The Digital Sublime

Television, Technology, and Culture: A Contextualist Approach

“…Most of what is now promised in relation to the Internet's supposed democratic potential was previously claimed for interactive cable television in the 1960s in the United States, which was heralded as ushering in an electronic democracy of ubiquitous two-way communications, as Mosco (2004) noted. Of course, cable television then disappeared in most places, only to reappear 30 years later in a new guise, as a form of distribution for niche-market commercial television.…”

“…Both booms were based on speculative investments, fuelled mainly by inflated predictions of future values, and produced so much excess capacity that the price of the assets finally collapsed (cf. Mosco, 2004;cf. also Wolmar, 2010).…”

Introduction: The Networked Communication of Contentious Politics

“…Retrieving the roots of exuberant expectations about the transformative potential of new (Mosco 2005 ) and social media (for an overview see Fuchs 2014 ), one encounters a raft of earlier controversies stirred up specifi cally by the notion that activism had gained a digital aura with the advent of networked communication (Lievrouw 2011 ). An ethereal, alternative space unfettered from material bonds had emerged on the Internet where activists could congregate and build collectivity by referencing shared identities and culture, and where they would voice standpoints and personal narratives (Bennett and Toft 2008 ;Bennett and Segerberg 2013 ) that countered and mobilised against the hegemony of the political mainstream.…”

Surveillance: Work, Myth, and Policy

“…34 Surveillance technology can be both conspicuous and innocuous in the travails of daily life. One cause of this may be what David Nye and others have called the technological sublime, in this case the sense of the awesomeness of modern surveillance technology that overwhelms and defi nes how we think about surveillance.…”

“…35 The 9/11 report is redolent with this muddling mythos-"Technology as an Intelligence Asset and Liability," the openness of the Internet serving good and evil alike, and so on. 38 Induced into this sublime disorder, the Bush administration and its fellow travelers seemed to be in the thrall of the ubiquitous surveillance machinery, perhaps less to catch the bad guys than to sate an infantile desire for omnipotence or to serve the divine mission of the all-seeing Christian god, or both. Then, of course, the true believers of Total Information Awareness and Homeland Security were getting their own incredible buzz from ingesting these myths of an all-powerful digital presence.…”