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Video Games as Evocative Objects

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Video games can evoke feelings of liberating escapism while shaping perceptions of real life. In her anthology, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, Sherry Turkle demonstrates the ability of objects to facilitate transitional periods of life. Several chapters demonstrate how beloved objects can mediate coming-of-age experiences. When reflecting on my own belongings, I realized a Nintendo game titled, Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town, mediated my perceptions of adulthood. I perceive this cherished game as my own “evocative object”; as a young child, its virtual world evoked my excitement towards growing up. 

For my seventh birthday, my oldest sister gifted me a mysterious Macy’s box. Inside the box was my first video game console–a pink, hand-me-down GameBoy Advance. Inside the console was a game cartridge titled, Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town. As I flipped the console’s on-switch for the first time, a saturated, pixelated screen and a cheerful soundtrack greeted me. The game was a farming simulator, where the main character collects profits by selling dairy, poultry, crops, and foraged items across the quaint atmosphere of Mineral Town. While creating a profitable farm, the player can build relationships with NPC townspeople, get married, and start a family. The game never ends; however, one can presume that winning consists of bringing economic prosperity to the town and becoming a likeable figure among its citizens. At the young age of seven, I did not realize the game’s themes of coming-of-age, hard work, and social acceptance. Now, as a twenty-year-old reflecting on its narrative, I recognize its depiction of adulthood through the player’s journey of moving to a new town, meeting new people, and pursuing a risky career.

I played this game for hours on end, under the covers past bedtime, and during the morning before school; Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town not only catalyzed my love for video games, but mediated my expectations of adulthood. Through numerous hours of improving my farm and achieving a successful lifestyle for the in-game protagonist, the game subconsciously instilled the message that hard work results in joy and companionship. Additionally, the game introduced concepts of trade and capitalism to its child audience by framing a profitable lifestyle as the player’s ultimate goal. Within the game, the protagonist can earn the townspeople’s admiration by gifting them items and talking to them on a daily basis. This mechanic led my immature mind to think that in reality, showering individuals with their favoured items and repeatedly speaking to them would guarantee their loyalty. The addictive, interactive medium illustrated friendships as collectible prizes, rather than everchanging, complex relationships. Unknowingly, this piece of electronic media produced an unrealistic view of adult life as fun, easy, and exciting.

I believe this evocative object would belong in Turkle’s chapter, “Objects of Transition and Passage”. Turkle notes transitional objects “[mediate]” a child’s “growing recognition” of their independence (Winnicott qtd. in 314). Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town taught me such independence by forcing me to make responsible choices in a low-stakes environment. If I forgot to feed my livestock or water my crops, my profits could hinder. Then, I would have less money to purchase gifts for my in-game neighbours and I would lose their friendship; as a result, the game taught me accountability in a simulated setting. However, as I grew older, I lost interest in the game. I no longer needed it to simplify the concept of responsibility to me; instead, I practiced “real-life” responsibility through managing schoolwork, chores, and extracurricular pursuits. As I ventured into my teenage years, the game sat in my dusty drawer, supporting Turkle’s view that these objects of childhood development are “destined to be abandoned” (314). 

Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town as a Cyborg Object

Furthermore, this game acts as a “cyborg” object–an object which combines the “natural and the artificial” (Turkle 325).  An example of a “cyborg” object is Annalee Newitz’s beloved laptop in the chapter “My Laptop”. Newitz’s relationship with her laptop is deeply “intimate”; the inanimate device melds with her natural self causing her difficulty in distinguishing “where it leaves off and she begins” (Turkle 325). She exists as “one with her virtual persona” and views herself as the ‘“command line…of glowing green letters”’ on her screen (Turkle 325). Similarly to Newitz, I developed an emotional attachment to my virtual persona–the tiny, pixelated farmer on the screen of my GameBoy Advance. The more time I invested in my persona, the more she represented my hard work. As a result, my connection to her grew, similarly to the laptop’s “co-extensive” relationship with Newitz’s “self” (Turkle 325). Altogether, this avatar was not just an escape to a simplistic world where adulthood did not seem so frightening, but a representation of myself and the adult I aspired to be.


Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town’s Mediation of the Body

As Wegenstein states in Critical Terms for Media Studies, “‘the logic of the computer”’ has afforded humans the ability to exist as numerous “selves” (28). She notes that modern individuals experience satisfaction by constructing several virtual “personas” that contrast their real-life, “mundane” selves (Wegenstein 28). I experienced this phenomenon while developing my in-game persona; my avatar’s economic and social autonomy contrasted my supervised upbringing. Moreover, the amount of exciting tasks the game afforded my character differed greatly from my simple, repetitive childhood. Rather than being a supervised seven-year-old child, the game transformed myself into a farm-owner, creating a self-sufficient life.

Conclusion

Altogether, my virtual experiences afforded by Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town mediated my expectations of adult life. Through using this object as a form of escapism, I gained a deep emotional connection to this game that remains with me today. While glamourizing adulthood, this game played a role in my childhood development by introducing concepts of hard work and responsibility.   

Works Cited

Wegenstein, Bernadette. “Body.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen, U of Chicago P, 2010, pp. 19-34.

Turkle, Sherry. “WHAT MAKES AN OBJECT EVOCATIVE?” Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, The MIT Press, 2007, pp. 307–27. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhg8p.39 . Accessed 4 Oct. 2025.

Written by Emily Shin

Photos taken by Emily Shin

Critical Concept Explication

Do We Sense The World… Or Does it Sense Us?

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As we navigate the world, our perception is shaped through our touch, taste, sight, sound, and smell.

But how do we understand these experiences and how does mediation play into this interaction?

In the chapter Senses, Caroline Jones explores two contrasting answers to this question. Through Friedrich Kittler and Marshall McLuhan, we can begin to understand the complexities of how our senses interpret media and the surrounding world.

Starting with our first theorist, Kittler believes that our senses are radically shaped by the media around us. His idea is fairly synonymous with ideas about technological determinism. On the opposite end of the spectrum, McLuhan insists that human senses are grounded in the body and simply extend their reach through or using media. By dissecting these opposing ideas, Jones extends these ideas to explain how media and the senses interact.

Jones’s main argument is that the senses are not natural or unchanging, but are always shaped and reshaped by media. As she puts it: “The senses both constitute our ‘sense’ of unmediated knowledge and are the first medium with which consciousness must contend.” (p. 88) While Media delivers content to our existing senses, they actively reorganize how we experience the world through touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight.

Building on the work of the two earlier thinkers, Friedrich Kittler and Marshall McLuhan, Kittler argued that media fundamentally produce and change the senses. We see this currently when smartphones reshape our attention span and even eye movement patterns from the constant flicking and scanning our eyes do, while also restructuring how we process information.

To compare, McLuhan argues that media are extensions of our senses. Take for instance, the telephone extends hearing, but our senses remain grounded in our body. Jones takes this further by showing that, across history, from ancient philosophy to modern capitalism, our senses have always been shaped by outside forces. For example, we have been conditioned to associate smell to the terms “Pine Forest” and “Country Fresh” to a clean, hygienic home.

As for vision, society has often treated sight as the most important path to truth. According to Jones, vision became privileged because philosophers, starting with Plato, saw it as the most objective sense that could reach truth from a distance. Over time, philosophy and art reinforced this by treating sight as the ‘pure’ path to knowledge, while pushing touch, taste, and smell aside as “too bodily” or “animal”.

But this ranking of sight above touch, smell, and taste is not natural because it’s something created by media and culture. Her main point is that the media are not solely neutral tools that show us the world. Instead, they actively change our senses, reshaping what we know is true and also how we actually experience reality through our bodies. And to study media, we need to perceive senses as the very ways of shaping our sense of reality.

Through the course of philosophy’s historical developments, we’ve seen a lot of fluctuations as to what counts as knowledge and the ways in which one may truly “know” something. From the philosophers of Ancient Greece – Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, who regarded philosophical reasoning as the way to gain a true sight of reality. to modern-day thinkers, most infamously Hume, who rejected the concept of “universal laws”, favouring sensory experience to understand the world.

In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Plato presented prisoners shackled to the walls of a cave, where the prisoners perceive the projected shadows of objects as the objects themselves, for they can not turn around, and thus, they are unaware of the illusion being carried out. In this case, the eyes are seeing, yet the prisoner is effectively blind to the truth of reality. Their “senses” have effectively failed to distinguish between a representation of reality, its fabrication and reality itself.  Plato attributes this blindness to a lack of philosophical reasoning. Critiquing the dependency on the five senses to understand reality, and as a means to achieve true knowledge. He then proceeds to provide the remedy for this, in which the prisoner is required to be willing to be blinded once again, this time by the volitional blinding light of reality. Shown in the allegory as the eyes having to adjust to the bright sun after spending a whole life in the darkness of the cave. 

Fast-forwarding into the Enlightenment period, we have John Locke and, famously, David Hume, with his Problem of Induction, arguing that we can not know for sure that something has happened until it has happened; his idea of reality is one which can only be validated by our senses, such as the eyes or ears.

Hume argues that it is only a force of habit and custom that we assume to “know” things. For example, we do not have all the empirical data of history and the future to accurately claim that a sound is produced when we clap our hands. Human reasoning, consequently, is argued to be a cumulative process based on data from sensory experience, and this is the primary way in which we understand the world.

In concluding the chapter’s philosophical basis, Jones’ main idea that “our senses are not fixed” is strongly reinforced by a modern thinker, Karl Marx and his argument that the way our senses interact with technology and political economies form us as humans. This idea of technological determinism claims our senses are formed externally by the historical development of the world rather than internally within ourselves. Our senses are in a constant state of change and adaptation, in relation to our experience of the world.

Taking a step back to Hume, which considers media as a tool for gathering or promoting information for the senses, and is not only “the bridge in the middle” but also something that shapes and influences how people use and reconsider their senses and the world experienced through them. Media not only “outputs”, but also “inputs” through our senses. The chapter shifts our understanding of media as solely information we consume but also the force that transforms our human senses that we use to experience the world.

While the media shapes people’s perception of reality and the way we interpret our own senses, the media itself is also ever changing and replaced by new inventions and technologies. Our senses, when mediated, shift with it, and so does our conversation with the world around us. In such a context, the ability to independently think while understanding how our senses interact with media is the key of guiding us out of the cave.

Maxine Gray, Betty Liao, Nam Pham, Aubrey Ventura

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What’s The INFO On Information?

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This chapter proves that information is never neutral or stable. It is a common denominator across multiple forms, and each form reveals how we understand systems, communication, and the meaning behind them. The chapter explores virtuality, language, entropy, noise, and feedback, which highlight that information, along with being stored, also reshapes the environments that carry it. Even though information sometimes fades or persists, most often, it transforms. Theories from Saussure, Shannon, Boltzmann, and Bateson prove that information is defined less by permanence and more by probability, relation, and adaptation. Information demonstrates itself to be both constrained and filled with endless possibilities, whether through the structural logic of language, the physical principles of entropy, or the creative possibilities of noise and feedback.

​​​​​​Information: Everywhere and Nowhere

We found that one of the most intriguing parts of the chapter on virtuality is the contrast in how information was stored in the past compared to today. Physical traces such as carvings and manuscripts have been left behind and have survived for centuries. Contrastingly, digital information is extremely fragile. For example, a file can be duplicated without limitation, but it can also disappear with a click or even a forgotten password. As such, information is both everywhere and nowhere. It doesn’t necessarily have weight or size, yet it structures the way in which we perceive the world. This is where its power lies. Information can be re-coded or transformed to fit new contexts instantly. This reminds us of how much of what we create only exists temporarily; examples include Snapchat stories or disappearing messages. Blake’s idea of how these moments still carry meaning even if they don’t have a lasting trace can be applied here. What matters isn’t necessarily permanence but the way information can adapt and reshape systems.

Communication and Language

The most striking aspect of the “Language” chapter was the comparison between Shannon and Weaver’s theory of communication and Saussure’s theory of language. Despite being completely different theories, they still both show that systems matter more than the individual messages. Meaning essentially appears from the structures that shape it. Shannon and Weaver’s model treats information in terms of probability. The focus is on how predictable or unpredictable a message is within the system. Saussure also makes a similar point, as speech only makes sense in the context of the larger structure of language. This is where words have value through their position in relation to each other. For example, in the text, English is mentioned as 50% statistically predictable. Even though redundancy would sound like a flaw, it is actually what makes communication work. If every word were unpredictable, we wouldn’t be able to follow along. Even though the system constrains us, this constraint is what gives meaning and clarity.

What is Entropy? How its Connected To Energy?

Looking at how information has a significant connection to physical systems, the theorist Ludwig Boltzmann demonstrated that entropy, which measures disorder, is a physical property of a system.  Over time, systems tend towards maximum entropy, which means more disorder and less usable energy. Ordered systems are low in entropy and contain more information and less unusable energy. Using the example of a scenario of finding a hot cup of coffee on a table in a cool room instead of the usual situation of finding a cup at room temperature to explain entropy. The hot coffee in the cold room is low-entropy because the coffee won’t stay hot for long, making it an unusual situation. In contrast, a cup at room temperature is a more probable and expected state.  Boltzmann wanted to define the entropy of a physical system as a function of possible energetic configurations, the number of different possible ways to distribute more configurations and produce a random high entropy.  Boltzmann quantification of the entropy law, creating the equation S = k log P, with S standing for the entropy and P being the number of different possibilities.

How We Use Entropy in Communication Systems

Looking further at the link with statistical mechanics, Shannon defined information as the mathematical inverse of probability. The more surprising it is, the more information it contains. For example, choosing from a binary set (yes/no, on/off) provides one bit of information, but not a lot, because the options at the source are very limited. In this way, the value of information is calculated: the more choices a sender has, the more information the message carries. In the approach to calculate the value of information, considering how many choices the sender has and how much information the message may contain, Shannon created a mathematical formulation of information H = –∑ pi log pi. Pi being the probability of choice, H is if the choice is predictable. Information theory explains how unlikely order shifts to probable disorder in physical systems, distinguishing between signals (useful) and noise (waste) in communication. In physical systems, thermodynamic entropy is the amount of energy unavailable for further work, or “wasted”. In communication systems, the informational entropy of a message measures the message probabilities from different perspectives

– The source: how many choices are possible

– The channel: the amount of signal transmitted versus the amount lost in noise

– The destination: how much uncertainty the message resolves for the receiver.

Through the development of reception theory, reader response theory and cognitive science, which have focused on how people interpret information through different ways of communication. 

Media Systems and Noise

The author, Bruce Clarke, positions media not as neutral tools for transmission but as dynamic systems embedded in material and environmental contexts. His liking for systems theory is evident in the way the chapter frames all meaningful communication as occurring within cycles of transmission and reception, where signals and noise are always present. Noise is defined as anything in a received message that was not originally sent. It was first treated as an obstacle to efficiency, described by Shannon as random interference that disrupts productivity. However, he and Weaver also recognized that noise introduces new probabilities into the system and can be understood as information itself. Gregory Bateson sharpened this point with his definition of information as “[…] a difference that makes a difference”(165). Noise unsettles transmitted messages, creating the potential for new forms and information to emerge.

Norbert Wiener’s definition of cybernetics as the study of messages and control highlights why noise matters. Both machines and biological organisms regulate themselves through circuits of transmission and feedback. Signals travelling through these circuits are never perfectly stable; real-world channels, be that nerves or telephone wires, always contain random fluctuations or noise. Just as thermodynamic systems lend themselves toward entropy, communication systems face the inevitability of noise. What begins as a problem of error or interruption can quickly become a creative opportunity: systems learn and evolve because they must adapt to noise.

This is most clearly visible in media arts. What engineers once feared as breakdowns or flaws often became the raw material for innovation. Musicians like Jimi Hendrix transformed screeching feedback into controlled musical enhancements, while tape manipulation and distortion gave artists like the Beatles new expressive vocabularies. In these cases, noise was not a loss but a generative supplement to the message. Visual media can carry similar outcomes: glitches in video or digital photography can become aesthetic choices, reframing errors as features. Media art reveals that meaning is often made through the manipulation of noise, not its elimination.

Early communication systems, such as the telegraph and telephone, prioritize noiseless transmission, aiming to reduce distortion, while inscription media such as the phonograph or photograph captured and preserved both signal and noise. Friedrich Kittler shows how these technologies disrupted the dominance of writing, which reduces speech to 26 symbols (letters) and filters out the messy world of accidental sound. In contrast, sound recording and photography preserved continuous reality, complete with its imperfections. This created a conceptual divide: symbolic systems that treat information as immaterial code, and material systems that capture the world’s natural, noisy textures. However, symbolic and material systems are never fully separate. Information only comes into being when it takes material form, whether in carved stone or cloud servers. The qualities of these materials determine what endures, what decays, and what remains accessible.

Noise is not the enemy of communication but a structural feature of it. Sometimes it destroys order, but just as often it enables creativity, adaptation, and novelty. Media systems are ecological: they consist of signals, noise, and the environments that sustain them. Recognizing this prepares us for the cybernetic concept of feedback, where noise and uncertainty are not filtered out but re-circulated through the system, enabling regulation, adaptation, and, at times, the discovery of entirely new patterns.

Introduction of Feedback in Information Systems

Information has shifted not just to store or transmit, but to be used to create a new function of feedback. Noting that information theories define information as a mathematically inverse function of the probability of a predictable message. Bateson stated that noise is the only possible source of new patterns or information, highlighting how noise always carries meaning, even if it seems meaningless to the audience. During the 1940s, as computers were being developed, feedback became a crucial part of control mechanisms. With certain sensors, both input and output can be managed by converting them into a circuit, creating a feedback loop that uses its own output as an input. This results in either negative feedback, which stabilizes order, or positive feedback, which leads to growth or disorder. Uncertainties about messages allowed noise to serve as a source of additional information, introducing unexpected patterns useful for creative or adaptive purposes. Feedback transforms transmission into a dynamic process that enables systems to self-regulate, discover new patterns, and produce art.

Key Takeaways

Media should be understood not merely as channels for transmitting information, but as dynamic systems in which signals and noise interact within material and environmental contexts. Clarke emphasizes that meaning arises from relationships within these systems, what Bateson calls the “context principle”, and that communication is impossible without context. Information is never neutral. It moves, transforms, and reshapes the systems it inhabits. Media are not just channels for messages but dynamic, ecological systems where signals and noise coexist, and new meaning emerges from the appearance of noise. Noise is not simply interference but a generative force that shapes, disrupts, and enriches meaning. By situating media within ecological systems, Clarke challenges the notion of isolated tools and instead presents them as active participants that both shape and are shaped by the information around them.

Work Cited

Title cover and Images created in Canva By Alisha and Sam

Clarke, Bruce. “Information.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 157-171. Accessed 1 October 2025.


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Art and Reproducing the Human Experience

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How do we consider a piece to be a work of art? 

How do we differentiate between mass media and fine art? 

Is it the time and effort put into the piece? 

Is it the materials used? 

Or, is it the meanings and interpretations that surround the work? 

These are all questions American scholar Johanna Drucker tackles in her chapter from Critical Terms for Media Studies. 

Art has long been recognized as a concept that is difficult to define. We often hear the saying “art is subjective,” and that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” So, if the term “art” is so complex and personal, why attempt to define it at all? In an era of mass media and reproduction, it is important for us, as media studies students, to understand what makes art valuable.

The methods by which modern artists create are very distant from what was originally used to classify works as pieces of art. These previous conventions included: 

  1. Art as a Set of Practices and a Class of Objects 

Modern artists are no longer limiting themselves to traditional materials and methods once used to create art. Instead of using paint or clay to create a piece, artists are now incorporating digital media into their work. This means art can no longer be classified solely on the basis of its making. 

  1. Mass Media vs Fine Art

Before, there was a clear boundary between “fine art” and “mass media.” Now that we are living in an age where reproduction is limitless and our access to images is immediate, those lines have now become blurred. Iconography, themes, and technology that are largely associated with “popular culture” or “commercial media” have now made their way into contemporary art practices.

  1. The Idea of an “Artist”

In the past, the classical idea of an “artist” revolved around being some sort of genius. They were trained professionals with formal skills who adhered to traditional notions of beauty, harmony, and proportion. However, these skills are no longer required to be given the title of an “artist.” Present-day artists instead explore diverse media and forms, not needing conventional skills. 

  1.  The Role of Fine Art

Art no longer has to establish aspirations toward “higher” values (spiritual messages or moral grandeur). Now art is no longer conforming to fixed genres, just as it is no longer being crafted from elite materials. 

Drucker starts off the chapter with a quote by Charles Ogden from The Foundations of Aesthetics: “Art is the exploitation of the medium.” Beginning the chapter with this quote establishes the important role media plays when defining art. The definition of art, as Drucker suggests, is never going to be fixed; it will shift along with the media through which they are expressed.

History of the Term “Art”: 

In the foundational understanding of art, the medium allows for the very existence of art. 

Image credit

As the chapter unfolds, the author guides us through the evolution of the definition of “art” across different time periods. As art expanded beyond technical perfection to embrace ideas and personal expression, the meaning of its media expanded as well.

The Classical Period shows us an art form that was primarily associated with applied skill. At this stage, individual talent wasn’t connected to personal expression. Instead, form followed a strict sense of aesthetic, and we can see this clearly in the work of sculptors like Praxiteles in the 4th century BCE.

Moving into the Medieval Period, we see artistic skills applied to more specialized tasks – things like illumination, calligraphy, painting, drawing, and bookbinding. Importantly, art was not yet recognized as a separate domain in itself, but rather as a craft embedded in other practices.

The Renaissance is where the idea of the artist as a gifted individual really emerges. Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, published in 1550, cemented the notion of the artist as a kind of genius. Figures like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo embody this new artistic ideal, where personal vision and technical skill were celebrated together.

During the Romantic Period, the emphasis shifted toward imagination and emotion. William Blake, for instance, highlighted art’s power to open “doors of perception.” Art was no longer just about beauty or mastery – it became a way to challenge the rationality of the Enlightenment (Adorno, anyone?).

Finally, in the Modern and Postmodern periods, we see radical shifts in how art relates to media. Pablo Picasso disrupted traditional artistic representation with collage. Marcel Duchamp pushed even further with conceptual art, famously exhibiting a porcelain urinal as artwork. And Andy Warhol brought mass media and popular culture into frame, blurring the lines between high art and commercial imagery.

Through these shifts, the chapter shows how the definition of art and its relationship to media have continually evolved, reflecting broader cultural values and reshaping what we consider art to be.

Defining Art

As the chapter progresses, Drucker starts to formulate two key definitions of art, both of which directly correlate with the evolutions of art’s role, technical definition, and position of the artist themself. 

The first is art as autonomous, first introduced by philosophers of the Frankfurt School in the early 20th century- most notably, Walter Benjamin. His 1937 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, expands on this idea by introducing the concept of “aura,” a unique, unintelligible quality an original work holds, and cannot be replicated by mass media reproductions. This idea of aura was then expanded upon as a method of preserving older values through defamiliarization, the idea of not viewing a work through its original context, but informing a newer audience of the time and space it was conceptualized in. 

This theory was not only employed by Benjamin and his contemporaries such as Adorno and Horkheimer, but also by the cultural critic Clement Greenberg. In his essay, Avant Garde and Kitsch, he argued that fine art was to be used as a preservation of civilization in the fight against mass culture, insisting that the visual flatness of art was characteristic of its autonomy, in its ability to separate past capsules of time through art from ever evolving, ever shifting ideology.

Although Greenberg’s writings championed experimental fine art as the perfect cocktail of aesthetics and values to capture the present, his insistence of visuality was criticized as being despotic in its desire to critique ideological references and narrative qualities. Through this criticism, another definition was born- Art as conceptual, based not on formal principles and technicality, but on the individual ideas and concepts the artists employed. The origination of this school of thought can be traced back to Duchamp, in his work’s suggestion that art is not founded off of technical ability or formal principles, but off of conventions of thought and ideology. However, this definition started to go mainstream in the 50s and 60s, with artists and writers equally examining the concepts behind a piece as much as its material form. 

A quote that may encapsulate this definition best is Sol LeWitt’s, “An idea is a machine that makes art,” written in a 1967 essay, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art. Critic Lucy Lippard expanded on this further, observing the concepts of dematerialization within the art of the day- noting that artists were viewing material form as secondary to the work’s concept. Media that otherwise would not be used in a work started to be introduced in wanting to represent the artist’s ideas and concepts as purely as possible. Most audaciously- in the case of Yves Klein’s exhibition Void (1958), where he famously showed it was not the medium, but rather the lack thereof that made a piece luminous in its conceptuality- making it possible to enforce his ideas of direct, tangible presence and concept without the burden of medium.

This definition was not free without criticism, however. In one of her earliest works from 1966, Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag argued that modern art criticism was too focused with attempting to decode a work’s concepts, meaning, and ideas, sacrificing the fostering of direct, felt, sensuous experience in the attempt to make art decomposition an intellectual exercise of translation. But today, exemplified in contemporary art’s ideals of unorthodox media and materials, a colliding definition of fine art and mass production, and an emphasis on conceptual expression over strict formalism, the definition of art as conceptual lives on.

Takeaways 

The meaning of art and media will never be fixed; it shifts as culture evolves and as we, the audience, reshape what we consider “art.” 

In the modern and contemporary periods, our perception of media has moved on from being at the service of art to becoming the very subject and substance of artistic creations. In other words, instead of merely carrying the artist’s message, the medium began to gain recognition as an artistic presence in itself.

In the final pages of the chapter, Johanna invites us to reinterpret the chapter’s opening claim, “Art is the exploitation of the medium”. 

“‘Medium is a message.’ But it is the art coefficient that provokes wonder and seduces us into consideration of the way it inflects and shapes meaning”. By identifying art as the ‘coefficient’ of the medium rather than the central figure of the piece, the traditional hierarchy between art and medium is redefined. In this sense, art can be understood as a ‘meta-medium’: a tool that engages the audience and invites them to consider the potential and power of the medium itself.

Her final statement, “Art becomes a way of paying attention”, ties it all together beautifully. Art is now defined less by its materials or composition, and more by the way it is interpreted as being tangibly different from an everyday product of a different cultural industry, marked by its uniqueness to the artist and its context.Since our existence as humans is mediated by perception, shaped by personal and cultural backgrounds, art really is everywhere. It emerges whenever we choose to slow down, pay attention, and wherever we find beauty and meaning.

Sources:

Mitchell, W. J. T., Hansen, M. B. N., & Drucker, J. (2010). Art. In Critical terms for media studies. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226532660.001.0001

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Gaza and the Failure of Mass Media

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Never before has a genocide been both the most documented in history and the first ever livestreamed in real time. And never before has the world scrolled past such unthinkable horror.

Carpet bombing entire residential neighbourhoods, erasing streets, homes, and entire families in seconds.
A boy screaming into the night after Israeli airstrikes wiped out his entire family.
A father collecting the scattered remains of his daughter in a plastic bag because there is no body left to bury.
Premature babies pulled from incubators after hospitals were bombed.
Doctors forced to operate on children without anesthesia, using vinegar and sewing needles because medicine has been cut off.
Hospitals, mosques, and churches bombed to rubble.
UN schools turned into mass graves.
People burning to death because bombs ignited their homes, trapping them under rubble and fire with no way out.
The deliberate murder of journalists, medics, doctors, nurses, UN staff, aid workers.
White phosphorus and other internationally banned chemical weapons raining down on crowded refugee camps.
Children starving to death, due to malnutrition and Israeli-made famine.

They are my family. Many of them have been murdered. Others are still buried under the rubble. And for nearly two years now, my people have been forced to livestream their own genocide to the world.

But this genocide did not begin in 2023. It’s actually the latest chapter in a 77-year Zionist settler-colonialism of Palestine. It’s a continuation of the Nakba of 1948, where 750,000 Palestinains were forcibly expelled and 500 villages destroyed to make way for the creation of the colony of “Israel.” It has carried on through decades of apartheid policies and military occupation of indigenous Palestinian lands.

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A UN ambassador described Gaza as “the most documented genocide in history.” According to the latest UN OCHA update, Gaza’s Ministry of Health reports 65,419 Palestinians killed and 167,160 injured since October 2023. International law is shattered with impunity, and war crimes are committed in plain sight. A genocide carried out by a settler-colonial power, protected and armed by Western governments, and sanitized by Western media institutions. 

That is the contradiction I cannot shake. Billions see it but nothing changes. 

I think this paradox, of hyper-documentation alongside silence, denial, and complicity from institutions of power, is what makes Gaza one of the most urgent media events of our lifetime.

Messages, Means, and Agents Under Attack

To understand this paradox, I turn to John Durham Peters’ chapter on Mass Media in Critical Terms for Media Studies. The author explains that media always involve three things: a message, a means, and agents. The “what,” the “how,” and the “by/to whom” (p, 266)

In Gaza, all three are under attack.

The messages Palestinians send are live footage of their mass murder, but by the time they reach Western newsrooms, they are twisted into biased reporting that flattens, sanitizes, and outright misrepresents the truth. And this in turn, dehumanizes Palestinains to justify occupation and genocide. What is really the genocide of an indigenous population, carried out by a colonial state on illegally stolen land, occupied for 77 years, is reframed as a “conflict.”

The means are our devices and social media platforms. One would expect them to amplify oppressed voices, expose injustice, and make Palestinian suffering impossible to ignore. Yet these very platforms censor, shadowban Palestinian content and suspend accounts, silencing the very voices they should be carrying to the world. In fact, a 2025 report revealed that Meta, under an Israeli-led censorship campaign, complied with 94% of government takedown requests, removing or suppressing over 38 million posts about Palestine. At the same time, Israel has launched coordinated propaganda campaigns, paying influencers up to $7,000 per post to spread pro-Israel narratives.

And the agents, the local Palestinian journalists on the ground who risk everything to document the truth, are being targeted by the illegal Israeli occupation, murdered one after another. The occupation has deliberately murdered over 270 journalists and media workers during this genocide, an unprecedented number in history.

This is a systemic war on truth.

Power as the Ultimate Medium

“Power is perhaps the ultimate mass medium: it speaks to whom it will, multiplies symbols across space and time, and immobilizes audiences” (Peters, p. 278). The colonial state and its Western allies are not only waging war on an indigenous people and their land but also on the narrative itself. What the world sees, and what it is kept from seeing, is shaped by the machinery of power.

“Where mass media are, there is usually power” (p. 277). The myth of neutrality collapses when Western outlets uncritically reproduce and parrot the colonizer’s talking points, from the debunked “40 beheaded babies” claim to justifying the bombing of hospitals as “strikes on Hamas targets.” This is not journalism but propaganda laundering, justifying genocide and the 77-year-long illegal occupation and colonial oppression of Palestinians. Every accusation is a confession. Power multiplies these frames until they dominate the discourse, drowning out the voices of the oppressed.

Peters calls mass media “the playthings of institutions… under the management of the palace, the market, or the temple” (p. 277). In Gaza, the palace is the state power of the illegal Israeli occupation and its Western allies, which provide the political cover and billions of dollars in military aid (funded by our own tax dollars) that supply Israel with the most advanced weapons and military equipments in the world. The market is the military-industrial complex and corporate platforms, where profit is tied to both arms sales and digital control over information flows. The temple is the settler-colonial and ideological narratives that justify the occupation and genocide of Palestinians.

And when truth does break through, power immobilizes. Billions witness livestreamed massacres, children pulled from rubble, and entire neighbourhoods flattened yet visibility yields no action. Audiences are numbed, while those who resist and speak out are harassed, censored, fired, or cancelled. Cancel culture is weaponized against anyone who challenges these narratives, from journalists to students and professors, ensuring that speaking truth to power comes at the cost of their lives and careers.

Gaza exposes mass media as a battlefield where power itself is the ultimate medium, deciding what circulates, what is erased, and how the world responds—or fails to respond—to the most documented genocide in history.

Conclusion: Solidarity & Awareness as the Counter-Medium & Our Responsibility as Media Students

Gaza forces us to confront the failure and limits of the media. Never before has the world been so saturated with real-time evidence of genocide and war against humanity itself, and never before has that evidence been so easily dismissed, reframed, and silenced by those in power.

Yet despite censorship, despite propaganda, the truth is inevitable.

Citizen journalism in Gaza has created an indestructible archive that history will remember and hold power accountable. And global solidarity, from university encampments to mass protests and digital solidarity campaigns, shows that resistance and awareness are growing more than ever, worldwide. 

If mass media are the “playthings” of power, then solidarity and awareness are the counter-medium. It ensures that even when headlines distort and platforms censor, the truth still breaks through, carried by those who refuse silence and ignorance and choose to stand on the right side of history. Gaza teaches us that while mass media can immobilize, it can also mobilize when audiences choose to resist.

As Malcolm X said: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” 

And as media students, that choice is ours. We are not passive observers. We are agents who can decide whether to reproduce power’s narratives or to challenge them. To study media critically is to recognize its dangers but also its possibilities. Our responsibility is agency, and we have the tools to question, to respond, to expose, to resist.

By Maryam Abusamak

Image Credits

  • Photo: AFP – A relative mourns Palestine TV journalist Mohamed Abu Hatab and 11 family members, the day after they were killed in Israel’s bombardment of Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, November 3, 2023.
  • Photo: Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) – Pro-Palestine protest in Dublin, Ireland.
  • Photo: Abdel Kareem Hana / Associated Press – Relatives and colleagues mourn over the bodies of Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza, 2024.
  • Photo: Majdi Fathi / NurPhoto via Getty Images – Palestinian children walk past the rubble of the al-Bukhari mosque in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, March 2, 2024, after an overnight Israeli airstrike.
  • Photo: Anas Baba / AFP via Getty Images – Smoke rises above buildings in Gaza City as Israeli warplanes drop bombs at night.
  • Photo: Ali Jadallah/Anadolu Agency (AA Images) – The body of a Palestinian child after an airstrike.
  • Photo: Ahmed Hasaballah / Getty Images – Palestinian children mourn during the funeral of relatives killed in Israeli airstrikes on Gaza.
  • Cover image: Ashraf Amra / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images – Funeral ceremony held for Palestinian journalists Saeed Al-Taweel and Mohammad Sobh, who were killed in Israeli airstrikes in Gaza on October 10, 2023, while filming the targeting of a residential building in the Rimal district, western Gaza.

Critical Concept Explication

Negotiating the Body: Between Expression and Control

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Our group presented our analysis and explication through a podcast: https://on.soundcloud.com/mqPJiyJwTVvtSuQgM4

Our perceptions of the human body evolve across time periods and diversify across cultures. As technology advances, artificial intelligence and the ability to have multiple online personas complexify our view of the body as a mode for self-expression. Some even theorize the body will be replaced by “computational or other machinic embodiment”; this could appear as “brain layers” being transferred to “hard drives” in order to streamline knowledge exchange (Wegenstein 27). In these times of “disembodiment”, we must critically examine the importance of the tangible human body as a mode of communication (27). At first, our group was confused by the concept of being detached from the body; this prediction by Wegenstein and several theorists felt dystopian and unrealistic. However, we later realized this is exactly what Wegenstein aims to convey; she hopes to demonstrate the “frightening”, “posthuman’”, and “antihumanist” nature of this prediction (27). 

Connections with other Critical Terms

After watching other groups’ presentations, I found our chapter connected to the presentation on Chapter 12: New Media. The presenters noted that all media is in a sense “new”, as media of all ages has always had moments of “newness”. Although our chapter heavily focuses on defining the body as a medium, I believe the body can also constitute “new media”, as it is always being reinvented due to cultural precedents. Here, Hansen’s emphasis on affect and bodily experience of computation in “New Media”  underwrites Wegenstein’s claim that the body is not post-media but in media. Because of the heavily politicized nature in which bodies have existed through centuries, our chapter also connects to the “Law” chapter which emphasizes how legal codes inscribe and regulate bodies i.e determining which bodies are visible, legitimate, or deviant. Hence, we see the connection that the media produces bodies as aw policies. A striking example of this is cosmetic surgery–a regulated practice (with you can cut what is allowed and malpractice frameworks). Here we see the interplay of law and bodies as mediums of production. 

Podcast Brief

Through this podcast, we explore the discussion of ‘The Body’ chapter through summary, analysis, and drawing connection to our experiences and other media. We seek to answer the following questions: 

  1. If the body is always already mediated, is there such a thing as an “authentic” body at all?
  2. How does the body influence culture and how does culture influence the body?
  3. If the body is our first medium, what is one way you consciously use your body to communicate or express identity?

Our exploration of Wegenstein’s Body highlights how embodiment is never static but continually shaped by technology, culture, and law. Although it initially felt dystopian to explore the idea of disembodiment and machinic embodiment, we now see how it becomes predictive once we recognize it as a provocation to think critically about what makes the body meaningful. By situating the body alongside “new media” and legal frameworks, we see it not only as a vessel of self expression but also as a contested site of regulation, reinvention, and power. 

Podcast link: https://on.soundcloud.com/mqPJiyJwTVvtSuQgM4

Contributors: Stuti Sharma, Dea Yu, Emily Shin, Kimchi Tran

Works Cited

Wegenstein, Bernadette. “Body.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen, U of Chicago P, 2010, pp. 19-34.

StrawberryJello. “A Cold but Warm Winter ~Snow World~.”, SoundCloud, no. 8, 2016, https://soundcloud.com/strawberryjello/008-snow-world-yume-nikki-ost.

Critical Concept Explication

Mass Media is Never Neutral

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What does it really mean to speak to the masses? From kings carving words into stone to TikTok clips spreading across the globe, people have always tried to push their voices further than the moment in front of them.

Mass media, as John Durham Peters explains in Critical Terms for Media Studies (Mitchell & Hansen, 2010), is part of this long history of communication across distance and time. In our group’s presentation, we looked at how mass media reshape communication, power, and culture. Peters (2010) explains this through a triad: the message (content), the means (delivery), and the agents (authors and audiences). Together, these form an ecosystem of media. 

Mass Media has transformed from speaking face-to-face, to broadcasting for unknown audiences in three main features:

  1. Generalization, where the content is made for public standards and interests rather than tailor for specific individual needs. 
  2. Spatiotemporal Reach, which enables communication across space and time. 
  3. Elective Participation, related to the targeted audiences’ availability in time and the method of access.

Classic Theorists on Media & Power

These three aspects allow the media to become “mass” by expanding its audience while addressing them as strangers.

Classic theorists like McLuhan and Innis deepen this argument. 

  1. “The Medium is the Message”, one of Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrases, on how the form of media covers more meaningful information than the content it carries. 
  2. Harold Innis shows a different perspective on power and different media forms, proved  by the space-binding media like images, prints and audios serve better in Commerce, while time-binding media like oral traditions and scripture sustain Religious and Cultural authorities. 

These key arguments of the chapter highlight why media matters while showing how mass media has always been tied to structures of power while still leaving room for audiences to interpret and resist.

Media’s Reach & The Power of Audiences

Our chapter on Mass Media looks at media through a general lens that broadly covers concepts about its development and reception. It begins by discussing how “any form of communication has potential for spillage,” meaning that any form of communication, but most significantly word of mouth/face-to-face communication, may not be limited to being understood by the target audience. For example, a conversation, a speech, or a broadcast always has the potential to be overheard by an external audience that the content is not intended for. 

The second point, which the chapter elaborates on most extensively, is crucial to understanding the presence and efficacy of mass media: the Spatiotemporal Range. This basically refers to the presence of a media object across time and space, and how it maintains permanence through this.

The spoken word is a temporary form of communication. It addresses only a finite audience. Even though it can address large audiences at once, it cannot be passed on across cities or countries or years in the exact same way. In these terms, writing has a better spatiotemporal range. With the printing press, the written word could be replicated multiple times, which gives it permanence and the ability to be transported across landscapes. This becomes even easier with the internet and, in today’s age, social media. Now, ideas can be communicated instantly, reach an indefinitely large audience, and be preserved over decades effortlessly.

Lastly, the writer addresses the fact that interaction isn’t always two-sided. The way a piece of media is interpreted, and by whom, lies mainly in the hands of the audience/ consumers. Creators, authors, and speakers can curate their content to address a specific group of people and ensure it is understood in a certain way. However, the actual engagement with that content can always differ from the intended outcome. 

These sections lead us to understand the place of mass media in culture and through its evolution, eventually guiding us to a main argument, which, according to Peters is that “power is perhaps the ultimate mass medium.” Keeping this in mind, we think that the most crucial point that the readers can latch onto is that, despite Mass Media being centered around institutions of power, ultimately, the power to choose what influences people resides with us as audiences and consumers of media. Or in simple words: audiences have agency. 

This chapter is especially important and relevant now, when every individual has the ability to create independently, as well as easy access to any form of media through the internet. In such a digital environment, people of power can spread messages farther than ever. At the same time, this amplification of the spatiotemporal range, also amplifies the ability for audiences to reinterpret, resist, boycott, or support these messages and spread their own individual ideas. The vastness and accessibility of the internet allow the audience to do more than just accept or reject dominant ideas, which adds fragility to power. 

Connecting the Dots: Finding Common Ground in Media Theory

While this chapter looks at mass media through a broad lens, we found that other groups’ presentations had many overlapping themes with ours and were able to dive deeper into certain concepts to provide further insight into areas of media. 

For instance, though our presentation used the term ‘communication’ loosely, the group that presented on communication further explained how it works and the systems within it. They compared two models of communication: the transmission model, which focuses on the one-way transfer of information, and the constitutive model, which views communication as a dynamic, reflexive process. The latter describes how meanings are not fixed and are instead created during interaction, as the decoding of a message by a receiver heavily relies on social and contextual factors. We found that the constitutive model is similar to our chapter’s discussion of mass media’s indefinite form of address, in which it is explained that different audiences outside of the target group can interpret the same piece of information differently and thus change the original meaning. 

Furthermore, we emphasised the significance of power in mass media, which is a theme that runs through many other chapter presentations. The presentation on image talked about how we as humans heavily rely on images to act as tangible representations of concepts, which is why religious imagery, such as paintings, has such a strong influence on audience perceptions. The group that covered writing detailed different forms of writing such as recordkeeping or numerical notion for trade, and how the ability to write distinguishes those who have access to knowledge, and therefore power and control. Thus, image, writing, religion and art are some of the many chapters that relate back to our chapter’s argument that media is always tied to institutions of power, which makes mass media a tool of global influence.

Reflective Conclusion

Looking back on our presentation, we think there are a few things we could have done differently. One main thing we wish we had included was more examples, both from the author’s text and from our own media experiences. The chapter itself is filled with vivid illustrations from medieval manuscripts to modern broadcasting, and bringing more of those into the presentation might have made the theory feel less abstract. Even more importantly, connecting the ideas directly to examples familiar to us as BMS students, maybe like current events, pop culture or how we consume global media. We think this could have made it more interactive and relatable for our audience.

What we found challenging about this chapter was its sheer scope. The author moves from ancient kings and religious sermons to radio and television, and at first it was difficult to pin down what exactly he meant by “mass media.” Was it a modern invention or a timeless human practice? Eventually, we came to see that his answer is both: the urge to reach the many, to preserve messages across space and time, has always been central to communication. Even face-to-face speech, the author argues, carries the potential for mass communication because words inevitably spill beyond their intended audience. That realization reshaped how we think about communication itself, it is never fully contained.

Preparing this presentation also taught us something valuable that we think matters for the rest of the class: the importance of studying media historically and critically. It’s easy to treat mass media as something that began with the printing press or exploded with radio, television, and the Internet. Still, the author shows us that the logic of mass communication is much older. Religious texts, oral performances, decrees, even monuments, all functioned as forms of mass media long before the digital era. For us, that was a crucial takeaway. Mass media is always entangled with institutions of power but it has also always been reshaped by the audiences who interpret and respond to it.

If we had to summarize our own takeaway, it’s that mass media is never neutral. It carries with it histories of power, control, and institutions, yet it is never completely one-sided. Audiences always bring their own interpretations and agency, whether that’s through critique, resistance, or creative re-use. That tension, between institutional influence and human response, is what makes studying media so relevant to us today. In a world where media can both oppress and liberate, the responsibility falls on us to recognize its power, challenge its narratives and imagine new possibilities for how stories are told.

Contributors: Maryam Abusamak, Adela Lynge, Minh Ha Nguyen (Eira), Kenisha Sukhwal

Reference: Peters, J. D. (2010). Mass media. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies (pp. 267–280). University of Chicago Press.