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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

Other

Hey! I Saw Them Live*

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Introduction

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

Media Extensions and Prosthetic Memories

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

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

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

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

Our Memories and Time

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

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

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

A Dependance on Documentation

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

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

Prosthetic Emotions 

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

Works Cited

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

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

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

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

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

Image by Molly Kingsley

Written by Molly Kingsley