The new issue of MAST is out, edited by Tony D. Sampson & Jernej Markelj: it also includes an interview that Jernej and Claudio Celis Bueno did with me, titled “Ambiguity and Affect in Digital Culture“. This took quite a bit of thinking and the kind of retrospection I seldom do: quite the pleasure!
Category Archives: affect theory
experimentations in pandemic boredom
A new book edited by Britta Timm Knudsen, Mads Krogh and Carsten Stage, titled Methodologies of Affective Experimentation, came out in the summer with Palgrave. Full of insight into things to do with affect in cultural inquiry, it also includes my chapter, “Experimentations in Pandemic Boredom”. It asks how diagnoses of pandemic boredom, and cures thereof, during the COVID-19 lockdowns can help us to rethink broad theoretical takes on boredom identifying it as a modern (Zeitgeist?) phenomenon connected to an abundance of stimuli, or as a state of flatness and disinterest specifically brought forth by networked/social media.
Filed under academic pleasures, affect theory, cultural studies, data culture
technopharmacology is out!
Co-authored with the excellent Joshua Neves, Aleena Chia and Ravi Sundaram, Technopharmacology is just out with University of Minnesota Press in the In search of media series and as an open access book with Meson Press. The book explores the close relations of media technologies to pharmaceuticals and pharmacology and calls for expanding media theoretical inquiry by attending to the biological, neurological, and pharmacological dimensions of media and centers on emergent affinities between big data and big pharma. My section focuses on diagnoses of online porn addiction and makes an argument for attending to the excitements that make the self. This was fun to make.
Filed under affect theory, data culture, media studies, sexuality
‘I feel the irritation and frustration all over the body’
Our article with Mari Lehto, titled ‘I feel the irritation and frustration all over the body’: Affective ambiguities in networked parenting culture is freshly out with The International Journal of Cultural Studies, on open access. The fieldwork was all Mari’s, and here’s the abstract:
This article investigates the affective power of social media by analysing everyday encounters with parenting content among mothers. Drawing on data composed of diaries of social media use and follow-up interviews with six women, we ask how our study participants make sense of their experiences of parenting content and the affective intensities connected to it. Despite the negativity involved in reading and participating in parenting discussions, the participants find themselves wanting to maintain the very connections that irritate them, or even evoke a sense of failure, as these also yield pleasure, joy and recognition. We suggest that the ambiguities addressed in our research data speak of something broader than the specific experiences of the women in question. We argue that they point to the necessity of focusing on, and working through affective ambiguity in social media research in order to gain fuller understanding of the complex appeal of platforms and exchanges.
dependent, distracted, bored!
My book very long in the making, Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media, is out April 20 with MIT Press. To mark the occasion, I’m doing an IIPC debate talk the day after summing up some of its central themes and points. Join us April 21, 5:15pm EET, at https://utu.zoom.us/j/67932423692. This is the abstract:
According to a dominant narrative repeated in journalistic and academic accounts for more than a decade, we are addicted to the digital devices, apps, and sites designed to distract us, which drive us to boredom and harm our capacities to focus, relate, remember, and be. Focusing on three affective formations — dependence, distraction, and boredom — as key to understanding both the landscape of contemporary networked media and the concerns connected to it, this talk challenges the dominant narrative and argues for the centrality of accounting for complexity and ambiguity instead. Dependence and agency, distraction and attention, boredom and excitement can be seen as dynamics that enmesh, oscillate, enable, and depend on one another — and, in some instances, cannot be told apart.
Filed under academic pleasures, affect theory, data culture, internet research
shameless dicks
A new special issue edited by Gaby David and Amparo Lasén on Shame, Shaming and Online Image Sharing is just out with First Monday, with loads of stuff I’m looking forward to reading. It also includes an article we did with Jenny Sundén, titled Shameless dicks: On male privilege, dick pic scandals, and public exposure. And here’s the abstract:
Academic debates on shame and the involuntary networked circulation of naked pictures have largely focused on instances of hacked accounts of female celebrities, on revenge porn, and interconnected forms of slut-shaming. Meanwhile, dick pics have been predominantly examined as vehicles of sexual harassment within heterosexual contexts. Taking a somewhat different approach, this article examines leaked or otherwise involuntarily exposed dick pics of men of notable social privilege, asking what kinds of media events such leaked data assemble, how penises become sites of public interest and attention, and how these bodies may be able to escape circuits of public shaming. By focusing on high-profile incidents on an international scale during the past decade, this article moves from the leaked shots of male politicians as governance through shaming to body-shaming targeted at Harvey Weinstein, to Jeff Bezos’s refusal to be shamed through his hacked dick pic, and to an accidentally self-published shaft shot of Lars Ohly, a Swedish politician, we examine the agency afforded by social privilege to slide through shame rather than be stuck in it. By building on feminist media studies and affect inquiry, we attend to the specificities of these attempts to shame, their connections to and disconnections from slut-shaming, and the possibilities and spaces offered for laughter within this all.
technology, knowledge & society
The 17th Technology, Knowledge & Society conference, hosted by University of Melbourne and held entirely online, takes place April 8-9, 2021, with the overall theme “Considering Viral Technologies: Pandemic-Driven Opportunities and Challenges”. Very excited about doing a live plenary & garden conversation (8 April 2021 08:00AM CST Chicago // 8 April 2021 16:00PM Finland // 8 April 2021 11:00PM Melbourne) around my soon out book, Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media (MITP).
Filed under academic pleasures, affect theory, data culture, internet research
dependent, distracted, bored, in Padova
J
oin us February 25 for a webinar with the Padova Science, Technology & Innovation Studies (3pm, GMT+1). I’ll be talking on my forthcoming book on affective formations in networked media (out in April with MITP), with an intro from Cosimo Marco Scarcelli (University of Padova) and with Manolo Farci (University of Urbino) and Paolo Magaudda (University of Padova) as discussants.
Register here: https://unipd.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_dUESW2T5TlqrAKGPmiERUw
Filed under academic pleasures, affect theory, data culture, internet research
mediating presents
Mediating Presents, a special issue I coedited with the fantastic Rebecca Coleman, is just out with Media Theory (on open access). As we suggest in our summary, “it is both productive and necessary to think together ‘the present’ and mediation to understand how various interlocking aspects of socio-cultural life are currently produced, organised and arranged, embodied and affectively experienced. The contributions to the special issue see time not as a neutral backdrop to, but as actively constituted by and constitutive of, (digital) media, and develop broad understandings of both media and the temporality of the present/present temporalities. The special issue develops theoretically informed and engaged understandings of digital media presents, drawing from and expanding a range of theoretical traditions, including feminist, queer and anti-racist theory, science and technology studies, media theory, philosophy and cultural theory. They similarly take seriously an array of objects, practices and processes, extending from public and academic debates and figurations, mundane and routinised activities, the affordances of specific platforms and computational and data-driven software.”
Contributors include Xin Liu, Beckie Coleman, Ella Harris, Chris Ingraham, Nishat Awan, Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha, Femke Snelting and Tony D. Sampson – plus yours truly with Distracted Present, Golden Past? critically examining zeitgeist diagnoses equating networked media with notions of loss.
nipples, memes, and algorithmic failure
Our “Nipples, memes, and algorithmic failure: NSFW critique of Tumblr censorship” is just out on open access with New Media & Society. Elena Pilipets is very much the first author with her methods magic.
And here’s the abstract: In November 2018, after being suspended from Apple’s App Store for hosting child pornography, Tumblr announced its decision to ban all NSFW (not safe/suitable for work) content with the aid of machine-learning classification. The decision to opt for strict terms of use governing nudity and sexual depiction was as fast as it was drastic, leading to the quick erasure of subcultural networks developed over a decade. This article maps out platform critiques of and on Tumblr through a combination of visual and digital methods. By analyzing 7306 posts made between November 2018 (when Tumblr announced its new content policy) and August 2019 (when Verizon sold Tumblr to Automattic), we explore the key stakes and forms of user resistance to Tumblr “porn ban” and the affective capacities of user-generated content to mobilize engagement.
Filed under academic pleasures, affect theory, data culture, internet research, NSFW
Susanna Paasonen 