This possibility of withdrawal matters. The lettering guide can become incorporated into my bodily practice without becoming a standing condition of that practice. I enter into the relationship, and I can leave it. A tool can therefore be embodied without becoming environmental.

Many contemporary technological relationships complicate this distinction. A network connection, location service or recommendation system does not necessarily wait for a deliberate moment of use. Such systems can operate continuously in the background of ordinary action, whether or not I am attending to them. Their effects can precede the moment at which I consciously encounter a particular interface. The tool has not been put down. It was never really held.

Lingel’s account offers a social counterpart to this distinction. She describes students for whom simply being offline no longer feels like a practically available alternative, even while they remain conscious of the data extracted through their participation. This does not mean that technological participation is literally unavoidable. Rather, it suggests that withdrawal itself has changed: what was straightforward with the lettering guide—lifting the pen away—becomes increasingly difficult when technological systems participate in the conditions through which everyday life is organised.

Tim Ingold’s account of environment offers a way of naming this shift. Rather than understanding an environment as a container surrounding already formed things, Ingold describes organisms and environments as taking form through their ongoing relations. Environment, from this perspective, is not simply what is already there before a relationship begins. It emerges through the continuing processes by which bodies inhabit and respond to the world around them.

This helps distinguish an environment from something that is merely persistent. Technology becomes environmental when its operation begins to participate in producing the conditions of bodily possibility—when what a body can perceive, move through or act upon can no longer be separated from the technological arrangements within which those actions occur. Environment, in this research, therefore names something more specific than surroundings: Environment is not simply what surrounds the body, but the conditions within which bodily experience takes place. Technology becomes environmental when it operates as part of these conditions rather than as a discrete tool one occasionally reaches for.

But what does it mean to lift the pen away from a network? Where is the equivalent gesture for a location service, a recommendation system, an account, a platform, a phone that remains connected while sitting in my pocket? These systems do not always wait for me to consciously begin using them. They can continue in the background while I am doing something else. Their operations may precede the moment I encounter an interface and continue after I stop looking at it.

The tool has not been put down. It was never really held.

Lingel describes students who understand that their attention and data are being captured, yet feel that simply choosing to live offline is no longer a realistic alternative. This does not mean withdrawal is literally impossible. It means that withdrawal has become a much stranger gesture.

I know how to withdraw from the lettering guide. I lift the pen. But where exactly do I lift myself away from a technological relation distributed across devices, platforms, networks, infrastructures and other people?

Donna Haraway asked: “Why should our bodies end at the skin?”

For this research, I find myself reading the question quite literally. Not because I think technology simply extends my body outward, or because humans and machines are becoming one enormous organism. Rather, the question makes me wonder where the conditions of bodily experience actually begin and end. The skin gives my biological body a visible boundary. Our technological relationships are less polite. They cross it.

A sensor can notice me without touching me. A network can locate me without being somewhere I can point to. A recommendation can alter what becomes visible before I have decided what to look for. Knowledge about how to use the component in my hand can depend on people, platforms and infrastructures scattered far beyond the room in which I am sitting. The relationship extends beyond both the body and the object.