Ways of Knowing

An audio show about the humanities

Season 5: Media Objects

We’re surrounded by media—not just when we look at our phones, turn on the TV, or get on the internet. Everything from Tupperware and office plants to buttons and smartphone apps is exerting pressure on what we think, how we think, and what is even possible to think.

This is Media Objects, produced in collaboration with Media Studies at Cornell University. With support from the college of Arts and Sciences and the Society for the Humanities. Editing and academic counsel from Erik Born, Jeremy Braddock, and Paul Fleming. New episodes every Wednesday.

Episode 1: Extensions

Writing is an extension of our voice, cars of our legs, guns of our fists, telephones of our ears, televisions of our eyes…Marshall McLuhan considered all media to be technology that extended the human body. The arrival of a medium like writing can completely reorder social relations because it has the power to “shape and control the scale and form of human association and action.” McLuhan’s idea of extensions is arguably the beginning of modern media theory, but it is not without its limitations. Guests include professors Anna Shechtman, Andrew Campana, Jeremy Braddock, and Erik Born.

Episode 2: Containers

While extensions are masculine coded and deal with tools that extend what human beings already do, containers offer a different and more feminine concept of media: something that selects, stores, and processes information. Containers primarily allow for preservation, but this goes far beyond things like food, water, or other materials. They also determine cultural and intellectual production. For a primer on how to think about the way objects around us select, store, and process information, we’re going to consider one of America’s most iconic objects of containment: Tupperware. With professors Brooke Erin Duffy and Jeremy Packer.

Episode 3: Buttons

We increasingly interact with the world through the binary, on/off medium of buttons—from keyboards and appliances, to the digital interfaces of phones and tablets; but it didn’t have to be this way. “There is nothing natural or inevitable about buttons or the act of pushing a button. Various constituencies over the years—especially advertisers and manufacturers—have marshalled tremendous resources to make buttons popular and alluring,” Rachel Plotnick, author of Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing.

Episode 4: Typewriters

Text written with a typewriter is not the same as text written by hand, composed on a computer, sent in a text message, or generated by artificial intelligence. Like all media, the typewriter does not just transmit what a person wants to write. It is its own particular medium. In the 20th century, it changed the way writers write and the way people read—profoundly altering warfare, commerce, literature, and, perhaps most dramatically, gender relations.

Episode 5: Artificial Intelligence

Companies are marketing AI as something totally new, revolutionary, and disconnected from history. But just like a button, typewriter, or container, it is culturally and socially dependent. The way it works and the content it creates is determined by humans—from those who write the code and run the companies who produce it, to those who have generated all the data it is trained on. AI is not magic…It is a media object.