Tag Archives: my evocative object

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Life Long Comforts: How Objects From Early Childhood Stay With Us For Life.

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(The earliest photo I can find of the blanket, vs my blanket this week)

[Prefix: I am just a girl, and when writing this felt quite vulnerable with the idea that I would share it with you. My mom reminded me that while vulnerability feels like a weakness to ourselves, it looks like courage to others. So be nice!!]

When we’re babies, we’re given many toys, stuffies, and blankets, but many of us grow an attachment to just one particular thing. In my family, we refer to that one thing as a “Lovey”. Many children begin to lose their attachment to their lovey when they enter their teens, sometimes younger, sometimes older. Others hold onto that attachment for life. Clearly, there was a gene in my family that made us so attached to our Loveys; both my parents still have teddy bears that they were given as young children and held onto. For me, my object was my little pink blanket. 

The blanket itself is not impressive. I’ve been told and seen in photos that my blanket was soft and bright pink at first, but as far as I can remember, it’s been rough and white. It’s about 2ft by 3ft, and literally tearing at the seams. It’s worth nothing, but to me it is worth everything. To me, it’s worth going back to my house to grab it in an emergency, or pack fewer clothes than I need to bring it with me on trips; it’s even to come to friends’ houses with me. This blanket has moved houses with me eleven times and has spent the last 20 years with me. It is, without a doubt, 100% a security blanket. It is an analog of my emotional data. Each tear or stain is a sign, an index of past use and care. It bridges my past and present, mediating the “temporal aspects” of experience, as it literally allows me to relive or re-access memories and moments of safety and comfort from earlier stages in my life. In this way, it shows how media and memory are coextensive, and how even a humble object can serve as a living archive of feeling. 

But to me, it’s so much more than a blanket, and it offers me so many affordances. It allows me comforted sleep at night, it offers me warmth. The blanket acts as an anchor, a constant in my life, and stays with me every night when I am most vulnerable; when I’m asleep. The affordances of comfort aren’t inherent to my blanket alone, it emerged through embodiment, my lived experience and relationship with it over time. In McLuhan’s terms, “The medium is the message”, the way my blanket soothes and anchors me is inseparable from what it is, a soft, small, familiar object.

My blanket is a medium of experience, just like how our bodies are a medium of human experience. Like Turkle’s evocative objects, it’s both loved and thought with, my emotional companion and tool for reflection on things in my life. The blanket mediates my feelings on such a wide spectrum, in moments of joy and in moments of hardship, it is always waiting for me, wherever my “home” at the time has been. It is something that knows everything about me, and yet nothing at all (because it’s just a blanket, not a conscious thing). It acts as a technological medium in miniature, something that stands in the middle between my inner world and my external world, helping me process and feel my emotions and transitions. 

As we continue through time and advances in technology, I can’t help but think about how much media is experienced through their physical qualities, and how that meaning is threatened by the digital age as we become more abstracted from material experience in a digital world. My blanket is lived and tangible, and stands as an opposition to the transition into digital mediators. It reaffirms the importance of touch, texture, smell, and material presence in the making of meaning. Nothing digital could replace any aspect of my blanket, material or immaterial in meaning. It is also an active counter to dematerialized media: a reminder that mediation can be intimately physical and that memory is not just cognitive, but physical and textual. Would a carpet still feel the same on a phone screen? Would the Mona Lisa be as popular if it were only to be seen digitally? My blanket is also a great example of Eco’s “vegetal memory”- memory preserved in organic material. It stores my personal information and history in its fabric, colour, tears and frays

If we were to think about my blanket with some critical theoretical insight, it could teach us that media are not always obvious or high-tech, mediation begins with everyday objects that are transformed to have meaning. The comfort, touch, and emotional security are themselves mediated experiences that can change an object’s meaning. The memory is not abstract or purely cognitive but entangled with physical matter. The theories of media and mediation must include the affective and tactile, not just the visual or digital. 

In closing, my blanket shows how mediation begins with the material and personal, not just digital or technological media. It embodies the link between body, memory, and materiality, showing that meaning and comfort are felt through touch and texture. It illustrates Turkle’s idea of evocative objects as things that are both loved and thought with/through. It reflects Gibson and McLuhan’s affordances, as my blanket’s value comes from what it allows, which is warmth, safety, and reflection. Its value is not determined by what it physically is. It reminds me that media theory isn’t only about our devices or information, but also how objects can mediate our relationships with the world and ourselves. And ultimately, it teaches me that mediation is intimate and embodied, a process that connects mind, matter, and memory across time. 

Thanks for reading!

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The Window as An Evocative Object

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Introduction

The setting sun slowly hiding behind distant mountains, groups of students walking between classes, the whistle of wind and the rumble of thunder – these are all sights and sounds accessible through my bedroom window. An object integral to architectural design, windows are embedded within the walls of almost every building, bridging the gap between interior spaces and the outer world. They allow for both the acts of looking outwards and looking inwards, offering a view of reality that is separate from one’s current situation. 

Windows have always been a significant part of my life, taking up space on the walls of my bedrooms, from the one in which I spent my childhood, to the ones in my different living situations during university life. They offer a view into the natural world that lies beyond the internal space that exists physically within my room and cognitively within my mind. Despite the ever-changing scenery, my bedroom window remains still and unmoving, acting as a constant that is always there. 

To understand more about the affordances of windows and what they can mediate, I turn to some relevant media theorists who were discussed in class. 

Objects of transition and shifting meanings

Sherry Turkle describes how the meaning of evocative objects “shifts with time, place, and differences among individuals” – a sentiment I find particularly relevant to windows (307). Sunlight streaming through a window could make it an object associated with positivity, encouraging someone to go outside. Conversely, the scene of heavy rain gives the window a gloomy evocation that is in contrast with the safety and warmth within one’s home. These are associations that I personally make with such scenes, though someone with different experiences may perceive things differently. 

Despite not quite fitting Turkle’s discussion of transitional objects as small, handheld ones that remain the same over time and distance, I find that windows can be still considered an object of transition and passage. They stay with us as we grow into adulthood, always present regardless of location. The view from my childhood bedroom differs from my current one, but the window’s function of showing the outside world remains the same. Windows can also be transitional in how they are decorated and personalized. In my first year of university, I made a crochet garland for my dorm window and continued to hang it up on my new one after relocating. This item holds memories from the past, framing the outside world through a sentimental lens despite the view being different from before.     

Old dorm room window (left) and current dorm room window (right)

Objects of discipline

Turkle’s discussion of objects associated with discipline and desire also resonates with my experience with windows. Opening the blinds in the morning and closing them at night is a simple part of my daily routine that I pay no mind to, but can be considered an act of discipline that has ingrained itself within my life. Michelle Hlubinka expresses how her watch and datebook structure her life and keep her on schedule. These objects are described by Turkle as having the ability to take over one’s life and control their perceptions of time, and thus, actions (310). Indeed, my digital devices, and all their applications, perform functions like these, but my window always reaches me first. It acts as my primary indicator of time and weather before I check my phone. Windows engage my senses and tell me information about the world before I even consciously think about it. The pattering of rain on my windowsill enters my ears, so I pack an umbrella; the rays of morning sun hit my eyes as I lie in bed on my phone at 5AM, so I finally decide to go to sleep. Hence, the window subtly acts as an object of discipline that dictates daily actions.

Mediators of the senses 

Caroline Jones’s chapter on the senses brings up Plato’s allegory of the cave. It describes prisoners trapped within the depths of a dark cave, with their only perception of the world being through the sight of shadows instead of the real figures that cast them. The prisoners are victims of a “partial form of sight”, blinded to the true content of the media that the shadows mediate and only being able to derive individual interpretations about what they see (Jones 89).

Since windows allow light to shine into a room, informing its inhabitants of the outside world in a factual and realistic way, they can be seen as something opposite to the cave. However, I realised that windows also have their limitations, and the somewhat limited world that they depict could, conversely, be thought of as the deceptive shadows in Plato’s allegory. 

Windows, most of the time, only span certain parts of walls, each providing a specific view of the exterior. For instance, my room’s only window is west-facing, which allows me to see the sunset. However, this means I see sunlight later in the day than those with rooms opposite to mine since theirs face the sunrise, leading to me having a skewed perception of time when first waking up. I have also experienced hearing music from outside without being able to see its source, leading to me only being able to make assumptions about the source’s location and the people involved. Windows are like transparent barriers to the outside, letting us witness the world while physically isolating us from it. They allow us to see, hear and smell information, but not touch or taste anything; we cannot touch the grass we see from the view of a window, nor can we feel the rain on our skin.

Jones states that only by exiting the allegorical cave can one understand the full dimensions of things, “thereby also discovering what has been mediating reality”(89). Similarly, windows provide useful but limited views of the world, and only by going outside can one immerse themselves in the scene and find the sources that information is coming from. 

Conclusion

Drawing connections between windows and media theory made me realize just how significant of a role they play as mediators of senses, memories and so much more. They ground us in reality, tell us about the world and subtly guide our perceptions and actions. I have found that my time spent looking out of the window has gradually lessened as the time I spend looking at my digital devices has increased. Although these virtual screens act as windows into different worlds that bring new perspectives to my life, they can never act as a replacement for the physical, natural reality that I live in. Finally, we must be reminded that despite their affordances, the extent to which windows mediate information is limited, and gaining a deeper understanding of everything requires going outside to experience the world in its full scope. 

References

Caroline, Jones. “Senses.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, Edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, The University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 88–100. 

Turkle, Sherry. “WHAT MAKES AN OBJECT EVOCATIVE?” Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, The MIT Press, 2007, pp. 307–27. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhg8p.39. Accessed 6 Oct. 2025.

Written by Adela Lynge

Images by Adela Lynge

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When Words Breathe

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Under the Blanket

When I was a child, my favorite part of the day began when everyone else had fallen asleep. I would hide under my blanket with a flashlight in one hand and a book in the other, afraid my mother would open the door and find me awake past midnight. The world around me was quiet, but the one inside the pages was bright and alive. Reading was my secret act of resistance against routine—it was the only moment I felt entirely on my own. Unlike television, which offered ready-made images, books asked me to imagine. They demanded that I build the world myself, word by word, sound by sound.

The Cucumber Scene

The book that defined this ritual was Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. I first read it in middle school, a time when every day felt packed and mechanical. The story was slow, melancholic, and strangely still, but within its silence I found comfort. I remember one scene vividly: someone eating a cucumber beside a sick patient.

“I could hear the crisp, wet sound as the person bit into it, the contrast between the freshness of that sound and the stillness of the sickroom struck me. I remember thinking that sound alone was enough to sustain life”

(Norwegian Wood 189). That line stunned me. For the first time, I felt that words could be as physical as sound, as tactile as touch. I could almost hear the bite, smell the coolness, and see the water glisten on the cucumber’s skin.

Hearing Through the Page

I never understood why that passage about the cucumber felt so alive until many years later, when I came across Marshall McLuhan’s description of the acoustic space. McLuhan writes that before writing was invented, “we lived in acoustic space, where the Eskimo now lives: boundless, directionless, horizonless, the dark of the mind, the world of emotion” (Understanding Media 41). Reading that, I realized what I had experienced as a child was a glimpse of that space. While reading Norwegian Wood, I was not only seeing words—I was hearing, smelling, and feeling them. The page was no longer flat or silent; it surrounded me, like sound. In the acoustic space, McLuhan explains, perception is simultaneous. The senses work together, not in isolation. Looking back, I understand that books once offered me that same immersive totality, a way of knowing that modern media rarely afford. Today, I scroll or listen, but seldom feel. When media speak only to the eyes or the ears, as McLuhan warns, perception becomes linear, reduced, and disembodied.

The Depth of Words

What draws me to language is the way it conceals its complexity beneath simplicity. Visual media reveals everything at once, leaving little room for the mind to wander; words ask us to linger. They depend on absence, on what they withhold. That tension—between precision and uncertainty—is what gives language its life. It moves in suggestion rather than display, always half-lit, always inviting us to imagine the rest.. When I open Norwegian Wood I feel as if I’ve stepped into a quiet bar where the air is thick with cigarette smoke and jazz. The words don’t describe the place; they become it. This is what Sherry Turkle means when she says that evocative objects are “things we think with” (Evocative Objects 5). My book is one such object. It doesn’t just tell me stories—it creates a space in which memory, imagination, and feeling mingle, like the indistinct murmur of voices in a room.

 Language as Mediation

Turkle argues that evocative objects “mediate between thought and feeling,” serving as psychological anchors that help us navigate transitions in life (6). It reminded me that media are not only about meaning, but about mood and texture—the spaces they open within us. To read was to enter that space, to feel the air of another world pressing gently against my own.

Reading as a Bodily Act

 As Bernadette  Wegenstein notes, media are “continuous with the human nervous system” (Critical Terms for Media Studies 29). Reading, in that sense, is a bodily act: the rhythm of the sentence, the quiet of the page, the slight movement of the eye all contribute to an embodied way of knowing.

Walter Benjamin might call this the aura of reading—the singular, unrepeatable encounter between reader and text (“The Work of Art” 220). My copy of Norwegian Wood, its softened spine and underlined phrases, still carries that aura. It is both material and emotional, both object and atmosphere. In contrast, the media that fill my days now—scrolling feeds, short videos, fleeting audio—rarely offer that sustained, resonant attention. As Wendy Hui Kyong Chun observes, digital culture produces “enduring ephemeral” experiences that promise connection yet dissipate almost instantly (Updating to Remain the Same 59). Reading resists that speed. It slows perception, allowing thought to settle, memory to form, and the senses to reconnect.

Memory That Stays

Even now, when I open it, I can still hear that crisp, wet sound of the cucumber echoing faintly in the quiet. Since then, no image on a screen has stayed with me in the same way. Digital scenes fade as quickly as they appear, but that moment—the sound of the cucumber in the still air—remains exact, as if preserved in the rhythm of the page itself.

Works Cited

Benjamin, W. (2002). The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility. In H. Eiland & M. W. Jennings (Eds.), Selected writings, Volume 3: 1935–1938 (pp. 101–133). Harvard University Press.

Chun, W. H. K. (2016). Updating to remain the same: Habitual new media. MIT Press.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. McGraw-Hill.

Murakami, H. (2000). Norwegian wood (J. Rubin, Trans.). Vintage International.

Turkle, S. (2007). What makes an object evocative? In S. Turkle (Ed.), Evocative objects: Things we think with (pp. 307–327). MIT Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhg8p.39

Wegenstein, B. (2010). Body. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies (pp. 19–34). University of Chicago Press.

Written by Nicole

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Evoking control, memory and self while planning my studies

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Quick warning: this essay mentioned eating disorders. If this is something you’re not comfortable with, feel free to skip this post. Stay safe.

Ironically, my evocative object was heavily used to create this. And many other things, because I organize my whole academic life with my notion. Not to be that person, but I love it.

If a course isn’t on Canvas before the term begins, I can get frustrated: it means I can’t prepare for school in advance by adding all the deadlines into my notion, writing out grade components into each classes’ page, can’t break each assignment down and plan my workload before the first class. For MDIA 300, I wrote out not only the major and minor assignments and what each entails, but also what page of syllabus it is on, and I am very grateful to my past self for that. Notion helps me know what to do on any given day, if I’m lucky to find a good spot in either of the libraries.

That is not, however, to say that my notion has any power over me: I am free to ignore my own study plans if I feel so inclined. Notion simply evokes the feeling of control over my student life, gives me structure and simplifies the search for much needed information. 

Affordances 

In my personal case, the digital aspect of it has affordances that physical notebooks lack: mainly, accessibility, larger creative control and digital media opportunities (try putting in a hyper-link or a gif into a physical notebook). I also prefer typing out my notes and editing later over writing them down with a pen with no space for mistake. Being able to easily share my notes and copy and paste in-class assignments is also a huge boost for digital over physical copies. 

On the other hand, I’m aware that a large company holds control over my app for studying, and has the power to take it away. Which it did, actually: Notion is no longer available in Russia, so I was unable to see my notes or add my new subjects into my calendar when I was home. Which, obviously, is not that big of a problem.

Digital brain

Evocative objects are “things we think with”, according to Turkle, and that is exactly the function my Notion fills in. In her chapter about a long-lost datebook, Michelle Hlubinka describes her evocative object as “an external information organ—a piece of my brain made out of paper instead of cells”. Similarly, in her chapter on her own laptop, Annalee Newitz writes:

“It’s practically a brain prosthesis. Sometimes I find myself unable to complete a thought without cracking it open and accessing a file of old notes, or hopping online and Googling a fact or two”

And both of these are truly remarkable, mostly because I believe most of us relate to this sentiment. In the digital age with technology being so wide-spread, most of us delegate our knowledge and memories to a laptop, a phone, or a memory stick. So many of my friends (and me, too), when having trouble remembering the last week or our summer, pull out a phone and go through the gallery to see which moments come in which order.

This is what I am likely to do if you ask me about the syllabus: I’ll go to Notion, because I filtered out what I need to know from Canvas and put it in there. Wrote it down and, well, immediately forgot.

Mediation of memory

Bernard Stiegler wrote a rather gloomy and dystopian chapter on Memory, where he talks about the consequences of delegating knowledge and memories to an external source. While I agree with him about the dangers of information manipulation and the act of remembering for yourself as the “true form of knowing”, I am glad (or blind) to say my situation is not as dramatic when it comes to consequences and explications. The information isn’t being manipulated in my case: professors just change syllabus and move deadlines sometimes. 

But let’s go back to Hlubinka’s chapter on databooks. She describes losing her databook as a small-scale tragedy:

“I felt as though I had lost my life. My memory of all I did and planned to do from January to May 2003 vanished, along with the physical form that contained it.”

If I were to be locked out of my Notion and all the professors were to delete their syllabi at the same time, I would be very confused but also unable to retrieve all the important dates, all my notes, and all my study plans at once. Our understanding of what we wrote down will forever be tied to the object holding these memories: it’s a memory stick that, if lost, won’t be remade. While it is liberating to get some weights off our hard-working brains, we should keep one thing in mind: once we delegate the memory, it will be outside of our control.

Mediation of control 

I see myself a lot in how Hlubinka describes her friend Ginger and the way she manages her own databook. Ginger colourcodes her plans (check!), leaves herself extra time so as to not be late (check!) and says her need for control is rooted in her now recovered eating disorder (check!). 

For us, documenting, planning, colourcoding is a way to structure the way we see our lives, understand our weeks clearer and, therefore, control it. In the modern days more than ever, our lives are filled with chaos, days are filled with events, weeks filled with plans. How do you stay on top of things the way we’re expected to? We simplify it: this day is for writing comments on blog posts and reading two more chapters, tomorrow we will worry about source traceback, and the day after that Ingold’s Making will be due in the library, so I’ll need to re-check it. The world seems more approachable when it’s simplified and, therefore, controlled. And then we give ourselves a pet on the back for doing what we should: Ginger uses stickers, I get to see my calendar turn green from all the completed assignments. 

Lastly, both Ginger and I simply like our objects of structure. She says: “my audience is myself . . . a lot of these devices are to make me happy“. Me too, Ginger! I spend hours on end picking pretty covers for each subject, finding pretty gifs, assigning symbols. And while I don’t mind people looking over and noticing how cool my Notion is, it is for me only.

Mediation of self

Hlubinka describes her lost databook as a reflection of what kind of person she was: what caught her interest, what events she considered or attended, what conversations she had and what topics she found worthy of writing down. She says “I like to think that anyone could open up my lost paper datebook and see what kind of person I am”. 

While databooks and notion study calendars are purely personal, we as humans cannot stand to not mark things as our own, not shape them to be ours. There is so much personality in how we structure our books and notions just because it will so heavily depend on how we see this world. In a way, it is a two-way communication: we input our view of the world into the databook which reflects this view back at us, shaping it further. Ginger tracks her life by weeks, I break down a term into months, because this is how we live our lives. 

Control, calendars, due-dates

To sum it all up: the way we plan our lives is a powerful mediator of control, memory and self. It allows us to simplify our life and therefore understand it better, and while storing all the most important memories on one Google Drive is not recommended, digital planner allows us to take some weight off our brains when it comes to planning ahead and remembering dates.

Hlubinka, Michelle. “THE DATEBOOK.” In Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, edited by Sherry Turkle, 76–85. The MIT Press, 2007. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhg8p.13.

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.

Stiegler, Bernard. “MEMORY.” In Critical terms for media studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. N. Hansen, 64-87. University of Chicago, 2005.

Header and post by Bara Bogantseva

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Video Games as Evocative Objects

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Conclusion

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

Works Cited

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

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

Written by Emily Shin

Photos taken by Emily Shin

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Make It Make Scents: The Evocative Power of Perfume

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Illustration by James Taylor / Harvard Gazette

Have you ever been out in public and smelled a scent that brought you back to a certain time in your life? Or remembered a specific person?

When I put on perfume, that is the goal that I set out to have—to be associated with a fragrance so intimately that one can’t help but remember me in public if they encounter it. I remember an anecdote my friend once recounted to me of her sleeping at a library and being woken up by smelling my perfume somewhere. She looked up and I wasn’t there, but she knew at one point that I was. Thus, for me, my perfume mediates my expression of self in how it becomes part of my identity—so much so that if I leave the house without putting it on, I’ll go back to just ensure that I have so I can rid myself of the sense of something missing. On the other hand, for my friend, my perfume mediates her perception and memory of me.

Another friend once texted me that they put on an old hoodie that I borrowed in high school and the scent of my perfume had still been left behind on its collar. At that point, we hadn’t spoken to each other in over a year, and I had changed what perfume I wore daily by then. How much more had changed between us, between how they see me, between how I saw them? Their memory of me was confined to that one instance.

We forget that objects have a history. They shape us in particular ways. We forget why or how they came to be. – Sherry Turkle

Dawn Goldworm, the co-founder of an “olfactive branding company” explains that smell is the most developed sense in a child up until the age of around 10 when sight takes over; thus, “smell and emotion are stored as one memory” in your childhood. (Walsh, 2020). We can liken this back to Marcel Proust’s evocative object (which Turkle (2007) put as “perhaps the most famous evocative object in all literature”): the madeleine. When dipped in tea, the madeleine brings Proust back to his youth, opening him to “the vast structure of recollection.”

This phenomenon, aptly named the Proust effect, is when strong, vivid, and emotionally-charged autobiographical memories are involuntarily triggered by smell and taste (Green et al., 2023). Scientifically, this is because the part of the brain that handle smells and odours have a direct connection the regions of the brain related to emotion and memory.

One role of theory here is to defamiliarize them. Theory enables us, for example, to explore how everyday objects become part of our inner life: how we use them to extend the reach of our sympathies by bringing the world within. — Sherry Turkle

If we look at scent through the lens of Proust and relate it back to Charles Sander Peirce’s Model of the Sign, we begin to see how scent emerges within a system of signification. In my case, my perfume becomes a signifier that represents me, the signified, through memory and scent-association. The interpretant is then capable of interpreting this meaning only if they have both encountered me and my perfume before. Scent becomes a means of language and communication in a way that is profoundly human: we understand it only in relation to and in terms of other things—and memory is formed through a social system of constantly remembering.

If we go even further, then scent and perfumery become a powerful and evocative form of media, in the way that mediation is a form of negotiation between the mediator, our olfactory senses, and what is being mediated, our memory. Yet, this medium is often untapped. When we think perfume, we think of an aroma that is pleasant, fragrant, and palatable to be used for everyday—but this limits and confines the form completely.

The infamous Secretions Magnifiques from Etat Libre d’Orange seeks to subvert this by creating a nauseating, eerie odour reminiscent of melting plastic, sweat, blood, semen, rot, and perversion. Would anyone wear this perfume? The average person would say no for fear of smelling repulsive, yet reviews on Fragrantica, an online database for perfume enthusiasts like Letterboxd is for film and Goodreads is for books, describe it as “deliciously offensive”, an “excellent conversation starter”, and “a work of art.” This specific perfume becomes a medium for evoking a feeling that is vile and primal to the extent of disgust. It transforms the idea of perfume from being one for daily use into an object to be consumed as an art form that inspires memory in a guttural sense.

Hence, if scent and perfumery are a medium of communication, then it is important to emphasize that, along with every other medium, it is also political and tied to institutions of power. Dr. Ally Louks’ thesis on olfactory ethics presents this argument through the intersectional study of olfactory oppression by establishing the underlying logics of how smell creates and subverts power structures through film and literature (2024). A poignant example she uses is how in Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, the rich associate the poor with the smell of sewage. Let’s place this idea in the context of our everyday life: how often do we associate femininity with flora, masculinity with musk, wealth with cleanliness, ethnicities with the smell of their food? These associations have relevance in understanding what we know of the world.

Indeed, my perfume can evoke the memory of me, but only if you know me. Recognizing that rose is feminine but Axe body spray is masculine and Aesop incense is upper-class but Bath & Body Works’ A Thousand Wishes is middle-class and so on is a learned behaviour. Our ability to associate a fragrance with a memory is limited by what we understand from our own experiences—how we can put this unknown scent in relation to what we already know. That last part, what we already know, is key. Certain scents become analogous to certain concepts and ideologies, which calls into question our preconceived notions and biases about gender, class, sex, and race.

So I ask: what can conversations about the evocative power of scent teach us about how we see—no, smell—and thus perceive, the world?

References

Green, J.D., Reid, C. A., Kneuer, M. A., & Hedgebeth, M. V. (2023). The Proust effect: Scents, food, and nostalgia [Abstract]. Curr Opin Psychol, 50(101562). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2023.101562.

Louks, A. (2024). Olfactory ethics: The politics of smell in modern and contemporary prose [Doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge]. Cambridge University. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.113239.

Secretions Magnifiques Etat Libre d’Orange. (n.d.). Fragrantica. Retrieved October 4, 2025, from https://www.fragrantica.com/perfume/Etat-Libre-d-Orange/Secretions-Magnifiques-4523.html.

Turkle, S. (2007). What makes an object evocative?. In S. Turkle (Ed.), Evocative objects: Things we think with (pp. 307-326). MIT Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhg8p.39.

Walsh, C. (2020, February 27). What the nose knows: Experts discuss the science of smell and how scent, emotion, and memory are intertwined – and exploited. The Harvard Gazette. Retrieved October 4, 2025, from https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/02/how-scent-emotion-and-memory-are-intertwined-and-exploited/.

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Analyzing My Perspective

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Introduction

Everyday, when I wake up, the world is a little blurred. Beside my head, on my windowsill, are the frames of plastic that fix that. 

I have had glasses since I was nine years old and since then they have been the windows through which I have quite literally watched my entire life. Without my glasses, I would not have the same memories that I do today, namely because lots of the details would be missing. Nothing is more subjective than a person’s perspective, and in that, their perception of the world. By watching the world through my glasses, my perception has been permanently altered by them. It would otherwise be lacking image and depth as I literally would not be able to see the bigger picture. Unless I decide to wear contacts, or get surgery to fix my eyesight, my entire world will always be mediated through these pieces of plastic and because of that, they are the root from which all of my memories, perceptions, and opinions grow.

By clarifying the world around men, mechanically fixing the way that my eyes focus the light in the world they watch, my glasses have mediated my experience and memory since I got them.

Affordances

The main affordance of my glasses is pretty clear: they help me see. Without them, and assuming there was no alternative to fixing my vision, my everyday life would be significantly impaired. I would not be able to see properly beyond a foot from my nose, which would make things including–but not limited to–reading signs and whiteboards, driving, and recognizing faces pretty difficult. Though they are crucial to my easy access to the world around me, the function of my glasses reaches beyond what they do to the light as it enters my eye.

Each pair of glasses that I have means something different to me. I have a purple and green glow-in-the-dark pair from when I was a kid, pairs that were too small, pairs that gave me a headache and, most importantly, pairs that I love and feel myself in. In addition to helping me see, my glasses are a mode of self-expression. Just because they are functionally necessary to my everyday life, does not mean I can not use them to a further effect and have fun with them. I also deliberately avoid wearing contacts. Frankly, I hate them. Though I do not mind sticking a piece of plastic in my eye, they are far too finicky for my taste, and when I do wear them, they always really dry out my eyes. Additionally, because I have had my glasses for so long, I have gotten used to them, and feel more myself when I wear them than when I go without.

I rarely change my everyday glasses. All of these frames are distinctly associated to different periods of my life, and by that effect, are irrevocably linked to the memories I have within those periods. By mediating my world so thoroughly, my glasses can be studied within the context of many of the critical terms we discussed in class, most notably, Body and Senses.

Body

Growing up with glasses, they have become incorporated into my own sense of identity. This is interesting to consider in the context of McLuhan’s theory of media as “extensions of man” and it should be understood as “continuous with the human nervous system”(Wegenstein 29). My glasses are an extension of my eyes by necessity, altering the way my eyes receive light, and focusing the world around me. By affecting my vision so concretely, there is very little distinction between the “inside and outside” of the media and myself, greatly conflating my perspective with the perspective of the glasses. Theoretically, the glasses still mediate when they are not on my face, they still function off my face, there just is not anyone to perceive the perspective they create. 

McLuhan defines a dual function of media, one that is both an extension and amputation of the body (Wegenstein 29). They are an extension of my eyes and mediate my world through their lenses, yet they are also physically separate from my face, focusing the light in the world whether or not they are on my face. 

Senses

Obviously, my glasses pretty heavily impact my own sense of sight, however, what is more significant is how reliant I am on my glasses.

The concept of Plato’s cave is interesting to consider in relation to my reliance on my glasses. The basis for Plato’s cave is the division between “knowing and mere existence” in that the prisoners–bound to simply watching the world–only exist, while philosophers–who experience the full dimensions of the world and understand its mediation of reality–are in the know (Jones 89). This distinction between watching and knowing is applicable to my perception of the world with and without my glasses. Without them, my ability to see and move through the physical world is inherently altered, but I am still able to see. However, the lack of depth and detail that impedes my ability to see the bigger picture could be compared to the simple existence of the prisoners in the cave who simply watch without knowing.

By correcting my vision, my glasses afford me an effective sense of sight, allowing me the context and depth of details, and affording me the knowledge associated. The construct of the cave completely dictates the prisoners’ experiences of reality, forming “a system of representation and deception with which the blindered sense of sight colludes”(Jones 89). Similarly, my glasses completely mediate my perception of the world. Though the reliance between me and my glasses is far less absolute than that of the prisoners and the cave featured in Plato’s cave analogy, and most of the things I do in my everyday life are possible without sight, there is a similar reliance on media to fully experience the world and the full extent of knowledge it offers.

Exploring these parallels further, the concept of true vision–“turning away from spectacle… closing one’s eyes to the visible world—or its mediated image—to question what one sees”–is also interesting to consider. Associated with this notion, and Plato’s analogy, are two tropes of blindness:“the ignorant blindness of the prisoners and the volitional blindness of the philosopher”(Jones 89). These ideas of different blindness parallel the function of glasses. I can consciously take off my glasses, turning away from the spectacle and engaging in a form of volitional blindness, thus un-mediating the world and returning it to the state that my own eyes and brain have decided is right for me (as inconvenient as that may be). But it also renders me ignorant to the details of my physical surroundings.

Conclusion

It is intriguing to study my glasses as they have become such a routine and unremarkable part of my life. By looking at them through the lens of the theories discussed in these chapters, I found a new appreciation for my frames. By looking at the functional and everyday objects in our lives in these ways, we can appreciate how the more menial objects mediate us and how we perceive the world. 

(Note: Obviously there are ways to navigate the world without being able to see, I wrote this post in the context of the knowledge I have as someone whose vision is correctable with prescription lenses.)

Sources

Jones, Caroline. “Senses”, Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T Mitchell and Mark, B.N. Hansen, The University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 88-100. 

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

Blog post written by Molly Kingsley

Image by Molly Kingsley

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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

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Portal Into my Mind and Barrier to the World. “AirPods”

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My Evocative Object: “AirPods” 

 Humans need ways to be distracted. As a baby you are given rattles to numb the need for mental stimulation and the woes of being a baby. When you clock-out of your nine-to-five you turn on the TV to decompress from your workload. Since childhood I have struggled with chronic anxiety. My thoughts have flooded my mind with seemingly no way to channel (unless I resort to insanity).  The best tools to combat my anxiety have been distractions. I have many hobbies to distract myself from day-to-day. However, as far as I can remember I have had a growing addiction to technological distractions, specifically ones with sound mediators (i.e. dialogue, music, etc.). I would watch a movie, and headphones would allow me to be in my own world. I found that I needed headphones to be able to distract myself while pursuing other distractions. My Spotify playing would be parallel to my drawings, while also having a tv show in the background. Now I cannot even write a paragraph for school without having another stream of noise in my mind. My need for distraction is the reason why I can always be found with my wireless Bluetooth headphones, my AirPods.  

As I step onto the bus to go to class, I am comforted by the little pieces of plastic and wiring in my ears. My small white AirPod case can always be found in the front pocket of my backpack. If I leave my AirPods at home, I am devastated because it is nice to not have to hear my own thoughts. It is almost a necessity if I would like to have a quiet ride. My AirPods allow me to be alone. In Bernadette Wegenstein’s chapter “Body” in the Critical Terms for Media Studies she emphasizes the distinction between body and embodiment. Wegenstein defines embodiment as contextually dependent on the environment in which the physical body is. By this definition of embodiment, Wegenstein also establishes the fracturing of embodiment with the increasing technological use of society. People split into multiple selves when using the various interfaces of technology, the technological barriers somewhat protect people’s dignity thus allowing them to perform.  

Using AirPods, to me, is like a term that was used in Sherry Turkle’s Evocative Object, “brain prosthesis”. The distraction in my mind by the dialogue of whatever is coming from my mind allows me to relax and “perform” in social interactions in a way that is comfortable. The barrier of the media as a constant white noise in my mind protects me from the version of myself in my mind, thus allowing me to be more present in the moments with others. Technology has become an embodiment of myself. My comfort in technology could be an example of a parasitic reliance of new technology, or it could be symbiotic relationship to use technology as tools of self-realization. In my opinion, I believe using media technologies in this reliant form has given me a sense of control over my mind. 

In Caroline Jones’ chapter “Senses” in the Critical Terms for Media Studies, she explains that technology has trained our minds. Endless scrolling has affected our attention span. McLuhan insights in the “Senses” chapter states that media technologies have become extensions of man thus, extending our senses and supplemented our way of thinking. However, one of the dangers of using technology as an extension is the narrow scope that technology has. It is inherently biased because of our own perceptions and for the communities that do not have access. If we solely use technologies, then we are only perceiving reality through the layers of interfaces of technology rather than firsthand experience.  

This isolation of my thoughts using media technologies could be like the Evocative Object “My Laptop” and the attribution of “brain prothesis” the author, Annalee Newitz, gave to her laptop. Wearing AirPods, the Bluetooth aspect allows me to complete my tasks. I am impeded from my tasks without them in my ears; this highlights my need for distraction and the reliance I have already. I have noticed that whatever is playing in my headphones determines my mood and productivity. I even use my AirPods as a channel to convey my emotions to my own body. If I am on the edge of a good mood I will play something that reminds me of a happy moment to supplement my mood. The state of myself in which I feel the most comfortable, is a state where I am an extension of myself who is constrained by a medium.  

A mindset that I use to justify my overuse of this technology is that not only do AirPods allow me to have access to my own knowledge of my mind, but also access to music, and knowledge of others through podcasts. I use these objects as a medium to myself. To me they represent my expression of my feelings to myself. If I am feeling incredibly overwhelmed, the heavy metal in my ears reflects that.  My AirPods have given me the perspective of the world with autonomy over what noise I hear. Perhaps this lack of control I have felt over my own body has inspired my ideology of the importance of autonomy in my own mind. This may have caused my attachment to this technology. My fear of loss of control may have also stemmed from the helplessness I have experienced with my own body. My day-to-day tasks are constantly mediated by AirPods and afforded me focus, however they have also been a barrier for human interaction because I have to tune myself out. Ultimately, AirPods are a medium of communication and perception in a digital interface, however, impedes my perceptions and communication of reality without technological interference.  

Written by Bridghet Wood  

Image by Bridghet Wood 

Citations 

Jones, Caroline. “Senses.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, Chicago [Ill.], 2010. 

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 30 Sept. 2025. 

Wegenstein, Bernadette. “Body.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by Mark B. N. Hansen, University of Chicago Press, Chicago [Ill.], 2010.