Tag Archives: Media theory

General Media Theory

Digital Surveillance: Body & Power

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Introduction:

Our phones are constantly surveilling us, although we often fail to notice it. In this era of digital technology, we have grown accustomed to our devices requesting access to our data, our location, and ultimately our private lives. We have become accustomed to saying “yes” to breaches of our privacy without considering the repercussions and what these companies plan to do with our data. This passive willingness has kept us unaware of the larger political and economic systems that are at play. As society has become more polarized and capitalist, it is essential to be aware of the dangers inherent in digital surveillance. Companies are actively collecting, commercializing, and selling intimate data without informing the users. Lindsay Balfour’s Surveillance, Biopower, and Unsettling Intimacies discusses the dangers of surveillance of women’s intimate needs in the overturning of Roe v Wade. Balfour’s work reminds us of the hysteria that occurred after the overturning and the fear of period tracking apps selling our data to the United States government. In this era of political control of people’s bodies, especially marginalized communities, it is crucial that we stay aware of these dangers. These concerns become even more prevalent with the newly introduced government-funded AI-driven surveillance system to help ICE profile and hunt down immigrants across social media. This military grade surveillance system is being used to perpetuate fear and discrimination. Balfour’s analysis of intimate data and ICE’s extreme monitoring practices demonstrates how surveillance functions as a tool of power that aims to control the body and society. 

Biopower & Intimate Data:

After the overturning of Roe v Wade, I remember feeling worried about my menstrual application and the data it held. Before these political implementations, I had been utilizing a US-based company, Flo, before switching to Clue, a UK-based company that explicitly claimed that it would protect user’s health information. Looking back, this choice was more significant than I realized. Balfour discusses that in 2021, Flo reached a settlement with the FTC (Federal Trade Commission)  after being accused of sharing intimate health data of over 100 million users to third-party companies. Although Flo still claims they never sold this data, and that this settlement was “save time”, they were accused again in 2025 for collecting data and utilizing it for advising. This example demonstrates how easily our most intimate bodily data can be packaged, commodified, and circulated without our consent. While it may seem harmless for advertisers to have access to this information, the stakes become higher when such data can be accessed by the government or law enforcement. 

Through Balfour’s discussion of biopower, it becomes evident that these methods of surveillance do not simply observe the body; they regulate it. Balfour references Michel Foucault’s theory on biopower from Biopower: Foucault and Beyond, which is defined as a form of political power that regulates bodies and population by collecting and surveilling, ultimately working towards making a society that serves the government’s interest. Balfour reminds us that through collecting reproductive data that tracks cycles, predicts pregnancies, and perhaps informs about complications or personal choices, these platforms lose their neutrality. They participate in a political system that wants to govern bodies at a biological level. Balfour argues that “Platforms are no longer things outside or adjacent to us, whether hand-held or screen mediated; instead they are now embedded, both literally and figuratively in our lives and bodies”(60). The intersection between these digital platforms and our bodies can be dangerous when we understand its political consequences. With the increasingly strict regulations surrounding abortion and gender affirming care, choices that were meant to be private are being monitored without our consent. This is an attempt by the political system to limit self expression and autonomy, having society adhere to their values or be punished for deviation. We can see how the monitoring of our personal information is being used against us, putting our bodies and livelihoods at risk.

State Surveillance & Social Control:

This era of surveillance is not limited to regulating our bodies; it’s being increasingly used to control the population and immigration. As reported by The Lever, the Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) has purchased a 5.7 million AI social media surveillance software that is designed to read over 8 billion social media posts a day. Although ICE claims that this software is meant to “detect threats,” there has been no public consent from social media users whose information is being run through this program. It becomes clear that the government is using digital surveillance to control and classify people as “dangerous” or “threatening” without proper investigation. This raises major concerns in this current polarized political climate, as many pro-Palestine activists have been targeted by immigration authorities after being doxxed (having their private information exposed). With the increase in anti-Latino immigration rhetoric, it is worrying how this technology will further perpetuate systems of violence. These surveillance methods work to silence political expression and place vulnerable communities at even more risk. This surveillance technology is extremely alarming, as there is a lot of secrecy surrounding it. Even after searching online, there was a surprising lack of articles on the topic. This lack of transparency demonstrates erasure of consent on digital platforms. Social Media companies that once promised to protect users’ privacy are easily allowing government access to their information without permission or warning. Serious matters such as immigration are being reduced to the qualifications of AI technology and “digital footprint”. With the rise of digital surveillance, it’s becoming clear how easily our autonomy is being stripped away, leaving our private information at risk. 

Conclusion:

As digital surveillance increases, it becomes more important than ever for us to be self-aware of our data and the breaches of our privacy. As mentioned by Foucault, systems of power use surveillance to control our bodies and population. These power structures want to silence our voices and limit our choices through surveillance and punishment. It’s crucial we acknowledge that these platforms that say they will protect our data are often taking hidden contracts that commodify our information, caring more about money than our safety. Although privacy issues around menstruation and immigration data occurred in the United States. These problems are not confined to only one country, as digital surveillance expands globally, and many countries are turning more conservative. This use of intimate data to control, silence, and discipline the masses is becoming normalized. It’s crucial as Media Studies students and users of the internet that we recognize the danger of surveillance. This topic is extremely important to us as media creators, as we are often using digital platforms to speak our minds. We must acknowledge that our art, our words, and our values may be surveilled and used against us. This is why we must take the time to analyze and consider the repercussions before passively saying “yes” to tracking or sharing data. We can only begin to resist these systems of oppression once we truly understand them and their consequences.

Works Cited: 

Balfour, Lindsay Anne. “Surveillance, Biopower, and Unsettling Intimacies in Reproductive Tracking Platforms.” TOPIA, vol. 48, 1 Mar. 2024, pp. 58–75, doi:10.3138/topia-2023-0025. 

Cisney, Vernon W., and Nicolae Morar. Biopower: Foucault and Beyond. The University of Chicago Press, 2016. Schwenk, Katya. “Ice Just Bought a Social Media Surveillance Bot.” The Lever, 21 Nov. 2025, www.levernews.com/ice-just-bought-a-social-media-surveillance-botice-just-bought-a-social-media-surveillance-bot/. Accessed 10 Dec. 2025.

Written by Aminata Chipembere

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We’re All Born Naked and the Rest is Performative Materiality: Drag, Gender, and Audiences.

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In Materialist Media Theory, Grant Bollmer argues that media are not passive carriers of meaning but material processes that act upon bodies, shape subjects, and generate the conditions through which identities can emerge (Bollmer). Media, in this sense, does not simply represent; it performs. It intervenes in the world. It exerts force. It structures what bodies can do and how they appear.

The art of drag is a productive lens for understanding Bollmer’s notion of performative materiality. Rather than treating drag as an exceptional or marginal cultural form, I use it as a case that makes visible the broader media-ontological operations Bollmer attributes to all mediated identity. Drag helps us see, in concrete terms, how gender emerges from interactions among bodies, objects, technologies, and audiences. Drag exemplifies Bollmer’s core argument: Identity is the outcome of material practices, not an interior essence, and media such as prosthetics, language, and audiences participate in performing identity alongside us.

The Body as Medium

If media is performative, then the body is one of its primary sites of action. Bernadette Wegenstein describes the body as “our most fundamental medium,” a surface continuously shaped, rewritten, and extended through material practices (Wegenstein 2010). Drag performers make this process visible.

Egner & Maloney’s study documents performers who articulate gender not as a fixed inner truth but as something produced through embodied technique: padding, contouring, binding, layering, staging, and stylizing. These techniques are not superficial decorations; they are operations that actively reorganize the performer’s physical and social presence.

In Egner and Maloney’s study, performers consistently describe drag as something that operates beyond fixed categories of sex or gender. Performers move fluidly between masculine and feminine embodiments, sometimes within a single act, and anatomical exposure does not necessarily disrupt the gender being performed. What matters is not the visibility of the body’s “biological” markers, but the larger assemblage of gesture, costuming, movement, and audience orientation through which gender becomes legible.

Image Credits: BobTheDragQueen.com

Bollmer’s framework is useful here because these transformations are not simply symbolic gestures layered over an already-existing identity. They are material operations that actively reorganize how the body functions in space. Wigs, makeup, padding, and prosthetics act as media technologies that exert force on perception, movement, and social recognition. Drag performers, therefore, exemplify Bollmer’s argument that what we call “identity” is inseparable from “the material relations that allow subjects to be produced at all”. Gender is not expressed through media; it is generated through media.

Drag as Material Performance

Drag’s power lies not simply in its visual transformation, but in the convergence of materials, practices, and infrastructures that produce a performative body. As Egner and Maloney note, “acting in a way that disrupts expectations of how ‘normal’ people do gender allows drag performers to subvert gender expectations for both their everyday and on-stage gender presentation” (Egner and Maloney, 2016, p. 877). This disruption does not occur only at the level of meaning or representation. It happens through specific material actions such as costuming, makeup, bodily stylization, movement, and staging.

This is where Bollmer’s idea of performative materiality becomes especially useful. For Bollmer, media do not simply communicate identity after it already exists. Media are part of the process that brings identity into being. When drag performers alter their bodies through makeup, padding, wigs, and gestures, they are not expressing a pre-existing gender that lives inside them. They are using media technologies to actively produce gender as something that becomes visible and legible in the world.

From this perspective, the subversion that Egner and Maloney describe is not only cultural or symbolic. It is material. Disrupting how “normal” people do gender works because drag physically reorganizes bodies in space and changes how those bodies can be seen, interpreted, and responded to. What counts as masculine or feminine shifts because the material conditions that support those categories are being altered in real time. This is exactly what Bollmer means when he argues that identity emerges from material relations rather than from an inner essence. Drag does not represent gender. It participates in making gender possible in different ways.

Video Credits: RuPaul’s Drag Race

Audience as Medium: Interaction as Material Process

One of the most significant contributions of Egner and Maloney’s study is the claim that audience interaction is not supplemental to drag performance but constitutive of it. Performers report that their gender presentations shift depending on the audience present, the reactions they observe, and the boundaries they attempt to breach. What is being performed is therefore not a fixed gender identity but a relational process that only takes shape through response.

This is where Bollmer’s concept of performative materiality becomes especially clear. For Bollmer, media are environments that shape what actions can occur and what forms of identity can emerge. The audience functions as part of this media environment. Their reactions operate as material forces that influence how gender is performed in real time. Laughter, discomfort, silence, and shock are not just interpretations of drag. They actively condition what kinds of gender expressions become possible in that space.

Egner and Maloney show that performers adjust their performances depending on the setting. When performing for mixed or university audiences, performers often wear more clothing and reduce sexual content because less is required to breach dominant gender norms (Egner and Maloney, 2016, pp. 897 to 898). In queer venues, performers intensify their gender transgressions in order to generate the same disruptive effect. This demonstrates that subversion is not located in any single costume, gesture, or body. It is produced through a dynamic interaction between performer and audience.

From Bollmer’s perspective, this means that gender is not performed by an individual subject alone; it emerges from a media system composed of bodies, space, sound, attention, and reaction. Identity forms through ongoing material feedback rather than through internal psychological intent. Drag makes this process visible by showing how gender must be constantly adjusted in response to the media environment in which it appears.

Fluidity as a Media Condition

Drag performers in Egner and Maloney’s study frequently describe gender as fluid, shifting, and multiple. Rather than explaining this fluidity as a psychological experience or an inner truth of the self, Bollmer’s performative materiality allows us to understand it as something produced by media conditions themselves. Gender becomes fluid because the material relations that generate it are fluid.

Bodies become sites of repeated inscription through costume, makeup, gesture, and movement. Audiences function as interpretive infrastructures that change what kinds of gender presentations become legible or disruptive. Performance spaces shape how far gender can be pushed and in what direction. The result is that gender is not simply flexible in a personal sense. It is procedural. It is continuously built and rebuilt through interaction between bodies, materials, and environments.

Egner and Maloney describe this process as “gender bending,” rather than “gender acting” (Egner and Maloney, 2016). This wording emphasizes process over representation. Gender shifts within performance as performers respond to audience reaction. In some cases, new understandings of identity emerge through drag itself. Identity is therefore not something that exists first and is later expressed through performance. It takes shape through the material act of performing.

This directly mirrors Bollmer’s claim that identity is always produced through performances composed of material relations (Bollmer, 2020). Drag makes this visible by placing gender into a system where it must respond to bodies, media technologies, spatial conditions, and social reaction all at once.

Image Credits: RuPaul’s Drag Race

Gender as a Media Event

When viewed through Bollmer’s concept of performative materiality, drag becomes more than a genre of entertainment or a symbolic critique of gender norms. It becomes a system in which the material production of identity can be seen in real time. Gender does not appear in drag as an inner truth that is later expressed outward. It takes shape through concrete media operations such as makeup, costuming, bodily technique, spatial staging, and audience reaction. These elements do not decorate identity. They actively generate it.

Drag makes visible what Bollmer argues is always happening across media more broadly. Bodies become media surfaces through modification and stylization. Audiences become part of the media environment through their responses, which shape what kinds of gender expressions become legible, disruptive, or acceptable. Repeated performance turns gender into a process that must be continually recalibrated rather than a stable essence that simply endures. Identity, in this sense, is not located inside the performer and later communicated outward. It emerges through the material relations that connect performer, body, object, space, and audience.

Because drag requires constant adjustment to audience response, it makes clear that gender is not produced by individual intention alone. It is produced through feedback. The meaning and force of a performance change depending on who is watching, how they react, and what norms are already in place. This directly enacts Bollmer’s claim that media do not merely transmit meaning but operate as environments that shape what subjects can become. Gender in drag is therefore not just represented. It is materially organized through circulation, response, and repetition.

What drag ultimately reveals is that identity itself operates as a media process. The instability of gender in drag is not an exception to how identity normally works. It is an intensified version of the same material dynamics that structure identity in everyday mediated life. Drag shows with unusual clarity that subjects are not formed in isolation, but through ongoing interaction with media systems that exert force on bodies, perception, and social recognition. In this sense, drag does not only critique gender. It exposes the media conditions that make gender possible at all.

Works Cited

Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019, https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/monograph?docid=b-9781501337086. Accessed 5 December 2025.

Egner, Justine, and Patricia Maloney. ““It Has No Color , It Has No Gender , It’s Gender Bending”: Gender and Sexuality Fluidity and Subversiveness in Drag Performance.” Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 63, no. 7, 2016, pp. 875-903.

Wegenstein, Bernadette. “Body.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, 2010. Accessed 5 December 2025.

Header Image by Fernando Cysneiros (Taken at UBC!)

General Media Theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

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

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

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

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

General Media Theory, Other

Why We Fight Online: Environmental Polarization in Digital Media

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Introduction

Even though everyone has come to realize that internet has always been a medium of chaos and conflict, but it has always been mildly confusing for us that while verbal sparring in reality is a relatively mild and civilized form of exchanging viewpoints, online it becomes a genuine battlefield—strangers clash fiercely over differing opinions, or sometimes simply to provoke, with conflicts erupting openly for all to see. I’ve also seen many ordinary content creators who share their daily lives eventually forced to turn off private messages after gaining attention, because clearly, many people use such channels like random assailants, aiming only to wound without reason. 

If aliens studying Earth were to witness the spectacle of online discourse, they might be astounded by the stark contrast with the polite and respectful demeanor most people display in real life. What causes such a clear divide in behavior between the online and offline worlds for the same individuals? Does the digital environment inherently make people more irritable, less tolerant, and unwilling to understand others? In this article, we will explore this very question—specifically, the causes of environmental polarization and the role the media plays in it.

Network Polarization and the Online Environment 

Network polarization refers to the phenomenon where issues that might be understandable in real life are continuously amplified and fixated upon by online communities to the point of harsh criticism. People become less tolerant of differing viewpoints online, while growing increasingly exclusive within their own labeled groups—even if their so-called “allies” might struggle to hold a two-sentence conversation with them in real life. Environmental polarization makes everyone more sensitive and defensive. In this climate of pervasive insecurity, individuals seek solace in groups, yet this very process only deepens the divides between people. While cooperation and understanding thrive offline, online, certain opinions are immediately branded as heresy worthy of burning at the stake—judged with absolute, uncompromising harshness.

If we look back at the online environment around 2000, although media technology was far less efficient and accessible than today, the atmosphere of communication was generally much healthier than the current state, where a single comment can rapidly poison a community. Does this mean the advancement of media technology is not truly a positive development? Perhaps, as Umberto Eco wrote in Chronicles of a Liquid Society (2017), “Progress doesn’t necessarily involve going forward at all costs.” While Eco was mainly discussing the unnecessary “diversification” of physical inventions that replace what already exists, I suspect he would also disapprove of today’s digital landscape.

Potential Reasons Behind Network Polarization and the Influence of Media

To understand why online environments intensify conflict, we can turn to Gibson’s ecological perspective, which helps explain why digital environments intensify conflict and relies on what the environment makes available to us. Applied to online usage, this suggests that when people use social and online platforms, they shape the exact platform they are using while the platform itself simultaneously shapes them. 

In The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Gibson emphasizes that the “animal and the environment make an inseparable pair” (p. 8). Gibson writes that the perceiver is always surrounded by “the medium in which animals can move about (and in which objects can be moved about) is at the same time the medium for light, sound, and odor coming from sources in the environment.” (p. 13), meaning that perception is shaped by whatever information the environment supplies.

One major factor of polarization is selective perception. Our online feeds are not a neutral environment, as algorithms curate and amplify content that they assume the user appears to be “looking for.” This makes polarization feel natural and unavoidable because the environment reinforces the observer. Online, this means users often search for confirmation validation that aligns with existing emotions and beliefs.

Gibson also reminds us that perception is active, not passive. He states, “we must perceive in order to move, but we must also move in order to perceive. ” (p. 213). Online, there is constant “movement” in scrolling, liking, and reposting, which affects what the users perceive next based on the algorithm. The environment is always refreshing, adjusting to user behaviour. This repeated cycle then boosts reactions and reinforces patterns, making it easier for polarization to become a way of interacting.

Looking into Media: a Tool or an Amplifier?

Concluding from Gibson, we can say that the internet we are looking into is not a neutral environment, and media does not only act as a tool for our voices. Depending on algorithms, the pages shown to everyone are different, designed for our own taste. By manipulating what people perceive, media and the internet can easily influence the opinions of people, and the information cocoon will naturally feed towards the minds of the opinions already there, making the opinions increasingly polarized and entrenched. People use the internet to voice themselves, but the internet will also amplify what they are saying to other people’s ears. 

Sources:

Eco, Umberto. “Have we really invented so much?”. Chronicles of a Liquid Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2017. https://archive.org/details/chroniclesofliqu0000ecou 

Gibson, James. J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Psychology Press

. 2015. https://library.uniq.edu.iq/storage/books/file/The%20Ecological%20Approach%20to%20Visual%20Perception%20Approach/1667383098The%20Ecological%20Approach%20to%20Visual%20Perception%20Classic%20Edition%20(James%20J.%20Gibson)%20(z-lib.org)%20(1).pdf

Törnberg, K.P. (Petter). “Social media polarize politics for a different reason than you might think”. University of Amsterdam. 2022.https://www.uva.nl/en/shared-content/faculteiten/en/faculteit-der-maatschappij-en-gedragswetenschappen/news/2022/10/social-media-polarize-politics-for-a-different-reason-than-you-might-think.html?cb

Collaborators:

Siming Liao, Aubrey Ventura

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

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

Citations 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

General Media Theory

Media makes us STUPID? When internet slangs become your only mean of expression…

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The more deeply I engage with media—especially while studying in a program centered on media itself—the more I notice how easily it shapes my perception, attention, and even my habits of thought. This course has made me confront something I never really questioned before: what does it mean to maintain a healthy distance from the media systems that structure so much of our daily life? And what happens when we don’t? Will constantly scrolling through short videos or fragmented content make us less intelligent? If so, how?

Since middle school, teachers told me that I used too many vague pronouns in my writing, which affects my precision. They frequently remind me to avoid using “this” or “that” in my writing. “If you can’t find suitable words, it means your language isn’t keeping up with your thinking.” This indicates that you lack language as a tool to deeply form your own understanding and thoughts. If medium shapes cognition (McLuhan), how is constant scrolling reorganizing our ability to think? Many people intuitively think that short videos make us “dumber”, but the reasons are often misinterpreted. The issue isn’t that watching TikTok directly lowers intelligence. Instead, these platforms cultivate a discourse environment that is extremely homogeneous and structurally limited (Loupessis and Intahchomphoo). You may seem to be exposed to a lot of content every day, but in reality, it’s all just a repetitive corpus of viral phrases.

According to the article “What the Sigma?: The Sociolinguistic Applications of Gen Alpha Slang in the Digital Era,” scholars, based on Generation Alpha’s own digital slang research, cataloged 46 different examples of Gen Alpha slang and grouped them into five categories: Fresh & Creative, Flippant, Imitative, Acronym/Clipping, and more (Rodriguez). Most of those slang terms fall under the “Fresh & Creative” category — that is, they are newly coined, playful, and often tied to visual-media or short-form video contexts like “Skibidi,” “rizz,” “fanum tax,” etc. This suggests that the linguistic repertoire of Gen Alpha is not being recycled from older generations but is instead expanding—producing new vocabulary at a very fast pace and restructuring how younger people communicate.

In contrast with the more stable, formal language, this dynamic and rapidly shifting slang ecosystem emphasizes my concern: as everyday expression is increasingly shaped by fleeting memes and platform-specific references, so the linguistic resource on which thoughtfully reflective, precise expression diminishes, limiting how wide or deep our conceptual world can become.

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

In light of our course discussions, this feels connected to Wittgenstein’s insight that language structures the world we can inhabit conceptually. If, as McLuhan suggests, media environments reshape attention and cognition, then a restricted linguistic repertoire not only reflects that shift. It reinforces it, narrowing the range of ideas we are capable of forming in the first place. The convenient yet biased categorization of things, the crude grouping of people and events, the choosing of sides, and the imposition of stereotypes are often caused by the inertia of language. When language divides the world, it limits how our brains organize knowledge.

This brings me back to our discussions of Bollmer and materiality: the problem isn’t just what content says, but how platforms structure the kinds of expression that feel natural. TikTok discourse often feels “vast,” but structurally it’s incredibly limited. We scroll through thousands of videos that appear diverse but repeat the same linguistic templates, emotional beats, and forms of reaction. The result is what Adorno might call pseudo-individuality: a sense of originality inside a fundamentally homogenized system (Theodore Adorno). So my emerging argument is this: Homogenized media environments don’t just limit what we see—they limit the language we have available to describe our own experiences. And when language narrows, thought narrows.

The topic of how language shapes thought is a well-worn one, and it’s also a frequently discussed binary proposition in philosophy. A comparable concern arises in George Orwell’s notion of “Newspeak” in 1984, wherein the state deliberately reduces vocabulary so that citizens become literally incapable of forming rebellious or complex thoughts (“Language in 1984 and the Concept of Newspeak”). While our contemporary situation is not governed by authoritarian language control, the basic mechanism is similar in a way that is almost unbelievable: when available vocabulary shrinks, so shrinks the range of imaginable ideas. Neil Postman extends this argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death, contending that societies dominated by entertainment-centered media lose the capacity for sustained, rational discourse (Postman). For Postman, the danger is not censorship through force, but through distraction—when a culture becomes saturated with quick, shallow, emotionally stimulating content, people lose the cognitive habits required for critique. Both Orwell and Postman offer useful parallels to what we have discussed in class: media environments shape not only what we think about, but the very conditions under which thinking is possible. When we combine their insights with McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” and Bollmer’s claim on media materiality, a clearer pattern emerges–media forms that privilege speed, simplification, and entertainment tend to produce linguistic environments where nuance atrophies, and with it, the capacity for deeper political, ethical, and intellectual reflection.

How can we improve our expression and critical thinking skills? Read more serious books and works, or listen to insights that aren’t mass-produced. Strive for greater precision in word choice, try to describe feelings more specifically, find a precise word for vague thoughts, and then replace it with more of these words to expand your vocabulary. The vastness of our thinking is only limited by our limited language. In reality, our thoughts are incredibly vast; given better language tools, we can go much further.

Reference:

Loupessis, Iliana, and Channarong Intahchomphoo. “Framing the climate: How Tiktok’s algorithm shapes environmental discourse.” Telematics and Informatics, vol. 102, Oct. 2025, p. 102329, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2025.102329.

“Language in 1984 and the Concept of Newspeak.” Teddybarbier.Com, www.llceranglais.fr/language-in-1984-and-the-concept-of-newspeak.html#:~:text=What%20is%20Newspeak%20?,in%20totalitarian%20countries%20and%20organisations. Accessed 5 Dec. 2025.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Pearson Education, 2007

Rodriguez, Sophia Marie. What the Sigma?: The Sociolinguistic Applications of Gen Alpha Slang in the Digital Era | by Sophia Marie Rodriguez | Medium, medium.com/@sophiamarie.rodriguez/what-the-sigma-the-sociolinguistic-applications-of-gen-alpha-slang-in-the-digital-era-b7ef7e489af0. Accessed 5 Dec. 2025.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, mariabuszek.com/mariabuszek/kcai/PoMoSeminar/Readings/AdornoHork.pdf. Accessed 5 Dec. 2025.

Cover: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/784752303855969869/

Written by Gina Chang

General Media Theory

McQueen: Evocation and the Fashion Madhouse

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Image sourced from GATA Magazine

I will begin with the statement that fashion, as an umbrella term, is not an evocative object. In its modern form, fashion is too widespread, commercial, capitalized, and individual for all of it to be considered evocative. Fashion is viewed by the mass majority of people in the way Kopytoff defines commodities- being produced materially as something, but also being marked societally as such. It is a wonderful, divine medium, but it doesn’t have one singular meaning, as not all of them are exactly designed to shake a person’s worldview or way of thinking, nor act as a transitional object and a basis of emotional connection. What is infinitely more interesting, however, is when designers use the medium of fashion as an object through which they can proclaim their own evocations, as does the Spring 2001 collection entitled Voss by the late, great British designer Alexander McQueen.

There is an evocation of insanity throughout the collection- the models walk with jerky, unnerving, enigmatic movements and expressions. The makeup is pale and bilious, the hair is covered with wrappings and bandages as if they’ve just come out of surgery. The set is designed to look like a padded cell, and there are one-way mirrors inside offering a voyeuristic view into the encagement, a view that satirizes the way the fashion industry preys on designers and models, treats them as entertainment, discards them the moment their evocation has been ran dry.

There is an evocation, that of discipline, throughout the collection. It is often said that fashion is a discipline itself, a code, a simultaneous desire and denial of values, be it aesthetic, functional, or emotional. The showpieces are uncomfortable, made of unconventional materials, both unorthodox in style and responsibility. A bodice of blood-red venetian glass, a breastplate of spiked silver and black pearls- a dress of ostrich feathers and microscope slides, a periwinkle straightjacket frilled with amaranth. It is all a discipline, a discipline of lunacy that is par for fashion’s course.

Furthermore, the evocation of transition and reinvention manifests with intrigue and aplomb. Many pieces are distinctly androgynous- menswear staples such as the pantsuit are deconstructed into gauzy and feminine silks and chiffons. Comedic surrealism is also used- a necktie becomes a makeshift halter, an unfinished puzzle is now a chestplate, a model castle perches itself on a model’s shoulder, weighing her down with the burden of being just that, a model. It’s a very liminal form, a form that tiptoes between expectation and self, the cultural and the natural, the rigidity of grounded society and the freedom of surreal insanity.

And another evocation begins to reveal itself, that of meditation and vision. Natural materials feature throughout- seashells fresh from the British coast, various explosions of feathers, the fearsome stillness of taxidermied birds. They are indeed familiar, but they are manifested uncannily, disorientingly unfamiliar. They infuse the collection with a contemplation of sorts, a contemplation on how these objects have both been made and found, found to be made into its own reflection on the hauntings and perils of modern fashion.

Indeed, at this point in his life, McQueen, who was 31, had grown tired of the insatiable thirst of the fashion elite. He was in the process of leaving his position as the head of Givenchy, a storied Parisian couture house, and he had always struggled with the press’s framing of him as a rebellious, working-class outsider in the upper-class society of luxury fashion. He was heavily smoking and using drugs, and had grown weary of the immense pressure put on him, especially regarding rumours surrounding his work at Givenchy.

So when one analyzes this show retrospectively, it becomes clear that this collection is, by both definition and practice, a quintessential example of what Turkle considers to be an evocative object. The whole show is a double-entendre, showing the fashion elite what they want to see by way of “wearable” clothing and commercialized androgyny, but also laughing in their face, satirizing their seriousness and forcing them to commit their own sins, viewing the clothes and models as scrutinized lab rats for experimentation. It is an object of discipline and desire, controlling his deranged fantasies within the constraints of traditional fashion. It is an object of transition and passage, allowing the concepts in his mind to be transported into reality, traversing the line between the constructed and the abstract, the self and its surroundings. It’s a liminal collection, an intermediate space between fashion’s expectation and McQueen’s heedlessness.

And, most obviously, it is an object of meditation and new vision, giving old objects a new meaning and purpose through a new medium or way of thinking. A dress of razor clam shells is most likely the most obvious reference to this logic, with McQueen even referencing it in a 2000 Women’s Wear Daily interview, saying “The shells had outlived their usefulness on the beach, so we put them to another use on a dress. Then Erin [O’Connor] came out and trashed the dress, so their usefulness was over once again. Kind of like fashion, really.” (Fallon)

It’s all a phantasmagoric display, escalating into a final display of writer Michelle Olley, fat, nude, and covered in moths, a direct contrast to the sanitized, tall sylphs floating through the show. And yet, the collection is its own evocative object for McQueen, in its existence as a provocation to thought, a companion to his emotional life, an undying legacy in the face of modern fashion’s tendency to steal, beg, barter, copy, backstab, and ignore. It’s pure, unbridled, raw, hopelessly realistic fashion that is simultaneous in its purpose as a commodity and its evocation as a manic transcendence.

Objects, as per Turkle, shift their meanings with time, place, and individuals. Fashionable objects go in and out of style. But just like the amaranth, the unfading bloom, a designer’s evocation never dies.

Works Referenced:

Turkle, S. (Ed.). (2007). Evocative Objects: Things We Think With. The MIT Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhg8p

Fallon, J. (2020, April 23). The McQueen Chronicles. Women’s Wear Daily. https://web.archive.org/web/20240807033219/https://wwd.com/feature/article-1201126-1706647/

Kopytoff, I. (1988). The cultural biography of things: commoditization as process. The social life of things (pp. 64–91). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511819582

understitch,. (2024, March 2). The Life and Death of Alexander McQueen. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CY1fkAWprE

All photographs sourced from firstVIEW unless otherwise stated

Written by Rosetta Jones

General Media Theory, Other

That’s Valid…?

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My grade twelve homeform teacher was one of the people who encouraged me the most to go to UBC. He went to Simon Fraser for BEd and once joked I reminded him of a younger version of himself — it was all the sweeter when he said I was “full of s—” when I asked what he’d meant in calling me facetious. We were his last class in his last year teaching, and he liked drawn out chats as much as he liked to talk over the entirety of a film’s run time, spare the long pauses with open faced palms and a big smiley “ah-ah-ahhh,” glancing at us in a darkened classroom to see if ‘we got it’ (imagine the sound of a seal eager to be fed).

He didn’t talk over Gattaca though. The 1996 sci-fi flick stars Jude Law, Ethan Hawke, and Uma Thrurman and is set in the near-future where eugenics is widespread, dividing society in perfected ‘valids’ and impure, naturally-conceived ‘invalids.’ Hawke plays an invalid, Vincient, who masquerades as the paralyzed — but valid — Olympic swimmer Jerome in a bid to go to space that would otherwise be impossible given the unconfirmed presence of heart defect. Every single morning, Vincient undergoes an extensive routine of meticulously hiding himself behind contacts and fingers printed in the shape of Jerome while scrubbing clean any bioindictors that would identify his true self.  That’s mad, man.

Anyway: this one’s for you, Joel.

The eugenics of Gattaca are multifaceted. Fertilization takes place in laboratory petri dishes as zygotes are screened and selected both for particular attributes like gender, complexion and intelligence and the absence of defects or inheritable diseases. The resulting effect is the proliferation of a caste system, powered by an invalid underclass resigned to menial, subservient social and economic positions. Genoism — discrimination of those due to their genetic profile — is technically prohibited but a principle practice in the hyper-corporate-capitalist future. Instantaneous and frequent DNA testing is everywhere and powered by a collective genetic registry, squashing any attempt for an invalid to circumnavigate their social roles.

Though (thankfully) our own society doesn’t practice eugenics, the concept of capitalist biometric surveillance is not foreign to us — no, not at all. Lindsay Anne Balfour authored an article which raises rightful suspicions toward Femtech: her term for platformized feminine health technology like menstruation and ovulation trackers on one’s smartphone (2024). Data from users is stored by these apps and have — and continue to be — sold to social media and advertising firms, becoming an implicit identifying category digitally for users. These data bases, though not collectivized or publicly accessible, constitute an analogous structural transposition of a genetic registry. Advertising-driven models of revenue for digital platforms commodifies user-sourced data, incentivizing and contextualizing the channels of information infrastructure toward a de facto confederated pool of identifying data. 

As media scholars, we should have no illusion that our advanced (and still rapidly growing) digital social spaces lack a reactive, considered legal framework that accurately represents their whole relationship to both the self and society. Though Balfour uses the example of the app Flo being charged in the US for misleading customers regarding data sales, personal data stored on these apps have few legal protections. FemTech rarely tracks data that warrants platforms being listed as a covered-entity under America’s Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. As such, these platforms have fewer restrictions on storing and selling data. She provides the example of a South Carolina bill designed to make abortion punishable by death — it’s not an unfounded question to the moral character of lawmakers so offended by access to healthcare in asking what end they’d go to in ‘bringing people to justice.’ What about tracked geospatial data of a user visiting a medical clinic? Beyond subpoenas, what if police proceed into the (disgustingly) unregulated territory of simply purchasing data from advertisers in search of a conviction?

In the face of such technology, users end up having their personal ‘self’ increasingly imprinted and fragmented across digital spheres. A person has the ready ability to use these information deposit-boxes as extensions of their mind, assisting in monitoring what they’d otherwise do themselves. Sherry Turkle has written extensively on this notion that people’s identities reflect separate but enmeshed characterizations of themself. (Weiss 2019). When biometrics identifiers are among those being tracked, this enmeshment becomes paradoxically intimate; user’s physical bodies are increasingly traced through apps as their data is liable to be shipped and shared with less-than-privy eyes. 

Okay, wait, let’s return to Gattaca. Again, we do not share the film’s fantasy of living in a genetically engineering civilization — the conversation regarding eugenics and biopolitics is its own can of worms. However, we can’t ignore its commentary on what advanced media technology has the potential to enable regarding how we interact with human identity. The genetic registry is of particular interest in this regard. It can be accessed and shared among any corporate entity to corroborate a DNA test against one another, returning a binary marker of the person before them as either ‘valid’ or ‘invalid’ — good or bad. In this action, they are robbed not only of any semblance of mobility, agency, or equality before their peers but of all of these virtues and rights we take for granted regarding the very act of self-conception. Vincent possesses every cognitive faculty which would let him go to space but is prohibited by an omnipresent registry that reduces his human potential to the delimitation of a collectivized knowledge base.

It’s best to proceed with my point in comparing the technology of Gattaca and Balfour’s concerns regarding FemTech. FemTech does not create or define a person as a living, breathing human. It does, however, draw increasingly sensitive categories around one’s digital self  — the way that our digital sphere conceives and represents the human. More important, however, is that this data becomes increasingly foreign to oneself and is, as evidenced through legal proceedings regarding such data, flowing further away from our explicit control. To think that current laws come close to matching the potential exploitative — or discriminative — features of digital technology made increasingly intricate year by year is both naive and explicitly wrong. Sci-Fi is one manner in which we speculate future outcomes of our current actions. In walking away from Gattaca, we must affirm a commitment to upholding the human behind the numbers, not the numbers themselves. 

References:

Balfour, Lindsay Ann. “Surveillance, Biopower, and Unsettling Intimacies in Reproductive Tracking Platforms.” Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 48, 2024, pp. 58-75.

Weiss, Dennis M. “Seduced by the Machine Human-Technology Relations and Sociable Robots.” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, pp. 217-232. Canvas Materials.

Other

Corresponding With Ideas: Making, Writing & Charlie Kaufman

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Central to Tim Ingold’s Making is the notion that “making is a correspondence between maker and material;” that creation is not a matter of imposing your will on the world, but to engage with it; that in the unique properties of every material exists a sort of agency that, in correspondence with your own, shapes the final work. This material may be a piece of clay, a paintbrush, an axe, a violin, matter. But, as I will argue in this paper, this relationship of correspondence may be more universal than applying only to matter; that the material we correspond with may be an idea.

The art form of writing, an abstraction of story, thought, and ideas alloyed only by language, is where we see most clearly this correspondence between maker and idea. Perhaps no writer is better a manifestation of Ingold’s principle of making responsively, reflexively, and in correspondence with than Charlie Kaufman. In his 2011 BAFTA lecture on screenwriting, he wrote: “A screenplay is an exploration. It’s about the thing you don’t know. It’s a step into the abyss. It necessarily starts somewhere, anywhere; there is a starting point but the rest is undetermined, It is a secret, even from you. There’s no template for a screenplay, or there shouldn’t be.” Kaufman, screenwriter of such surreal and labyrinthine narratives as Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is known for his complex, layered, and often relatable work. Perhaps the iconic and idiosyncratic nature of his projects are thanks to a specific process, one that does not begin with predetermination but with exploration, one that rejects a pre-composed design, and privileges the ideas he works with as shaping the final work. If you’ve read Ingold’s Making, this approach should sound familiar.

“Allow yourself the freedom to change as you discover, allow your screenplay to grow and change as you work on it. You will discover things as you work. You must not put these things aside, even if they’re inconvenient.” Here, Kaufman encourages the writer to change their initial ‘design’ for a screenplay as they are making it. If you’ve ever written anything substantial, you might have shifted gears after a discovery during research, been inspired by an idea from another work that shaped your own, or noticed that a phrase or an argument didn’t sound quite right when put into words, despite your initial intent. Just as a sculptor looks for certain clays and pigments and shapes them to their liking, a writer goes out into the world and learns the truth about certain ideas, concepts, and things, either through deliberate research or human experience, and weaves them together into an argument or a story. Then, like the sculptor reacts to the texture, weight and strength of the clay and adjusts their work accordingly, the writer shapes their story according to the concepts and ideas they’ve learned and encountered. Your writing doesn’t come straight from your head to paper. At some time or another, you got all your ideas from somewhere, and they shape your work as much as you do. You aren’t interacting with physical matter, or collaborating with another person, but there’s clearly something affecting your work here that isn’t you. This secret collaborator, then, may be the agency of ideas, concepts, things; the truths of the world that are a secret to you, but that you can go out and discover. Justice, redemption, war, infinity, the Vietnamese punk scene, our inner desires, father-daughter relationships, what it’s like to live as a janitor, these are the materials of a writer. These are what films, and books, and stories are about. Just as a sculptor makes with clay, a writer makes with these concepts. And just as a seamstress cannot pull a thread so far that it snaps, a writer cannot betray the truth of an idea. 

But, you may object, you can make an idea in your story or essay or lecture to be whatever you want – objects however, do push back against you, literally; they have physical limits. If you don’t correspond to their agency they will actually shatter, melt, break. It’s true, this is a noteworthy distinction. Consider, however, a story about the idea of romantic relationships – one about a guy that gets into a relationship and is therefore freed from all sadness. This story has ignored the truth about romantic relationships; that they have flaws, that they aren’t all there is to life, that they are not, truly, a cure for sadness. Contained within the idea of relationships is that naked truth about ourselves that we’ve all likely experienced. And in making with it, in putting it into your story, that truth exerts a sort of agency in your work. The writer does have the choice to ignore it, just like the carpenter has the choice to ignore the tensile strength of cedar, but just as that lazy carpenter’s house will crumble sometime or another, that writer’s work, in Charlie Kaufman’s eyes, will become forgotten, irrelevant and inapplicable to our human experience, because it is not true to their experience. It is not true to what they really think if they really sat with it, or who they really are. As Kaufman puts it: “I think you need to be willing to be naked when you do anything creatively in film or any other form, that’s really what you have to do because otherwise it’s very hard to separate it from marketing.”

Of course, truth, famously, is subjective. But there are many writers who have written work that is not true to themselves; not because they really have a different view on what the truth of the matter is, but because they’ve ignored it – because the story would not have been as exciting or marketable or formulaic if they had taken the time to think about how things really are. Kaufman argues that “…we’ve been conned into thinking there is a pre-established form. Like any big business, the film business believes in mass production. It’s cheaper and more efficient as a business model.” He quotes Harold pinter in saying “A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity… you find no shelter, no protection, unless you lie. In which case, of course, you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician.” We can think of  a formulaic screenplay that ignores the truth of human experience much like a politician’s promises, a cheap mass-produced blender or a prefabricated house – sooner or later, it will have to be replaced. Shlocky, formulaic novels and lazily written, straight-to-DVD movies can be entertaining for a while but they don’t tend to be remembered like works that really tried to sit with an idea, find the universal human truth in it and see what they could truly make with it. Just like materials, ideas can last a long time, can continue to be relatable, insightful and truthful to our lives as humans, if we acknowledge their agency; if we try to understand how they really work instead of how we think they should, if we experiment with them, put them together in new ways and wait honestly to see how they correspond with each other and ourselves. In other words, whether the maker is corresponding with materials or ideas, they must make with the truth of the matter.

Ingold, Tim. “Making: Archaeology, Art & Architecture.” Routledge, 2013.

Kaufman, Charlie. “Screenwriter’s Lecture: Charlie Kaufman” BAFTA, 2011.

Pinter, Harold. “Nobel Prize Lecture” The Nobel Foundation, 2008.

Written by Daniel Schatz.

General Media Theory

Not (Yet?) a Swifty

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If Spotify recommends Taylor Swift to me one more time, I might start believing it knows something about me that I don’t. It’s strange how a platform can make you question your own musical identity, even if you, like me, have never listened to T. Swizzle. Perhaps she and Westside Gunn have more in common than I thought, or perhaps there are assumptions even my own listening choices cannot defy.

Genre as Culture on Spotify

Spotify may be a useful site for finding music and creating playlists, but it is also important for examining how genre and identity are produced today. In looking at how Spotify organizes genre and distributes listening statistics, as discussed in Muchitsch & Werner’s paper, we can understand genre not simply as a descriptive category but as a system of representation that shapes how listeners come to understand themselves. Genre formation has long been recognized as unstable — “fleeting processes whose boundaries are permeable and fluctuating, yet nevertheless culturally and socially safeguarded” (Brackett, 2016 qtd. in Muchitsch & Werner, 2024, p. 306). Genres constantly shift and divide, giving rise to newer sub-genres like indie pop or bubble grunge. But genre is also representational; it defines a type of music and, by extension, a type of listener.

Metadata and Identity

Spotify’s use of genre as metadata allows us to better see how they construct identities — genre becomes an identity category embedded into algorithmic logic, a technical shorthand for grouping users and predicting their future behavior. Besides recommendations, the advent of personalized playlists — like the well-known (and awful) “Just For You”s — are examples of how technology actively dictates the media we encounter. The algorithm assumes an identity about the listener and continually supplies content that reinforces that assumption. Although it appears that our listening habits inform the algorithm, the relationship is indeed reciprocal. Technology also shapes our perceptions of our own identities by offering back a curated and often reductive portrait of who we “are” as listeners.

Bollmer and Performativity

This feedback loop often goes unnoticed because of the widespread belief that technologies are neutral. Bollmer’s work on representation, identity, and performativity challenges this assumption, reminding us that representational identities—such as those produced in digital platforms—affect our capacity to act and perform within society. Especially as branding culture dominates the media landscape, individuals frequently become the “faces” of genres, embodying particular aesthetics or attitudes. These stylized identities influence how other listeners understand themselves and how the algorithm categorizes them in return. And, as we know but will not explore fully here, these categorizations are far from unbiased.

For Bollmer, identity is something both enacted and mediated. We cannot fully control how we are represented, nor can we detach ourselves from the biases and conditions that shape how we perform in the world. At the same time, we are constantly surrounded by stimuli that instruct us in the ways we should construct our identities. Playlists and music taste are only slim examples of the performative acts through which we present and negotiate a sense of self. Spotify, by mediating genre, participates in this process, co-producing musical identity through representational systems that determine what counts as meaningful performance.

What does this mean for users?

Rather than stable categories, genres have become interfaces for identity. Users construct self-image through listening habits, while platforms translate those habits into data profiles that feed back into the listening experience. Mood playlists—“chill,” “in love,” “rainy day,” “main character”—make this even clearer. They frame music not only as sound, but as a tool for managing and performing the self. In this way, Spotify exemplifies how contemporary media systems blur the lines between what we choose and what is chosen for us, shaping identity through the very categories that claim to represent it.

Identity as “Self Work”

Tia DeNora’s idea of music as a “technology of the self” deepens this understanding of genre and identity. For DeNora, people use music to regulate emotion, construct moods, and shape situations—music is a tool for self-presentation and self-maintenance. But when platforms pre-organize music into specific categories, they intervene in this process, prescribing what kinds of selves the listener might want to inhabit. What once felt like personal, intuitive self-work becomes filtered through Spotify’s mood-based playlists, quietly guiding the identities we perform and the emotions we deem appropriate.

Implications

The implications of this are subtle but significant; If identity is enacted through musical choice—as Bollmer and DeNora both suggest—then algorithmic curation narrows the range of performative possibilities. The listener performs the self through their music, but the platform anticipates, predicts, and nudges that performance, creating a closed loop where identity is both expressed and engineered. Genre, once a loose cultural concept, becomes a data-driven identity label that platforms use to categorize and influence behavior. And because these systems appear neutral, the shaping of identity through recommendations often feels natural rather than infrastructural.

In the end, the relationship between genre, identity, and streaming platforms reveals far more than how music is organized—it shows how contemporary technologies dictate who we are allowed to become. Spotify doesn’t just categorize sound; it categorizes people, returning our listening habits to us as ready-made portraits of taste and selfhood. Between Bollmer’s emphasis on mediated identity and DeNora’s conception of music as self-shaping, it becomes clear that our musical preferences are never solely our own. They emerge from an ongoing negotiation between personal expression and platform governance. And if my “rap-only” listening history can still make Spotify insist I’m a Taylor Swift fan, it’s worth asking: are we using these systems to express ourselves, or are they teaching us who we ought to be?

Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2019.—Introduction.

DeNora, Tia. “Music as a Technology of the Self.” Poetics, vol. 27, no. 1, 1999, pp. 31–56.

Muchitsch, Veronika, and Ann Werner. “The Mediation of Genre, Identity, and Difference in Contemporary (Popular) Music Streaming.” Popular Music and Society, 2024, pp. 302-328.

Written by Allie Demetrick 

Photo from Spotify