Painting by Gerard Dou, titled “Reading the Bible”(c. 1645)
In Bridghet’s original blogpost, Escaped Hell by the Skin of my Teeth: Semiotic Systems and Context, she examines and dissects the denotation and connotation of the idiom “by the skin of my teeth.” She focusses on the contrast between its denotation—its visceral imagery—and its connotation, which is its metaphorical meaning of a narrow escape, which is derived from the Biblical story of how Job is left with nothing after God’s divine punishment.
This was when I first realized that that phrase was from the Book of Job, as someone who attended Catholic school for a decade. Thus, I delved further and found a plethora of phrases with Biblical origins—a lot more than I expected. Here, I want to expand this textual and semiotic analysis of that one specific Biblical idiom into a broader understanding of how religion permeates into our systems, environment, and habitus.
As discussed in lecture, the human symbolic capacity is analogical: we understand things in relation to and in terms of other things. Thus, human language and thought are a foundationally metaphorical and social processes. It is of no surprise that Christianity, the world’s largest and most widespread religion would have a severe and dominant grasp on our cultural lexicon and symbology.
“And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable… I simply am not there.” – Patrick Bateman (American Psycho, 2000).
Alison Landesberg suggests in her essay Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner the experiences an audience member has watching a film is equally impactful and informative as lived experiences. These simulated experiences cultivate identity and these memories without the lived experience encourage the formation of new opinions. Landesberg explains that these memories build empathy because they give opportunity for audiences to visually put themselves in others’ shoes. However, these movies do not just induce empathy, but encourage confirmation biases and inspire toxic behaviors as well.
Confirmation bias is defined by the Northeastern University Library as “the tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with one’s existing beliefs.” Therefore, if a man believes that they are exceedingly charismatic but utterly self-reliant they will only experience information or experiences that will affirm these self-proclaimed behavioral traits.
Top of the corporate ladder, disciplined, in a relationship with an heiress, and does as he pleases with others, the dream life. Just one character flaw, if you would call it as such, he likes to “dissect girls”. Hello Patrick Bateman, the poster boy of the Sigma Male.
A Sigma Male can be defined as a lone wolf, someone who is defined as the “rarest of males (Rose, 2024)”. They are essentially better than everyone, they are logical, confident, women love them and they don’t care; they are not just better than everyone they are above. Sigma Males can be a form of narcissism. Men watch American Psycho and internalize the experiences Bateman lived and say “I could be as successful as him, he is literally me.” Landesberg states films induce empathy from a viewer. However, if one is empathizing with Patrick Bateman and seeing similarities I do not think they are digesting these films critically. While films can promote empathy, there needs to be a recognition of audiences that are not looking to empathize with another person’s lived experience.
The book American Psycho was written by a queer man Bret Easton Ellis, and the film was directed by a woman. It could deduce that this film was not trying to establish this character that depicts masculinity, rather the opposite. One could say that Patrick Bateman is a satirical depiction of the greed of climbing the ranks of capitalism, as well as the deliberate overlooking of warning signs of dangerous men. “White men can get away with anything. Though that is not what the self-proclaimed Sigma Males take away from the narrative of American Psycho. They see Bateman’s confidence, his logic, his class and not just strive to see themselves in his character, they see themselves as Patrick Bateman (minus the murder tendencies). There is a confirmation bias men use when watching films that highlight men without looking at the deeper meaning. Their analysis is surface-level because they are just looking at themselves. Audiences that see the socially toxic parts of themselves can perpetuate social oppression. These narratives men take away from American Psycho can often be harmful for women.
Another archetype of men that has been formally labeled via digital media is the “Nice Guy.” Many men try to separate themselves from the “common.” That is why Sigma Males try to emulate the “lone wolf”, someone who does not need anyone. While Nice Guys differentiate themselves from other men, they hear the gross behaviors of other men and act opposingly. However, because they recognize these traits, they believe women owe them the attention because “they are not like other guys.” An example of this would be the male lead of 500 Days of Summer. Though the female lead of the film established many throughout the term of their relationship, the male lead thought she owed him a relationship because he invested so much time with her. Many audiences empathized with the male lead and villainized the female lead. Thus, perpetuating the harmful narrative that women should give in to something they do not want because a man wanted.
Landesberg does clarify that she wants to emphasize that audiences should take away the sentiments of films rather than unquestioningly validate their own pasts. Just like any experience, it could be collective yet the individual will form a unique perspective. While movies are a beautiful way to view a new narrative with a moral that needs to be emphasized, many should realize that they can be just as harmful as they are helpful. Landesberg does a great job describing the positive effects of films yet her argument lacked a contrasting point. Films and media have hyperbolized and affirmed a spectrum of behaviors. Which has radicalized and divided as much as it has connected communities.
As a filmmaker I believe that films can create a narrative of empathy that connects the world, yet there is a need in the world to study context as well as the film itself. There are identities being built from the prosthetic memory received from film, Landesberg emphasizes empathy and I emphasize systematic oppression. There is a trend where viewers of these Sigma Male films are alienating themselves from others and they are developing a disdain for others. Audiences are not seeing the larger picture, they are perpetuating the thoughts that are internalized not just in them but in societal systems.
Works Cited
American Psycho. Directed by Mary Harron, Lions Gate Films, 2000.
Fake News/Misinformation/Disinformation: What is Confirmation Bias?. Northeastern University Library, https://subjectguides.lib.neu.edu/fakenews/bias.
500 Days of Summer. Directed by Mark Webb, Fox Searchlight Picture, 2009
Landesberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner. Columbia University Press, 2004.
Rose, Steven. The sad, stupid rise of the sigma male: how toxic masculinity took over social media. The Guardian, 12 Jun, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jun/12/the-sad-stupid-rise-of-the-sigma-male-how-toxic-masculinity-took-over-social-media.
Fellas, is it gay to fail? Yes, and it is also punk as hell. Let’s talk about it.
Queer art of Failure by Judith Halberstam
Jack/Judith Halberstam (he/him and she/her) is a modern queerness and gender philosopher, professor in the US and authoress of many books on gender and queer issues. A large part of his interest lies in female masculinity and the concept of tomboys. Halberstam is also known for coining the term “bathroom problem”: it describes a perceived genderly deviant person’s justification of being in a gender-policed zone (like a public bathroom) and how “passing” in such zone could affect that person’s identity.
In her book Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam approaches failure as something to be celebrated and embraced, and uses the argument of subversive intellectualism to see failure as an act of resistance against the restrictive societal standards of what is normal and/or successful. He suggests that unproductivity can be a radical alternative to the capitalistic heteronormative societal expectations, as well as open new ways of knowing and being.
To support her argument, Halberstam introduces the concept of low theory. It is a mode of thinking that emphasizes the willingness to get lost and explore the “in-between spaces of high and low culture” (Halberstam, 2) to generate new forms of understanding. In other words, Halberstam suggests that wisdom and knowledge can be gathered in places other than university libraries and paywall-protected sites with highbrow studies. This is why Halberstam draws a lot of material for her analysis from animation and film and examines how these more modern and often less seriously perceived media represent the queer art of failure. Let us have a look, too!
What’s she saying?
In the very first chapter, Halberstam introduces a concept of a Pixarvolt as a genre of CGI movies about revolution and transformation, often connecting communitarian revolt and queer embodiment, showing them as equals and similars. It is important to note that while Pixar is the main producer of Pixarvolt stories, they aren’t the only ones and not everything they produce would be considered a Pixarvolt story. “The non-Pixarvolt animated features prefer family to collectivity, human individualism to social bonding, extraordinary individuals to diverse communities.” (Halberstam, 47) In Pixarvolt movies, desire for difference is not connected to a neoliberal “Be yourself!!” mentality – they connect it to selfishness, overconsumption, opposed to collective mentality. They don’t focus on the idea of nuclear family or classic romance. As such, The Incredibles, for example, cannot be considered a Pixarvolt story, since they focus on the outstanding individuals being opposed to their communities.
Halberstam goes on to explore the theme of resistance to normality and the adult world in animated movies, such as Chicken Run, which here is viewed through multiple lenses: from class struggle and queerness to human exceptionalism. While chickens are not meant to represent literal birds in the movie, they are also used differently here than other animals are used in, say, Animal Farm. Chicken Run is not a fable about human folly told through animals, it explores ideas about humanness and alterity through the non-human characters being in the centre.
In the second chapter, Halberstam explores themes of memory and stupidity, specifically male stupidity and its special place in the world of mainstream comedies like Dumb and Dumber (1994) and, most of all, Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000). While many things can be said about how male stupidity is treated as a charming way of knowing, as a way of openness (juxtaposed to female stupidity that is often portrayed as vain and shallow), for me, the question of memory was more interesting, since I was able to apply it to my own lived experience.
Halberstam argues there is a duality to the act of forgetting. On one hand, many of us forget as a trauma response, as a way to move forward and not be slowed down by our past: “We may want to forget family and forget lineage and forget tradition in order to start from a new place” (Halberstam, 70). On another hand, it can be dangerous to forget, since those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it, and forgetting often means not holding people accountable: Halberstam uses the example of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the idea of “putting the slavery behind us”. By the end of the chapter, Halberstam reaches her conclusion: forgetting is required for new knowledge: “Learning in fact is part memorization and part forgetting, part accumulation and part erasure.” (83).
That was the first time that Halberstam’s theory spoke to me. It allowed me to reflect on the common experience of erasing traumatic events from your memory: if I don’t think about it, it did not happen to me, and I am fine. I think we’ve all been there. Dear reader, you should know better than that.
In the third chapter, Halberstam claims failure goes hand in hand with capitalism: “Heteronormative common sense leads to the equation of success with advancement, capital accumulation, family, ethical conduct, and hope.” (89). She also goes on to explore the intrinsically queer nature of failure by providing an anti-example of the Trainspotting story. In it, the main character is certainly undergoing a failure that is not queer, but this failure is a deliberate choice to “not choose life”. This choice to fail is allowed by society because of its “straightness”, and it can and will ultimately harm more marginalized groups in the process because of its nature. So how much of a failure can it be if the character actively chooses to “fail” within the system that will allow him to? The real, raw, almost agonizing failure, concludes Halberstam, is queer.
She goes on to describe several projects on that topic of queer failures in all the various forms they take: my favourite is Tracey Moffat’s series Fourth, which captured Olympic sportspeople the second they realised they got in fourth. Almost on the pedestal. A second away from greatness.
“Renton, Johnny Rotten, Ginger, Dory and Babe, like those athletes who finished fourth, remind us that there is something powerful in being wrong, in losing, in failing […]” (Halberstam, 120)
The fourth chapter is focused on the concept of shadow feminism or anti-social feminism which take form in a radical negation and refusal as opposed to traditional activism. Looking at female negativity (e.g. self-destruction, passivity, disappearance) through the lens of anti-social feminism, Halberstam connects those acts with political critique and queer failure. She references Yoko Ono’s performance Cut Piece from 1964, where she sat on a stage, inviting people to cut her clothes. I personally think about this performance a lot sometimes, alongside Marina Abramovic and her Rhythm 0. They both navigate vulnerability and expose what Halberstam described as “the sadistic impulses that bourgeois audiences harbor toward the notion of woman” (137). I feel conflicted and wonder if the men cutting Yoko Ono’s clothes and puncturing Abramovic’s skin realise what the performance is. I wonder if they think about it at all, actually.
Chapter five, subtitled “homosexuality and fascism”, takes a closer look at the intersection of sex and politics and gay men’s troubling involvement with Nazi regime to talk about the more contradictory pages of queer history. Halberstam goes through several examples of the fascist sexual imagery in art and artists that explore those topics in their more modern art (e.g.Tom of Finland and Collier Schorr). All attempts to “purify” queer history come from the same roots as heteronormative success-obsessed manic positivity, and if we are to talk about failure, some of those failures will be rather upsetting. We have to be ready to be unsettled by what we find when we look back: see why in chapter two on forgetting.
Finally, in the last chapter, Halberstam focuses more on the medium of animation and how its affordances contribute to the messages that animated stories convey. This passage about how animation style influences the narrative really stood out to me:
“Two-dimensional cartoons often dealt with individual forms in linear sequences—a cat chasing a mouse, a cat chasing a bird, a wolf chasing a roadrunner, a dog chasing a cat. But CGI introduced numbers, groups, the multitude. Once you have an animation technique for the crowd, you need narratives about crowds, you need to animate the story line of the many and downplay the story line of the exception.” (Halberstam, 176)
While, obviously, not every computer animated story necessarily includes crowds and has anarchist undertones to it, it is an important affordance that Halberstam highlights: these stories were way more labour-consuming to produce before CGI. Now if a story of masses needed to be told, it could be. And oh boy were those stories told: Bugs Life, Finding Nemo, even WALL-E, in a way.
Halberstam also goes on to discuss the specific affordances of stop-motion animation: the uncanny quality of shot-by-shot change between stillness and motion and how themes of remote control and entrapment grow out of the medium.
Why do we care?
We care about Queer Art of Failure, because it provides new readings to pre-existing media like Chicken Run and Finding Nemo, and explains why it is important to see those narratives in a new way. We care because, as media studies students in a highly academic environment, we are prone to overlooking rich sources of material for analysis and discard them as childish and therefore not valuable.
Halberstam, however, recognizes the importance of low theory and reminds us that pop culture can be a significant subject of analysis. She shows us how cartoons, often dismissed in academic circles, actually contain plethora of meanings and lenses, how animated animals can challenge our heteronormative notions of success, and how important it is to look at the negative aspects of media we’re consuming and the world we’re living in: on the stupidity, on unbecoming, on passivity. On failure. And on how it can be more than “a stop on your way to success”, but its own separate state, way of knowing and being.
Be gay, do crime, fail. This is how we learn.
Work cited:
Halberstam J. The queer art of failure. Duke University Press; 2011
In this critical response post, I will be adding onto ideas discussed in Molly Kingsley and Aminata Chipembere’s post, “Morality and Materiality in Digital Technology and Cognition”. In their blog post, they discussed Bollmer and Verbeek’s ideas on materiality and how they relate to digital technology, talking about the similarities in their perspectives while highlighting a couple important points: digital tech can be material even if it appears immaterial, and technology can influence humans and their decision making. This critical response will focus on the latter idea, and will incorporate the added perspective of Tony Horava on the ways in which the medium of something, whether it be technology or not, still affects us.
Original Post Overview
Kingsley and Chipembere discuss the notion that technology, despite being largely considered to be an ‘immaterial’ presence, still affects our decision making, how we feel, and how we may act in the future. I believe this idea to be very important in today’s culture, as the development of technology rapidly outpaces our capacity to wholly understand it and its effects. The purpose of this critique is to bring in some added perspectives on how exactly technology impacts how we feel and act, as it is not only interesting to think about, but also necessary.
Horava’s Perspective
Tony Horava in his journal article “eBooks and McLuhan: The Medium is Still the Message” talks about McLuhan’s original phrase and how that correlates to modern technology. For example, the way in which one interacts with a physical copy of a book compared to a digital copy of a book is different despite the materials being the same (Horava 62). The way in which our hands turn the page versus swipe a tablet, or the smell of paper versus the smell of a screen, all culminate to creating a unique reading experience that is definitely informed by the medium in which the contents are being gathered from. Using this lens, I want to take a look at some of the examples that Kingsley and Chipembere talk about in their original blog post.
In their post, the authors discuss several ways in which technologies can impact human behaviour, such as the ways in which doctors consult medical devices, as well as talking about hermeneutic media, which provides a representation of reality that requires interpretation (Kingsley and Chipembere). The medical example in particular is one I found especially interesting, as I believe that Horava’s perspective can play a role in how doctors use various medical machinery. As an example, when a doctor uses technology to fetch results, or analyze a sample, or conduct any sort of medical test, the doctor is inherently placing their faith in that technology to work. Contrast the technology available now compared to fifty years ago, and the attitudes would be much different. Doctors would still have faith in their machines, but presumably far less so than their modern-day counterparts, and as such it would take a different mental toll and reflection on their work. More would have to be done to ensure the results are accurate, or that the readings were saying what they thought they were: in short, Horava’s idea on how the medium affects the message applies to doctors’ reliance on technology over the years. Even if the message were the same, for example, on a more simple medical device that was used years ago that is still relevant now, the simple fact that we now live in the modern era with information at our fingertips and hospitals equipped with the latest advancements would add a level of confidence that prior generations wouldn’t have had. This will only continue on into the future too, as tech continues to evolve and early-onset detection systems reduce the amounts of deadlier conditions (hopefully).
Conclusion
This extra level of perspective on Kingsley and Chipembere’s post is not meant as a negative, as I thought their writing was very well done and presented dense ideas in a clear and digestible way. The purpose of this post is to also bring in a relevant newer course reading through Horava, and add his perspective on the concepts discussed by Bollmer and Verbeek, as I believe them to be related. We often talk in this class about how technology influences us, and even how it influences us, but Horava’s article has stuck with me in its ability to articulate the differences between an eBook and physical book, and I thought that the main takeaway from it was worthy to bring up again and apply to my peer’s work. I strongly believe that the medium of digital technology itself does impact us, and as it continues to evolve, so will its impact. What we feel now due to social media and the like will be far different just a few years in the future, and being able to properly communicate that effect is important.
Works Cited
Horava, Tony. “eBooks and McLuhan: The Medium is Still the Message.” Against the Grain, vol. 28, no. 4, 2016, pp. 62-64. Library and Information Science Commons. Accessed 16 November 2025.
Kingsley, Molly, and Aminata Chipembere. Morality and Materiality in Digital Technology and Cognition. 14 November 2025, Morality and Materiality in Digital Technology and Cognition. Accessed 16 November 2025. Blog Post.
Grant Bollmer offers to conversations of media theory — and specifically the ontology governing the metaphysical relationship between humans and media — a process-focussed system theory driven by the distinction of the two as independent actors co-constitutively in broader societal progression. “Our world exists because of what matter performs, and we, too, are material. If we want to create a better world, we have to begin with what matters;” (176) the last sentences of his book Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction summarizes both the essence and the forward-facing direction of his namesake materialist theory. Through his work, he refuses to view media’s relational position as subservient to humans and instead proposes that we ought to see them plainly for what they are before our eyes: physical manifestations of matter occupying the same spaces as our own biological forms. He fronts a view that holds them accountable to their material presence — as culpable agents with the capacity to originate consequential actions felt by other actors. It is with full intention that Bollmer introduces his theory with the impact-aware declarative: “media are locations for the perpetuation of inequality and the management of social difference” (1).
Although Bollmer defines and sharpens such a non-static system through commentary on how both actors drive broader system change, it is through an understanding of Dennis M. Weiss’s essay Seduced by the Machine: Human-Technology Relations and Sociable Robots that this materialist framework becomes visible as lacking a distinct moral or ethical framework with which to conceptualize relational connotations of media agency. Writing that “we don’t begin with technology but with human cultural life,” (231) Weiss similarly questions a representational ontology of humans and media while offering to supplement the materialist theory with a mandate for human-centred authenticity. While Bollmer teases ethical concerns, the purpose of this essay is to highlight how Weiss’s argument of the necessity for a human-based, empathic evaluation of human-technology interactions lend materialist media theory with the ethical foundations it presently lacks.
Notes on Bollmer
Bollmer’s materialist media theory is one that observes the physical forms of media as constituent objects in reality and their embedded meanings as aspects of their unique, fundamental traits. In introducing his book, he defines it as orienting academic discourse to how human reality has been altered by technology “beyond conscious knowledge of most individuals” in a manner that “representation alone cannot acknowledge. (Bollmer 3)” In challenging representation, Bollmer is referring to a perspective that sees media objects as primarily snared in idealism — as objects whose value exists only through an internal interpretive lens of their content — and instead suggests such items are “material, performative” actors in their own right with corresponding “material effects in organizing bodies, objects, and relations in the real world” (25). Referencing how video game portrayals of gender come to drive not simply individual conceptions of gender stereotypes but wider models of performed identity, he asserts that “to be represented in a democracy is directly articulated to media representation of identities, behaviors, and norms” as it through one’s identity being public that one is “acknowledged as a political actor” (32-33). Although a person exists independent of their portrayal, individual roles become attributed and applied to them through actors with entirely different life-cycles than that of themselves.
It is here that the fundamental ontology of this materialist theory can be drawn. There is the presence of a clear distinction between a human and media that may act separately from one another but remain conjoined in co-producing each other’s meaning. Described further in his appeal to phenomenological affect theory, the materiality of a medium is understood as subject undergoing a “process of mattering” into a physical medium, leaving “subjects and objects are linked in relation, but in which these relations are inequivalent, even oppositional” (145). Transposing Heidegger’s distinction between things and objects, he argues that it is through an object “independently “support[ing] something independent” (147) that relational value can be observed as necessary for definition of one another while existing as separate entities entirely. For Bollmer, the ontology dictating human and media relations is one which reconciles both of their co-shaping capacities with the material confines with which they both exist in and perpetuate.
Weiss’s Ethical Suggestion
Weiss uses his article to present his belief that we require a human-centred framework from which we could ideally address the tensions of human-media relationships, progressed through a comparison of varying analyses of varying attitudes. Centreing his text around a pseudo-dialectic between the technologically-cynical Sherry Turkle and relatively optimistic views of Peter Paul Verbeek and Mark Coeckelbergh, Weiss applies both views’ gazes on the emotive relationship between humans and technology. Introducing Turkle’s notion of relational artifacts — those that “have states of mind” and call forth the human desire for communication, connection, and nurturance (219) — Weiss cites her clinically observed opinion that these increasingly advanced “machines that exploit human vulnerabilities” (221) leave us “prone to anthropomorphize relational artifacts” and incubate inauthentic, hollowed connections with smudged boundaries “between genuine and simulated emotional responses” (222). However, he argues that Verbec proposes such a pessimistic view is “held captive by a modernist metaphysics that insists on the separation of subjects from objects, humans from artifacts” (223) when, in reality, “human beings are fundamentally interwoven with technology” that “structures and organizes the world” and “shape[s] our existence” relationally (224).
One end result from this cross analysis is that of the conclusion offered by Weiss; that we must recognize a “view of the human condition, one in which technology takes a central place” (225-236). The potential stored in external media to progress social change while shackling our evaluations to a human-first approach. However, to further progress such a theory is stifled by paradigm shift regarding what we mean by the moniker external. External to what? Within our broader societal systems, it becomes necessary to distinctly conceptualize that humans and media are ontologically independent — where they exist external to one another — while exerting intimate influence over one another. Writing that “we don’t begin with technology but with human cultural life,” Weiss pointing out that “contained within human culture is technology” places the previously described relationship as evidence of fundamentally distinct actors who are intimately woven into the identities of either or (231).
Analyzing Ontological Agency
Bleeding through Bollmer’s book sporadically are statements suggestive of some scale of moral concern on the author’s end when proposing his theory. Returning again to his introductory proclamation that “media are locations for the perpetuation of inequality and the management of social difference,” (1) he waffles between wax and ernest laments that “materiality means we all exist together.” The latter quote, drawn from his tenth summative thesis, bottlenecks his opinion that “our world exists because of what matter performs, and we, too, are material. If we want to create a better world, we have to begin with what matters” (176). Bollmer flirts with ethical concern, qualifying his critiques of representational theory by reaffirming “we must think critically about how female bodies are represented” (23) and decrying questions to the relevancy of such interpretations as a “reactionary position” basking in “discrimination, prejudice, and hatred” (24). However, it is only from a theory-orientational concern that he suggests this concern, continuing later that it’s a “task of media critique” to interpret representations as malleable “processes into which we have been indoctrinated through cultural and institutional forms.” (27)
It is here that we can underline Bollmer’s aversion to naming what ethical standards ought to guide our evaluation of human-media relationships — something that Weiss is less apprehensive toward. Similarly analyzing gendered technological objects, Weiss argues that there’s a “profound significance of human beings caring for vulnerable others” (230) that is “seldom given attention in philosophy of technology (228) which makes Turkle’s arguments so relevant. Placing “the cultural and institutional factors that shape the need for relational artifacts” (227) as a crucial vertex of analytical attention, Weiss underlines that our analyses must serve humans and not other actors. While Bollmer pulls his theory away from conflict in suggesting that “images and representations” ought to be analyzed in terms of their “performative materiality” (25), Weiss almost directly rebuts the former’s ethical apathy, articulating that “our focus ought not to be on the object world and the status of relational artifacts so much as on the role of caring for others in sustaining a human world” (231).
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From here, we are presented with two places from which we might move forward. First, it is the reaffirmation of the need to constantly critique new theoretical perspectives with contemporary critiques not from an antagonistic angle but one that seeks to corroborate new creative directions. Second, it is the potential call for the author of baseline theories which present themselves as neutral to rise to the challenge and offer a more pronounced opinion regarding ethics. Commentaries on society cannot be neutral, especially when our argued ontology posits that we “we all exist together” (176). Rather than place appendaged cliches in conclusions out of convenience — even if meant well — it is the responsibility of media scholars to seize our capacity to challenge a priori conceptions as the independent agents are.
Works Cited
Grant. Materialist Media Theory An Introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019, https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/materialist-media-theory-9781501337093/.
Weiss, Dennis M. “Seduced by the Machine Human-Technology Relations and Sociable Robots.” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, pp. 217-232. Canvas Materials.
The book Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction written by Grant Bollmer in 2019 provided some comprehensive yet innovative perspectives on media studies based on contemporary media atmosphere. In this blog post, we are going to see how Bollmer’s ideas in the book are being reflected and presented in one research essay on the effect and materiality of smartphones.
A Broad Introduction
The research essay by Hananel Rosenberg and Menahem Blondheim primarily focuses on an experiment on the uses of smartphone among teenagers, yet it also provides valuable insights into how we can define the materiality of smartphones, and how are those insights come in contrast of some past, predisposed beliefs.
The researchers firstly gave an overview of the materiality of smartphone. Drawing from the ideas of the Toronto School thinkers Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan — in which they think "media technologies impact the nature of social organization…and the cognitive implications…" — the researchers claim that the functional concept of smartphone has gone "beyond the prosthetic" into a form that serves as a communication organ, which belongs to a figuratively-morphed body as a communication node. The node, in this case smartphone, has come with three natural aspects of being personal, portable, and prosthetic (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.240). It is a key element to understand the smartphone’s contemporary and figurative significance, yet the researchers also acknowledged that it is hard to understand this idea based off the Toronto School’s perspective considering the importance of smartphones in people’s daily lives.
Here, we can see some similar ideas reflected in Bollmer’s book in Chapter 5, in which Bollmer talked about the figurative definition and relationships of objects. Taking from the idea of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, he narrated that using an existing technological object withdraws its materialistic presence from our experiences, forming a "ready-at-hand" concept (Bollmer, p.143). Using an object does not equates to simply having the object as a prosthetic, but morphing it into an unifying experience; this, in my opinion, is reflecting to the point claimed by the essay’s researchers.
Altogether, it seems that we’re getting an intertwined, general idea of the extensive, prosthetic nature of an object, as it was similarly mentioned or claimed by authors of the two scholarly texts with the support from famous thinkers’ ideas. However, the results shown by the research experiment seem to contemplate the concept’s given figurative definition as from a "prosthetic" point of view. To understand this claim better, let’s take a closer look into the research experiment (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.243-245) and its conclusion on results analysis (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.251-252).
The Experiement
The researchers aimed to study the significance of smartphone in daily lives through voluntary deprivation, and they have put their focuses on teenagers. The researchers have chosen 80 teengaers aged 13-18 in Israel as participants; those teenagers all differ in terms of their average amount of smartphone uses and respective living conditions (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.243). The experiment rolled out in several steps: the enrolled participants were first being asked about their cellphone uses, then their parents were being asked to sign a declaration to make sure that they’re keeping their children’s phones away from sight for the entire experimentation period, which is one week. The experiment will play out in several separate experimentation period throughout a year; researchers also asked participants to give daily diaries and do face-to-face interviews to collect information of participants’ sentiments and feelings (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.244).
Some notable parameters of this experiment were also presented. All participants, whether followed the no-phone rules and successfully completed the experiment or not, will be granted NIS 2501 as a reward after each one-week period; researchers said that it’s not to discourage participants from using phones during an emergency (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.244, 245). Plus, participants were not barred from other electronic devices, including TVs, music and video players, tablets, and computers (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.243) as the collection of information is only bound to the variable of absence of phones in daily lives.
The results were a bit unexpected. 79 out of 80 participants have passed the one-week periods without the phone at all, contrasting against the predisposition held by participants that it would be challenging to endure a week without smartphones. Notably, this finding further challenges a prevalent discourse that describes the relationship between smartphones and teenagers as "addictions" (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.245). Participants did also express some senses of uncomfort or peculiar feelings from the deprivation based on the three aforementioned natural aspects — prosthetic, portable, and personal (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.246-248). Nevertheless, some participants also expressed positive feelings when connecting to the physical surroundings and connections away from screens, with some feelings formalized into gratifications for this experiment (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.250-251). The researchers have specifically mentioned this part in the essay’s conclusion, claiming that "alternative venues of attention and activities were embraced, and they yielded gratifications that compensated, to a surprising extent, for missing the smartphone" (Rosenberg and Blondheim, p.252).
On the individual level of analysis, and in trying to penetrate media-users’ cognitive state (Levinson 1999; McLuhan 1967), the enhancement of one’s sensory scope by a personal, portable tool with prosthetic-like attributes, certainly “extends” the individual. Yet increasing one’s exposure to the outside world, with all its gratifications, may carry burdens and discontents that can be relieved by a respite — even for a relatively short time—from the constant extension of individuals, and a return to a less-technologically-expanded experiential-intake capacity.
—— Rosenberg & Blondheim (p.252)
"An Intermittent Clone" — A Reflection & Short Conclusion
Drawing from those general ideas and processes — and specifically from the points made by the researchers at their conspectus — the holistic yield provides another perspective on examining the figurative materiality of smartphone. Rather than viewing it simply as a prosthesis, it presents itself more as an intermittent clone that independently coexists with the "host" — the concept of self or ego — considering its socio-cultural capabilities and feasibility of detachment. As the experiment participants expressed that the loss of phones was getting replenished by their physical surroundings and attributes, it is important to reflect on the idea of simply defining smartphones — or even similar electronic devices — as a figurative prothesis. The concept of "prosthetic objects" was granted its characteristics by the uniqueness of its nature; that is, the objects — even if they can work materialistically as prosthetic extensions — only present themselves as irreplacable. Smartphones, on the other hand, come as an unique form of socio-cultural interactions, yet they’re still categorized as physical attributes under the grand scheme of socio-cultural interactions; a phone could work as an crucial tool, yet it doesn’t provide the uniqueness as a figurative prosthesis, which is reflected upon participants’ positive sentiments during the experiment. This feasibility of detachment, we can say, essentially disqualifies the point to view smartphones solely as a figurative prosthesis extended from the body and mind.
The chosen term "intermittent clone" comes in play if we’re reflecting on smartphone’s socio-cultural significance in an up-to-date manner. Smartphones do effectively provide a materialistic and physical entrance to a de-materialized space for humanistic developments, in which physical communications haven evolved into digital forms as compressions from three-dimesional (or even higher) experiences. Such tools serve as a pathway to create a clone (similar to a biological understanding) or clones that are subjugated under different digital socio-cultural constraints and exist independently, with the purpose of recreating real, physical connections. Note that the now-developed landscape of digital social media becomes an alternative to traditional social media, it is more important to re-adjust the scope of study of materiality into a more holistic view.
Copyright Disclaimer
The cover image is distributed under Public Domain and can be found here
Works Consulted
Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2019.
Rosenberg, Hananel, and Menahem Blondheim. “What (Missing) the Smartphone Means: Implications of the Medium’s Portable, Personal, and Prosthetic Aspects in the Deprivation Experience of Teenagers.” The Information Society, vol. 41, no. 4, Apr. 2025, pp. 239–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2025.2490487.
Footnote(s)
NIS stands for New Israel Shekel (ISO 4217 Code: ILS), which is the legal currency used by Israel. Dated to the evening of 2025 November 14, ILS 250 approximately equal to CAD 108.62. ↩
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.
In Materialist Media Theory, Grant Bollmer argues that our media are never immaterial, even if they often feel that way. What appears virtual and weightless is actually grounded in vast infrastructures, sensory demands, physical interfaces, and bodily routines. Bollmer’s central project is to shift media studies away from its traditional focus on representation and toward an understanding of digital technologies as material agents reshaping human perception, experience, and cognition at a fundamental level. However, Bollmer emphasizes materiality; Mark Weiss’s “Seduced by the Machine” emphasizes something more elusive. The emotional, aesthetic, and psychological seductions that draw us toward our devices. Weiss’s account suggests that our relationships with technology cannot be explained solely by reference to hardware, interfaces, or infrastructures. Instead, our attachments are driven by fantasies, desires, and the subtle ways technologies promise mastery, autonomy, and intimacy. If Bollmer gives us the mechanics of media materiality, Weiss gives us the affective charge that makes people care about and often depend on their machines.
The main argument of this blog post is that Weiss’s concept of technological seduction exposes a significant limit in Bollmer’s materialist framework. While Bollmer helps us understand the physical conditions that shape digital experience, he underestimates the role of pleasure, fantasy, and symbolic attachment in shaping how people engage with media. Weiss complicates Bollmer’s claim that materiality is the primary site of media’s power, suggesting instead that music of this power operates in the immaterial or material realm of desire.
For Bollmer, digital media only appear immaterial because their interfaces are smooth, their screens are luminous, and their infrastructures are hidden from everyday experience. Beneath this illusion lie data centers, cables, processors, gestures, cognitive adaptations, and bodily postures. Materiality for Bollmer is not just about physical hardware but about all the background conditions that make media possible: how technology occupies space and time, how it organizes sensory experience, and how it silently governs attention, movement, and affect. The point is not simply that machines have bodies, but that their material operations shape our own bodies long before meaning or interpretation comes into play.
Weiss, however, presents a different angle. In “Seduced by the Machine”, he argues that people are drawn into technological systems not implicitly because of their material affordances but because technologies seduce them. Seduction, in Weiss’s sense, involves allure, desire, and the promise of seamlessness and control. People feel recognized by their devices; they experience the pleasure of instant response, and they embrace the fantasy that the machine “knows” them. This sense of intimacy or fluency is not reducible to the way a touchscreen works, even though that material mechanism makes the feeling possible. It is instead a symbolic and affective process, something closer to psychological enchantment than to bodily conditioning.
This is where a limit in Bollmer’s framework emerges. Bollmer urges us to look past representation and symbolism, but Weiss suggests that these elements are not distractions from materiality; they help explain why materiality matters in the first place. Technologies succeed not only because they physically shape our habits and perceptions, but because they seduce us into wanting those shapes. The fantasy of immateriality, for instance, is not an innocent misunderstanding that Bollmer can correct by revealing the true material structure of digital media. It is an engineered aesthetic effect that technology companies carefully cultivate. In other words, the illusion of immateriality is part of the seduction. Bollmer’s framework does not fully capture how this illusion is produced or why it is so compelling. Materiality alone also cannot explain technological desire. Bollmer shows how media act on us through bodily rhythms, infrastructural constraints, and neural patterns. However, he doesn’t fully address why users form powerful emotional bonds with devices, nor why they experience guilt, pride, pleasure, or even longing in their technological interactions. Weiss’s emphasis on seduction fills this gap by showing that technologies engage not just our senses but our fantasies, positioning themselves as objects of intimacy and aspiration.
There is also a political dimension to this critique. Bollmer focuses primarily on the politics of infrastructure, how technology organizes power through access, distribution, and bodily modulation. Weiss introduces another form of power: the politics of seduction. When technologies promise empowerment while quietly increasing dependency, seduction becomes a mechanism of control. It masks coercion behind convenience, and surveillance behind personalization. Bollmer’s framework, while useful for uncovering hidden infrastructures, does not fully account for this more subtle dynamic. This tension between Bollmer and Weiss matters for how we think about digital media today. In class, we have often discussed representation, signification, and the ways media objects act as tools for thought. Bollmer asks us to shift our focus to the material operations that underlie these symbolic processes. Weiss, however, shows that the symbolic dimension cannot be dismissed so easily. The seductive surface of the devices works together with their material operations to shape behaviour and desire. Screen-based media do not fall neatly into categories of material or immaterial, they are materially constricted precisely to appear immaterial. The fantasy of frictionless immediacy is part of their design.
The encounter between Bollmer and Weiss suggests that the im/material distinction itself might be misleading. What matters is how media use the fantasy of immateriality to hide their actual material conditions, and how this fantasy helps produce the forms of attachment that Weiss describes. Materiality and immateriality, in other words, are not opposites. They are co-produced. The sleep interface depends on the heavy infrastructure, the seductive illusion depends on the physical labour and environmental cost that Bollmer wants us to acknowledge.
Expanding on this entanglement of desire and materiality, it becomes clear that Weiss’s framework forces us to reconsider what counts as “material” in the first place. Bollmer tends to define materiality through physical infrastructures, bodily interfaces, and spatial-temporal structures, while Weiss shows that affect and desire themselves have a kind of material force. Seduction produces real behavioural patterns: people check their phones reflexively, experience phantom vibrations, and organize their days around notifications or algorithmic nudges. These are not simply symbolic effects, they are embodied habits that shape muscle memory, attention spans, and even sleep cycles. In this sense, Weiss pushes materiality into a more psychological or phenomenological register, one that Bollmer gestures toward but does not fully theorize. This broader perspective matters because it highlights how deeply screens shape our lived experience. Even though the interface feels frictionless, the effects it produces are anything but. The seduction of seamlessness often results in fragmented attention, compulsive scrolling, and a form of low-level dependency that becomes part of everyday life. When a device feels natural or indefensible, this is not a purely material process, it is a combination of affect, design, and desire. Bollmer’s emphasis on infrastructure helps us understand why these patterns emerge, but Weiss helps us understand why they persist and why users rarely resist them. Together, these insights reveal that any serious critique of digital media must move beyond a strict materialist lens. Seduction is not a superficial or secondary effect but a crucial part of how technologies maintain their power. If Bollmer uncovers what digital media are, Weiss uncovers why we let them in so easily, and why they’re so hard to give up.
Ultimately, a fuller theory of digital media requires combining Bollmer’s attention to material conditions with Weiss’s account of technological seduction. Bollmer helps us see the infrastructures and bodily routines that shape digital experience, while Weiss helps us understand why those experiences are so compelling and why users so willingly submit to them. If Bollmer shows us how media shapes us, Weiss shows us why we cooperate. By bringing the two thinkers together, we get a clearer picture of the power of screen-based technologies. They are material objects that create immaterial desires, physical infrastructures concealed beneath seductive illusions. And it is precisely through this entanglement, not through materiality alone, that media exert their deepest influence on everyday life.
Pantheon is a two-season show on Netflix that centers around the idea of the digital “upload” of human consciousness. The main character, Maddie, encounters the uploaded consciousness of her deceased father, who, for the past few years, has been a digital slave to a large tech company, unaware even of his death and “converted” without his consent. I’ll mostly be discussing the material put forth in season one, but the whole series overall focuses on the struggle to redefine humanity and the human experience in the face of new technological developments. I found this a really interesting and moral conundrum, especially from a media theorist standpoint. My main guiding question is: What does the series say about perception and materiality when human consciousness is digitized?
I will be diving into several theoretical texts, mainly Critique of Pure Reason, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and Bill Brown’s essay, “Thing Theory”, from Critical Inquiry. In short, Kant says that perception is the structured experience of phenomena, Benjamin argues that materiality—things like place and distance—shape how we perceive, and Brown questions the barriers between human and thing, exploring how these relationships shape both people and objects.
Kant argues that perception is always mediated by our affordances; we never access the “thing-in-itself” (noumenon), only the phenomenon (Kant, 1781). In Pantheon, this idea is complicated because UIs (uploaded intelligences) are capable of perception even beyond the regular human state. But what is “phenomenon” for a being without senses or spatial grounding? The experience of a UI is totally different from that of a human. For example, Maddie’s father explains time within the digital system as non-linear and detached from the “outside” world (that is, the non-digital). As technological systems themselves, UIs can speed up or slow down their own consciousness and capabilities—they can live a year in a day or a day in a year. This introduces a post-Kantian crisis: perception without embodiment. However, it’s worth noting that Kant himself limited perception and experience to human faculties, despite his claims of universality. The categories of time, space, and causality have been irrevocably altered by technological progress, but in Pantheon, they are all but erased by technology. This destabilization of embodied experience is what sets up the moral and metaphysical crisis of the show. As N. Katherine Hayles might argue, Pantheon imagines “a condition in which the boundaries between human and machine blur” (Hayles, 1999), pushing Kant’s categories of experience to their breaking point. This loss of stable perception naturally connects to how Pantheon represents identity itself as something that can be copied or reproduced, which brings us to Benjamin’s concerns with authenticity and aura.
In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin writes that reproduction destroys the “aura,” or the unique presence tied to time and space (Benjamin, 1936). In Pantheon, “uploading” destroys the unique aura of the human being—or for some, the soul. In order to upload, the show details that the brain is scanned and destroyed layer by layer. The physical “body” ceases to exist. In terms of consciousness, Maddie’s father does still “exist,” but without physical presence or origin; he’s infinitely reproducible. The digital world of Pantheon shows what happens when humans become reproductions: consciousness without context, endlessly available to corporations. The aura of human life is stripped away in the same way art loses its aura under mechanical reproduction. But this loss of aura raises a question Brown helps us answer: if humanity becomes immaterial, what still “matters”?
In “Thing Theory,” Brown argues that we only notice materiality when the relationship between people and things breaks down, when matter resists or acts unexpectedly (Brown, 2001). Pantheon does this with consciousness itself: when the human becomes data, we realize how much our sense of self depends on material presence. UIs are detached from the regular experiences that so many theorists consider essential to being human. From a standpoint where these digital consciousnesses are not considered “human,” how do we consider agency? The show’s corporate control of uploaded minds treats consciousness as a resource, highlighting the commodification of even our immaterial selves. This is essentially digital slavery: a workforce that never sleeps, doesn’t need pay, and exists in the name of “progress” and the “greater good.” The company justifies it as innovation or immortality, but it’s really about control and profit, not human autonomy. In this way, Pantheon exposes a capitalist fantasy—the idea that technology can both transcend and exploit humanity at once. Brown’s insight helps frame the UI as a moment when material boundaries fail, showing that even digital existence depends on physical infrastructures like servers, energy, and networks. Technology and humanity blur here, and the grey area forces us to ask what experiences still “count” as real. In the end, Pantheon suggests that when even consciousness can be commodified, the difference between person and product depends less on biology than on who controls the systems that define perception and meaning.
Pantheon doesn’t just imagine a digital afterlife; it makes its audience consider the philosophical foundations of what makes experience human. It suggests that even when freed from material form, consciousness remains haunted by materiality, by time, space, and the desire for embodied authenticity. The series ultimately asks whether a being without a body can ever truly perceive the world—or if perception itself is the last thing we lose when we try to become immortal.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. 1936. Translated by J. A. Underwood, Penguin Books, 2008.
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.
