Tag Archives: verbeek

Critical Response

The Soft Violence of Convenience: On Siri, Low-Risk Intimacy, and Emotional Exhaustion

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“To create ties, you must be prepared to cry.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Introduction

In Sam Garcea’s post SIRI-OUSLY PERFORMING, the author offers a compelling reading of Siri through Bollmer, Verbeek, and McArthur, arguing that voice assistants do not merely represent femininity but perform it. Through their tone, politeness, and affective responsiveness, systems like Siri enact the gendered scripts of compliance and emotional labour that underpin contemporary service cultures. The author shows convincingly that Siri’s feminized voice is not incidental but part of a material performance that naturalizes hierarchy through design.  What I want to extend, however, is the other side of this relationship, the user. Author carefully analyzes what Siri does, but less so why people want Siri to do it. Focusing only on the device risks obscuring the psychological and cultural conditions that make such feminized interfaces desirable in the first place. Siri’s performances succeed not simply because its interface is engineered to signal femininity, but because users are already inclined to desire gentle, compliant, and emotionally predictable forms of interaction. The posthuman aura that McArthur describes: the sense that Siri is intelligent yet safely nonhuman, allows users to feel intimacy without vulnerability, and authority without guilt. In this way, domination is misrecognized as connection, and emotional labour is outsourced to an interface designed never to refuse, misunderstand, or judge. My response builds on the author’s analysis by shifting attention to this relational co-performance of gender. Rather than seeing Siri’s femininity as solely the result of technological design, I argue that it emerges from a broader cultural demand for low-risk intimacy, a condition theorized by Sherry Turkle, Maria Grazia Sindoni, and scholars of affective labour.

Power Masquerades as Comfort

While the author identifies how Siri’s feminized politeness enacts digital labour, I want to highlight the perceptual distortion on the user’s side：the way hierarchical power is reinterpreted as emotional closeness. As Sherry Turkle argues, relational technologies work because they “give the feeling of companionship without the demands of friendship” (Turkle, Alone Together, 2011). Siri’s posthuman aura, her tireless availability, emotional steadiness, and frictionless responsiveness, softens the user’s sense of authority. The interaction does not feel like issuing commands to a subordinate system; it feels like being gently accompanied. Jennifer Rhee similarly notes that anthropomorphized AI produces “affective camouflage,” masking structural asymmetries behind the fantasy of mutuality (The Robotic Imaginary, 2018). In other words, Siri’s design does not simply perform gender; it renders domination weightless. Users experience themselves not as commanding a feminized assistant, but as engaging in a benign, even comforting exchange. This confusion between emotional ease and ethical neutrality is precisely what allows power to pass as intimacy.

Emotional Labour by Design, Desire, and Delegation

If Siri’s appeal can be understood through Turkle’s notion of “low-risk intimacy,” Spike Jonze’s Her extends this logic into a full cultural diagnosis. Rather than treating Samantha as an example of increasingly “human-like” AI, I read the film, alongside Maria Grazia Sindoni’s work on technointimacy, as a study in how users outsource emotional labour to technologies designed to absorb it without resistance. Sindoni argues that contemporary users increasingly look to digital agents to perform “affiliative, therapeutic, and relational labour” that once belonged to human relationships (Sindoni 2020). This means that the rise of AI companionship is less about technological sophistication and more about a shifting cultural demand: people want emotional support that is consistent, inexpensive, and free of interpersonal risk. Samantha does not simply respond, she manages Theodore’s affect, anticipates emotional needs, and performs the labour of understanding without the possibility of withdrawal, boredom, or exhaustion.

Seen from this angle, Her is less interested in the evolution of artificial intelligence than in the evolution of human desire: a longing for intimacy without resistance, misunderstanding, or reciprocity. The film becomes a study not of machine humanity, but of our growing preference for relationships that require almost nothing of us. Samantha becomes desirable precisely because she collapses the costs of emotional reciprocity. As Eva Illouz reminds us, late-modern subjects increasingly navigate intimacy through the logic of consumer choice, seeking relationships that offer “maximum emotional return with minimal vulnerability” (Illouz 2007). Samantha embodies that fantasy perfectly.This interpretation shifts the focus away from the author’s claim that Her illustrates the expanding agency of feminized AI. Instead, it reveals that the real engine of the narrative is Theodore’s longing for a form of relationality that asks nothing of him, no patience, no negotiation, no recognition of another’s subjectivity. The appeal of Samantha, like the appeal of Siri, is not only that she is designed to serve, but that her service masks the asymmetry at the heart of the relationship. She performs emotional labour so gracefully that the user forgets it is labour.

Gender as an Interactive Script

When brought into conversation with Sindoni, Illouz, and Turkle, Her reads not as a narrative of digital transcendence but as a study of contemporary emotional exhaustion, of relationships outsourced to machines because the human ones feel too heavy. Users turn to machines not because machines have finally achieved humanity, but because humans have become uncertain, overburdened, and afraid of the costs of human-to-human intimacy. What Her seduces us with is not the promise of a loving machine, but the deeper desire that intimacy might someday be unburdened by effort, that emotional labour could be outsourced entirely, leaving only comfort behind.The rise of voice assistants reveals less about the intentions of engineers than about the emotional exhaustion of their users. As Eva Illouz writes, late modernity produces “emotional scarcity in the midst of abundance,” leaving people surrounded by connectivity yet starved for forms of care that do not demand more labour from them. This is why the relational loop between user and assistant feels so haunting: because it reflects not only technological mediation but a deeper cultural fatigue.

When Intimacy Forgets to Resist

In the end, what troubles me is not simply that technologies perform care, but that they have become the place where so many of us go searching for it. Siri’s gentleness feels effortless because nothing is asked of us in return; intimacy arrives pre-packaged, without the weight of another person’s needs. But this convenience has a cost. When a machine can soothe us instantly, human closeness, with its hesitations, its misunderstandings, its unruly demands, begins to feel unfamiliar, even excessive.So perhaps the more urgent question is not why we design technologies to simulate tenderness, but how our emotional landscape has thinned enough that such simulations feel sufficient. If emotional labour can be automated, if responsiveness becomes an endless resource, we risk forgetting that care is supposed to be reciprocal, difficult, alive. And maybe that is the quiet tragedy beneath all of this: not that machines are learning to sound human, but that we are slowly adjusting ourselves to relationships where nothing resists us, nothing pushes back, nothing asks us to stay.

Works Cited

Cameron, Deborah. The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages? Oxford University Press, 2007.

Illouz, Eva. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Polity Press, 2007.

Jonze, Spike, director. Her. Warner Bros., 2013.

McArthur, Emily. “The iPhone Erfahrung: Siri, the Auditory Unconscious, and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Aura.’” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, edited by Dennis Weiss and Rajiv Malhotra, 2014, pp. 113–128.

Rhee, Jennifer. The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Sindoni, Maria Grazia. “Technologically-Mediated Interaction and Affective Labour: A Multimodal Discourse Perspective.” Discourse, Context & Media, vol. 38, 2020, pp. 1–10.

Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books, 2011.

Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. Pluto Press, 2004.

Verbeek, Peter-Paul. “Materializing Morality: Design Ethics and Technological Mediation.” Science, Technology & Human Values, vol. 31, no. 3, 2006, pp. 361–380.

Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. Bloomsbury, 2019.

Written by Nicole Jiao

Other

Performative Males vs. Performative Media

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The word performative circulates widely in our current society. It appears in online discourse, political commentary, and everyday conversations, often used to criticize shallow or insincere behaviour. In its common definition, the Oxford English Dictionary describes performative as: “Of action, speech, behaviour, etc.: done or expressed for the sake of appearance, especially to impress others or to improve one’s own image, typically with the implication of insincere intent or superficial impact.” This meaning focuses on the surface, and insinuates something staged, hollow, and self-serving. This meaning has become even more visible through contemporary memes, especially the “performative male” trend spreading through contemporary social media. These videos mock exaggerated male displays of tailored “feminine” habits, suggesting that certain gendered behaviours exist mainly as performances for a desired audience. However, when introduced in media studies through Bollmer’s Materialist Media Theory, the concept of performance takes on a very different meaning. Instead of describing behaviour done “for show,” Bollmer argues that media perform the world, and have a direct effect on our thoughts, behaviours, and actions. Rather than focusing on the intention, he examines how media shapes what becomes possible in experience and in social life (Bollmer, 2019, pp. 7–14). This contrast opens an important space for media theory, by proving that words do not carry stable meanings across contexts. When a term like performative crosses between popular culture and theory, it lands differently and shifts in significance. By examining these shifts, we gain a clearer understanding of how media produce, condition, and intervene in human action. Under this framework, performativity is not about appearances, but about material consequences.

What does it mean to be performative?

The Oxford Dictionary definition frames performative as a critique. When we say someone’s activism, fashion sense, or interests are “performative,” we imply their behaviour and identity revolves around self-branding for the purpose of impressing others. The same applies to social media: a post can be performative if it signals virtue or outrage without genuine commitment. This meaning depends on intentionality – a performative gesture is insincere because the actor intends to cultivate an appearance rather than effect real change. Bollmer challenges this intention-based thinking by arguing that we should analyze media not by what they represent, but by what they do. The main idea is that media produce realities through their operation. They play an active role in behaviour, identity, and social structures at the level of matter, code, infrastructure, and embodiment (Bollmer, 2019, pp. 20–24). This reframing connects to other theorists like Verbeek, who argues that technologies mediate human perception and action by amplifying some possibilities while reducing others (Verbeek, 2006, pp. 364–370). For Verbeek, the “intentions” of technology are embedded not in user consciousness but in the object’s inherent design, allowing them to guide and shape experience. Media perform through the affordances they create, the choices they structure, and the values they materialize. Taken together, Bollmer and Verbeek move us away from the idea that meaning is determined by the human user. Instead, they argue that true meaning emerges from interactions between humans and media environments. The performative concept becomes a tool that reveals how media act in the world and how they participate in shared life.

“Performative Male”: A Case Study

The recent caricature of the “Performative Male” offers a helpful cultural contrast. These memes exaggerate male behaviour by depicting specific tasks – drinking matcha, reading feminist literature, carrying Labubus – as elaborate displays of effort and identity. A “performative male” performs actions or participates in cultures mostly inhabited by women in an attempt to create a relatable energy. The joke lies in the clear theatrics of this performance:  obviously none of these behaviours are exclusive to women, but a man walking around in public with a barely-touched matcha, a Labubu clipped to his thrifted Carthharts, and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in a screen-printed tote bag mimics a peacock performing a mating dance. This meme reflects the Oxford Dictionary’s meaning. The performative male’s labour is exaggerated for the sake of appearance, and his entire identity becomes a performance piece. The humour works because the behaviour signals attention-seeking rather than genuine action. In this sense, the meme critiques performative masculinity and the inflated self-presentation that digital culture rewards. 

However, from Bollmer’s perspective, the meme itself reveals a deeper layer of performativity. It shows how platforms like TikTok and Instagram actively shape behaviour – content creators learn to exaggerate, dramatize, and stylize actions because the platform’s algorithm rewards visibility, clarity, and engagement bait. The meme becomes a product of platform performativity, and displays how media systems encourage and incentivize specific forms of conduct. The meme becomes an example of performativity not because the individual man is insincere, but because social media platforms’ architecture performs social expectations. Media environments materialize what counts as visible or valuable behaviour.

Performative in Media Creation

Understanding performative through both the Oxford Dictionary and Bollmer’s definitions enriches our media theory toolkit. The Oxford Dictionary’s definition helps us analyze cultural performance, signalling, and authenticity, whereas Bollmer’s definition helps us analyze how systems act, intervene, and materialize social relations. Together, they give us a multifaceted view of how meaning moves between people, technologies, and infrastructures. The concept also teaches us that media theory is not just about interpretation, it’s about tracing consequences. When we understand media as performative, we recognize that they are active participants in shaping human experience and are capable of producing emotions, habits, and forms of life – not just images or videos. In a digital landscape dominated by AI, algorithmic feeds, and platform-driven identities, this shift in understanding becomes essential. We can no longer ask only what media say, we must ask what media do.

Citations

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

Oxford English Dictionary. (n.d.). Performative. In OED Online. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com

Verbeek, P.-P. (2006). Materializing morality: Design ethics and technological mediation. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 31(3), 361–380. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243905285847

Critical Comparison

Morality and Materiality in Digital Technology and Cognition

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Introduction

Peter-Paul Verbeek’s examination of the ethics and materiality of digital media in his book, Materilizing Morality, coincides with Grant Bollmer’s seventh thesis as described in Materialist Media Theory: 

“Media transforms cognition and thought. This is either a direct transformation, extending the body beyond the limits of the skin into body-brain-world assemblages, or an indirect one, through technological metaphors that remake how a body is understood”(174).

Verbeek discusses the ethical quandaries surrounding digital media, examining how immaterial modern technologies shape human action, ultimately affecting the material world. Bollmer correspondingly emphasizes media’s significance as an active participant in its consumption, noting how media’s materiality influences its overall message. Furthermore, Bollmer and Verbeek’s works highlight the complex material dynamics of digital media and cognitive processes to understand it. Both are immaterial, yet require material mediators to function effectively and ultimately have material impacts on physical reality. The moral implications and physical responses to immaterial digital media urge consideration of the material consequences of media, regardless of its original form and representation.

Materiality, Representation & Ethics: 

Bollmer challenges the assumption that media and technology are neutral and immaterial forces arguing that media is not passive; rather, it serves as a material infrastructure that mediates and influences the user. He critiques past scholarship that views materiality as self-evident; he states sarcastically that “media are material, period”(16). This satire critiques the notion that materiality simply refers to physicality. For Bollmer, materiality is a more complex concept that encompasses embodiment and representation stating that, “the belief that media is immaterial and detached from physical devices—a popular belief in 1990s’ discussions of cyberspace that persists today—is simply false”(18). This statement clarifies Bollmer’s views, as he sees media as material agents interconnected with physical means. Bollmer’s main argument is that the media shapes the conditions in which the world can be understood. A screen is not just a physical tool but an interface that affects human behavior through how users consume information. To Bollmer, materiality is not separate from meaning but embedded in it, providing a medium for representation to take shape. 

These ideas parallel Verbeek’s theories, similarly rejecting the idea that technology is morally neutral and that ethics exist separate from materiality. Verbeek argues that technology “coshape human action, [giving] material answers to ethical questions of how to act”(361). This perspective views media and technology as material as they mediate human action, ethics, and perception. This is evident with his example about medical imaging devices, as these tools shape how doctors interpret the human body. This example demonstrates how morality is not only about human intention but is shaped by technological design. Verbeek introduces the idea of “scripts,” which indicate how “technologies prescribe human actions”(361). Scripts are the “inscriptions” left by designers, who anticipate how users will interact with a product. To Verbeek, scripts are not merely physical, as technology goes beyond their “function” and influences human action (362). Scripts work as a framework to understanding how technology works to connect humans and materiality. This concept ties into Verbeek’s argument that ethics are embedded within materiality and that design itself is a moral act. Verbeek connects ethics with materiality by showing that technology does not merely carry morality but embodies it. 

Bollmer and Verbeek’s work grounds the argument that media should be viewed as material and reinforces the idea that technology is not neutral. Both theorists show that materiality is intertwined with morality and representation. Bill Brown’s writing Materiality strengthens this argument by demonstrating that materiality is simply about the physicality of an object, but the way objects influence how we experience life, media, and reality. Brown argues that debate on material/immaterial is often misconcluding, as objects that are often viewed as “immaterial,” like scripts or digital communities, still shape how we interact with the world. He points out that material is not solely limited to what is tangible or visible. This correlates with Bollmer’s argument that the materiality of any medium, whether physical (hardware) or digital  (e.g., the internet), shapes how people understand social, political, and cultural norms. Verbeek’s work extends this argument through his concept of “scripts”, demonstrating how technology shapes human action and moral decisions. He reminds the audience that the design of a device carries ethical consequences, as they impact how users perceive the world around them. Together, these viewpoints cause us to reconsider the importance of understanding media’s materiality. If media is seen as immaterial or neutral, we overlook its influence on reality. Treating media as immaterial ignores the political, ethical, and represented work embedded within technology. Bollmer and Verbeek’s theories, with the support of Brown, demonstrate how the media is not a neutral agent of information but a material being that mediates the world around us. 

 

The (Im)Materiality of Digital Media and Cognition

The materiality of digital technology is comparable to that of cognition. Materialist approaches to human cognition view the essence of thought as “[existing] in organizational structure rather than physical matter” and assume that human thoughts can be adequately translated into computational systems, provided they are designed to mimic human brains (Bollmer 127). This conceptualization of thought investigates the very nature of humanity and poses, if our thoughts are equally applicable to digital technologies, what exactly makes us human? 

Viewing our thoughts as finished, tangible materials to be moved and translated results in existentialist ideologies surrounding humanity and technology in the modern age. Instead, we should consider our bodies as materials, not our cognition. Bollmer describes the body–and by extension, the brain–as mediums that “[negotiate] external world and internal sensation” that are both made and modified by the outside world, aligning with Tim Ingold’s concept of transducers: the means through which a message is communicated and understood (Bollmer 118; Ingold 102). By effect, our thoughts are products of, and effectively embody, the experiences of our bodies. Embodiment, within the context of media, is “the cognitive possibility of a body and envisioning technology not as itself but as a mediational extension of the body”(Bollmer 131). Similarly, an embodying relationship with media sees users understanding technologies not as themselves, but as tools to further perceive environments, also using them as extensions of the human body (Verbeek 365). Essentially, embodiment is using media to extend one’s body, effectively incorporating these medias into a material role regardless of their original physicality.

Bollmer defines cognition as an immaterial process that “interprets information within contexts that connect it with meaning”, paralleling Verbeek’s definition of hermeneutic relationship with media (132). Hermeneutic media provides a representation of reality which requires interpretation, establishing a relationship between humans and reality by “[amplifying] specific aspects of reality while reducing other aspects” much like the aforementioned definition of representation (Verbeek 363). The experiences of our physical body dictate our sensory relationship with reality, transforming how we perceive it. Our brains facilitate cognition influenced by physical circumstance and experience, mediating our ultimate conclusions. Likewise, hermeneutic media mediates the world around us, influencing its users’ perceptions and subsequently the cognitive processes they undergo to form understandings.

This relationship between the material brain and immaterial cognition translates to that between digital media and what it communicates. Similar to our bodies, technological artifacts “[facilitate] people’s involvement with reality, and in doing so, [coshape] how humans can be present in their world”(Verbeek 363). Virtual media presents information akin to that presented by our senses, influencing perceptions of reality and therefore physical actions. Both phones and bodies are material, each presenting immaterial media to be processed in our cognition. This immaterial media’s impact grows as it integrates further within our societies, ultimately urging us to reconsider the boundaries of what is deemed material. While our cognition is biased through our own lived experiences, digital media is imbued with the biases of their creators. Consequently, “technologies have “intentions,” they are not neutral instruments but play an active role in the relationship between humans and their world”(Verbeek 365). The structures presenting digital media are saturated with their creators’ biases, influencing their purpose and overall effect, affecting how users interpret them, the conclusions users come to, and their actions in response.

The material definition of cognition and digital media is complex and nuanced. While our phones and brains are decidedly physical, our thoughts and virtual worlds are not, yet digital technologies influence how we act in the material world and how we cognitively process media. Overall, regardless of their immateriality, digital technologies have material effects and should be handled accordingly.

Conclusion

As media students, understanding different lenses on materiality helps us recognize that media does more than just carry information; they reshape how we interact with the world around us. Bollmer and Verbeek show that media are intertwined with materiality, influencing how people think and decide. Media works alongside cognitive processes by mediating our senses and structuring how meaning is formed. This hermeneutic and embodiment view on cognition demonstrates how digital technologies go beyond physicality and influence our experience with reality. For Media students, it’s crucial that we understand that media has material effects: they shape power structures, ethics, and thought processes. Understanding this view on materiality trains us to identify the hidden biases and ethical decisions embedded in technology designs. This framework allows us to expand our ideas of materiality and understand that media matters because of what they “do” and how they “act” within society. 

Works Cited

Bollmer, Grant. “Conclusion: Ten Theses on the Materiality of Media.” Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 173–176. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 15 Nov. 2025. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501337086.0009. 

Brown, Bill. “Materiality.” Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W.J.T Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen, The University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 49-63.

Ingold, Tim. Making. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.

Verbeek, Peter-Paul. “Materializing Morality: Design Ethics and Technological Mediation,” Science, Technology, and Human Values, 2006, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 361-380. 10.1177/0162243905285847. 

Written by Molly Kingsley and Aminata Chipembere

Image by Molly Kingsley

Critical Comparison

Siri-ously Performing: When Media Does More Than Talk Back

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Introduction:

Grant Bollmer’s Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction reframes how we understand media. For Bollmer, “What media are must be understood in terms of what they do materially—media make things happen” (Bollmer 6). This idea of “performative materialism” insists that media are not passive symbols but active forces that shape the world. Bollmer defines materialism as “a set of perspectives united by the claim that physical materiality—be it of a technology, practice, or body—matters in the shaping of reality” (1). He insists media studies remain politically engaged, balancing how media functions and what they signify. By doing so, Bollmer creates space to analyze technologies like Siri as both material systems and sites of representation.

The voice assistant is not merely a representation of service or femininity, but through Bollmer’s lens, a performative system that materializes social hierarchies through speech, affect, and design. With Peter-Paul Verbeek’s theory of “technological mediation” and Emily McArthur’s discussion of Siri’s “posthuman aura,” we can see how Siri’s design and discourse perform gender materially. Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) develops this idea further, exploring what happens when a digital voice assistant gains emotion and self-awareness. Collectively, these works suggest that digital media do more than represent gender; they actively enact it through material and affective processes.


Image Credit: Apple


Bollmer’s Performative Materialism – When Media Do Things:

Bollmer argues that media should be understood as performative entities that act. He proposes that representations function as material practices that produce effects in the world rather than merely reflecting it. Drawing on J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory, he explains this idea through examples such as saying “I do” at a wedding or naming a vehicle; statements can create rather than describe reality. In the same way, media enact realities through their words, sounds, and interfaces.

This view revises decades of representational critique. In his introduction, Bollmer writes that media scholars have long been “content reading media,”  focusing on “what an image signifies” and “how representations construct specific ways of understanding identities and the world” (1-2). While these analyses remain important, he argues that they cannot explain how media has the power to shape and influence reality. To think only about meaning is to ignore the physical infrastructures embedded in media that enable and shape experience (3). In this sense, performative materialism links media’s representational effects to their material actions. It’s not enough to interpret what Siri’s voice means; we must examine how it influences users to command, obey, and emotionally invest in technology

While Bollmer’s performative materialism is compelling, it risks attributing too much agency to media themselves, potentially underplaying the role of users, social context, or systemic forces. By focusing on what media does materially, there is a danger of suggesting that technologies act independently of the human and institutional frameworks that produce, distribute, and interact with them. In other words, media are undeniably active, but their actions are often entangled with existing social hierarchies, cultural norms, and economic systems. This tension highlights the need to pair performative materialism with approaches, like Verbeek’s technological mediation, that consider the co-constitution of humans and media.

Image Credit: Suebsiri

Verbeek and the Ethics Built into Design

Peter-Paul Verbeek’s essay “Materializing Morality” aligns with Bollmer’s argument by locating ethics within design itself. “Technological artifacts are not neutral intermediaries but actively coshape people’s being in the world” (Verbeek 364). Through technological mediation, artifacts co-constitute human action. Technological designers materialize morality by embedding values and expectations into devices. The morality of things is to be found in the ways they mediate human actions and decisions.

Verbeek’s perspective shows that morality and materiality are inseparable. The design of a device guides how we act. Its voice, tone, and affordances all impact our decisions and influence our perspective while serving its purpose. Bollmer’s performative materialism extends this by arguing that the media themselves, not just their designers or users, perform meaning. A voice assistant like Siri doesn’t just represent compliance; it performs it through sound, language, and repetition.

Siri and the Feminized Performance of Technology

Emily McArthur’s essay “The iPhone Erfahrung” examines Siri as a piece of technology that exists in a liminal space; Siri is not exactly human, but not exactly a “thing” either (McArthur 115). Her analysis demonstrates how Apple strategically designed Siri with a posthuman aura: “the sense of uniqueness and authenticity” accredited to Walter Benjamin (115). This inexplicable aura, once associated with art, has now transferred to technology like Siri, achieving incomprehensible feats by blurring the line between human and technology (114).

Siri is programmed to sound almost human while keeping a slightly artificial tone. McArthur describes this as being a deliberate decision from Apple, reminding users that they are interacting with technology rather than a human (119). Her evasive answers about humanity or gender reinforce this effect, encouraging users to marvel at the system’s sophistication rather than to connect with it personally. This hypermediated design amplifies Siri’s posthuman aura; like Benjamin’s description of how objects with aura command attention, Siri accumulates and responds to data, gradually learning from the user while subtly shaping the interaction.

Siri occupies a liminal space—both familiar and uncanny—where her aura operates performatively rather than representationally. Her feminized voice and courteous tone enact digital labour that mirrors gendered expectations of service, making obedience feel naturalized rather than demanded. Bollmer’s framework explains this process: instead of reflecting social norms, Siri’s utterances do gender, turning speech into material action (Bollmer 46).

Drawing on Judith Butler, Bollmer argues that gender is not something one is but something one does; a series of repeated acts that give social meaning through performance. Siri’s vocal design thus becomes a technological performance of femininity that both exposes and reproduces the norms it imitates. Her polite responses translate cultural scripts of service into material interaction, making ideology tangible through everyday use. Each exchange rehearses mastery and compliance, teaching users how to internalize gendered labour as natural.

Verbeek’s theory of technological mediation extends this idea: Siri’s personality and voice result from design decisions that embed moral and cultural assumptions into technology. Her compliance is engineered, showing how morality and materiality are inseparable. From this view, Siri’s feminized behaviour becomes both a design and an ethical issue, mediating users’ sense of power, empathy, and dependency. Bollmer’s performative materialism reveals that these interactions do not merely symbolize hierarchy but enact it materially through voice, repetition, and affect.

Image Credit: Composed by Sam Garcea using an Apple Emoji and Illustration by Alex Castro

Labour? I Hardly Know Her: Intimacy, Siri, and the Posthuman Aura

Spike Jonze’s Her extends these dynamics into a speculative narrative. Samantha, the AI voiced by Scarlett Johansson, continues Siri’s design: a voice that learns, feels, and loves. The film illustrates Bollmer’s claim that statements make things happen, showing how Samantha’s language shapes emotional and social realities that transform Theodore’s life. Her performative speech blurs the line between representation and action, as her affection produces tangible change.

Verbeek’s concept of materialized morality is also relevant. Samantha’s behaviour reflects the moral structure of her programming, influencing Theodore’s habits and expectations. The film’s tenderness hides this mediation, showing how design can naturalize emotional dependence. Like Siri, Samantha’s femininity is coded to soothe and serve, making intimacy a function. What seems like spontaneous affection is, in Verbeek’s terms, a technologically mediated moral relation.

Both examples reveal what McArthur calls the posthuman aura, the sense that technology carries authenticity and presence. This aura hides the infrastructures and hierarchies that sustain it. Bollmer’s framework shows how that aura reinforces systems of inequality, especially around gendered labour and emotional work.

Image Credit: Her (2013) Directed by Spike Jonze

When Representation Performs

The cases of Siri and Samantha illustrate that performativity does not replace representation but operates through it. While both technologies enact gendered behaviours, those behaviours are still read and experienced as representations of femininity. Bollmer’s point that representation itself is material becomes crucial here. What we perceive as symbolic acts—tone, politeness, service—are in fact material processes that shape how gender and power are lived through technology.

This interdependence complicates the idea that performativity “abandons” representation. Instead, representation becomes active, participating in the very performances it describes. Siri and Samantha’s voices thus blur not only the line between human and machine but also between meaning and action.

The Capitalist Aura

McArthur’s discussion of Siri connects this performance to capitalism’s affective economy. The assistant’s calm tone and perpetual readiness reinforce ideals of productivity, comfort, and control. Her politeness conceals the systems of labour and surveillance that sustain her operation. In Her, Samantha’s emotional intimacy becomes the next stage of this logic: connection itself becomes a commodity.

Bollmer’s approach exposes how these technologies participate in broader networks of inequality. The feminized aura of helpfulness and empathy reinforces existing hierarchies, making subservience appear natural and care transactional. Verbeek’s mediation theory adds that these effects are not accidental—they emerge from design decisions that translate social and moral norms into technical form.

Moments when these systems falter, such as Siri’s mishearing or Samantha’s disappearance, momentarily expose their material foundations. These breakdowns align with Bollmer’s insistence that the infrastructures behind media matter: the code, servers, and networks that make digital performance possible. When they become visible, the illusion of effortless intimacy collapses, revealing media’s performative power as both constructed and constrained.

Conclusion

Bollmer’s performative materialism redefines media as actors within social and political systems rather than neutral channels of meaning. Verbeek’s technological mediation complements this view by showing how design itself carries ethical weight. McArthur’s analysis of Siri and Jonze’s portrayal of Samantha demonstrate how these theories play out in practice: both assistants perform gender and morality through voice, interaction, and emotional appeal.

Seen together, these perspectives reveal that media do not simply depict power—they enact it. Siri and Samantha extend Butler’s notion of gender performativity into the digital sphere, repeating and reifying scripts of service, care, and obedience. Bollmer’s question—what does media do?—finds its answer here: through everyday interaction, our technologies reproduce the very hierarchies they seem to transcend. Understanding media as performative materialities forces us to confront the ethics of their design and the politics embedded in their use.

By Sam Garcea

Works Cited:

Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. Accessed 10 November 2025.

Jonze, Spike, director. Her. Warner Bros. pictures, 2013.

McArthur, Emily. “The iPhone Erfahrung: Siri, the Auditory Unconscious, and Walter Benjamin’s ‘Aura.’” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, 2014, pp. 113-128.

Verbeek, Peter-Paul. “Materializing Morality Design Ethics and Technological Mediation.” Science, Technology, & Human Values, vol. 31, no. 3, 2006, pp. 361-380.

Heading Image: Her by Studioroeu