Analyzing the Mitchells vs. the Machines (Rianda 2021) Through Cinema and Media Theories: Toward a Media-Oriented Techno Literacy Framework
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54103/2036-461X/23172Keywords:
Human-Technology Interaction, Audiovisual Media, Media Archaeology, Neuro-Cognition And Cinema, Techno LiteracyAbstract
In this study, I propose that Mike Rianda’s The Mitchells vs. The Machines can serve as a model of a learning object that fosters a specific form of technological literacy. Within the current international educational landscape, institutional guidelines recognize the critical role of media in shaping citizenship, particularly in light of the growing prevalence of digital and visual phenomenological forms in everyday technological life. From this perspective, The Mitchells vs. The Machines is a valuable model for addressing various media-educational themes. However, its relevance extends beyond this: the film’s content can also be interpreted as a representation of specific theoretical approaches within media studies –such as media archaeology, technological postphenomenology, and the neuro-cognitive approach to cinema and audiovisual media– which currently rank among the most widely debated topics in the field. I propose that it is possible to metaphorically ‘put one’s hands into the film’, ‘touching’ its components to understand the interactions among its various elements and acquire a set of preknowledge that may be helpful in other aspects of everyday life. To do so, my theoretical analysis establishes a concise dialogue between media archaeology, film studies, and neuroscience to support the hypothesis that The Mitchells vs. The Machines constitutes a prototype for technology literacy pathways.
Downloads
References
Brooker, Floyde E. 1947. “Motion pictures as an aid to education.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 254(1): 103–09.
Burn, Andrew, and Mark Reid. 2012. “Screening literacy: Reflecting on models of film education in Europe". Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy, 7(4): 314–23. https://doi.org/10.18261/ISSN1891-943X-2012-04-07
Calabrese Stefano, and Valentina Conti. 2020. Neuronarrazioni. Milano: Bibliografica.
Carbone, Mauro. 2016. Filosofia-schermi. Dal cinema alla rivoluzione digitale. Milano: Cortina.
Carbone, Mauro and Graziano Lingua. 2023. Toward an Anthropology of Screens. Showing and Hiding, Exposing and Protecting. London: Springer.
Carocci, Enrico. 2018. Il sistema schermo-mente. Cinema narrativo e coinvolgimento emozionale. Roma: Bulzoni.
Caruana, Fausto, and Anna Borghi. Il cervello in azione. Introduzione alle nuove scienze della mente. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Casetti, Francesco. 2015. Galassia Lumière. Sette parole chiave per il cinema che viene. Milano: Bompiani.
Cassinadri, Guido. 2024. “ChatGPT and the technology-education tension: Applying contextual virtue epistemology to a cognitive artifact.” Philosophy & Technology, 37(1): 14–28. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-024-00701-7.
Ciano, Aydin, Margoth González Woge, and Peter-Paul Verbeek. 2019. “Technological Environmentality: Conceptualizing Technology as a Mediating Milieu”. In Philosophy and Technology 32(2): 321–38. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-018-0309-3.
Chu, Sharon Lynn, Francis Quek, and Kumar Sridharamurthy. 2015. “Augmenting Children's Creative Self-Efficacy and Performance through Enactment-Based Animated Storytelling”. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI '15): 209-14. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2677199.2680602
Cometa, Michele. 2020. Cultura visuale. Una genealogia. Milano: Raffaello Cortina.
Cometa, Michele. 2024. La svolta ecomediale: La mediazione come forma di vita. Milano: Mimesis.
D’Aloia, Adriano, and Ruggero Eugeni, eds. 2015. “Neurofilmology. Audiovisual Studies and the Challenge of Neuroscience”. Cinéma & Cie, 22/23.
D’Aloia, Adriano, and Ruggero Eugeni, eds. 2015. Teorie del cinema. Il dibattito contemporaneo. Milano: Cortina.
Davies, Randall S. 2011. “Understanding Technology Literacy: A Framework for Evaluating Educational Technology Integration”. In Tech Trends, 55: 45–52. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-011-0527-3.
Denicolai, Lorenzo, ed. 2022. Robotmedium: dispositivi, intelligenze, cinema. Milano: Meltemi.
Dissanayake, Ellen. 2015. Art and Intimacy. How the Arts Began. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Dumouchel, Paul, and Luisa Damiano. 2016. Vivre avec les robots. Essai sur l’empathie artificielle. Paris: Média Diffusion.
Ellis, Patrick, and Colin Williamson. 2020. “Object lessons, old and new: experimental media archaeology in the classroom.” Early Popular Visual Culture, 18(1): 2–14. https://doi.org./10.1080/17460654.2020.1751434
Ernst, Wolfgang. 2005. "Let there be irony: Cultural history and media archaeology in parallel lines.” In Art History, 28(5): 582–603. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8365.2005.00479.x
Eugeni, Ruggero. 2021. Capitale algoritmico. Cinque dispositivi postmediali (più uno). Brescia: Scholé-Morcelliana.
Fickers, Andreas, and Annie van den Oever. 2014. “Experimental Media Archaeology: A Plea for New Directions”. In Technē/Technology: Researching Cinema and Media Technologies-Their Development, Use, and Impact, edited by Annie van den Oever, 272-78. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Fickers Andreas, and Annie van den Oever. 2018. “Per un’archeologia dei media sperimentale. Note epistemologiche e metodologiche sugli esperimenti con le tecnologie mediali del passato”. In Archeologia dei media: Temporalità, materia, tecnologia, edited by Giuseppe Fidotta, and Andrea Mariani, 199–229. Milano: Meltemi.
Fickers, Andreas, and Annie van den Oever. 2019. “Doing experimental media archaeology. Epistemological and methodological reflections on experiments with historical objects of media technologies”. In New media archaeologies, edited by Ben Gordon and Mark Goodall, 45-68. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Fickers, Andreas, and Annie van den Oever. 2022. Doing experimental media archaeology: Theory. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Fingerhut, Joerg. 2021. “Enacting Media. An Embodied Account of Enculturation Between Neuromediality and New Cognitive Media Theory”. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 635993: 1–22. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.635993
Floridi, Luciano. 2014. The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Floridi, Luciano. Ed. 2015. The Onlife Manifesto: Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era. London: Springer.
Floridi, Luciano. 2021. “Digital Time. Latency, Real-Time, and the Onlife Experience of Everyday Time”. Philosophy and Technology, 34: 407-21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-021-00472-5.
Fuller, Matthew. 2005. Media ecologies: Materialist energies in art and technoculture. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Gallese, Vittorio. 2017a. “Mirroring, a liberated embodied simulation and aesthetic experience”. In Mirror Images. Reflections in Art and Medicine. Thun: Verlag für modern Kunst, 1–9.
Gallese, Vittorio. 2017b. “Visions of the body. Embodied simulation and aesthetic experience”. Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico, 10(1): 41–50. https://doi.org/10.13128/Aisthesis-20902.
Gallese, Vittorio, and Michele Guerra. 2015. Lo schermo empatico. Cinema e neuroscienze. Milano: Raffaello Cortina.
Gibson, James J. 1979/2014. “The theory of affordances”. In The people, place, and space reader, edited by Jen Jack Gieseking, William Mangold, Cindi Katz, Setha Low, and Susan Saegert, 56–60. New York: Routledge.
Gottschall, Jonathan. 2012. The storytelling animal: How stories make us human. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Grodal, Torben. 1997. Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grodal, Torben. 2009. Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Grusin, Richard. 2015. “Radical mediation”. Critical Inquiry, 42(1), 124–148.
Hansen, John W. 2003. “To Change Perceptions of Technology Education.” The Journal of Technology Studies, 29(2): 116–19.
Ihde, Don. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ihde, Don, and Lambros Malafouris. 2019 “Homo faber revisited: Postphenomenology and material engagement theory.” Philosophy & Technology 32: 195–214. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-018-0321-7
Jenkins, Henry. 2009. Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Keeler, Amanda R. 2012. “John Collier, Thomas Edison and the Educational Promotion of Moving Pictures.” College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications, 124: 1–17. Available on: https://epublications. marquette.edu/comm_fac/124
Lemish, Dafna. 2015. Children and media: A global perspective. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.
Malafouris, Lambros. 2013. How things shape the mind. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Malafouris, Lambros. 2021. “How does thinking related to tool making?”. In Adaptive Behavior, 29(2), 107–121. https://doi.org/10.1177/1059712320950539.
Montani, Pietro, Dario Cecchi, and Martino Feyles, eds. 2018. Ambienti mediali. Milano: Meltemi.
Noë, Alva, and Kevin O’Regan. 2001. “A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness.” Behavioral and brain sciences, 24(5), 939–973. doi:10.1017/S0140525X01000115
Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Noë, Alva. 2015. Strange tools: Art and human nature. New York: Hill and Wang.
Pappa, Christina Ioanna, Despoina Georgiou, and Daniel Pittich. 2024a. “Technology education in primary schools: addressing teachers’ perceptions, perceived barriers, and needs”. In International Journal of Technology and Design Education 34: 485–503. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-023-09828-8.
Pappa, Christina Ioanna, Despoina Georgiou, and Daniel Pittich. 2024b. “Assessing the state of technology education in primary schools: a systematic review of the last 2 decades.” International Journal of Technology and Design Education 34: 1003–1044. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-023-09851-9.
Parikka, Jussi. 2012. What is media archaeology? Cambridge: Polity Press.
Parisi, Francesco. 2019. La tecnologia che siamo. Torino: Codice.
Paxton, Richard J., and Alan S. Marcus. 2018. “Film media in history teaching and learning.” The Wiley International handbook of history teaching and learning, 579–601.
Pinotti, Andrea, and Antonio Somaini. 2016. Cultura visuale: immagini, sguardi, media, dispositivi. Torino: Einaudi.
Reid, Mark. 2018. “Film education in Europe: National cultures or European identity?”. In Film Education Journal, 1(1): 5–15. DOI https://doi.org/10.18546/FEJ.01.1.02
Ronzhyn, Alexander, Ana Sofia Cardenal, and Albert Batlle Rubio. 2023. “Defining affordances in social media research: A literature review.” New Media & Society, 25(11): 3165-88. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448221135187
Rosenberger, Robert, and Peter PCC Verbeek, eds. 2015. Postphenomenological investigations: Essays on human-technology relations. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Saettler, Paul. 1990/2004. The Evolution of American Educational Technology. Charlotte: Information Age Publishing.
Sandry, Eleanor. 2015. Robot and Communications. New York: Palgrave.
Sandry, Eleanor. 2017. “Creative Collaborations with Machines.” Philosophy & Technology, 30: 305–17. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-016-0240-4.
Sobchack, Vivian. 1992. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sobchack, Vivian. 2004. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Sobchack, Vivian. 2009. “Animation and automation, or, the incredible effortfulness of being.” Screens 50(4): 375-91. https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjp032.
Sonvilla-Weiss, Stefan. Ed. 2010. Mashup Culture. London: Springer.
Tikka, Pia. 2008. Enactive Cinema: Simulatorium Eisensteniense. Jyvaskia: Gummerus Printing.
Tikka, Pia, Mauri Kaipainen, and Juha Salmi. 2023. “Narrative simulation of social experiences in naturalistic context – A neurocinematic approach.” Neuropsychologia, 188, 108654: 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2023.108654.
Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2005. What things do: Philosophical reflections on technology, agency, and design. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Wagner, Robert W. 1972. “Thomas Edison to Protean People.” Journal of the University Film Association, 24, 4: 92–100. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20687183
Williams, John A. 2009. “Technological literacy: a multiliteracies approach for democracy.” International Journal of Technology, and Design Education, 19: 237–54. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-007-9046-0.
Wojciehowski, Hannah, and Vittorio Gallese. 2011. “How Stories Make Us Feel: Toward an Embodied Narratology.” California Italian Studies, 2(1). http://dx.doi.org/10.5070/C321008974.
Wulf, Christoph. 2022. Human beings and their images. Imagination, Mimesis, Imaginary. London: Bloomsbury.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Lorenzo Denicolai
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
