Tag Archives: Mediation

Critical Comparison

Materialism and Mediation: The Shared Critique of the Subject-Object Divide

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Photo by Aubrey Ventura

Introduction

Grant Bollmer’s Materialist Media Theory and Dennis Weiss’ “Seduced by the Machine” both show how media are material forces that structure experience. Bollmer emphasizes how infrastructures perform power and organize social relations, while Weiss highlights how technologies act through the body. While Bollmer focuses on the political and social effects of material media, Weiss raises ethical questions about the authenticity of emotions mediated by technology. Together, they show that mediation is both material and emotional, intertwining power, feeling, and ethical experience in human life.

Overview of Bollmer’s (2019) Materialist Media Theory 

Grant Bollmer’s Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction (2019) explores how materialist perspectives shape how we understand and study media. Bollmer argues that “media and technology are not mere tools” that shape our perceptions of power and discrimination; instead, they are “locations for the perpetuation of inequality and the management of social difference” (Bollmer 1). Throughout the book, he critiques the common form of solely studying symbols and representations in media studies, claiming that it disregards how media truly produce cultural and political effects. He explains that when we “only examine meaning, what a medium is and does is limited to human perception and experience,” which he identifies as a key flaw in traditional meaning-based media studies education (Bollmer 2). Instead, he encourages a materialist approach, where media act as “participants” that influence our relations with people, objects, and ideas, rather than serving as a passive, neutral tool (Bollmer 25).

Overview of Dennis M. Weiss’ “Seduced by the Machine” 

Dennis M. Weiss’s essay “Seduced by the Machine: Human-Technology Relations and Sociable Robots” (2014) from Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman tries to answer key questions related to sociable robots and “relational artifacts,” machineries designed to mimic emotions, empathy, and human connection. Weiss has used four major perspectives to support his discussion. He has used Turkle’s “Machines Take Advantage of Human Vulnerability” to “seduce us into a relationship” (Turkle et al. 2006, 326). This can lead to a new kind of “loner yet never alone,” an extended loneliness, and a feeling of loss and longing that paradoxically arises in the context of an abundance of networked connections. Later, with Corry and Allenby in Final Position, bringing the ideas on emotional companionship, Corry describes the intense relief of one when receiving the illusion of a companion, which suggests that machines can fulfill a basic human social connection. However, Allenby, after fulfilling a human contact, is later shot to prove Corry’s point of emotional bonding between human and machine, which raises the question of how to understand the role of relational robots in our lives. (Weiss 218) Lastly, Weiss mentions Verbeek’s philosophical counterargument on the separation of subjects from objects, bringing a cautious view on how technology can co-shape human existence and morality, that “we are profoundly technologically mediated beings” (Weiss 223).

Comparison of Bollmer’s and Seduce by the Machine

The strongest bond between Weiss and Bollmer is the broader philosophical critique of the separation between humans and technology, which is the central project of Bollmer’s materialism theory. In his work on materialism, Bollmer claims that “physical materiality… matters in the shaping of reality” in his Thesis 9, which, with media, we come into contact with and become something else (Bollmer, 176), with the key concept of interacting with some medium that alters human beings. This is going hand in hand with Weiss’s argument using Verbeek’s theory: “Humans and technologies do not have a separate existence anymore but help to shape each other in myriad ways” (Weiss 224). To further support this case, in Bollmer’s book, he states that “media are performative.” He sees them as active participants: they do things. They shape how people, objects, and ideas relate to one another. He also argues that media are “vital objects, possessive of their own agencies and abilities” (Bollmer 176). This is similar to Verbeek’s philosophical argument that technologies are not just tools but actively “co-shape” human existence, morality, and perception. For example, the sociable robot, Paro, is the evidence for this case study, with the robot’s material design, which is fluffy and reacts to touch. It becomes a presence that shapes the person’s emotional response and social habits, which might match the definition of “companion.”

However, the authenticity of human emotion is the core of the contradiction between Bollmer’s theory and Weiss’s essay. While Bollmer’s materialism tries to move away from centering human experience and avoiding reducing the machines to human experience to focus more on material performance and political outcome, especially in thesis 5. Weiss focuses more on the simulated emotion (machine) and authentic emotion (human), which is the core of Turkle’s critique. In his conclusion, the Twilight Zone episode reveals the ethical cost of such mediation. The prisoner Corry fell into despair and realized that the companionship with Allenby was only an illusion, which shows a hierarchy where human connection is morally superior to the machine-mediated one.

Distinguishing the Im/material in screen-based media

The distinction between what is material and what is immaterial has become increasingly vague with the rise of new media and technology, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence. Bollmer argues that “media are vital objects, possessive of their own agencies and abilities,” meaning that even intangible forms of media, such as an app interface and networks, influence our perception and behaviours. (Bollmer 174). On the other hand, Weiss’s focus on “social” robots and their ability to mimic human emotions and empathy exhibits its need for material design, such as their programmed tone of voice and trained outputs. Weiss explains that “the truth is that we are profoundly technologically mediated beings,” indicating that our emotional and thinking processes are continually built by the technologies we interact with. Considering this, the ability to differentiate between material and immaterial does not have much value in the context of screen-based media, as scrolling through an app or talking to an AI chatbot relies on physical systems and even our own bodies to operate.

The importance of Materiality in Media Technology

According to Bollemer, materiality can be considered the basis of media, and to understand media, one has to move beyond the representation and meaning to how they act, affect, and structure relations between humans and technology, in other words, the material means. Weiss reinforces this by quoting the views of Turkle, who has written, “Material culture carries emotions” and ideas of startling intensity (Turkle 6) in Evocative Objects, and noting that media technology is already interacting and reshaping the material world. Concluding from both readings, materiality is crucial when it comes to discussing media technology because the function – or the “affordance” – of media technology is what humans can discern directly. This is the first step of understanding media technology, which is rapidly evolving and developing new applications every day. 

The affordance of media technology changes as their materiality changes, as Bollemer noted; media are not neutral and produce and sustain power structures through their material existence. Weiss supports this through examples and presents that the difference in materiality caused a large division in the human’s attitude towards machines, which shows the importance of materiality when it comes to discussing media technology. 

Link back to previous readings

Bollmer argues that media are “not mere tools” but “locations for the perpetuation of inequality and the management of social difference” (Bollmer 3), shaping how we relate to others, objects, and the world. By defining media as performative, things that act and make things happen, Bollmer emphasizes that technological mediation is an active, material process organizing human experience. Media are not neutral backdrops; they structure social relations and determine which bodies, histories, and interactions are made visible. Weiss illustrates this on a bodily level, showing that human attention, emotion, and desire are shaped by technological design. Users are pulled into emotional and social patterns by technology, and interfaces guide how they interact, showing that humans and machines shape each other. Annalee Newitz’s “My Laptop” personalizes this idea, describing a reciprocal relationship of care and dependence: “It doesn’t just belong to me; I also belong to it” (Newitz 88). Together, these works show that mediation operates materially, socially, and emotionally, challenging the traditional separation between subjects and objects. Humans don’t act alone on passive tools but are connected with technology, which influences who we are, how we interact, and what matters to us.

Conclusion

Between the two readings, what defines materiality is presented in various ways. In conclusion, materiality is the wires, the shape, and the technical form of the medium, as well as the way they “speak” and “express” to humans. Bollmer and Weiss may both agree that materiality is the crucial element in defining a media technology, which is not only a tool but also an outlet that shapes and bends our emotions and perception of the world. 

Works Cited

Dennis, Weiss M. “Design, Mediation & The Post Human. Chapter Eleven, Seduced by the Machine: Human-Technology Relations and Sociable Robots.” Accessed 8 Nov. 2025. 

Grant, Bollmer. “Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction.” Bloomsbury, www.bloomsbury.com/us/materialist-media-theory-9781501337093/. Accessed 8 Nov. 2025. 

Newitz, Annalee. “MY LAPTOP.” In Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, 86–91. The MIT Press, 2007. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhg8p.14.

Turkle, Sherry. Evocative Objects: Things we work with. The MIT Press. 2011. https://williamwolff.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/turkle-objects-2011.pdf. Accessed 9 Nov. 2025.

Turkle et al. “A Nascent Robotics Culture: New Complicities for Companionship.” [online] AAAI Technical Report Series, July 2006. Available at: web.mit.edu/sturkle/www/nascentroboticsculture.pdf.

Contributors: Lorriane Chua, Siming Liao, Eira Nguyen, Aubrey Ventura

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In a Silent Search

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Reflection on Umberto Eco’s Library of the World

When the film opened with Umberto Eco walking slowly through his library, surrounded by more than 30,000 books, I felt something stir inside me. His library is, quite honestly, my dream library. The way the camera moved through the endless rows of books felt almost like watching time itself, layer by layer and century by century. Eco’s library felt like a living organism and a space for remembering and a pulse of thought and time. 

Rewatching the film again at my own pace, taking notes and pausing throughout, I realized how much of what we’ve been learning in this course came to life in Eco’s words and character. As he said early in the film, “a library is both a symbol and a reality of universal memory” (2:01). That line stayed with me because it shows exactly what the film explores, the library as an extension of the human mind and a living memory system that binds matter, meaning, and mediation together.

Books as Media & Memory

The film presents the library as a medium of memory and through it, Eco shows how matter and meaning are inseparable. Eco’s son says, “It’s a living thing, not an archive, not a traditionally organized library” (44:14), and that description stayed with me because it reframed what a library could be. In Eco’s eyes, every book is both an object and an idea, a kind of container of thought that only becomes alive when touched, opened, and read.

I think this connects to Stiegler, from the chapter on memory in Critical Terms for Media Studies, where he explains that “human memory is originally exteriorized, which means it is technical from the start” (p. 67). He calls this process epiphylogenesis, the way we evolve “by means other than life,” through the tools, marks, and traces we create (p. 65). In other words, memory has always existed partly outside of us. Eco’s library, in that sense, becomes an externalized form of what Stiegler calls hypomnesis, meaning “recollection through externalized memory” (p. 67), sort of a living system of technical memory that carries human thought across generations.

Eco, in the film, categorizes memory into three kinds: vegetal, organic, and mineral. He explains that books represent vegetal memory because they are literally made of living matter: “books are made out of trees and anciently from papyrus” (9:40). The paper, ink, and bindings store traces of human experience the same way trees store rings of time. Books, then, are one of humanity’s earliest forms of technical memory, bridging nature and culture and body and medium. In a sense, when Eco walks through his library, he’s walking through a forest of preserved thought, each book a leaf in the great tree of human memory. That’s a library of the world.

Mediation, Knowledge, & the Human Mind

Eco’s intellectual life thrives through mediation. He believed that “to be curious intellectually means to be alive” (40:59). That line really stood out to me because it shows how Eco lived with a kind of restless curiosity that never stopped questioning or exploring. For him, thinking is an ongoing process of understanding. 

“I feel I had a full and long childhood because I stole somebody else’s memories,” he says, describing how reading allowed him to experience countless lives (33:46). This made me think about how books become mediators of experience, carrying us into other people’s memories, stories, and worlds. He also rejected the hierarchy between “important” and “unimportant” texts: “The life you conquer with reading does not discriminate between great literature and entertainment” (34:09). I think this aligns with Mitchell and Hansen’s idea of media as “environment for living—for thinking, perceiving, sensing, feeling” (p. xii). Reading, to Eco, was a way of living through mediation itself.

And this reminded me of Turkle’s ideas in Evocative Objects, where she writes that “everyday objects become part of our inner life: how we use them to extend the reach of our sympathies by bringing the world within” (p. 307). His library feels alive because I think it mirrors the structure of a human mind. It’s associative, layered, and full of contradictions. It very much resists the linear order and embraces the chaos of curiosity.

Silence, Information & the Loss of Meaning in Today’s World

One of the most thought-provoking parts of the film was when Eco talked about silence. He said, “You cannot find God where there is noise. God reveals himself only in silence” (1:15:00). That line felt timeless but also so relevant to the kind of world we live in today, one that is constantly oversaturated with distractions.

At some point in the film, an interviewer asked Eco if he didn’t own a cellphone, and Eco said, “Yes, but it’s always out… I don’t want to receive messages, and I don’t want to send messages! This world is loaded with messages, and even each of them says nothing!” (48:10). I actually laughed listetning to that but the more I thought about it, the more profound it became. I don’t think Eco is anti-technology but he was critiquing the modern condition of constant noise, essentially that is communication without depth and meaning.

He warns that “the risk is losing our memory on account of an overload of artificial memory,” because when everything is available instantly, nothing stays long enough to matter. “Clicking a button, you can get a bibliography of 10,000 titles. A bibliography like that is worthless. You can just throw it away. Once you went to the library and found three books, you would read them, and you would learn something” (26:10). 

In the film, there was a sign that read: “In a library, silence is both a duty and a necessity” (31:51). I think that really summed up Eco’s entire philosophy. Silence, for Eco, is so sacred, it’s almost a form of preservation. It’s the condition for memory, reflection and meaning to survive. In a world overflowing with noise and distraction, Eco’s library felt like an act of resistance and a reminder that real understanding is born from the quiet, slow process of thought.

Why this Film Matters, Now

This film matters especially now because it reminds us what it means to think slowly in a world that never stops moving. In an age of instant access and algorithmic noise, Eco’s library feels almost radical and a sanctuary of slowness, silence and curiosity. His philosophy challenges the illusion that more information equals more knowledge, showing instead that depth is actually what sustains understanding.

Eco’s philosophy pushes back against the digital condition in which technology’s promise of infinite access leads to the loss of knowledge itself. His insistence on silence and reflection feels like an act of intellectual resistance.

I think we were asked to watch this film because it turns the media theories we’ve been studying so far into something we can see and feel. Eco’s closing words were so important: “There’s no truth or creativity in an earthquake, only in a silent search” (1:15:25). I think it means we should slow down, remember, and think again.

References

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

Cinecittà. Mitchell, W. J. T., & Hansen, M. B. N. (Eds.). (2010). Critical terms for media studies. University of Chicago Press.

Stiegler, B. (2010). Memory. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies (pp. 64–87). University of Chicago Press.

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

Photo Credits

Daily Sabah. (2021, February 22). A library of all libraries. Daily Sabah. https://www.dailysabah.com/opinion/op-ed/a-library-of-all-libraries

Screenshot from the film (31:51).

By Maryam Abusamak