“Hey Chat…!” and the Illusion of Infinite Mediation

*originally published via Substack (05/14/2025)

Defining the Landscape: Mediation, Hypermediation, Infinite Mediation

For the non-scholars (or just as a conceptual refresh):

• Mediated space refers to experiences or environments constructed through technological or artificial means. Things like video games, VR/XR, films, television, digital tools, and even novels. These are intermediated by human or machine channels (Lombard, Ditton).
  

• Non-mediated space, by contrast, includes naturally occurring environments: old-growth forests, oceans, and certain communal gathering spaces for spiritual or social practices. Think: environments that are experienced with minimal technological engagement. Although even these spaces are now infiltrated with technology (who doesn’t use their phone to take pictures at famous natural landmarks?) Some hybrid spaces like schools, museums, and national parks can feel non-mediated, even though they are semi-curated.
  

• Hypermediation occurs when media emphasizes its form: TikToks overlaid with text, music, filters, and interaction prompts are paradigmatic. You’re meant to feel aware of the medium. The interface is part of the aesthetic. (Bolter, Grusin)
  

The “illusion of infinite mediation” is not just about visibility. It’s about saturation. The illusion is not that media is present, it’s that it is everywhere, all the time, and ontologically unresolvable. Mediation is not the lens through which we look at the environment. It is the environment.

From Interface to Atmosphere

Our feeds, calendars, friendships, aesthetic sensibilities, and even moods are increasingly shaped by invisible curation systems. We know this. The pandemic didn’t introduce this condition, but it accelerated it: dissertation defenses done via Zoom (mine fell into this category), a fixation on an entire generation’s addiction to doom scrolling, calls to make learning more accessible via remote platforms, and so forth.“Touching grass” is no longer just a call to groundedness; it’s a (somewhat irritatingly cliche) meme, and so-called retreats into “the real” are staged with an eye toward their digital afterlife.

Reality has become, as Baudrillard once warned, a simulation of itself.

Algorithms as Interior Designers

Today, people discuss their algorithmic placement as if it were identity architecture: “I hate BookTok,” “My #FYP knows I’m depressed.”

During my most fatalistic moments, even I’ve been dismissive of the idea that I should care what algorithm I occupy; if it’s all a manipulation, what does it matter? As a mostly non-social-media user, I’ve said things like, “Whatever. I’d rather see ads for things I like than things I don’t.”

The truth is more complex.

Algorithms are no longer functional tools. They are emotional mirrors and aesthetic decorators. Our digital environments now reflect our interior lives, and more tellingly, we’ve started shaping our physical environments to mirror the sensibilities of our algorithm. We are not just mediated. We are arranged. Imagine: You walk into your friend’s new apartment and you’re immediately struck by how perfectly curated the entire experience is. There’s a carefully selected gallery wall of tastefully chosen but artistically unique imagery. It smells like citrus and sandalwood. The black marble charcuterie board houses an array of Trader Joes-purchased items she’s playfully referring to as “girl dinner.” It is the spitting image of the mood board you saved just last week.None of this is accidental, and it should be kind of disorienting. Instead, it’s aspirational.

The Offline World is No Longer Offline

Even so-called offline experiences such as concerts, parties, vacations, and meals are increasingly designed for their mediated afterlife. They’re staged, documented, filtered, and captioned.The number of YouTube confessionals displaying people “crying” into the camera with either elation or devastation is staggering. It isn’t to discount the necessity of emoting, but to suggest that the public display of emotion becomes a performance in and of itself.

“Is this content-worthy?” becomes a question we don’t ask aloud, but silently pose with every gesture. If it can’t be captured, was it worth doing?

We’ve internalized mediation so thoroughly that we begin to anticipate it within every moment. Mediation is no longer episodic. It is ambient. That’s more than a little scary.

The Influenced Become the Influencers

“Influencers” (ironically, the most influenced of all) now operate at the mercy of algorithmic consensus. Audience demand, platform logic, and sponsorship metrics all shape what they present as “real life.”

Gestures of authenticity are informed by real-time chat economies: parasociality stretched to its limit.

Consider SZA’s refrain in the Kendrick Lamar collaboration “30 for 30” a repeated invocation of “Chat…” followed by interrogative prompts. It conjures a virtual crowd, speaks to a commonly shared lexicon, and acknowledges, in a tongue-in-cheek manner, the way that content is shaped in response to feedback loops.

Kai Cenat’s livestreams, where every waking moment is documented and monetized, don’t just reflect infinite mediation–they enact it.Content creators no longer perform for followers. They live inside the performance, constantly shaped by anonymous consensus. What we perceive as spontaneous action is often just a feedback-informed response to semi-legible subscriber will.

The Great M-Dash Debate of 2025

This year, a strange debate erupted online: Can you tell whether a paragraph was written by a human or AI based on its use of m-dashes?

Authors, critics, and technologists weighed in with fervor. Was the sentence’s rhythm too mechanical? Was the phrasing too symmetrical? Was the punctuation too perfect to be human?

In the illusion of infinite mediation, the idea of unmediated human expression becomes almost mythological. Every sentence is suspect. Every output is haunted by the possibility of algorithmic authorship.This wasn’t about punctuation. It was about epistemic trust.As a creative and academic writer, I LOVE the m-dash. There are few pieces of punctuation that are as user-friendly, exact, and indicative of true speech patterns. To a writer, scholar, or critic who is also deeply attuned to trends and emerging perspectives, the continued use of the m-dash in an AI-driven world is an ontological flex. A choice to reassert effective mechanics, no matter the perceived cost or reader assumption. The debate also reinforces the emerging divisions between generations of writers, some whose pre-2020 education demanded a kind of intellectual forging, and those whose higher educational experience post-2020 has been informed by the constant and inevitable use of AI. I’ve seen more than a few posts by frustrated millennials and Gen X editors or copywriters who struggle to find a piece of punctuation more apt to serve its purpose than the m-dash, yet they’re asked ad nauseum if their work is the product of AI. On the one hand, the clients and companies who inquire aren’t wrong for doing so. On the other hand, the challenge to self-perception is sometimes hard to navigate when your income or livelihood depends on your authentic skillsets that you’ve spent years honing.How do you prove authorship or ownership in a world where everyone automatically assumes multiple layers of non-human mediation are present?

Seamless = Dangerous

When mediation is obvious, we can critique it. We can choose to engage with it or not.In the early 2000’s non-empathetic anti-cyber-bullying initiatives encouraged young people to “step away from the computer” as the easiest and most feasible means of escaping unwanted virtual interaction. Now, even walking down the street in a populated city risks unwanted video capture. You can easily (and unintentionally) end up as the subject of a seemingly innocuous dance video. Total anonymity in public places is a privilege rather than a given. Even in private spaces, the number of devices that can (and do) track everything from voice data to how long your cursor hovers over a $59 Southwest Airlines ticket sale would alarm even the most savvy social media user.When it’s seamless, it becomes invisible infrastructure, and when it is unlocatable, it becomes impossible to resist. Sometimes this is by design, but even when intentions are benign, the manipulation remains. The illusion of infinite mediation doesn’t just confuse: it conditions. It trains us to tolerate frictionless simulation. It teaches us that seamlessness is a virtue.

And it doesn’t encourage us to ask: who exactly is shaping what we see, what we feel, what we trust?

Toward Mediation-Conscious Living

We are not escaping mediation.

The task now is to live mediation-consciously, acknowledging the interface not as a tool or threat, but as perceptual architecture. If we don’t, we risk confusing conditioning for freedom.

To do this ethically, I propose three practices:

1. De-Influence Ourselves

Recognize the influencer as an archetype more than a profession. As hard as it is to admit, the existence of AI-generated influencers could offer an ethical solution: they absorb advertising labor without manipulating the lives of real individuals, particularly young content creators. Paradoxically, removing humans from the role may restore humanity elsewhere. (There’s another argument for reconsidering the role of advertising as a whole, but that’s beyond the scope of what I’m discussing here.)

2. Carefully Track Symbolic Patterns

Pay attention to the repeated symbols, phrases, and patterns in your online and offline life. Do they reflect who you are, or who you’ve been shaped to be? Accept or reject them consciously. This is symbolic awareness.

3. Retain the Untraceable

Preserve the parts of your life that resist algorithmic prediction. Wander. Choose unpredictably. Use language that expands rather than flattens. Rich, unusual vocabularies disrupt the models. They leave a trace of something wild. Something human.

Read More

(This should really be the 4th practice: Reading beyond what’s in front of you to develop a point-of-view that is based in more than just one perspective, but that feels a little prescriptive and preachy, so I’ll leave it down here.)

Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation (S. F. Glaser, Trans.). University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1981)

Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. (1999). Immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation. In Remediation: Understanding new media. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Chun, W. H. K. (2021). Discriminating data: Correlation, neighborhoods, and the new politics of recognition. The MIT Press. Hu, T.-H. (2022). Digital lethargy: Dispatches from an age of disconnection. The MIT Press. Logan, R. K. (2010). Understanding new media: Extending Marshall McLuhan. Peter Lang.

Lombard, M., & Ditton, T. (1997). At the heart of it all: The concept of presence. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 3(2). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997.tb00072.x McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding media: The extensions of man. McGraw-Hill.Parikka, J. (2015). A geology of media. University of Minnesota Press. Sharma, S. (Ed.). (2022). Re-understanding media: Feminist extensions of Marshall McLuhan. Duke University Press.