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Following our discussion on Wednesday, I wanted to think more about affect and transcendence, especially with regard to the feeling of new media. I am still working through this but thought I would take a crack at articulating it. Massumi describes a disappearance of the concrete subject in (neo)liberal capitalism and the emphasis in this … Continue reading ecstasy and transcendence in internet communication

Massumi and Raley both articulate visions of what an oppositional politics could look like amidst the ubiquity of neoliberal common-sense embodied by digital culture. As we’ve been discussing, networks and neoliberalism both immerse us in systems that feel ubiquitous and inescapable; their omnipresence denies both the possibility of desisting and the perceptual distance that allows images to … Continue reading Habitual(Splash)

Eleven years is a long time. I felt that, reading the introduction to Rita Raley’s Tactical Media, in part because her starting point is an intuition about “doxa” regarding a downturn in “the value, cultural significance, and efficacy of the streets,” and I think the generalized “sensibility” surrounding these questions has morphed a few times over … Continue reading “Tactical” and “Relational” in hindsight

Our discussion on QAnon and its dissemination over social media and internet forums such as 4chan is representative of the uneasy relationship between conspiracy theory and activism. QAnon has been allowed to thrive a networked system that moves too quickly for mainstream media outlets or even alternative digital outlets to fully comprehend or meaningfully debunk. Kevin Deluca’s essay “Weibo, WeChat, and the Transformative Events of … Continue reading trendy post about coronavirus

  In Updating to Remain the Same, Chun calls for the reflection on social media in relation to neoliberalism habits. In particular, New media “emerge as a privately-owned public medium” that obfuscates the boundary between public and private (p.12). In this post, I discuss the question of public and private against the backdrop of the … Continue reading Global Surveillance State: Profit, Ideology and In Between

Aria Dean situates black social media, and in particular black memes, in a larger historical circulation of blackness. The African diaspora prefigures the mediated, deterritorialized self of the contemporary black internet user, and blackness continues to be disseminated “through the aggressive circulation of videos that document black death or violence in general against black people” … Continue reading Black Memes, An Archive

In her essay “Poor Meme, Rich Meme,” Dean states that “blackness was always ahead of its time, always already a networked culture and always already dematerialized, thanks to the Middle Passage.” Dean further ends her piece by a turn to queer ways of being and knowing in a networked world, suggesting that “the meme teaches … Continue reading The Queerness of Rendering Blackness in a Networked World

When listening to the podcast about QAnon, I was utterly confused at first without knowing what they were talking about, especially when they were reading the tweet with repetitive thunderbolt emoji. It toke me a while to understand the rationale behind the phenomenon and why it has become a phenomenon social media event today. The … Continue reading QAnon, Cult and Social Media

Wendy Chun's chapters were a brilliant read. I want to focus on her distinction between habit and virus in relation to Malcolm Gladwell's take on social media activism as well as Deluca et al.'s article on Weixin and Weibo. Chun distinguishes between tracking fast, new, spontaneously spreading viruses and focusing on the more lingering, infrastructural … Continue reading Habit, Virus, and Social Media Activism

In class yesterday, the question came up over whether Neoliberal capitalism is a conspiracy along the lines of QAnon. I have been puzzling over the question for a little while, and while I do not agree entirely with the analogy, I want to explore it because it does seem like a productive comparison. I also … Continue reading QAnon and Neoliberal Capitalism