{"id":708,"date":"2025-11-02T00:33:40","date_gmt":"2025-11-02T07:33:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/?p=708"},"modified":"2025-11-02T00:33:40","modified_gmt":"2025-11-02T07:33:40","slug":"between-noise-and-making-re-thinking-eco-through-new-materialisms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/archives\/708","title":{"rendered":"Between Noise and Making: Re-Thinking Eco through New Materialisms"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Response to Leadle,\u00a0 Noise versus Knowledge: Umberto Eco on the Internet<\/a>: https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mdia300\/archives\/category\/critical-response<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In their post \u201cNoise versus Knowledge: Umberto Eco on the Internet,\u201d<\/strong> Leadle revisits Eco\u2019s warning that information overload risks turning meaning into mere noise. She connects his critique of digital excess with our own scrolling habits, describing how constant exposure to fragmented posts and updates produces a kind of semiotic overfeeding. I found her reflection especially compelling because it saturates Eco\u2019s theory in lived experience: the daily cycle of consuming, forgetting, and repeating online. Yet Leadle also resists framing technology as purely destructive. Drawing on Renata Kristo and Sherry Turkle, she shows that digital media can both scatter and sustain us,  a tension Eco himself recognized when he created Encyclomedia to teach with, rather than against, the web. Her post ends with a call for mindful media use, suggesting that meaning can still be preserved if we approach technology consciously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This nuanced reading of Eco captures why his ideas feel so urgent today. Still, I think Eco\u2019s distinction between information and knowledge can be expanded using more recent perspectives on new materialism and ecological thinking. Where Eco sees \u201cnoise\u201d as the collapse of meaning under too much data, theorists like Tim Ingold and Elizabeth Garber invite us to look at abundance not as loss, but as process, a field of relations where knowledge is continuously made. Their work reframes digital overload as something living and interactive rather than chaotic and destructive. Reading Leadle\u2019s post through this lens helps us move from Eco\u2019s anxiety about excess toward an understanding of media as ecological and participatory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Materiality to Materials<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eco\u2019s metaphor of semiotic overfeeding suggests that the digital world saturates us with signs detached from their original context. Leadle develops this by calling the internet a hypertext of our own making, where memory is constantly overwritten. This reminds me of Ingold\u2019s essay Materials Against Materiality (2007), where he argues that scholars have focused too much on the abstract idea of \u201cmateriality\u201d rather than on the materials themselves,  the substances that flow, shift, and transform. For Ingold, nothing in the world is ever still; every material is caught up in a continual flux of becoming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we apply this to Eco, information is not simply a pile of detached signs. It\u2019s more like a stream of interacting materials, images, words, code, pixels,  each carrying histories and potentials. From this view, the problem isn\u2019t that there\u2019s too much information, but that we often treat it as static content instead of living matter that requires engagement. Ingold might say that Eco\u2019s fear of noise stems from imagining media as finished objects rather than as ongoing processes of formation. Knowledge doesn\u2019t disappear in movement; it emerges from it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leadle\u2019s post resonates with this shift when she describes her laptop as both Eco\u2019s nightmare and Newitz\u2019s dream. That ambivalence,  technology as distraction yet also memory,  captures exactly what Ingold calls the correspondence between humans and materials. We do not simply use devices; we think through them, shaping and being shaped in return.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ecology of Meaning<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ingold expands on this idea in Toward an Ecology of Materials (2012), suggesting that materials are perpetually interconnected, forming an ecology rather than a mere assortment of objects. Thinking ecologically involves focusing on the movements of energy, time, and matter that link humans, technologies, and environments. When Leadle expresses feeling overwhelmed by semiotic excess, Ingold might argue that the objective isn’t to escape the current but to learn to navigate it, fostering an awareness of its patterns<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This perspective transforms Eco\u2019s noise into something more dynamic. The endless content of the internet becomes a living medium, a shifting landscape of meanings, algorithms, and affects. We might still feel overwhelmed, but the solution is not less information; it’s better correspondence with the materials of information itself. In other words, meaning is ecological: it arises through ongoing adjustment, not control.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Making, Knowing, and Intra-Action<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elizabeth Garber\u2019s \u201cObjects and New Materialisms: A Journey Across Making and Living With Objects\u201d (2019) extends this line of thought. She argues that objects and humans exist in intra-action (a term from Karen Barad),  they co-create one another through making. Materials aren\u2019t passive; they have agency that calls for response. Garber writes that \u201cmaking is a form of knowing,\u201d because working with materials teaches us how they think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leadle\u2019s reflection on scrolling, remembering, and forgetting can be reinterpreted through Garber\u2019s framework. When we interact with our devices, we are not just consuming media; we are constantly making meaning with it,  arranging feeds, curating profiles, remixing content. Even the so-called noise of the internet might be understood as a collective process of making, where knowledge is distributed across humans and technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This doesn\u2019t erase Eco\u2019s concern about misinformation, but it reframes it. If we see media as active matter rather than as neutral carriers of information, the responsibility shifts from filtering noise to engaging ethically with the ecologies that produce it. Knowledge becomes less about storage and more about relationships,  about staying attentive to how our interactions with digital materials shape what and how we know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Re-evaluating Eco\u2019s \u201cNoise\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leadle ends her post by saying she wants to think with the media without letting anyone else think for me. That sentiment perfectly captures the bridge between Eco\u2019s skepticism and new materialist optimism. Eco was right that the internet challenges our ability to discern meaning, but Ingold and Garber show that meaning has never been something stable to begin with. It\u2019s always been made through our entanglements with materials, ink, paper, screen, or code.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From this view, noise is not the enemy of knowledge but its condition of possibility. The excess of digital life forces us to negotiate meaning continually, to make and remake understanding in relation to the materials that surround us. Rather than Eco\u2019s image of drowning in information, we might imagine ourselves swimming,  sometimes struggling, sometimes graceful,  within a sea of ongoing correspondence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Leadle\u2019s reading of Eco opens a vital conversation about attention, memory, and media saturation. Building on her insights through Ingold and Garber helps us see that the internet\u2019s overflow doesn\u2019t only fragment knowledge; it also sustains new forms of making and thinking. Meaning, like matter, is never still. It moves with us, through our screens, our hands, our networks. The challenge is not to escape the noise but to listen within it, to recognize that even in the clutter of feeds and pixels, the world of materials is still teaching us how to think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

sources used: <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n