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 Cornell 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. With Cornell professor Roger Moseley.

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, as Metaphor

“Artificial intelligence” has no concrete definition. It does not refer to any specific technology. It is a metaphor. It equates machine processes with human thought. This comparison is at the heart of the marketing campaign to sell so-called generative artificial intelligence as the moment where the metaphor becomes reality, and machines can do everything we can only better, faster, and more efficiently. This revolutionary technology will supposedly change every aspect of our lives, for good…or for bad. This is not true. It is a myth that is obscuring how so-called generative AI functions and enabling a power grab that will fundamentally change the way we work, recreate, communicate…And ultimately, how we think about what it means to be human. Guests include Cornell professors Gili Vidan and Chris Csikszentmihalyi.

Episode 6: Artificial Intelligence, as Reality

So-called generative AI is not revolutionary. Instead, it’s an evolution of societal trends that have been a long time in the making and which were not inevitable—things like the automation of labor, growth of mass media, and vast increases in monopoly power. By understanding this context we can get a much clearer picture of what so-called generative AI actually is, what the companies behind it are really up to, and all the ways it can affect our lives. Guests include Cornell professors Steven Jackson, Mendi and Keith Obadike, Daniel Susser, Lee Humphreys, and Chris Csikszentmihalyi.