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Critical Response

When I Die, Please Let Me Die.

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Spoilers for the show Pantheon and Upload

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Citations

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

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

Critical Response

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

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

Introduction

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

Power Masquerades as Comfort

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

Emotional Labour by Design, Desire, and Delegation

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

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

Gender as an Interactive Script

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

When Intimacy Forgets to Resist

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

Works Cited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Written by Nicole Jiao

Critical Response

We Don’t Just Watch Disney—We Become it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

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

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

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

Written by Gina Chang

Critical Response

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

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

By Micah Sébastien Zhang

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Consulted

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

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

Image Acknowledgement

The header image was produced by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash.

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Becoming Cultural Products: Digital Subcultures and the Culture Industry

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A Critical Response to Molly Kingsley’s The (Not-So) Secret Double Lives of Mormon Wives: Digital Subcultures on Reality Television”

Introduction:

In the post The (Not-So) Secret Double Lives of Mormon Wives, media theorist Molly Kingsley examines the intersectionality of reality television, digital subculture, and the commercialization of social media through the niche digital community “MomTok.” This community is centered around a group of young Mormon mothers whose popularity leads to a Hulu series, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. Kingsley argues that MomTok demonstrates how digital subcultures often form around central figures who guide the community’s interests and social norms. She discusses how digital subcultures often lose meaning due to being susceptible to external commercial pressures. Although these subcultures often begin as a space of identity and representation, their visibility on digital platforms is easily manipulated by monetization, performativity, and the demands of the culture industry. Kingsley’s argument provides a strong foundation for understanding how the authenticity of social media slowly dissipates due to commoditization. Building on her analysis, I plan to expand this discussion through the theoretical frameworks of Jenna Drenten’s “Curating a Consumption Ideology” and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s theory of the culture industry. Together, these theories demonstrate that MomTok, Reality Television, and influencers not only participate in systems of commercialization but ultimately become cultural products of the system itself.

Platformization, Performativity, and Consumption Ideology 

Kingsley discusses the performativity of MomTok, highlighting how influencers construct digital identities for public visibility.  This topic becomes more significant when examined through Drenten’s framework of platformization. She describes platformization as the “penetration of infrastructures, economic processes and governmental frameworks of digital platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life, as well as the reorganization of cultural practices and imaginations around these platforms” (93). This means that digital platforms reshape cultural production by interweaving themselves in social and economic life. Platformization alters how cultural goods are created and monetized. This is made evident by influencers altering their identities to fit within the economic structures of the platform. Within Momtok and “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” influencers commercialize most aspects of their lives. These digital subcultures thrive on mindful curation of their personal branding to maximize platform revenue. This curation encourages audiences to adopt the consumption ideologies ingrained within these platforms. An ideology that normalizes the purchasing products and adopting lifestyles glamorized by influencers, while fueling envy among their audience.

As discussed by Kingsley, reality television intensifies the performativity of influencers. This is evident with the popular MomTok Influencers transitioning from TikTok to Hulu, entering them into a larger, more commodified platform that thrives on drama, conflict, and controversy. Through reality television, these influencers become the cultural product being consumed, as every view, every tweet works to push their careers. This shift allowed the members to reach a wider audience meanwhile further integrating themselves into a capitalistic system that benefits from emotional vulnerability and spectacle. Drenten reminds the audience that social media influencers often overlook the negative outcomes of pushing controversial forms of consumption. As the digital landscape advances controversies, scandals, and dramas have become economic goldmines. Influencers are becoming the very products that social media uses to push capitalist ideals. Their lived experiences are shaped into media commodities whose purpose no longer serves storytelling but rather promotional content aimed to generate monetary value. ​

Reality Television & The Culture Industry

When examined through the framework of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s The Culture Industry, the commodification of influencers becomes apparent. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that under capitalism, cultural products become standardized commodities designed for mass consumption. They highlight the intersectionality of labor and entertainment, demonstrating how mass media advances structures of power. Instead of creating social change and critical thinking, the culture industry produces mass media that pushes ideologies of consumption and promotes false realities. Although this theory predates social media, it remains relevant with influencer culture and reality tv. This is evident with the influencers of MomTok becoming cultural products. Their identities, family lives, and moral dilemmas are turned into viral content aimed at attracting views and sponsorship. Their lives become packaged and mass-produced for the audience’s consumption, blurring the lines between authenticity and performativity. Although these influencers might seem genuine on screen, their personalities are being manufactured to bring fame and visibility to their shows. This ultimately reduces them to commodities of the entertainment industry. This mirrors the culture industry’s process of creating seemingly unique and innovative content that in reality is shaped by industry norms. In the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, the members are exchanging privacy and agency for profit. The influencers and the audience become embedded in a system that focuses on controversy and consumption over authenticity or critical reflection.

Conclusion

Kingsley’s argument sparked an interesting conversation on the instability of digital subcultures when confronted by capitalism. The shift from MomTok to reality television demonstrates how digital subcultures can be easily exploited by commercialization. What began as a niche community of self-expression discussing Mormonism, femininity, and gender roles easily became a place of controversy. The reality show ultimately worked to undo the curated family-friendly “personas” crafted by the influencers. In favor of shocking, dramatized “personas” that are more profitable to producers and the entertainment industry. 

When viewed through the framework of Drenten, Horkheimer, and Adorno, it’s apparent that these subcultures not only lose meaning but become platforms of pushing ideologies of consumptions. The influencers of Momtok are not merely participating in the culture industry. They are culture products themselves, with their identities being curated, monetized, and mass consumed. Their lives are entertainment commodities that are displayed for the audience’s enjoyment. The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives serves as an example of how digital subcultures work as part of the culture industry, promoting unrealistic desires and controversial ideologies. As Media Studies students, it’s important that we acknowledge the systems at play and learn not to take social media at face value. We must understand that digital platforms can be places of social change and critical thought if used correctly. If we fall victim to commercialization, we can easily lose the core values of these digital communities. Momtok and its journey into reality television demonstrate the intersection of social media, platformization, and the culture industry.

Works Cited

Drenten, Jenna, et al. “Curating a consumption ideology: Platformization and gun influencers on Instagram.” Marketing Theory, vol. 24, no. 1, 10 Oct. 2023, pp. 91–122, https://doi.org/10.1177/14705931231207329. 

Horkheimer , Max, and Theodor Adorno. “The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception.” Dialectic of Enlightenment, 31 Dec. 2020, pp. 94–136, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804788090-007. 

Kingsley, Molly. “The (Not-So) Secret Double Lives of Mormon Wives: Digital Subcultures on Reality Television” UBC Blogs, 22 Nov. 2025, https://blogs.ubc.ca/mdia300/archives/901

The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, by Jeff Jenkins, Jeff Jenkins Productions, 2024. Hulu, www.disneyplus.com.

Written by Aminata Chipembere

Image created by Aminata Chipembere

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Critical Response Post to “Morality and Materiality in Digital Technology and Cognition”: How Tony Horava’s Takeaway on ‘the Medium’ Will Always Affect Us

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Introduction

In this critical response post, I will be adding onto ideas discussed in Molly Kingsley and Aminata Chipembere’s post, “Morality and Materiality in Digital Technology and Cognition”. In their blog post, they discussed Bollmer and Verbeek’s ideas on materiality and how they relate to digital technology, talking about the similarities in their perspectives while highlighting a couple important points: digital tech can be material even if it appears immaterial, and technology can influence humans and their decision making. This critical response will focus on the latter idea, and will incorporate the added perspective of Tony Horava on the ways in which the medium of something, whether it be technology or not, still affects us.

Original Post Overview

Kingsley and Chipembere discuss the notion that technology, despite being largely considered to be an ‘immaterial’ presence, still affects our decision making, how we feel, and how we may act in the future. I believe this idea to be very important in today’s culture, as the development of technology rapidly outpaces our capacity to wholly understand it and its effects. The purpose of this critique is to bring in some added perspectives on how exactly technology impacts how we feel and act, as it is not only interesting to think about, but also necessary.

Horava’s Perspective

Tony Horava in his journal article “eBooks and McLuhan: The Medium is Still the Message” talks about McLuhan’s original phrase and how that correlates to modern technology. For example, the way in which one interacts with a physical copy of a book compared to a digital copy of a book is different despite the materials being the same (Horava 62). The way in which our hands turn the page versus swipe a tablet, or the smell of paper versus the smell of a screen, all culminate to creating a unique reading experience that is definitely informed by the medium in which the contents are being gathered from. Using this lens, I want to take a look at some of the examples that Kingsley and Chipembere talk about in their original blog post.

In their post, the authors discuss several ways in which technologies can impact human behaviour, such as the ways in which doctors consult medical devices, as well as talking about hermeneutic media, which provides a representation of reality that requires interpretation (Kingsley and Chipembere). The medical example in particular is one I found especially interesting, as I believe that Horava’s perspective can play a role in how doctors use various medical machinery. As an example, when a doctor uses technology to fetch results, or analyze a sample, or conduct any sort of medical test, the doctor is inherently placing their faith in that technology to work. Contrast the technology available now compared to fifty years ago, and the attitudes would be much different. Doctors would still have faith in their machines, but presumably far less so than their modern-day counterparts, and as such it would take a different mental toll and reflection on their work. More would have to be done to ensure the results are accurate, or that the readings were saying what they thought they were: in short, Horava’s idea on how the medium affects the message applies to doctors’ reliance on technology over the years. Even if the message were the same, for example, on a more simple medical device that was used years ago that is still relevant now, the simple fact that we now live in the modern era with information at our fingertips and hospitals equipped with the latest advancements would add a level of confidence that prior generations wouldn’t have had. This will only continue on into the future too, as tech continues to evolve and early-onset detection systems reduce the amounts of deadlier conditions (hopefully).

Conclusion

This extra level of perspective on Kingsley and Chipembere’s post is not meant as a negative, as I thought their writing was very well done and presented dense ideas in a clear and digestible way. The purpose of this post is to also bring in a relevant newer course reading through Horava, and add his perspective on the concepts discussed by Bollmer and Verbeek, as I believe them to be related. We often talk in this class about how technology influences us, and even how it influences us, but Horava’s article has stuck with me in its ability to articulate the differences between an eBook and physical book, and I thought that the main takeaway from it was worthy to bring up again and apply to my peer’s work. I strongly believe that the medium of digital technology itself does impact us, and as it continues to evolve, so will its impact. What we feel now due to social media and the like will be far different just a few years in the future, and being able to properly communicate that effect is important.

Works Cited

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

Kingsley, Molly, and Aminata Chipembere. Morality and Materiality in Digital Technology and Cognition. 14 November 2025, Morality and Materiality in Digital Technology and Cognition. Accessed 16 November 2025. Blog Post.

Image Credit: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2022-07/MIT-Healthcare-Technology-01_0.jpg