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Heidegger and Humanity of the Hand: Smartphone Cynicism

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In the chapter “Telling by hand”, we see Ingold proposing a very interesting concept that is the “humanity of the hand”. Where the author argues, with help from Heidegger’s philosophy, that it is in the hands that the essence of humanity lies. Other senses of perception, the eyes, the nose and the ears, do not afford us the ability to tell stories the way the hand does. It could very well be said that with our eyes, nose and ears, we perceive the world while through our hands, we shape it into form. With our hands – the supreme among the organs of touch, we write, we draw, we thread and as such, we are able to tell stories to the world. 

Humans and the Language of Hands

According to the famous German thinker – Martin Heidegger, the hand is no mere instrument, for only with it came the very possibility of instrumentality. Supported by anatomist Frank Wilson’s claim that the hand exists as an extension of the brain and not a separate device under its control. The brain reaches out into the hands and from there it reaches out into the world. The hand is what separates us from mere animals, but it is not because we have opposable thumbs, nor the fact that we have flexible fingers that move independently, equipped with nails instead of claws. For Heidegger, it is language that holds the hand, which in turn is what holds man. For him, words as the essential realm of the hand provides the stable base in which humanity is grounded. 

For this exact reason, animals are considered by Heidegger to be “poor-in-the-world”, for they lack the essence of “world-forming” that characterizes man, an essence afforded to man by the hand. “Humanity” thus, challenges man by opening up for man a world that is not simply given, but one that must be unraveled to be properly understood. The task of the hand as follows is to tell, one must write, one must draw, only then may one’s world be properly formed.

As such, for the German philosopher, writings only truly tell (a story) when it is written by hand, as opposed to text produced through a typewriter. He argues that the human eye’s script is interpreted as the form of writing that tells and through holding the pen, the hand expresses our humanity. A humanity that starts with the essential “being” which then allows us to “feel”, and it is through that feeling that we start to “tell”. This is exactly what the typewriter has taken away from us – our humanity, for to type is not to write at all, and the typewriter paradoxically stops us from writing, an act that inevitably silences us from telling. 

Stories of Screens, Scrolling, and Smartphones

Ingold’s concept of the “humanity of the hand” can be further extended to the contemporary act of typing on our smartphones. This specific process of mediation reveals how our hands continue to mediate thought and feeling, even in a digital context removed from the material intimacy of pen and paper. While Heidegger mourned the typewriter’s detachment of writing from the hand, the way we send texts today further complicates this separation and disconnect. It can be argued that touchscreens still demand the tactility of our fingers, but the gestures we make with every tap, swipe, and scroll, completely transform writing into a choreography of minimal movements. Hence, the new generation is being taught both this choreography alongside writing by hand simultaneously, resulting in a generational difference and new ways of perceiving and telling stories. 

In handwriting, the thumb is peripheral and supports the pen that is the main object of mediation, whereas in texting, the thumb becomes the primary storyteller. Every new development to our smartphones reduces the thickness of our screens and consequently the distance between our fingertips and the world within our devices. The thin glass screen acts as an invisible barrier, creating the illusion that all forms of mediation are coming directly and instantaneously from our fingertips, almost as if we have become one with our devices.

Today’s digital age creates endless possibilities for our bodies to craft messages, emotions, and relationships. With every communication platform competing for users’ attention, people are always building connections through new innovative ways. Whether that is through texting, calling, reposting, sending stickers, or even Instagram reels, the overstimulating combination of text, audio, and visuals convey more than words simply could. The rise of meme culture on the internet invented a new way to express oneself, which is to make references to other preexisting media. This way, our internal thoughts and feelings, even those that we are unable to fully express, can be mediated with massive external reach, all from the from our fingertips. 

Through these rapidly changing technologies, our bodies constantly translate feelings into digital traces. Instead of leaving fingerprints on tangible objects we touch, we leave digital footprints after every interaction. Furthermore, this enables your smartphone to then reconfigure its role in mediation. Regardless of its convenience and innovation, nothing can compare to the feeling of holding a physical handwritten letter. There is power in the warmth of touch that is now reduced to the cold surface of glass. Ultimately, our fingers’ ability to edit before sending and our habitual scrolling creates a new expression of the hand’s humanity, emphasizing the negotiations between intimacy and distance in the mediated fabric of modern communication.

The Typewriter Returns

Comparing this with Heidegger’s pessimistic opinion of technology, and specifically the typewriter, we can imagine his stance on the disconnect between the hand and smartphone. Through a handwritten letter, we receive more than the words on the page. We see the erased or crossed-out attempts, the personality in the way each “i” is dotted, or even an ink smudge from writing too fast. As we adapted to using typewriters, we lost the sense of humanity and personality in handwriting. However, through the typewriter, we still see a lingering sense of intention beyond the words, we can see the “x”-ed out phrases, creased paper corners, or even a coffee stain on a message written late at night. Evolving into the smartphone, we lose more of these unintentional material stories that linger in each message. With the ability to unsend, edit, and pre-send our messages, we so ingenuinely mediate our communication to a point where we have lost our humanity.

In distinguishing ourselves from other animals, Heidegger emphasizes the strength of the hand in the realm of communication, or more importantly, storytelling. Despite the capabilities of this dexterity, we find our communication regressing to selections of premade facial expressions–emojis. When considering interpersonal communication, we see this grasp of personalisation among the monotonous, identical fonts in messaging systems. In place of personalised handwriting styles, some find ways to change their typing font. In place of crossed-out phrases and typos, some retype their messages rather than editing or deleting . As such, with the dramatic development from the typewriter to today’s smartphone, the typewriter maintains more personalised humanity in comparison to the smartphone. Perhaps if Heidegger could re-evaluate, his interpretation would cut the typewriter some slack. 

Courtesy of Kim Chi Tran, Maxine Gray, Nam Pham

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Memory is Soul:

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A Response to “Umberto Eco: A Library of the World” By Christine Choi and Aminata Chipembere

Introduction: 

In Davide Ferrario’s documentary Umberto Eco: A Library of the World, the viewers are given a tour of the inner workings of Umberto Eco’s mind. The audience has the chance to revisit many of his influential theories on materiality, memory, and knowledge. Early in the film, Eco asserts that “Memory is Soul,” setting up his reflections on the human need to preserve and seek out knowledge. Eco introduces an intersection between libraries and memory. For him, a library is more than just a collection of books; it is “mankind’s common memory”. It serves as a living embodiment and symbol of humanity’s collective effort to make sense of the world. 

The concept of the library being a vessel for memory connects to Eco’s broader reflections on archives and materiality. Eco’s attachment to physicality resonates with the knowledge introduced by Bill Brown in Materiality, which considers how physical objects reshape one’s lived experience. Eco’s theories warn about the dangers of the internet and overcomposition. These theories can be explored in relation to Annalee Newitz’s My Laptop, which describes how digital technologies have transformed our relationship with information. Eco’s work alongside these theories highlights the evolving relationship between memory, materiality, and media. Reminding audiences that the mediums in which we store knowledge reshape the way we remember and understand. 

Memory & Information: 

In the documentary, Umberto Eco introduces three types of memory: Organic, Vegetal, and Mineral. Organic memory resides in the brain, “made of flesh and bone” (Eco), and encompasses our ability to recall and forget. Vegetal memory refers to written media (books, papyrus) and represents memory in its physical form. Mineral memory, the newest form, is stored in silicon or digital technology. This form highlights technology’s ability to hold and collect knowledge. While each of these forms serves its own purpose and works to expand knowledge. Eco suggests that mineral memory introduces a paradox: an overload of information that could eventually overwhelm rather than benefit. 

Eco warns that human beings aren’t meant to know everything, stating that “if we knew all that is contained on the web, we’d go crazy.”(Eco). He points to the flood of digital content as the main reason behind what he calls information noise, the idea that so much information exists that it becomes impossible to distinguish meaning from distraction. He argues that the world is constantly overloaded with messages that often say nothing. He warns that this noise disrupts one of the core functions of memory: the ability to select, filter, and prioritize important information. In this era, dominated by mineral memory, this filtering process is breaking down. The internet, as Eco puts it, functions as “an encyclopedia where everything is potentially recorded, but without the tools to filter its content.” Eco highlights an important issue with the ability to filter information and organize its content; its usefulness diminishes. 

In discussing the overflow of digital content, Eco causes us to reconsider this dependence on mineral memory. Over time, humanity has become increasingly more reliant on technology and has slowly turned away from organic memory. This is evident in Annalee Newitz’s work, My Laptop, where she describes that she relies on digital tools to store and recall information. She writes, “It’s practically a brain prosthesis.”(Newitz 88), highlighting the extent to which her laptop has replaced her own cognitive abilities. This dependence serves as a real-world example of Eco’s fears coming true, that technology, instead of working alongside organic and vegetal memory, has begun to replace them entirely. As we continue to store our memories in technology, we risk weakening our own abilities to process and record information. This raises the question, what is the point of remembering, writing or archiving, if everything can be conserved online? The answer to this dilemma lies in Eco’s ideas on the importance of materiality. 

Memory & Materiality: 

It is no wonder, then, that Eco has a preference for physical books over digital files when it comes to reading, citing reasons such as how you are unable to underline passages, make dogears, nor smear the pages with a dirty thumb when reading on a digital interface. This, too, reveals a part of the memory that is held within the books themselves, giving them their own uniqueness and individuality. As Bill Brown quoted in the Materiality chapter of Critical Terms for Media Studies, “Information, delaminated from any specific material substrate, could circulate—could dematerialize and rematerialize—unchanged (55).” This unchanging and immaterial nature of digital media (or “new media”), would lead us to believe that it comes with immortality since it appears immune to the environmental changes and deterioration that physical media tend to be prone to—which is why we often see digitization of physical media as a form of preservation. However, Brown argues that “digital media are themselves subject to deterioration” since “they still require physical support”. This, too, highlights the threats that come with shifting towards depending on mineral memory more than vegetal memory as Brown also notes that “all media may eventually be homogenized within the hegemony of the digital” (53). 

Brown further asserts the threat that the digital landscape brings to materiality as more and more media get “dematerialized” (51). With the increase of communication occurring in our digital devices, it is also just as susceptible for it to vanish without the physical traces that take its form in our physical world, and with it, the memories of them would be forgotten to time. This sort of archaeological view of the media that we leave behind is, of course, great concern as media academics. As Eco stated, “we are beings living in time. Without memory, it’s impossible to build a future,” and without the vegetal memory that we can refer back to, it could end up compromising the very foundations and integrity that media studies is built upon. This is also the type of future that Brown is concerned with, as he states, “the homogenizing, dematerializing effects of digitization,” which would result in “the human body thus becom[ing] the source for “giv[ing] body to digital data” (58).” As a result, this affects the way we, as human subjects and media consumers, are mediated and facilitated by the information in our environment. 

Conclusion:

From Eco, Newitz, and Brown, we have seen how our modern-day society has a complicated dynamic when it comes to organic, vegetal, and mineral memory. We can also see why, then, libraries like Umberto Eco’s would be so significant in our current media landscape. From Eco’s teachings and theories brought attention to the pitfalls the over-reliance on technology and the mediation of mineral memory through them. This documentary serves as a reminder that too much information can ultimately cause harm rather than benefit us. It causes us to rethink the constant need to gain more knowledge, as we can easily drown in the noise rather than learn from it. We must distinguish what information is crucial for us to keep and what we can discard. As media theorists, it allows us to think more critically about the fallibilities that we have often overlooked as we continue to adapt and familiarize ourselves with mineral memory in favour of vegetal memory. Much like Eco continued to emphasize throughout the film, “sentimentally, you cannot replace books.”

Citations

Brown, Bill. “Materiality.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 49–63. 

Ferrario, Davide, director. Umberto Eco: A Library of the World. Film Commission Torino-Piemonte, 2023. 

Larsen, Martin Grüner. Umberto Eco in front of the bookshelf in his library which contains books he has written and translations. 9 May 2011. Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/mglarsen/5772998464/in/photolist-9N98jh-9N6bdM-9N69ti-9N95nS-9N93EQ-9N8SFU-9N8QWo-9N6g9a-9N8ZtJ-9N63Hg-9N62ya. Accessed 19 Oct. 2025. Newitz, Annalee. “MY LAPTOP.” Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, The MIT Press, 2007, pp. 86–91. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhg8p.14. Accessed 20 Oct. 2025.

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Touch your books: that’s kind of what they’re for

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Within (and for) this course, I have read, reflected, said and written so much about materiality of media, that it has become a challenge to not comment on the materiality of every evocative object I see on our blogsite. This, of course, is in large part due to the very first assignment which gave me this new lens to look at things through. Now I get to analyse the importance of materiality in everything I touch and loan the only physical copy of “Making” in the library over and over again (sorry). So, obviously, I cannot go past the question of materiality of books and knowledge in the case of Umberto Eco and his majestic library of the world. 

Library of the world

A large part, if not all, of the documentary either takes place in or is based around Umberto Eco’s impressive library of over 30,000 books: it is mentioned that civil engineers were worried Eco’s collection would be too heavy for the building to hold it (which is wildly impressive if you ask me). 

It is natural that a scholar, professor and thinker would have a large library of his own. Umberto Eco valued physical books deeply and has been gathering them throughout his life – academic writings, comics and manga, encyclopedias, anything that he found interesting, really. But Eco’s library was not just for storing, – this can be done online, too, – but accumulating over time, displaying and, most importantly – interacting with books, which is what brings the importance to physicality of his library. Interacted by adults who get to curate, annotate, leave their bookmarks in, but also by Eco’s grandson. He remembers reading practically ancient books as a child. Because knowledge cannot and must not be simply accumulated by one person without sharing it, and because most grandparents have a soft spot for their grandkids. I think this particular moment stuck with me the most, because we are so used to seeing older books protected from destruction, and it was so fascinating to hear about the other perspective on that. I doubt my grandparents would ever let me touch a medieval book should they’ve had it (they’re both historians, so I would actually expect them to). In the documentary, Eco describes the difference between a bibliomaniac and bibliophile as such: the former would secretly flip through his collection in the evening like Scrooge McDuck bathing in his dollars, the latter would want people to know about the wonder of the book they are holding. 

Given Umberto Eco’s openness about his library and its treasures, given that his family donated it to the public and I doubt they’d go against his will, I believe it is safe to assume Umberto Eco was a bibliophile. 

Physicality

When explaining the inconvenience of e-books for him, Eco says books “must be touched with hands”, re-read, underlined, dog-eared. If you cannot interact with the book meaningfully, it is a different, less fulfilling process, so why settle for a book in your phone, if you can have it in your lap? 

This, of course, brings us to “Making”, in which Ingold argues that meaning and knowledge is co-produced through human-material interaction, not simply transmitted through abstract content. In the same way as a potter both changes and is changed by the clay through the means of a pottery wheel, so does the reader both affect and be affected by the knowledge through the means of a physical book. The reader adds to the knowledge in the book by meaningfully interacting with it: underlining what matters, questioning paragraphs that don’t make sense, dog-earing the most important pages. And the knowledge, obviously, also changes the reader: their perception of the world, their thoughts, their actions, in the best of scenarios. We read with the book, as Ingold would say.  

True or real?

Another connection between Eco’s library and physicality is the question of truthfulness. One of the most beautiful things about Eco’s library is his passion for untrue knowledge: scholars who have been proven wrong, theories that were debunked, conspiracy theories, you name it. In Eco’s library, the discredited is not discarded: it is archived, annotated, and re-read with attention and affection.

The documentary focuses, in part, on Athanasius Kircher, a German polymath: jack of all trades, a master of both all trades, but also somehow not really. He managed to both completely misinterpret Egyptian hieroglyphics and notice the inconsistency in magnetic north. He suggested plague’s reasons lying in microorganisms and went on to describe dragons with the same vigor. But wrong or not, Kircher is forever remembered for his writings and drawings: Eco specifically implies their significance. The schemes, diagrams, illustrations all provide a layer of validity to the information, because lies are more interesting to prove.

Authority of the physical

But more interestingly, I want to discuss the effect of materiality on the perceived truthfulness of the media. In “Always Already New”, Lisa Gitelman explores how the physicality of print media has influenced perceptions of the written word as authoritative and truthful. She claims that physical qualities of books, such as their weight and texture, mediates to the viewer the sense of legitimacy that digital media often lacks. In the nineteenth century, Gitelman explains, print’s authority was derived from its tangibility: its position of a fixed media created the assumption of stability and truth. This “fixity”, as James Secord calls it, glorifies “textual authenticity and legitimates textual evidence”, says Gitelman. 

But once the industrial revolution did its thing and industrial printing rose, so did the mass literacy and so did the critical attention to those texts. I find it very insightful how Gitelman explains it: she says that before the mass publications, reading went hand in hand with appreciation of the text, not its interpretation. Now that more and more people were able to publish anything, “mass literacy met cheap editions” and it changed the public’s perception of physical media’s authority. So here is a quick reminder that truth is not guaranteed by any one medium but negotiated through it.

Eco’s library, of course, mostly comes from the times before industrial printing, the books there often being as wrong about the world as they seem to be correct: the books are heavy, large, leather-bound, old as time and therefore radiate the aura of higher knowledge and ultimate wisdom. This is why, I believe, it is so interesting to study this contrast between the authority-mediating form and the dilly-dally content.

Conclusion

In Eco’s library, in Ingold’s book, and in Gitelman’s reflections on print and digital media, the material form of knowledge is inseparable from its content and meaning. Truth and understanding are not abstract or disembodied, they are shaped through interaction. By underlining your favourite quotes, by weaving baskets, by touching what you read. If knowledge lives through material contact, a book is never only a vessel for ideas – it is a collaborator in their creation. I’m sorry, but the medium is still the message. To read, make, or preserve knowledge is always to engage with its material body. So go touch a book. Maybe ask me to return “Making” to the library so you can loan it yourself. 

Works cited:

Ferrario, Davide. Umberto Eco: The Library of the World. Italy: Rossofuoco, 2022. Documentary Film.

Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

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

Picture and text by Bara Bogantseva

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Making in the Eco Chamber

“Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity.”

― Umberto Eco

Umberto Eco: A Library of the World is a documentary that delves into Italian literary critic and semiotician Umberto Eco’s life and his personal library, which houses over 30,000 volumes of novels and 1,500 rare and ancient books. Director Davide Ferrario discusses with Eco, conducts interviews with his family and friends, and retrieves archival footage of Eco to beautifully encapsulate Eco’s life through his love and passion for books and the exploration of the truth. The 80-minute film presents Eco’s library as a living archive that mediates the relationship between media and memory, providing insights into how media shapes thought, culture, and history. Expanding to the scope of this course, the film explores the importance of the distinction between material and digital media, semiotics, and the body. I will connect these concepts to Tim Ingold’s novel Making, specifically, with Ingold’s claim that media as living matter and his distinction between ‘objects’ versus ‘things’. I argue that Eco’s approach to media and memory through books parallels Ingold’s concept of making as a continuous process between the conscious and material world.

The film’s themes of media and material knowledge emerge most vividly through Eco’s private library, which serves as both a physical living archive and a conceptual framework for understanding his worldview. The library, which is a growing personal collection of Eco’s books, then becomes a symbol of a living system of knowledge, rather than a static collection of objects. The film strengthens this idea by presenting Eco’s notion of vegetal memory, which mediates memory and knowledge through paper and books. Eco claims, in his paper on vegetal memory, that libraries are ‘the most important way of keeping our collective wisdom’ (Eco, 1). For him, books and their mass presence through the space of a library become a physical thing that mediates memory, linking memory to material forms. This idea parallels Ingold’s argument that material form is flowing, not fixed. He claims that the material world and human thought are mediated through correspondences, where the flow of materials and the flow of consciousness are intertwined, where making becomes a process of mediation (Ingold, 21). For Eco, making comes in the form of curating books for his personal archive, where he engages thought and memory with the physicality of books. Ingold proposes that making is an embodied interaction that occurs before and during meaning is made (Ingold, 96). Eco mirrors Ingold’s claims as he physically turns the page of each book, engaging with it at every turn. Beyond completing the reading, he continues to engage with the material by keeping a collection of books. Here, the meaning of books changes before, during, and after the activity of reading the actual contents of the object. With embodied interaction with its material, as Eco refuses to put on gloves to preserve its material, rather letting it decay, breathe, and live in its environment, the books transform from a commodity to a physical vessel of memory and knowledge.

To further explore the library as a metaphor for collective knowledge, Eco’s fascination with semiotics exhibits many parallels with Ingold’s distinction between objects and things and their affordances. Eco connects semiotics, the study of signs as a means of meaning-making, back to vegetal memory, where every book is a sign whose contents reference other signs and histories. Through these signs and the curation of other signs through books, humans can form frameworks to understand the world. Because of this, Eco’s library transforms into a semiotic system that not only houses these vessels of signs and knowledge but also creates a network that connects books through categories and cross-referencing. Furthermore, Ingold’s interpretation of seeing things as things, rather than as objects, is extremely relevant in exploring how Eco engages with books through a semiotic lens.

Ingold quotes philosopher Martin Heidegger’s claim that objects are complete in themselves, where correspondence does not occur because it does not interact with the world and its surroundings (Ingold, 85). On the other hand, Ingold claims that things are with us as opposed to objects being against us. Things can be experienced in a way that corresponds with their surroundings, rather than merely witnessing or existing alongside an object. A thing is a dynamic gathering of material matter that engages with other things, such as people or the environment (Ingold, 85). Ingold concludes his claim by stating that things exist and persist because they leak, where materials interact with each other physically across the different surfaces they encounter. Through these types of leakages and interactions, things can be living and dynamic and possess a sort of bodily agency that can die, decay, or transform over time (Ingold, 95). With this distinction between ‘objects’ and ‘things,’ it is clear that Eco’s books are not static or to be read and stored once completed. Rather, his consciousness corresponds with the book’s materiality, and even goes beyond his personal interpretations of his texts when he connects different texts and shares his understanding with the public. As mentioned in the quote at the start of this post, Eco’s passion for books goes beyond viewing them as a mere object or commodity; rather, it affords him knowledge and understanding of the world around him. Through this ongoing dialogue between mind and material, Eco transforms reading into a living practise, one that blurs the boundaries between individual memory and the collective intelligence stored within his library.

Ultimately, Umberto Eco: A Library of the World reveals that knowledge is never static but is continually made and remade through our material and intellectual engagements with media. Through the lens that books are dynamic ‘things’ rather than ‘objects,’ the film presents Eco’s books as a living, constantly growing system of knowledge. A point in the film that struck me the most was the intimate moments of Eco physically interacting with his books. Sensory actions such as touching the covers or each page, smelling the books, or rearranging books in categories became systems and processes of thinking. This reminded me that reading is not just an intellectual activity, but also a tactile and relational practise. Reflecting on our course discussions, I found parallels with the Critical Terms chapter I read for my presentation, “Writing,” where theorist Andre Leroy-Gourhan emphasises graphism in writing. Specifically, how literacy is not only used as a means of communication but as a tool that links mind, body, and material. The film offers a powerful reminder that media are not passive containers of knowledge but active participants in the making of knowledge itself.

Works Cited

​​Eco, Umberto. (2022). Umberto Eco: A Library of the World [Film]. Directed by Davide Ferrario.

Eco, Umberto. “Vegetal and Mineral Memory: The Future of Books.” Academia.Edu, 21 June 2015, www.academia.edu/13152692/Vegetal_and_Mineral_Memory_The_Future_of_Books_by_Umberto_Eco. 

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

Cover image from The Belcourt Theatre

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Tresses of Expression

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The tangles and knots of my morning hair don’t hurt anymore when I pull them out; I have become accustomed to the soft tug and immediate static separation of strands, like polarized magnet ends. I pried red wisps from my clothes as I readied myself today, and I recalled when the strands were black and orange and blue and blonde. My hair is an identity of mine, the style and cut can define who I become for a time – imbued with confidence or dysphoria. We use it to express or resist, but also to categorize, admire, or control. Hair evokes emotions, represents identities, provokes thought, and also, perhaps most importantly for me, remembers.

Before my mother’s hands I recall sitting, gazing in the mirror as she guided a brush through my tresses, brown in this faded memory, and saying it reminded her of her mother; of youth spent under the sun, of gardening together, of running barefoot. Hair is a bridge for many, a symbol of what was lost or where you came from. It is at once a memory and memorabilia; it can provide us with identity or strip it, it constitutes our expressions but at once evokes it from us and from others. It separates us by aesthetic, vanity, and personhood, but connects us to our cultures – to our people, our interests, and our own lives. Hair is both an object of the body and an embodied object; we don’t just use it, we think using it. It affords us a sense of belonging, resistance and expression, but can afford others the ability to categorize and stereotype. It is a medium requiring thought – it is communication without words that shapes social interactions. Furthermore, Bill Brown would argue that hair is a material medium – it is not just symbolic, but has physical affordances. My hair has been braided, fishtailed, space-bunned, chopped, dyed, and styled an uncountable amount of times in my life. It becomes most visible as an object of the self when we manipulate it, but it is the perception (and often, preconception) that it affords us that defines it as an embodied medium, too. It is evocative because, as Turkle would say, it acts as the “companions to our emotional lives” and as a “provocation to thought”. As I lay the fresh blood-red dye in my hair last week, I thought of my mother doing the same to cover up her greys. I thought about whether people would notice that it stained my ears. I thought I looked a bit like Carrie at prom. It reminded me that hair is not only an object that sits on my head and tells people how much I rolled around in my sleep, but by understanding how it mediates our actions and thoughts, we can reconsider the boundary between medium and body. Our correspondence with the world is through these strands – through memories, rituals, and cultural practices. It defines how I interact with the world, and how society interacts with me. 

Hair is also a rare physical representation of a moment that has passed and yet remains unchanged. Some wealthy Victorians kept locks of hair from late loved ones in jewelry, and many cultures view the cutting of hair as a spiritual severing of sorts (grief, marriage, coming of age etc.). Hair, when it is detached from the human body, stops being part of the living self and becomes a “thing” – an artifact that represents an identity or relationship during a specific moment in time. Hair is no longer an object of mediation, but as Bill Brown may say, a “thing” once it has been removed from the context of its existence within the self. This “thing” is that which mediates memory and loss, but is also that which is in direct opposition to the very nature of hair – growth. Hair exists as an object between the transient and the permanent: on the head, it changes daily; off the head, it becomes a fixed representation of a particular time, person, or feeling. Like photographs or audio recordings, preserved hair mediates the present and the past, turning lived moments into material memorabilia.

Hair, as both living material and preserved artifact, reveals the complex ways media mediates identity, culture, perception, and time. Through our attentiveness to styling and care, hair functions as an embodied medium of self-expression, a form of communication without words. When it is cut, saved, or transformed, hair becomes a tangible record of specific moments, anchoring personal and collective memories in a physical form. Victorian mourning jewelry makes this especially obvious: hair becomes a medium that bridges presence and absence, life and death, permanence and change. The ways in which we view hair on both ourselves, others, or alone reveals how bodily objects participate in broader cultural systems of meaning. Hair is not simply something we have; it is something through which we express, connect, and remember. This perspective challenges us to look beyond conventional technologies and recognize how our bodies mediate the world, and how medias are woven like threads through the very fabric of our lives.

  1. Turkle, Sherry. “WHAT MAKES AN OBJECT EVOCATIVE.” Evocative Objects: Objects We Think With. 
  2. Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry, 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22.
  3. Brown, Bill. “Materiality.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 49–63.
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Evocative Objects and Memory

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My Evocative Object


Pink baby, and later to be known as Baby Jordan, was the first “friend” I ever had. It was a pink doll that I was given at birth, and I brought it everywhere with me from my first sleepover to blueberry picking with my family. It rarely left my side until I got older. As a kid, it was the perfect companion, played well with my other friends and was there with me through everything, nightmares, playdates, and listened to everything I had to say. The presence of this plastic pink doll kept the outgoing spark alive within me. 

Growing up, I gradually feared more and more about other people’s options and started fearing and learning the concept of social norms, and slowly became more embarrassed to keep this doll with me and would keep it hidden between my bed and wall so that my friends wouldnt know, and later it eventually moved to a dusty box in my basement, along with that extraverted self. Looking back, I am fond of my younger self and how outgoing she was. She took that doll everywhere with her, without a second thought, not caring what others may think. Baby Jordan was a comfort to my younger self, a friend who would do and go through everything with me. 

Connections to the Inner and Outer Self

From the perspective of Sherry Turkle, my doll Baby Jordan was more than just a toy. Turkles describes evocative objects as things that connect through feeling and thought, acting as companions through life. This doll is a transitional object, as described by D.W Winnicott, a theorist who believed that transitional objects “are destined to be abandoned. Yet they leave traces that will mark the rest of life. Specifically, they influence how easily an individual develops a capacity for joy, aesthetic experience, and creative playfulness”(Turkle 314). The transitional object of my doll, Turkle suggests, is a bridge between my inner world and the larger world surrounding me, marking my stages of growth. Constantly being with me, I created an environment where I felt unselfconsciousness and began to hide it once I learned about embarrassment, social rules and identity. Putting it in my basement, the doll now became a memory attached to an object that I no longer hold present in my daily life, but it shaped a part of me. 

Materiality of an Object

Bill Browns thoughts on materiality adds another layer of understanding that materiality is more than just the physical presence, but an object whose texture and use created an emotional connection. Brown said that “materiality thus glimmers as a new rapier, cutting two ways. On the one hand: Doesn’t the medium elide the materiality of the object it represents? On the other: Aren’t you ignoring the materiality of the medium itself, the material support, the medium’s embeddedness within particular material circumstances, its material ramifications?”(Brown 50), My doll worked in both these ways as I got older, I dismissed the presence of my doll, hiding it away as if it had no meaning. But my doll Baby Jordan carried both material and immaterial meaning suggested in the brown chapter; the soft texture of plastic was a familiar presence were not just the physical quality of my doll, but anchored my feeling of safety and belonging. Even after she was put away in a box, the doll holds traces of how carefree and confident my younger self was, and my confidence to express myself. The materiality extended beyond “just being a doll,” it transformed into an object holding memory, emotion, and growth. My old doll shows how objects can embody parts of ourselves, being both a companion in the moment and a lasting symbol of who I once was. 

Refection

Reflecting on Baby Jordan and seeing how such a simple object from my childhood can carry so much meaning, then its physical form allows it.  Being an evocative object, the doll carried joy, self expression and companionship. Through Turkle and Winnicott, we can understand how Baby Jordan bridged my inner and outer worlds around guiding me through learning stages of growth and awareness throughout my life. Brown’s insight into materiality and how it further highlights the doll’s physical presence through the texture, shape, and tactility, how it was inseparable from the emotional and symbolic presence it holds. Even now, being stored in a box, my doll Baby Jordain, though it is not an object used in my everyday life, holds meaning and memory that embodied my younger self, my fearlessness. It now reminds me that the objects we cherish are not just objects but symbolic identity, experience and transformation. In this way, my doll had taught me about how material and evocative objects shape who we are, in present and past moments following us throughout our lives. 

Work Cited

Brown, Bill. “Materiality.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 2010, pp. 49–63

Turkle, Sherry, ed. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. MIT Press, 2007. Accessed 6 Oct. 2025

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Holding Memory

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Photo by me at the Laver Cup 2023 – making memories with friends

There’s a quiet intimacy in holding memory in your hands. My Fujifilm Instax camera has become a way for me to pause time, to transform fleeting moments with friends and family into fragile objects that I can touch, arrange, and carry. Unlike the endless scroll of images on a phone, each Instax print is deliberate. Film is limited (and a bit expensive), the picture develops slowly, and the print itself is singular. And by the time the image fully appears, the moment it records has already slipped into the past, leaving me with both proof and loss. This happened, and it’s gone.

I keep every print in a small photo album, a growing collection that has begun to feel like its own living archive. Flipping through its pages is different from scrolling through a phone gallery. Each print takes up space, carrying its own imperfections like a fingerprint smudge, a faded corner, a hint of overexposure. That’s why I think it’s an evocative object, one that teaches me how media hold onto time, how photos can mediate between presence and absence, and how the simplest object can become a way of thinking about what it means to remember.

To understand why these images feel so different from the thousands on my phone, I turn to media theory, which helps me see how the Instax mediates memory, materiality, and presence in ways that resist digital ephemerality.

Theory Part I – Objects & Materiality

Sherry Turkle writes that objects are “things we think with,” extensions of our inner lives that carry paradoxes into tangible form. My Instax camera has become exactly that. Every time I press the shutter, I’m reminded of what Turkle calls the way objects “extend the reach of our sympathies by bringing the world within.” This camera collapses an instant into a card I can hold, an object that forces slowness and attention in a world of infinite scroll. In the quiet ritual of waiting for an image to appear, I feel what Turkle describes in her account of Seymour Papert’s childhood gears, the way falling in love with an object can also mean falling in love with an idea. For Papert, gears opened the door to mathematics. For me, Instax prints open the door to thinking about time and how memory is always both preserved and already slipping away. Each print becomes, in Turkle’s phrase, a “partnership” that helps me live with presence and absence layered in the same frame. To hold one is to realize, as Turkle suggests, that theory itself can become an evocative object and that even in the smallest square of film, theory is brought down to earth.

Bill Brown helps me see why this matters so much especially now. He says, “materiality has come to matter with new urgency,” because we live in an era where images and information are constantly dissolving into pixels and numbers. With that context, my Instax photos feel like small rebellions. Unlike the phone gallery, where thousands of pictures blur into the endless scroll, each Instax print insists on its body. It can bend, fade, and hold the trace of a thumbprint. These so-called imperfections, in my opinion, are what make it feel alive and what Brown might call the “materiality-effect,” the way an object persuades us of its reality. Sliding a print into my album makes me realize that remembering is tactile and fragile, always mediated by surfaces, fibers, and light. Brown notes that new media often provoke a melodrama of threatened materiality as though the physical world is vanishing into code. But the Instax resists that narrative. It’s stubbornly here. A one-of-one artifact you can’t swipe away or back up to the cloud. In a time when digital photographs circulate endlessly yet somehow lose weight with every reproduction, my Instax reasserts the stubborn truth that memory is also matter.

Theory Part II – Images & Memory

W. J. T. Mitchell argues that images live in contradiction. They are, he writes, both “there and not there”material objects you can hold and spectral apparitions that summon what is absent. My Instax photos embody this paradox in the most literal way. When I watch a white square slowly darken into an image, I feel that double moment Mitchell describes: the excitement of recognition as my friend’s face or a fragment of sunlight appears, paired with the sudden awareness that the moment itself has already slipped away. Each print, I feel, is like a ghost, present enough to touch yet haunted by absence. Unlike the thousands of phone photos that blur together into a continuous stream, an Instax photo freezes the contradiction in miniature. Again, the feeling that this happened, and it’s gone.

Bernard Stiegler gives me another way of understanding what’s at stake here. He distinguishes between anamnesis (the living act of remembering) and hypomnesis (the technical supports) like writing or photography that externalize memory. The Instax makes me aware of both at once. Taking the photo is an act of attention, of choosing and framing a moment, an embodied practice of remembering. But the print that emerges becomes hypomnesis, a technical memory that lives outside me, tucked into an album. Unlike the automatic flood of digital images, though, this process feels deliberate. I decide what to keep, how to arrange the pages, what story the album tells. In Stiegler’s terms, my Instax resists the “industrial exteriorization of memory” that digital platforms often produce, where algorithms and infinite storage do the remembering for us. Instead, my album feels like a collaboration between lived memory and technical support. It’s not infinite, not perfect, definitely not optimized, and that’s what makes it special.

Thinking About Memory Now

We live in a time when most of our memories are outsourced to clouds and algorithms, where platforms decide what resurfaces for us through “memories” notifications and automated feeds. The Instax, by contrast, resists that industrial exteriorization of memory. It asks me to be deliberate, to decide what is worth holding onto and to give memory a material home. In that sense, it’s nostalgic but critical as it makes visible the stakes of how media mediate our lives.

In a way, this is a return to photography’s origins. Early cameras required patience and darkrooms producing images slowly and with effort. It feels like a strange return, a twenty-first century camera that reintroduces limits and imperfection. Maybe that’s what makes the Instax an evocative object. It reminds me that media are central forces in how we experience time, relationships, and even ourselves. And in thinking about memory now, in this moment of digital abundance and digital forgetting, we can see more clearly why theory matters as it helps us make sense of the fragile, human ways we hold on.

References

Brown, B. (2005). Materiality. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies (pp. 49–63). University of Chicago Press.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (2005). Image. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies (pp. 85–98). University of Chicago

Stiegler, B. (2005). Memory. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies (pp. 64–87). University of Chicago

Turkle, S. (2007). Evocative objects: Things we think with. MIT Press.

Blog post by Maryam Abusamak

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Handwritten Letters: What is Evoked When Kindnesses Endure?

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“Handwritten Letters Sketches Drawings I” by Frida Kahlo, courtesy of Vancouver Fine Art Gallery.

Introduction

In my accordion folder, next to a tab of identification documents and another of printed photographs, I store handwritten letters from friends and family. Specifically, I have kept every letter received– whether in a flashy card or on a plain piece of lined paper– since the summer before I left home for university. I do this because I feel bad letting go of them, but also because they bring comfort to me. When I take out the letters and read the thoughts of people I know (or have known) crystallized into deeply personal messages, I better understand those people. A lot of the time, people are more comfortable writing something than they might be saying it in-person. In this post I will attempt to explain how my sentimentality around these letters is evoked through their materiality, and the thoughts of others contained in them are mediated by writing.

Letters and Materiality

Bill Brown opens his essay on materiality in Critical Terms for Media Studies by questioning the material difference between a thought and a thorn that’s stuck in your finger. The thorn is obviously made up of matter; it is atoms arranged in a way that shapes the thorn. It is the shape of the thorn colliding with the atoms in your finger that causes pain and draws your attention to the urgent material nature of the thorn. It can be argued that thoughts are also material if you choose to look at them as “the effect of synapses within a neural network”, Brown says (49). However, the debate as to whether or not thoughts are material represents the kind of question that is secondary to a discussion of materiality. 

Describing the materiality of something is not an assessment of yes/no on its concreteness. As Brown put it, “When you admire the materiality of a sweater, you’re acknowledging something about its look and feel, not simply its existence as a physical object” (49). So materiality then is a qualitative assessment of something that’s based in the senses. In the case of the sweater, the sense of touch is evoked because of how a sweater makes contact with the body. The sense of sight is also involved, because the clothing we wear is often a signal of personal aesthetics and identity.

Now I’m going to tell you what I like about the materiality of birthday cards, best wishes cards, nice-to-have-gotten-to-know-you cards, and letters of admiration. 

  1. Handwriting. I like that with my grandparents’ handwriting, I have to decipher their cursive almost like I’m reading in a second language. My roommate recently told me that he can not read in cursive, as he was never taught to do so in primary school. There’s something almost antique by now about handwriting which is produced in cursive by default. Reading cursive teaches me patience, and feels like a way of adjusting to a communication practice of my grandparents’ day– even if on the smallest of scales. It reminds me that when I send my grandpa a hasty text message with zero punctuation, he is the one who must adjust to my communication style. Empathy and critical thinking– both ways of looking at the bigger picture– are evoked in me through working to comprehend handwriting.
  2. Voice. Just as people’s writing reflects their inner thoughts and perceptions, the way they communicate in a letter often maps easily to their personality. When I re-read letters from my dad, the voice reading it in my head belongs to him. That a choice of words, tone, or even the content of a message could evoke someone’s speaking voice in the mind I find incredible. Some people are more formal when they write than they are in conversation. In that case, my imagination goes as far as to conjure an image of that person giving a speech that they wrote, in order to find their voice within the writing. Most of the time though, in the context of a hand-written card, someone close to you will write in a way that makes their voice ring clearly through the noise of form.
  3. Persistence. Through the collection of paper– an often ephemeral and disposable material– I feel as though I have trapped in time a series of intimate pieces that any one given letter-writer may never have expected to be a part of. This is the part of the practice of saving letters that is self-serving. The record which was assembled from one-to-one messages becomes an archive of many unrelated notes with one commonality; they are directed towards a single recipient. Is the point of my keeping these notes only for the sake of using them on a rainy day? Another benefit of letter-keeping is that the archive offers a timeline of my personal history, experiences, and milestones by evoking memory. Just as flipping through printed photos facilitates my recollection of events, situations, and time periods, the letters facilitate a process of looking back upon a former time. The notes were written in now-time– yet as I read them today they influence and re-assemble my memory, which mediates the past. The “concreteness” of letters from a bygone time feels paradoxical– almost like they are relics which have survived through time.

Writing as a Medium Today

Each of these aspects of a letter’s materiality can be connected to theoretical frameworks, from language and communication to time and space. However, since their overarching medium is writing, I’ll describe what hand-written letters mediate by extending Lydia Liu’s scholarship on “Writing” in Critical Terms for Media Studies.

When thinking about why we even call non-cursive handwriting “print”, I was introduced to the idea of Print English in Liu’s essay. With the invention of the printing press, the English alphabet was transformed from a 26 character system, to a 27 character system (the new character being a space).  “Printed English is an ideographical alphabet with a definable statistical structure. As a post-phonetic system, it functions as a conceptual interface between natural language and machine language”, Liu explains (318). “The centrality of printed symbols for technology has something to do with the fact that, to use Friedrich A. Kittler’s words, ‘in contrast to the flow of handwriting, we now have discrete elements separated by spaces’” (320). I think there’s something really fascinating about how, if we call non-fluid “print” handwriting an effect of the printing press, people’s handwriting with each generation is coming to resemble (or following) the way that our technologies produce language.

In terms of both the “voice” found in handwritten letters and their persistence as a record through time, the following quote from Lydia Liu applies: 

“In the age of informatics and computer technology, writing increasingly penetrates the biomechanics of human speech to the extent that sound, including speech, is now being turned into an artifact, a notable example being text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. The colossal amount of written and printed record and electronic information stored in data banks, libraries, museums, archival centers, and global communication networks further indicates how much the technologies of writing and print have evolved to shape modern life and the future of humanity” (310).

The first sentence here seems to say that writing is by now such a dominant form of communication that there are tools for converting it back into a “vocalized” form. Of course, text-to-speech has a voice that is de-personalised because it is a machine which speaks through a complex algorithm. This idea can be expanded to include artificial intelligence, which produces extremely generalized writing, to the point that we get an uncanny feeling when a real person delivers an AI-generated speech. Needless to say, the specific way a person we know puts together a sentence– especially given the statistically infinite possibilities– creates the “sound” of their writing. This sensory quality (I’ll extrapolate from Liu) is increasingly the “artifact” in the writing.

Lastly, the sheer amount of communications records we have globally today is a critical infrastructure of daily life. There would be no way to do research, return a package, or quote an old text sent to your grandpa without the storage of data. However, with digitization, physical records are created less and less frequently. Many of the physical documents and artifacts stored within our institutions of record-keeping are only material because of their age. To collect writing done on paper is to maintain a kind of archive of interpersonal connections throughout one’s life. Even the letters from people who are not in my life any longer, or the letter I wrote to myself two years ago during Jumpstart are valuable to me. Their material aspects evoke the people who wrote them, making those people feel real. The letters mediate my knowing people, and their knowing me.

Works Cited

Brown, Bill. “Materiality.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 2010, pp. 49–63.

Liu, Lydia. “Writing.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois, 2010, pp. 310–326. 

Blog post written by Naomi Brown