{"id":347,"date":"2025-10-07T19:20:26","date_gmt":"2025-10-08T02:20:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/?p=347"},"modified":"2025-10-07T19:20:26","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T02:20:26","slug":"life-long-comforts-how-objects-from-early-childhood-stay-with-us-for-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/archives\/347","title":{"rendered":"Life Long Comforts: How Objects From Early Childhood Stay With Us For Life."},"content":{"rendered":"
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(The earliest photo I can find of the blanket, vs my blanket this week)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

When we\u2019re babies, we\u2019re given many toys, stuffies, and blankets, but many of us grow an attachment to just one particular thing. In my family, we refer to that one thing as a \u201cLovey\u201d. Many children begin to lose their attachment to their lovey when they enter their teens, sometimes younger, sometimes older. Others hold onto that attachment for life. Clearly, there was a gene in my family that made us so attached to our Loveys; both my parents still have teddy bears that they were given as young children and held onto. For me, my object was my little pink blanket.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The blanket itself is not impressive. I\u2019ve been told and seen in photos that my blanket was soft and bright pink at first, but as far as I can remember, it’s been rough and white. It’s about 2ft by 3ft, and literally tearing at the seams. It’s worth nothing, but to me it is worth everything. To me, it’s worth going back to my house to grab it in an emergency, or pack fewer clothes than I need to bring it with me on trips; it’s even to come to friends\u2019 houses with me. This blanket has moved houses with me eleven times and has spent the last 20 years with me. It is, without a doubt, 100% a security blanket. It is an analog of my emotional data. Each tear or stain is a sign, an index of past use and care. It bridges my past and present, mediating the \u201ctemporal aspects\u201d of experience, as it literally allows me to relive or re-access memories and moments of safety and comfort from earlier stages in my life. In this way, it shows how media and memory are coextensive, and how even a humble object can serve as a living archive of feeling.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But to me, it’s so much more than a blanket, and it offers me so many affordances. It allows me comforted sleep at night, it offers me warmth. The blanket acts as an anchor, a constant in my life, and stays with me every night when I am most vulnerable; when I\u2019m asleep. The affordances of comfort aren\u2019t inherent to my blanket alone, it emerged through embodiment, my lived experience and relationship with it over time. In McLuhan’s terms, \u201cThe medium is the message\u201d, the way my blanket soothes and anchors me is inseparable from what it is, a soft, small, familiar object.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My blanket is a medium of experience, just like how our bodies are a medium of human experience. Like Turkle\u2019s evocative objects, it’s both loved and thought with, my emotional companion and tool for reflection on things in my life. The blanket mediates my feelings on such a wide spectrum, in moments of joy and in moments of hardship, it is always waiting for me, wherever my \u201chome\u201d at the time has been. It is something that knows everything about me, and yet nothing at all (because it’s just a blanket, not a conscious thing). It acts as a technological medium in miniature, something that stands in the middle between my inner world and my external world, helping me process and feel my emotions and transitions.\u00a0

As we continue through time and advances in technology, I can’t help but think about how much media is experienced through their physical qualities, and how that meaning is threatened by the digital age as we become more abstracted from material experience in a digital world. My blanket is lived and tangible, and stands as an opposition to the transition into digital mediators. It reaffirms the importance of touch, texture, smell, and material presence in the making of meaning. Nothing digital could replace any aspect of my blanket, material or immaterial in meaning. It is also an active counter to dematerialized media: a reminder that mediation can be intimately physical and that memory is not just cognitive, but physical and textual. Would a carpet still feel the same on a phone screen? Would the Mona Lisa be as popular if it were only to be seen digitally? My blanket is also a great example of Eco\u2019s \u201cvegetal memory\u201d- memory preserved in organic material. It stores my personal information and history in its fabric, colour, tears and frays<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we were to think about my blanket with some critical theoretical insight, it could teach us that media are not always obvious or high-tech, mediation begins with everyday objects that are transformed to have meaning. The comfort, touch, and emotional security are themselves mediated experiences that can change an object’s meaning. The memory is not abstract or purely cognitive but entangled with physical matter. The theories of media and mediation must include the affective and tactile, not just the visual or digital.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In closing, my blanket shows how mediation begins with the material and personal, not just digital or technological media. It embodies the link between body, memory, and materiality, showing that meaning and comfort are felt through touch and texture. It illustrates Turkle’s idea of evocative objects as things that are both loved and thought with\/through. It reflects Gibson and McLuhan\u2019s affordances, as my blanket’s value comes from what it allows, which is warmth, safety, and reflection. Its value is not determined by what it physically is. It reminds me that media theory isn\u2019t only about our devices or information, but also how objects can mediate our relationships with the world and ourselves. And ultimately, it teaches me that mediation is intimate and embodied, a process that connects mind, matter, and memory across time.\u00a0
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Thanks for reading! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(The earliest photo I can find of the blanket, vs my blanket this week) [Prefix: I am just a girl, and when writing this felt quite vulnerable with the idea that I would share it with you. My mom reminded me that while vulnerability feels like a weakness to ourselves, it looks like courage to … Continue reading Life Long Comforts: How Objects From Early Childhood Stay With Us For Life.<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100855,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[42,45,30,55],"class_list":["post-347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other","tag-mcluhan","tag-memory","tag-my-evocative-object","tag-turkle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347","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\/100855"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":349,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347\/revisions\/349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}