Digital is Dead

Abstract

This chapter draws from a 6-month participant-observation with an Occupy Wall Street group in Richmond, Virginia—Occupy Richmond—to deliver an ethnography of public discourse in postcolonial, queer, and multimedia contexts, as part of a critical analysis of imperialism in the digital age. The author develops techno-seduction as a term to deconstruct the lure of technological determinism that promotes static interpretations of democracy, participation, and the digital, in addition to considering how these interpretations impact intrapersonal and group identity formation. Finally, the chapter asks that we suspend our conception of the digital/non-digital dichotomy by thinking of the digital as dead, as a force that guides and influences our sociopolitical interactions, rather than as an isolated concept wholly separable from the non-digital.