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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

Critical Concept Explication

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maxine Gray, Betty Liao, Nam Pham, Aubrey Ventura

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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.