There’s no ‘I’ in information: some naysayings for new media studies

Abstract

The proliferation of empirical inquiries into concepts such as ‘interactivity’ and ‘virtual reality’ has been at the expense of the theoretical (or metadiscursive) in new media studies. The greatest consequence of empiricism’s inductive hierarchies is an ontological negation of the body, the subject in corporeal space. Far from producing a ‘new’ subjectivity, such a negation only reifies a subject’s disembodiment and wholly abstracts the space around them. Examining the writings of many critics and theorists, most significantly Mark Hansen and the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre, this argument shows that the theoretical must first and foremost be held accountable to itself if the ‘new’ is to be realized. The stakes in this piece are the subject’s embodiment and very ability to articulate itself as ‘I’ in an information-saturated age that challenges the distinction between virtuality and corporeality, a challenge that conceptually bankrupts acts of distinction and differentiation.

Medicated bodies: Mental distress, social media and affect

“…This focus on the body as the centre of indetermination is later purified in Deleuze's (1986) study of the cinema. However, drawing back to Bergson's original position, Hansen (2004) describes Deleuze's (1986) neo-Bergsonist account of cinema as a 'progressive disembodying of the centre of indetermination' (p. 5), something he addresses through correlating 'the aesthetics of new media with a strong theory of embodiment' (Hansen, 2004: 3) (see also Conatser (2010), and Goodings and Tucker (2014) for a Bergsonian analysis of Facebook Timeline). Hansen (2004) argues that affect is essential to the creative process of 'enframing' digital information.…”