What makes our portable, networked personal media devices – smartphones, tablets, smartwatches – so irresistible? Reacting to our touch, voice, or gaze, seizing and keeping our attention with sounds, vibrations, and screen prompts, these objects construct an animated intimacy that builds trust and emotional dependence.

Needy Media explores how features such as face recognition, awareness sensors, and touchscreens have developed and intersected, tying them to key concepts of psychology, language, and the body. Surveying products and practices across a half century, Stephen Monteiro argues that the appeal is as much about how media devices behave as it is about the information they convey. Monteiro traces a symbiotic overreliance – a neediness – between users and devices, fostered by personalized aspects of digital materiality. The physical and emotional bonds that emerge, he argues, not only cast our devices as loyal companions adaptable to our needs and idiosyncrasies; they also facilitate the corporate harvesting of massive amounts of personal data in the name of making technology more friendly, intuitive, and individualized.

Raising important questions about privacy and power, Needy Media seeks answers in the complex and sensitive relationship between interface and body, a coupling that makes the networked object both an essential psychological presence and a lingering concern for our sense of self.

What makes our portable, networked personal media devices – smartphones, tablets, smartwatches – so irresistible? Reacting to our touch, voice, or gaze, seizing and keeping our attention with sounds, vibrations, and screen prompts, these objects construct an animated intimacy that builds trust and emotional dependence.

Needy Media explores how features such as face recognition, awareness sensors, and touchscreens have developed and intersected, tying them to key concepts of psychology, language, and the body. Surveying products and practices across a half century, Stephen Monteiro argues that the appeal is as much about how media devices behave as it is about the information they convey. Monteiro traces a symbiotic overreliance – a neediness – between users and devices, fostered by personalized aspects of digital materiality. The physical and emotional bonds that emerge, he argues, not only cast our devices as loyal companions adaptable to our needs and idiosyncrasies; they also facilitate the corporate harvesting of massive amounts of personal data in the name of making technology more friendly, intuitive, and individualized.

Raising important questions about privacy and power, Needy Media seeks answers in the complex and sensitive relationship between interface and body, a coupling that makes the networked object both an essential psychological presence and a lingering concern for our sense of self.