{"id":326,"date":"2025-10-05T22:58:45","date_gmt":"2025-10-06T05:58:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/?p=326"},"modified":"2025-10-05T22:58:45","modified_gmt":"2025-10-06T05:58:45","slug":"algorithm-in-the-lungs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/archives\/326","title":{"rendered":"Algorithm in the Lungs"},"content":{"rendered":"
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My lips purse around the little piece of plastic, and I take a deep breath\u2014then there goes the throat hit, rush of dopamine releasing in my brain, leaving a sting of sweetness on my tongue. Followed by a cloud that vanishes almost as quickly as it appears, the vape is small enough to disappear in my hand, but its presence in my daily life is anything but invisible. I try to recall my incentive to start vaping, yet it is far from what I can remember. It might have been peer pressure from high school, or a rebellious mentality that emerged from being an obedient child. Every time I successfully take a break from vaping, I realize that I turn back to it when I face moments of stress, depression, or anger, and become more stressed from the potential harm that it creates for my body. Living in this cycle for three years, I realized that vaping mediates both personal comfort and social identity, forming a complexity that is beyond addiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Vape<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember the first vape that I owned back in high school, it was in the shape and color of a tiny, green boba tea bottle. Back then, that series of vapes were incredibly viral, but I was clueless about the authenticity of the product, and I neglected to consider what it might do to my body. Then, I owned one with a silver liquid metallic outer design, and stuck to that one single vape ever since by replacing it with vape pods. It is small and rechargeable, lasting even longer than a phone, which makes it portable and easy to use.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trend or Need?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vaping has a different meaning to me\u2014unlike many who treat it as a social tool, I tend to avoid vaping in front of my friends and in places with many people. Instead, the emotional resonance came from sensory comfort when I am alone, as a way to pause and cope with hard times. Rather than saying it\u2019s the nicotine, I\u2019d rather say I force myself to believe that nicotine has an effect, in order to manage through times of fear and self-doubt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Uncanny<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A strong connection was formed between my vape and Turkle\u2019s concept of \u201cthe uncanny\u201d in Evocative Objects: Things We Think With.<\/em> Freud described the uncanny as a point in perception where the familiar meets the strange, simultaneously drawing us in and repelling us (8). I realized that the vape held power not because of its quality, but because it embodied the uncanny. Among all the types of digital devices we encounter daily, none of them is able to \u201cdigitize\u201d scent\u2014the vape\u2019s vapor mimics smoke, but it is never actually lit. The sensory experience of smoking has been digitized and flavored in a way that makes the experience both intimate and strangely alien. In that sense, vaping turns one of the most important senses in ancient sensory rituals, scent, into a controlled, technologized performance. My sense of taste and smell are mediated by a sleek plastic stick, a miniature machine that reprograms how my body encounters air itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Ritual to Algorithm<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf you want to find out what a new car or the inside of an Egyptian tomb smells like, \u201cGoogle Nose\u201d(Bradley, 1)\u201d I frequently wonder what would happen if this were to turn out to be true, if scents could be experienced as easily as we do with visuals. In Bradley\u2019s Smell and the Ancient Senses,<\/em> scent in antiquity was never a secondary sense but a vital medium shaping how people experienced ritual, morality, and even social order. Smell offered both allure and danger. For instance, fragrant incense in temples could signal divine presence, while foul odors were thought to reveal corruption or moral decay. But when scent meets media, the transformation of sensory digitization alters the sense into something repeatable and methodoligcal, much like modern digital media. Each puff is standardized, each pod replaceable, and the whole cycle of intake becomes less about the unpredictability of the burning process and more about the precision of a portable device. Just as feeds and notifications organize how we see and hear the world, the vape organizes how I breathe and taste before I get to encounter it. It reduces the chances of spontaneity in the sensory world into neat, reproducible, predictable units of vapor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Implications for Mediation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seen this way, the vape illustrates a broader ideology about media technologies from Critical Terms<\/em> for Media Studies<\/em>: they do not simply extend our senses, as McLuhan might say, but actively reformat them. And what we experience is the very reformatted senses, simply from the most basic sensory human act of breathing. To vape is to experience a digitally mediated version of taste, touch, and smell, all in one, instant and artificial. It blurs the boundaries of how I am mediated, between what Plato determines as \u201cremedy \u201c and \u201cpoison\u201d in Hansen’s chapter on new media (Mitchell, 173). Inhaling vapor for me is always a painful dilemma between comfort and risk, and being normalized into an act that soothes while silently eroding. This duality reveals how technology becomes embedded in the most ordinary gestures, transforming even the breath into a site of mediation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remain stuck between remedy and poison, intimacy and artifice, comfort and unease. The struggle, then, is not simply to resist or to indulge, but to remain conscious of how these mediations shape us and to search for a balance in living with them. It is in that space of dilemma, between surrender and domination, that the human breath becomes both a challenge and a lesson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Written by Gina Chang<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Works Cited<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bradley, Mark. Smell and the Ancient Senses<\/em>. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mitchell, W. J. T., et al. Critical Terms for Media Studies<\/em>. The University of Chicago Press, 2010.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Turkle, Sherry. Evocative Objects: Things We Think With<\/em>. MIT Press, 2011.

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My lips purse around the little piece of plastic, and I take a deep breath\u2014then there goes the throat hit, rush of dopamine releasing in my brain, leaving a sting of sweetness on my tongue. Followed by a cloud that vanishes almost as quickly as it appears, the vape is small enough to disappear in … Continue reading Algorithm in the Lungs<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":103710,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/103710"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":331,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions\/331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}