Tag Archives: Ingold

AI Isn’t Being Regulated and I’m Sick of It

2025-12-05 OwenMenning 3 Comments

Growing up in the digital age and with constant technological advancements happening left and right, it’s easy to become numb to the frequent sayings of “this is inevitable” or “everyone’s using it so you better get used to it”, or anything related to normalizing the rapid progress that tech receives. This particularly applies to Artificial Intelligence, as AI has become the central focus of not just young people, but the global economy as a whole, with OpenAI desperately trying to keep the bubble from bursting as companies send each other billions of dollars worth of “IOU’s”. Corporations and billionaires need AI to succeed, but governments seem to be sleeping at the wheel when it comes to actually regulating it, with the laws written either being outdated or nearly prevented from being made outright (Brown). I’ve written about AI a lot this semester, and in this blog post I am going to pull from various sources I used from this term to make the argument for why it needs strict regulation.

There have been countless news stories of people being scammed via fake AI voices of family members, to deepfakes and other image-generation technology used to sextort young individuals, and while the acts themselves are illegal, it’s still just as easy to go on a website and generate an image of someone without their consent as it was a few years ago. The only thing that’s actually gotten better is the tech itself, not the laws or guidelines surrounding it. Emily McArthur’s article, The IPhone Erfahrung: Siri, the Auditory Unconscious, and Walter Benjamin’s “Aura”, talks about technology when it comes to extension but it also highlights the responsibility that is shared between technology users and makers (McArthur). This is particularly applicable to AI today, since while obviously the users of the tech who use it for nefarious and illegal reasons should be punished, the creators of the tech itself should also be held accountable. There was a recent example of a teenager who committed suicide after a conversation with ChatGPT encouraged him to, and the parent company, OpenAI, denied responsibility because the teen had ‘misused’ the AI (Yang). If their response to a teenager killing themselves after being encouraged to by their product is “sorry, you weren’t authorized to talk to it that way”, there is clearly something extremely wrong with the way that the technology was created to begin with for this outcome to even have happened.

Another strong reason to support the increased regulation of AI is that our history depends on it. Photographic evidence and video evidence is a crucial part of our society and how we function as a people, how lessons are taught in school and how people are determined to be guilty or innocent in a court of law. The fact that those concrete forms of information are now at risk of being questioned forever should be an alarm bell for anyone who cares about truth. In Tony Horava’s article, eBooks and McLuhan: The Medium is Still the Message, Horava talks about how we can interpret and process the same information differently depending on the medium in which we consume it. The concept directly relates to AI images and videos, since a video made by a trusted source on a subject will be given more weight than an AI-generated version, even if it draws upon the same sources and delivers the same information. People already distrust AI videos since all we’ve seen them used for is memes and making fun of others, and so naturally if someone were to be accused of robbing a store for example, who’s to say that the security footage is even real to begin with. AI video and images only create distrust in the real, secure versions, so regulation needs to be in place to either limit or prohibit using the likeness of a real person, or ensure that any generated material has a permanent watermark that is easily visible or accessible. The alternative is that misinformation will only continue to spread at levels never seen before.

Relating to the believability of existing materials and physical media, Ingold in Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture discussed Michael Polanyi’s concept of ‘tacit knowledge’, and it talked about how Ingold did believe that all knowledge could be communicated or that even innate knowledge could be communicated (Ingold 111). I bring this up because when it comes to discerning whether or not an AI-generated creation is real or not, outside of the more obvious tells that sometimes appear, like messed up fingers or inconsistent patterns, people like to think that they can ‘tell’ when something is real or not. The whole concept of the uncanny valley is dedicated to this, the idea that people are able to tell when something looks off, or not human. Up until recently I was of the opinion that laws would come in place before AI-generation got to the point where it was impossible to tell what was real and what wasn’t, but Google’s most recent Nano Banana Pro model is already at that point, and the population isn’t ready. This technology threatens to make us lose our innate ability to tell between truth and fiction, to the point where trying to find irregularities may not be possible to communicate, which goes against Ingold’s thinking but as of this moment in AI history, it’s what appears to be the case.

While I have little faith that meaningful laws and regulations will be put into effect any time soon, I am still hopeful for the future and for the idea that AI will eventually exist in a limited capacity, driven by rules that prohibit stealing others’ likenesses, and ensuring that a permanent watermark resides on every piece of generated material.

Works Cited

Brown, Matt. “Senate pulls AI regulatory ban from GOP bill after complaints from states.” PBS, 1 July 2025, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/senate-pulls-ai-regulatory-ban-from-gop-bill-after-complaints-from-states. Accessed 5 December 2025.

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.

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture. 1st ed., Routledge, 2013, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203559055. Accessed 4 December 2025.

McArthur, Emily. “The Iphone Erfahrung: Siri, the Auditory Unconscious, and Walter Benjamin’s “Aura”.” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman. Ed. Dennis M. Weiss Ed. Amy D. Propen Ed. Colbey Emmerson Reid Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. 113–128. Postphenomenology and the Philosophy of Technology. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 1 Dec. 2025. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781666993851.ch-006>.

Yang, Angela. “OpenAI denies allegations that ChatGPT is to blame for a teenager’s suicide.” NBC News, 25 November 2025, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/openai-denies-allegation-chatgpt-teenagers-death-adam-raine-lawsuit-rcna245946. Accessed 5 December 2025.

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Ways of ‘Telling’ and ‘Knowing’: How We’re Able to Communicate ‘Tacit’ Knowledge

2025-12-05 OwenMenning Leave a comment

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

Background on Michael Polanyi and his work

Michael Polanyi was a physicist, chemist, and philosopher who was born in 1891 and passed away in 1976. He lived through both world wars, even migrating from Germany when Nazis took power (The Polanyi Society), and his philosophical work that he developed later in life was heavily influenced by living through those global events, being introduced to philosophy via Soviet ideology under Stalin (Polanyi 3). The book that Ingold refers to, The Tacit Dimension, was originally published in 1966 and introduces Polanyi’s idea of “we know more than we can tell” (Polanyi 4).

Formal vs. Personal Knowledge

Polanyi’s view on thinking and knowledge was that ‘we know more than we can tell’ (Polanyi 4) and he classified knowledge into two camps: personal and formal. Formal knowledge is knowledge that can be specifically articulated and explained clearly to someone else, whereas personal knowledge cannot. Personal knowledge, to Polanyi, is the type of ‘know-how’ that only comes from the experience and practice that an individual goes through, whether it be perfecting a craft or learning how to hunt, which he also described as tacit knowing (Polanyi 20). It is not able to be articulated and thus, it cannot be taught. Ingold very much disagrees with Polanyi’s sentiment about personal knowledge being ‘untellable’ and argues, for example, that the idea that the age-old example of a craftsman being suddenly unable to explain how they do what they do when asked, is unfounded (Ingold 109). Ingold argues that people are absolutely able to communicate and “tell” others what they do, no matter how innate or personal it may seem. However the telling is not necessarily verbal, but it can be shown and demonstrated. This ties into Ingold’s belief that people correspond with the world and think through making. Polanyi’s perspective doesn’t make sense through Ingold’s lens, because if unspoken stuff or lessons couldn’t be taught since they were ‘personal’, then no one could learn through making, and learning through doing is a well-established fact of life. Polanyi’s view on knowing is also a bit confusing, as when he describes it in detail when describing an experiment involving a frog, he seems to assume that knowing what a frog is and knowing to do an experiment is tacit knowledge (Polanyi 21), despite the fact that a frog very much can be taught about. The ‘otherness’ of a frog might be innately human and ‘tacit’, but to suggest that that cannot be described makes me agree with Ingold.

Ways of Telling

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

Ways of Thinking

To close out his argument regarding Polanyi’s words specifically, Ingold talks about ‘articulate thinking’, which is the process of thinking about one’s words before speaking them, organizing them in the brain all in advance before sharing the thoughts with anyone else. He argues that if every time people thought it were ‘articulated’, no thinking or ‘making’ would happen because everything would have to be thought of in advance, which goes against the learning-through-doing that Ingold has mentioned in the past. While Polanyi sees the ideas of formal and personal thinking as an iceberg nearly completely submerged in water, with only the formal tip of the ice peeking out of the water (Ingold 109), Ingold sees it as a series of islands that water flows freely around, knowledge being a mix of the two (Ingold 111), instead of a cut-and-dry one or the other. Ingold highlights the fact that in Chapter 1 of Making, he also talks about the idea of ‘knowing’ and ‘telling’ being the same thing, and he argues now that Polanyi is wrong because to know is to tell (Ingold 111), and so to suggest that people possess knowledge that cannot be conveyed is preposterous. Once again, this is not to say that everything ‘told’ will be in a neat verbal package, but rather that everything a person does is telling something in some way. So while not every scholar can articulate their knowledge, they can all tell it (Ingold 111).

Polanyi in The tacit dimension draws upon Plato’s theories to try and explain how someone can’t search for an answer (if they know what to look for they’re fine, and if they don’t know what to look for then they don’t know) as support for Polanyi’s arguments about how knowledge cannot be ‘explicit’ (Polanyi 22). This is an interesting perspective that Ingold does not write about, since if you break it down you can find a sort of through-line for all knowledge, like how you go to school to learn, ask teachers questions for more information, and so on. Despite this, it still does not address Polanyi’s flawed claim that personal knowledge cannot be taught, giving Ingold the more compelling argument.

In short, Ingold uses Polanyi’s ideas on ‘telling’ and ‘personal knowledge’ to highlight how his own perspective is correct, because to know is to tell, and even if it’s something as simple as a mechanic tuning up a car or a person knitting a sweater, even without step-by-step instructions they are wholly able to tell what they are doing to others.

Works Cited

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archeology, Art and Architecture. 1st ed., Routledge, 2013, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203559055. Accessed 4 December 2025.

Polanyi, Michael. The tacit dimension. Edited by Internet Archive, Gloucester, MA, 1983. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/tacitdimension0000pola/page/4/mode/2up. Accessed 4 December 2025.

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

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Podcast Episode: Is AI Killing Creativity? Or Making It Better?

2025-12-05 Aubrey Ventura Leave a comment

In this podcast, Siming, Eira, and Aubrey explore whether Gen AI should be considered a creative medium and whether it suppresses or improves creativity. Through different examples in video editing, 3D modeling, and design, we explore what AI mediates and reflect on how these technologies reshape both creativity and authorship in contemporary media.

Citations

Adobe. (n.d.). Automatic UV Unwrapping | Substance 3D Painter. https://helpx.adobe.com/substance-3d-painter/features/automatic-uv-unwrapping.html

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

Maisie, K. (2025). Why AI Action Figures Are Taking Over Your Feed. Preview.

https://www.preview.ph/culture/ai-action-figures-dolls-a5158-20250416-dyn

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge.

Salters, C. (2024). The New Premiere Pro AI Tools I’ll Definitely Be Using. Frame.io Insider.

https://blog.frame.io/2024/04/22/new-premiere-pro-generative-ai-tools-video-editing/

Schwartz, E. (2023). Adobe Brings Firefly Generative AI Tools to Photoshop. Voicebot.ai

https://voicebot.ai/2023/05/23/adobe-brings-firefly-generative-ai-tools-to-photoshop/

Faribault Mill. (n.d.). The Spinning Jenny: A Woolen Revolution. https://www.faribaultmill.com/pages/spinning-jenny

Van Den Eede, Yi. (2014). “Extending ‘Extension’: A Reappraisal of the Technology-as-Extension Idea through the Case of Self-Tracking Technologies.” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, edited by Pieter Vermaas et al., Lexington Books.

UX Pilot. (n.d.). UX Pilot: AI UI Generator & AI Wireframe Generator. https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1257688030051249633/ux-pilot-ai-ui-generator-ai-wireframe-generator

Loveable. (n.d.). Learn about Lovable and how to get started. https://docs.lovable.dev/introduction/welcome

Critical Comparison

Morality and Materiality in Digital Technology and Cognition

2025-11-14 mkingsle 3 Comments

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 Response

The Living Library: Mediating Morality in Books

2025-11-09 dyu20

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

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From Object to Ongoing: Ingold’s Response to Gell on Art and Agency

2025-11-08 Christina Zhao

In Ingold’s Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, he identifies a major theoretical source of anthropologist Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, published in 1998, in which he uses as a point to expand, challenging Gell’s focus on the finished artwork and its social functions, and discovers for an anthropology that emphasizes process, practice, and correspondence.

About Alfred Gell

Alfred Gell (1945–1997) was a British social anthropologist who was trained by professors of both Cambridge and the London School of Economics. He was known for sharp, concept-driven writings mostly based on ethnographic cases. Gell was deeply interested in how humans use material objects to act, communicate, and exert influence, and his research varied across topics such as symbolism, ritual, the cognitive dimensions of art, etc.

About the Source

Gell’s book, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (1998), has became famous for changing the way many scholars think about art. Instead of treating art mostly as a vehicle for aesthetics or cultural meanings, Gell claims artworks as parts of social action. He argued that artworks help to make things happen as they guide attention, influence decisions, and carry the presence of people across time and space. Gell further claimed that objects can be understood through the ways in which they connect to people and their original intentions. Moreover, he stated that the “anthropology of art” is the study of a set of social relations that an object stands in a special, “art-like” relation to a social agent. In other words, it is to start from the object, map the social relations around it, and then reconstruct the intentions and meanings that brought it into being.

Ingold’s Citation

Ingold cites the above idea in his book that Gell’s definition captures a widespread habit in the anthropology of art, in which specifically, the process of taking a finished object, placing it in the social context, and reading it backwards from the object to the maker’s intention or cultural meanings. From this, Ingold suggested that Gell refers to that “it should be possible to trace a chain of causal connections, in reverse, from the final object to the initial intention that allegedly motivated its production, or to the meanings that might be attributed to it” (Ingold 7). Ingold further thinks this move turns art into a static thing to be decoded, and that it hides the actual, living work of making, which is the growth of form in materials and the skilled perception of practitioners as they act and respond. In this case, Ingold sets out his own alternative that rather than an anthropology of art that reads in reverse from object to intention, he is convinced that it would be an anthropology with art that moves forward along with practice, and following how forms arise in time through attention, action, and material response.

Ingold’s Application of Source

Gell tends to reject the idea that artworks are only aesthetic objects or only symbols. As we mentioned before, he treats them as parts of action. In this view, it was further argued that an artwork is an index of a person or event and that it can stand in for a maker, bind a promise, intimidate, attract, or persuade. From Ingold’s perspective, he thinks that starting from the finished object leads us to miss or pay less attention to the ongoing movements, adjustments, and sensitivities through which forms actually come to be and these are the most vital parts. While Gell’s tool helps us to analyze how objects work in social networks after they are made, Ingold tends to want a tool for staying with the momentum growth of the work during its making process. Therefore, we suppose this was the reason that Ingold distinguishes the anthropology of art from the anthropology with art, in which further emphasizes the learning from art as a practice that trains perception and judgment in real time.

Across the book, Ingold argues that anthropology, archaeology, art, and architecture are not only fields that study things, but they are crafts of inquiry and that they share a basic commitment of that knowledge grows by working with materials, paying careful attention, and adjusting to it as we gain them. From this, he raises the term participant observation. According to Ingold, participant observation is not just a technique for gathering “qualitative data” to analyze for later, it is also a way of knowing from the inside.

Applying Gell’s insights, he stated a clear statement of a dominant approach that he wanted to challenge which is it focuses on the object and reconstructs intentions in reverse. Ingold calls this a “reverse-reading, analytic approach” and mentions that it leads to a dead end for the relation between anthropology and art, as it encourages anthropology to make other practices into objects for study instead of learning along with them. He proposes a different relation of that to think of art and anthropology as companion practices that both “reawaken our senses” and let knowledge grow “from the inside of being.”

We would say that Ingold uses Gell’s views as motivations to sharpen his own terms. Gell offers “agency” as an answer to the problem of how objects can matter in social life. In this case, Ingold responds by shifting the starting point that instead of asking how finished objects “act back” on people or stand in for them, he perhaps question how the work would involve materials, and how creators follow the lines of movement, force, and flow as they bring the work alive.

Overall, Gell provides us a strong analysis of art as part of social action, in which Ingold does somehow agree, but Ingold comes up with his own insights towards that with the living processes of making and seeing. By citing Gell’s views and then offering his own insights on “anthropology with art”, “knowing from the inside”, and “correspondence”, Ingold redirects the vision from what an object leads to how a work would process through time. This shift also reshapes his view of method, in which participant observation becomes a craft commitment to learn by moving with people and materials.

Contributors

Christina Zhao

Jacqueline Shen

References

Alfred Gell. Editorial Herder Mexico. (2022, February 21).

Claude Smith. (2015, April 9). A messy studio is a happy studio….work in progress.

Gell, A. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon.

Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (1st ed.).

Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203559055

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Ingold, Conneller, and the Materials of Creation

2025-11-02 rose 3 Comments

If there is one foundational argument in all of Ingold’s Making, it would be the one presented in Chapter 2: Materials of Life. The book explores our relationship with the act of “making” through many mediums, but in this chapter, he focuses on the materials themselves, centered around the idea that it is not a project’s surrounding idea that creates it, but rather, the engagement with both materials and consciousness. In order to solidify this argument further, he cites the work of Chantal Conneller, whose 2011 book An Archaeology of Materials: Substantial Transformations in Early Prehistoric Europe prescribes concepts to Ingold that elevate his argument to a higher level of understanding- namely, the return of alchemy.

Project v. Growth

Before we begin to characterize Conneller, however, we must recap Ingold first. And this chapter can be best illustrated by a graph he provides. Two vertical lines parallel each other- one stands for a flow of consciousness, the other is a flow of materials. Then, the flow of consciousness stops to form an image, while the flow of materials stops to form an object. But instead of letting these stoppages occur and resolve naturally, we have instead formed a new connection, one where ideas and objects feed off the flows of consciousness and materials, instead of letting the natural movement of both create on their own accord. (Ingold, 20)

The diagram of consciousness, image, materials, objects. (Ingold, 20)

This is a view that Ingold and many others characterize as hylomorphism, a theory by Aristotle that creates an object from start to finish with a predetermined purpose, function, and amount of raw material. It is this to which, Ingold states, we are accustomed to- the concept of making as a project. But rather, he proposes a new way of thinking; that is, viewing making as a process of growth, an interaction with the world of materials, an intervention in worldly processes. Instead of having an ouroboros of images and objects reign supreme without paying mind to the matter that constitues them, they should be formed as natural interventions within both- not wanting to know what will occur when consciousness and materials collide, but waiting in anticipation for the result of them doing so. (Ingold, 20) And in order to do that, we need to stop viewing materials through the lens of chemistry, and instead through the lens of alchemy.

About Chantal Conneller

This perspective of alchemy is one that Conneller has focused on for quite some time, in her position as an archaeologist and a professor of early prehistory at the University of Newcastle. With a focus on the mesolithic period, her book An Archaeology of Materials: Substantial Transformations in Early Prehistoric Europe helps to shift the view of materials away from one that fuels an image or its object, but as a unique form of matter with its own qualities and manifestation. Within this book, she argues that materials cannot be understood by one singular, all-encompassing, rigid definition, but rather through the social, cultural, and technical practices in which they are appropriated. (Conneller) And this perspective is one best understood by one who works with materials for a living, one who studies the art of alchemy.

One key example by Conneller is the differences in the characterization of gold- for a chemist, gold is a periodic element and has a form different from its physical manifestation. But for the alchemist, gold is a yellow, shining matter that glows brighter under water and can have its shape transformed- and the definition of gold is applicable to anything that fits the subject criteria. (Ingold, 29) This difference is key to Conneller’s main argument- “different understandings of materials are not simply “concepts” set apart from “real” properties; they are realised in terms of different practices that themselves have material effects.” Just because one material has a specific composition does not mean it is limited to it- instead, the alchemist views the material by “what it does, specifically when mixed with other materials, treated in particular ways, or placed in particular situations.” (Ingold, 29)

Chemical Ignorance

When comparing Ingold and Conneller to one another, parallels start to form- where Ingold expresses skepticism against the loop of image and object feeding into one another, Conneller directly warns against using one context of a material as a universal definition for all others. It is the same point- one conclusion on an idea or material cannot be used as a basis of knowledge for other forms of matter. Both consciousness and materials are vast in their complexity, difference, and position in space and time- no two forms of matter are ever the same.

And where Conneller proposes a shift to view materials as not singular categories, but amorphous forms that shift with the winds of time and context, Ingold uses this logic as a platform to propose his own shift; a shift that begins to view the act of making as a multifaceted processes that observes and intervenes in the world around us, specific to time and place. One practice, as Conneller observes, is not a basis on which one can interpret and make conclusions upon another. Instead these practices differ immensely in their purpose, their interaction with the world around it, and the final artifact they happen to create. (Ingold, 29) Everything in the act of creation, according to Ingold, is relative to the world around it- Conneller just so happens to agree.

Conclusions

To summarize, ideas and objects cannot blindly survive on their own- an awareness and a centering of creation must be shifted back to consciousness and materials. In doing so, we are giving these materials sentience and life, gifting them a wide-varying, complex definition that shifts with the practice and purpose they are used for. Conneller encourages creators to, instead of viewing materials solely through their form, view them through their process, intervene in their evolution, create with them in the forefront of their mind. Both ideas, like the diagram of creation theorized by Ingold, work in tandem to produce one another- where consciousness and materials collide and swirl to create images and objects, Conneller’s theory of material context supports and validates Ingold’s rally to indeed, shift our thinking by a quarter term- view the act of creation not as a project to be completed, but as an interaction to be mediated and observed.

Sources

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. Routledge, 12 Apr. 2013.

Conneller, Chantal. An Archaeology of Materials: Substantial Transformations in Early Prehistoric Europe. Routledge, 28 Mar. 2012.

Critical Response

Making… In a Silent Search

2025-11-02 eshin01 2 Comments

Tactility and silence are essential conditions of meaningful learning. The blog post, “In a Silent Search: Reflection on Umberto Eco’s Library of the World”, by Maryam Abusamak, is a film analysis of the documentary, Umberto Eco: A Library of the World (2022), directed by Davide Ferrario. In this blog post, Abusamak summarizes the core themes of the documentary; she demonstrates how the library of the famous philosopher, Umberto Eco, acts as a meaningful tool of knowledge production. She proves that in an information-saturated world, this biographical film demonstrates the importance of learning slowly and selectively. To extend her analysis, I propose that this film also exemplifies the cruciality of knowing through being, a concept explained in Tim Ingold’s book, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture. Through connecting Abusamak’s analysis to Ingold’s framework, I aim to show the importance of learning independently and critically through slow-paced and tactile methods; this message is especially important in a world where mis- and disinformation is instantaneously available through simple clicks.

Both Eco and Ingold illustrate inanimate objects as living beings. Interacting with these beings achieves meaningful knowledge production. I place emphasis on the word “with”, as Ingold repeatedly encourages the reader to not think “of” but “with” objects (8). Abusamak perceives Eco’s library, as presented in the documentary, as a “living organism” that “binds matter, meaning, and mediation”. In each book, “matter and meaning are inseparable”, demonstrating Ingold’s view that knowledge is made “in correspondence” with a material rather than extracted “from” it (94, 8). To Ingold, objects are alive due to their everchanging state; a building is never fully completed, as it will experience reconstructions, mold removal, and repainting over time (48), and a statue changes continuously, as it is chiseled by its artist and eventually “worn down by rain” (22). Abusamak’s interpretation of Eco’s library exemplifies this concept metaphorically and physically. She describes his library as a “living system of technical memory”, as well as “living matter” made of “ink” and “paper” (Abusamak). As a result, the individual who peruses this library acts as a maker of knowledge among a collection of living beings. Therefore, Eco’s library exemplifies Ingold’s view by acting as a “world of active materials” in which the maker is a “participant” (Ingold 21).

Furthermore, Eco’s library exemplifies Ingold’s view that tactile mediums enable nonconformist learning. Within her blog post, Abusamak claims the library exemplifies Stiegler’s concept of “epiphylogenesis”–the recording of human evolution through “tools, marks and traces we create” (qtd. in Abusamak). These physical traces externalize memories which survive “across generations” (Abusamak). While Eco favours tactile media consumption, Ingold favours tactile media-making; he believes handwriting, handdrawing, “weaving, lacemaking and embroidery” portray “the stories of the world” (112). He states that human knowledge production should replicate the “ongoing movement of” handdrawn and handwritten lines (Ingold 140). Furthermore, he does not praise “straight-line people” who run from point “A to B” (Ingold 140), but instead promotes “pack-donkey people” who “wander” and learn through “self-discovery” (140, 141). Rather than pursuing a linear path leading from “idea” to “action”, he embraces learning through instinct and curiosity (Ingold 140). This idea is upheld by Eco’s library, which “resists the linear order and embraces the chaos of curiosity” (Abusamak). Altogether, Eco’s library promotes knowing through being; its collection of non-chronological memories embraces the whimsical, unconventional learning promoted by Ingold.

Lastly, Eco’s library and Ingold’s theory express skepticism towards virtual learning. According to Eco, “clicking a button” brings about a “bibliography of 10,000 titles” that is “worthless” due to its sheer ubiquity; however, if one discovered three library books, they “would read them… and learn something” (qtd. in Abusamak). Ingold agrees with this statement; he believes modern consumers abandon learning as soon as they “[fill] [their] bags” with information (5). Like Eco, he condemns the mindless clicks produced by our fingers. He states that when ubiquitous information “is at our fingertips” it is simultaneously “out of our hands” (122). Additionally, he promotes Heidegger’s views of the “hand” as a symbol of sentience; when it writes with pen, “it tells” (Ingold 122). Therefore, he argues traditional penmen produce emotional “gesture and inscription”, while modern typists do not “feel” their “letters” (Ingold 122, 123). He shows that in order to generate true making, we must engage the entire human hand, rather than press buttons that enable machinic processes. To Ingold and Eco, technological advancement, sensitive to the touch of our fingertips, has decimated emotionally-engaged learning and impactful media consumption.

In a distracting, information-saturated world, Eco and Ingold emphasize the importance of learning through instinctual, nonconformist, and tactile means. Rather than gathering ubiquitous information through a mindless press of a button, individuals must attentively engage with physical materials to produce meaningful knowledge. As Abusamak states, Eco’s philosophy “challenges the illusion that more information equals more knowledge”; instead he attributes intellect to thinking slowly and selectively. According to Abusamak, Eco’s library relates to our curriculum through its transformation of media theory into “something we can see and feel”; her physical description of Eco’s library and its ability to evoke curiosity demonstrates the importance of slow, tactile learning. As a result, Eco’s library is an example of a tool that enacts Ingold’s concept of “knowing” occurring “at the heart of being” (6). Instead of instantaneously summoning innumerous sources of digestible information, we can engage directly with a physical environment, such as that of a library, to independently conceive truth.

Works Cited

Abusamak, Maryam. In a Silent Search: Reflection on Umberto Eco’s Library of the World, UBC Blogs, 9 Oct 2025, https://blogs.ubc.ca/mdia300/archives/394 .

Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, Taylor & Francis Group, 2013, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203559055.

Image Taken by Emily Shin (Page 83 of George Orwell’s 1984)

Post Written by Emily Shin

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Hey! I Saw Them Live*

2025-10-29 mkingsle 7 Comments

Introduction

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

Media Extensions and Prosthetic Memories

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

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

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

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

Our Memories and Time

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

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

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

A Dependance on Documentation

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

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

Prosthetic Emotions

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

Works Cited

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

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

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

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

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

Image by Molly Kingsley

Written by Molly Kingsley

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

2025-10-29 OwenMenning 4 Comments

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

Background on Michael Polanyi

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

Formal vs. Personal Knowledge

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

Ways of Telling

Ways of Thinking

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

Works Cited

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

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

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