the claim that feminism practiced without adherence to racial practices is not feminism at all”(18). She warns against analyzing technology through a “colorblind” lens, as that perpetuates more oppression, ignoring the harassment Black women face online. Steele emphasizes the need to recognize Black women’s foundational roles in feminist and civil rights movements, and urges readers to approach Digital Black Feminism with awareness of its historical and political context.

In the next chapter, Steele introduces the “virtual beauty shop” as a metaphor for Black feminism in digital spaces. She describes the virtual beauty shop as a constructed space for Black women. As beauty salons have been safe havens for the Black community, Steele shows how Black women are extending these safe spaces online through conversations about hair care. In the next three chapters, she connects this idea to the work of historic Black feminist icons and argues that social media has become a powerful tool for continuing their legacy. Steele challenges stereotypes that erase Black women from technology, showing how activities like blogging, hair tutorials, and Black Twitter contribute to knowledge, resistance, and academic discourse. She argues that Digital Black Feminism broadens the idea of scholarship, making theory more accessible. This book reframes the media not as a neutral technology but as a political space that is tied to history, empowerment and resistance. 

Media and Representation

Catherine Steele’s arguments in this book bring forward key ideas about media and power, and representations that align with the central themes of our course. Steele reminds the audience of the importance of Black women creators in the digital landscape, highlighting them as voices for their community and figures of representation. This resonates with Grant Bollmer’s discussion in Materialist Media Theory, where he argues that representation is essential to the politics of media, since it works to determine whose voices are heard and whose are erased. He highlights that the silencing of marginalized people is not simply an oversight but a tactic of political erasure. As representation in the media is a symbol of power, lack of visibility works to restrict political action. Steele’s analysis grounds this theory, as the harassment of Black women online, censorship, and algorithmic bias demonstrate how digital platforms function to discipline and silence marginalized users, limiting their participation in public discourse.

However, through Steele’s work, she demonstrates how Black feminists are actively defying these systems of power. The Digital Black Feminist movement emerges as a countermeasure to this silencing, transforming exclusion into a space for community. Through social media, digital storytelling, and activism, Black women are creating a space of affirmation and political critique that challenges the social hierarchies embedded in the media. This movement correlates with Bollmer’s ideas that the politics of representation lies not only in obtaining visibility but having control within these systems in order to change them. Steele reminds us that when Black women organize and create online, they are not simply using media but remaking it, pushing back against the very systems that aim to silence them. 

Media Politics & Surveillance

Steele’s discussions on representation and empowerment directly connect to ideas on media politics and surveillance explored in class and broader media scholarship. In discussions on mass media, it was emphasized that the media is centered around and controlled by institutions of power. Steele’s Digital Black Feminism, alongside theories by Simone Browne and Safiya Noble, exposes how media is inherently political, reproducing racial hierarchies through surveillance and algorithmic bias. Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness traces how the system of racialized surveillance is rooted in slavery and colonialism. She argues that racialized surveillance is “a technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and a power to define what is in or out of place” (Browne 77). These practices are reproduced in digital forms through tracking, data collection, and targeted harassment. These systems of power aim to control Black voices by supervising their interactions with the media. 

This is prevalent in Steele’s work as she discusses how targeted harassment and “algorithms of oppression,” a concept introduced by Noble, work to push Black women off digital platforms. Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression highlights how search engines and digital infrastructures are encoded with racial bias that pushes anti-Black rhetoric. She provides an example of how Google’s photo application automatically “tagged African Americans as “apes” and “animals” (Noble 6). This is just one example of the hundreds of “accidental” algorithmic incidents of racism. These algorithms aim to control and discourage Black users rather than allowing them to speak their truths. Steele extends this analysis by discussing how this surveillance works to hide Black presence, allowing their scholarship to be drowned out by harassment or go unnoticed. It’s important to acknowledge that race impacts a person’s experience on the internet and that colorblind view on media politics does more harm than good. 

Critical Reflection & Possibilities

Steele’s work highlights the blind spots that theorists often overlook when discussing race and technology. It offers more than a case study; it introduces a movement.  Theory is often influenced by embodied experiences. As introduced by Mark Hansen in Bodies in Code, media is an extension of the body that shapes perception and experiences. Hansen suggests that digital media makes the body the site of mediation, closing the distinction between human and technological experience. This reminds us that Digital Black Feminism is more than just a theoretical framework; it’s a lived experience. For Black women, embodiment in digital spaces is not evenly distributed. It’s important we acknowledge that the Black body is both hypervisible and surveilled.

However, after reading Steele’s argument, I was left with questions about Digital Black  Feminism and the limitations of her discussions. As an Afro-Latina media scholar, I noticed that Steele’s argument was largely grounded in a U.S. context. This focus allows her to speak on her positionality and the rich history between the African American slave experience and modern media practices. However, it is also a limitation. It left me wondering about the exploration of African, Caribbean, and Black diasporic lenses. Black Feminist media practices are at play globally, often interacting with colonial legacies and political oppression. A diasporic lens would work to extend ideas of surveillance, representation, and algorithmic bias. With the current state of the political world, I feel like analyzing the power of Digital Black Feminism and media politics in places like Sudan and Congo, which are suffering from extreme oppression and humanitarian crises, would provide another larger, inclusive perspective. Looking at Digital Black Feminism from a global lens would help root her claims as a universal Black experience rather than just through an American context, since it is bigger than just the USA. Given this, I would be interested in further analyzing Grant Bollmer’s ideas on geopolitics and colonial power influencing the media. 

Conclusion

Catherine Steele’s Digital Black Feminism transforms how we understand media, politics, and representation. By connecting digital culture with the long history of Black feminist communication, Steele demonstrates that media is both an agent of control and a tool for resistance. When read alongside Bollmer’s ideas on representation, Browne’s theory of surveillance, Noble’s work on algorithmic bias, and Hansen’s discussions on embodiment, it is evident that the media is deeply political and a lived experience. For Media Studies students, Steele’s book challenges us to reevaluate our ideas on media by making the reality of Black women media users present and visible. It warns us that the media is tied to systems of power that often work to hinder marginalized voices. Steele does suggest that if used with intention, it can work to create a safe haven of community and creativity. Ultimately, Steele’s work insists that the study of Black Digital Feminism should be seen as a study of liberation (as with her example of the virtual beauty salon), showing how marginalized communities can not only survive within the political systems but transform them into a space of joy and resistance. 

Written by: Aminata Chipembere

Works Cited

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

Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw89p. Accessed 10 Nov. 2025.

Hansen, M. B. N. Bodies in Code: Interfaces with New Media. Routledge, 2006.

Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press, 2018. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1pwt9w5. Accessed 9 Nov. 2025.
Steele, Catherine Knight. Digital Black Feminism. New York University Press, 2021.

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Materialism in Digital Life: The Envision of Smartphones

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Introduction

People often imagine digital technologies as immaterial, floating above physical reality. Screens are described in ways that make it seem like they are part of some other space, independent of anything material. Such a belief underlines much of how we speak about online communication and our digital life. Bollmer challenges this in his book Materialist Media Theory by arguing that all media, including digital forms, depend upon physical environments, embodied routines, and global systems.

Rosenberg and Blondheim extend this argument by observing what happens when a smartphone becomes unavailable. Every time people lose their phones or the battery dies, they go through confusion and anxiety. Everyday routines fall apart, showing how deeply connected with memory, orientation, and safety the device is. This provides everyday evidence for the theory of Bollmer.

This essay makes the case for smartphones as highly material technologies. Reading Rosenberg and Blondheim through Bollmer helps us to understand the smartphone not simply as a digital screen, but as an embodied and infrastructural medium shaping perception, action, and social life.

Bollmer and the Materiality of Media

In Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction, Bollmer argues that media is not an abstract system of symbols existing in a “virtual” world, but rather expressed within concrete material structures. He points out that the digital media we use daily, such as smartphones, are built on a vast and complex material network: from ore mining and chip smelting to power supply, server operation, and the transportation and maintenance of global supply chains. It is these seemingly small and hidden material links that support the operation of modern media. Bollmer states that the so-called “digital” has never been separated from matter; it relies on an entire global industrial ecosystem (Bollmer, p2).

These easily overlooked material components have also changed our understanding of “media.” Media is not merely content on a screen or a channel for transmitting information, but an entity composed of energy, metals, and resources. Behind every click and swipe lies the use of resources and the flow of matter. This also illustrates that media is actually part of the world’s material cycle. It not only creates new meaning but also continuously consumes natural resources. The smartphone is the best example of this contradiction. While smartphones appear lightweight and convenient, their creation is inseparable from raw materials from around the world, complex technologies, and the labor of countless people. We use it every day to browse the internet, take photos, chat, and read information; it has become our primary gateway to the digital world. However, it also consumes energy, metals, and environmental resources. In other words, while mobile phones represent the convenience of modern life, they also remind us of the entire real material foundation behind the digital world.

Therefore, according to Bollmer, understanding media requires returning to its material origins. The “existence” of media lies not only in transmitting information, but also in how it participates step by step in the construction of the world through concrete material forms such as chips, wires, plastics, and minerals. This leads to the proposition that media is not a container for information, but a process constituted by the material world itself.

Rosenberg and Blondheim and the Smartphone in Its Absence

In their empirical study on smartphone use and experience time, Rosenberg and Blondheim pointed out that mobile phones are not merely communication tools, but interactive devices that combine the body and technology, profoundly changing our perception of time, social interactions, and daily habits. Through a “deprivation study,” they deprived adolescents of their phones for a period of time. When the phone was not nearby, participants subconsciously reached for it in their pockets, bags, or on nearby tables, even without any external stimulus. This is interpreted as a phenomenon of “unconscious bodily attachment,” showing that they still have a conditioned reflexive expectation of the phone at a bodily level (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p. 246). From the perspective of media materiality, the touch, swipe, vibration notifications, and screen brightness of mobile phones constantly influence our physical world. As a material technology, the mobile phone intervenes in the body and perception, making the generation of abstract media meaning no longer just language and images, but built on a cyclical interaction of body-interface-attention-time.

For example, our subconscious actions of picking up our phones to check the time, set alarms, record time, and check notifications demonstrate that the phone has become an extension of our bodies. Smartphones have transformed our physical perception of monotonous states of time like “waiting” and “idleness.” Without phones, time felt fixed and continuous. But with phones, time becomes flexible and fragmented. For example, we can check our phones, reply to messages, and switch tasks at any time, breaking time into small segments. These behaviors influence how we perceive the world, understand time, and communicate with others. Smartphones have become an integral part of our lives and bodies, transforming “media” from a mere external tool into an extension of our daily experiences.

Comparative Analysis

Reading these texts together allows us to understand the materiality of the smartphone with much greater precision. Both Bollmer and Rosenberg and Blondheim deny the notion that digital technologies exist outside the physical world, but they do so from different levels and with different kinds of evidence.

First, Bollmer focuses on the structural side of materiality. He explains that what appears to be digital is supported by big and often invisible infrastructures, including mineral extraction necessary to build chips, moving devices along global supply chains, electrical grids powering servers and data centers, down to the physical gestures, which interfaces silently train into our bodies. To Bollmer, materiality is not only an attribute of the device but also a condition that shapes how digital media become possible at all. His view, therefore, underlines the background systems we rarely think about when holding a phone.

Rosenberg and Blondheim provide a more intimate, and immediately observable perspective. They indicate how the smartphone shapes everyday experience by small but meaningful disruptions. When the phone is missing, one loses the ability to navigate, to remember appointments, or to keep up a sense of security. These are not abstract consequences but real breakdowns most people have felt. Reaching for a phone that is not there, or feeling uneasy during a commute without it, makes the materiality of the device unmistakable. Their work brings attention to the micro level of how the smartphone becomes part of bodily rhythm, affective stability, and daily decision making.

Putting the two texts in conversation reveals a layered form of materiality. Bollmer describes the macro layer by emphasizing infrastructures, production and the environmental and political conditions that allow the smartphone to exist. Rosenberg and Blondheim illuminate the micro layer by showing how the device embeds itself in gesture, habit and emotion. These layers are different in scale, yet compatible in argument. Taken together, they reveal how the smartphone operates not only as a technical artifact but also as a lived environment that organizes perception and behaviour.

These connections make the comparison especially useful for our class. The smartphone becomes a case through which we can see how media operate simultaneously as symbolic systems, physical tools, and social structures. The texts also help us understand why smartphone dependence feels so powerful. It’s not simply a matter of distraction or preference. It’s the result of a technological object materially entangled with infrastructure, mobility, memory, and emotion. By looking at the smartphone through both authors, we get a clearer sense of how digital media shape contemporary life across different scales of experience.

Conclusion

Smartphones are often treated as digital or immaterial objects, but together the readings of Bollmer and Rosenberg and Blondheim show that they are deeply material. Their absence disrupts routines and makes visible their role in attention, memory, social stability and bodily practice. Far from separating us from the physical world, smartphones reorganize that world and shape how we experience it.

Understanding smartphone materiality helps us think differently about digital media more generally. It reminds us that screens and data do not exist outside physical life. They are embedded in bodily habits, infrastructures and emotional experience. For the students in this class, this perspective demonstrates that the analysis of media cannot stop at content or representation and has to consider also how technologies participate in shaping everyday life.

The smartphone is a material medium that allows us to see our own dependence particularly well. It calls into question the assumption of much cultural commentary that digital life exists somewhat separately from physical experience. Gaining insight into these conditions allows us to understand more about what structures contemporary life.

Citations

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

Rosenberg, Hananel, and Menahem Blondheim. “What (Missing) the Smartphone Means: Implications of the Medium’s Portable, Personal, and Prosthetic Aspects in the Deprivation Experience of Teenagers.” Mobile Media & Communication, 2025.

Written by Saber, Rai, Mio

Critical Response

The Living Library: Mediating Morality in Books

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

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

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

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

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

Citations:

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

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

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

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

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

Other

Inscription, Identification, and the Mezuzah in Jewish Cultural Habitus

“Bialystok Mezuzah”, created by MI POLIN: a Polish company which casts impressions of former mezuzahs stripped from Jewish homes during the Holocaust in bronze. Courtesy of The Jewish Museum via Medium.

Reading Grant Bollmer’s chapter of Materialist Media Theory, “Inscriptions and Techniques” – which has to do with the cultural practice of inscription and its part in determining reality – I immediately saw connections to my own Jewish culture. Specifically, I started thinking about the ways in which cultural material objects (such as Judaica) store, record, and determine a shared historical, documental, and technique-based experience of “habitus” for people raised within Jewish culture. Physical objects are not always thought of as inscriptions. Therefore, I will begin by addressing the performance of inscription through religious writing, then move on to the significance of Judaica objects, before finally identifying a piece of Judaica which bridges inscription and object, as well as religion and culture. 

Writings

The oldest Abrahamic religion, Jewish liturgical canon and everything considered as “text” within the tradition is seemingly endless. Far beyond just the Torah and the Talmud, Jewish scholars and the ultra-religious study countless writings and commentary which present a litany of different interpretations of text. Notably, the practice of scholarly and iterative work is considered essential even within Judaism’s set of canonical texts; “Ketuvim”, a section of Tanakh, refers to books, scrolls, songs, wisdom, and literature that have been amended to the so-called “Hebrew Bible” over time. 

Similarly, sub-groups (sometimes referred to as movements or sects) within Judaism have also undergone changes, identifying individuals within “orthodox”, “hasidic”, “conservative”, “reform”, “kabbalistic”, “humanist”, and even “atheist” categories, made up of those who agree upon their disagreements with earlier movements. This perpetual schisming of identity within the religion relates to what Grant Bollmer describes as the “control of one’s image and self […] reasserted through legal regulation of documents, inscriptions, and artworks that, in combination with the power of the medium to record, either permit or prohibit something from existing in the future, which can allow (or refuse) specific individuals and relations to materialize.” (55) As a concrete example of reasserting identity through inscription, look no farther than the historical “Platforms” developed by rabbis in US cities throughout the 20th century, which articulated and updated the guiding principles of Reform Judaism over time. 

Objects

What I find so interesting is that despite all of the disagreement (and morphing of central values and interpretations of canonical text within each movement), the media being used to record the cultural side of Jewish tradition are largely the same across movements, ascribing a sense of shared history and tradition among us. Judaica, for those who may not know, are items such as candlesticks, cups, Torah dressing, art, jewelry, religious apparel, and historical artifacts “used and cherished in the context of ritual practice” (Benesh). 

I can’t possibly describe the meaning and use of each physical item within Judaism that has shaped my upbringing and experience of culture. Bollmer describes the production of a habitus by inscriptions existing “at the level of the body[,] through practices we internalize and perpetuate– techniques that we practice” (57). He continues by arguing that repeated performance induces a biological form of inscription where “we are ‘writing’ into our own bodies ways of experiencing and acting that perpetuate cultural difference, which are foundational for how we understand both who we are as individuals and our relations with others.” (57-8). The practice of attending synagogue, the speaking and chanting of Hebrew words in unison; the donning of a tallit for a family friend’s Bat Mitzvah; the home rituals of Shabbat candles and baking my own challah; arranging a seder plate in spring; the smell of spices in a Havdalah box as it is passed around a circle of neighbours on Saturday at dusk– these are the kinds of ritual and embodied experiences that for me are not mere structures of worship, but ways of life.

For many, a sense of culture is intimately linked with a sense of difference. Following the French scholar Jacques Derrida, Bollmer argues that groups ‘write’ or ‘inscribe’ matter from within, producing ‘cuts’ that “organize or make sense of the world, which, in turn, locate, distribute, and police the location of specific bodies based on how they ‘matter’” (64). Unfortunately, much of Jewish history is a history of persecution– from historical subjugation under the Romans, to The Crusades and exile from Spain, to continuous pogroms across Europe, to the failed extermination attempt of the Holocaust. The few remaining Holocaust survivors of today tell their children and grandchildren of yellow stars which they were forced to affix to their clothing in the years leading up to the concentration camps. The inscription “Jude” was more than a sign of shame; the stars were an example of such a ‘cut’ that identified Jews from the rest of European society and primed their status as ‘outsiders’ or ‘others’ in relation to their neighbours. 

By contrast, Judaica objects are typically sites for positive identification at the level of Jewish identity. Many of these objects are either passed down in families, or are recovered after surviving anti-semetic events and being separated from their original owners (Benesh). The craftsmanship evident in their making comes from “hiddur mitzvah […] — the principle of beautifying obligations and rituals by appealing to the senses: sight, sound, texture and fragrance” (Benesh). Essentially, many of the objects are not just historical– and not just useful in ritual– but also beautiful sources of pride found in one’s home.

The Mezuzah

This brings me to a point where I can introduce the mezuzah: both an object which evokes identification, and an inscription which generates concepts and performs symbolic work. The mezuzah takes the physical form of a cylindrical encasement (typically decorated), which is affixed to doorframes and contains a small roll of parchment inside, inscribed with significant passages from Deuteronomy. Specifically, the text found inside mezuzahs contains the Sh’ma, considered the most important prayer in the Jewish religion. Highly observant Jews say this prayer three times daily, shading their eyes with a hand as they do so. The lines that follow the Sh’ma’s main proclamation of “one God” command:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. Take to heart these instructions with which I charge you this day. Impress them upon your children. Recite them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up. Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead, inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” (Deuteronomy 6:5-9)

Found in this translation of the original Hebrew, we can see a direct correlation between practices of the habitus and inscription of a religious identity. Various parts of the body such as the heart, the hand, and the forehead are all named as sites for marking. The physicality of the language, using “charge”, “impress”, “recite”, “bind” and, importantly, “inscribe” are significant, because they instruct a person to outwardly show and practice their alignment with the religion in their everyday actions. Perhaps that is why the object of the mezuzah is still so pervasively displayed before Jewish homes, despite the fact that many Jews today do not engage in regular prayer or observance, and many are altogether atheist or agnostic (Issit and Main). 

In Evocative Objects, Sherry Turkle argued that objects can be sites for our thinking. I would like to use this frame of reference to propose new meanings and uses for mezuzahs in contemporary Jewish culture. The idea of a conceptual mezuzah would suggest that one is hung before a family’s home not because God instructed them to do so, but because its presence offers a material site to “think through” something. Perhaps when we look at, touch, or even kiss the mezuzah when leaving the house, it can remind us of our own ethical standards, compelling us to try and behave accordingly in the world. Maybe the mystery of the mezuzah piques the curiosity of children, who ask their parents why it’s important to them to display a sign of Jewish identity on the cusp of/ barrier to their home. As Bollmer paraphrases from another scholar, Ferraris, “The distinction of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ can only happen from the inside– which means that ‘outside’ is always a relation produced by assuming the truth of the ‘inside’” (70).

In recent years, there have been efforts within the Jewish community to turn the sign of the mezuzah from a social object that creates a  ‘cut’ between ‘us’ and ‘them’, to one that welcomes and celebrates. For example, the Trans Pride Mezuzah “represents and embodies an intersection between the trans/nonbinary community and the renewal of Jewish tradition”, where trans and gender diverse people are not merely tolerated in a religious home or dwelling place, but actually highlighted and included (Ben-Lulu). Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, a synagogue in New York City which has welcomed the LGBTQ+ community since the 1970s, commissioned mezuzahs for their building created by a Polish company which makes “original casts of real mezuzahs that were on the houses of Jews who lived in Poland, before they perished in the Holocaust” out of bronze (Ben-Lulu). These contemporary Judaica are a highly creative documentation of history, and yet also a symbol of renewed values and understandings about Jewish belief– especially in the context of the synagogue whose entryway they mark.

Conclusion

Analyzing inscription in the context of religion is incomplete without examining materiality. I have just argued how repeated technique and interactions with physical objects create identification with a religious culture within one’s habitus. I’m certain that those with lived experience within other religions can relate to this claim, however I was only able to properly represent these ideas within the context of what I am familiar with. Although my own personal sense of faith is uncertain, and although I hold certain critical opinions about organized religion, my own identity as a Jewish individual is something I consider very important in my life. It is difficult to explain how my life experience, this “habitus”, is inscribed so beautifully and painfully in who I am. Writing this blog has actually allowed me to convey certain ideas which I have never had the words to articulate before. As Bollmer says, things are practiced first before they are ever described. I agree with Professor Schandorf that Materialist Media Theory provides a lot of good grounding for conversations that involve and transcend media studies, and I hope to be able to use it more in the future.

Blog post by Naomi Brown

Works Cited

Benesh, Mika. “Judaica.” Federation CJA, www.federationcja.org/fr/judaica/. 

Ben-Lulu, Elazar. Doorposts of Inclusion: Trans Pride Mezuzah as a Marker of Jewish-Queer Space, Taylor & Francis Online, 8 May 2025, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17432200.2025.2484500#abstract.  

Bollmer, Grant. “Inscriptions and Techniques.” Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 51–78. Bloomsbury Collections. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501337086.0005.

Central Conference of American Rabbis. “Platforms.” Central Conference of American Rabbis, 23 Jan. 2018, www.ccarnet.org/rabbinic-voice/platforms/.  

Issitt, Micah , and Carlyn Main. “Judaism.” Hidden Religion: The Greatest Mysteries and Symbols of the World’s Religious Beliefs. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2014. 3–32. Bloomsbury Collections. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9798400663277.0006. 

My Jewish Learning. “The Shema.” My Jewish Learning, 16 Jan. 2024, www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-shema/.