This is a review of Greg Goldberg’s (2016) article “Antisocial media: Digital dystopianism as a normative project.” It is available in New Media & Society Vol. 18(5) behind a pay wall or with institutional access: http://nms.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/08/16/1461444814547165.abstract

While the general tone of academic research on the internet has become increasingly nuanced since the 1980s and 1990s, much popular writing about digital technology remains locked in Manichean thinking: the internet is the best and the worst thing that has ever happened in the history of humanity. In an article for New Media & Society Professor Greg Goldberg analyzes the dystopian narrative common in popular writing on the internet, arguing that this discourse is “a normative project linked to domination.”

Goldberg begins the article with an overview of dystopian popular writings on the internet and its effect on humanity. He focuses specifically on two texts: Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains and Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other. Expressing concern about the neurological and psychological effects of the internet, respectively, the two popular publications reflect much of the tone of writing and reporting found in outlets like The New York Times and National Public Radio. Cyborgology readers will know that this type of writing is well-worn territory for the blog, with the critique of digital dualism being a cornerstone of our analysis, and co-founding editor Nathan Jurgenson’s extensive work on the augmented reality framework, which rejects the idea that “real life” is in opposition to the internet. In his recent essay on Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation (2015) David Banks articulates the ways Turkle scapegoats technology without taking seriously and acknowledging the material forces that lay the groundwork for antisocial relations and violence.

Rather than reject the empirical evidence and general claims made by Carr and Turkle, Goldberg is concerned with understanding where dystopian claims come from and what kind of work they do. Of Carr and Turkle’s work, he writes: “The identification and analysis of neurological and psychological transformations engendered by internet use occur alongside the valuing of certain forms of embodiment, intellect, and psyche” (790). But Goldberg pushes beyond these surface concerns of dystopian internet writing to “interpret these as proxies for the social field and, in particular, responsible forms of sociality” (791).

To make this argument, he delves into the literature on affect and the politics of emotion, specifically that of Sianne Ngai and Sara Ahmed. Specifically, Goldberg uses anxiety as an affective foundation for dystopian analysis of the internet. He, through Ngai and Ahmed, draws an important distinction between fear and anxiety, one made by many modern and postmodern scholars, as one of temporality and object. Fear is present, and object-based; something is coming for you, you know what it is, and it is here. Anxiety, however, is locked in the future, and rather than having a single object that instills fear you have many, perhaps countless, objects that produce anxiety. As such, as Ahmed writes in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, “Anxiety becomes an approach to objects rather than, as with fear, being produced by an object’s approach.” Anxiety produces a feeling that one’s subject position is endangered, and these dystopian narratives index the anxious loss of subject position among the elite.

The anxiety on display in these dystopian narratives is not that the internet is not real, despite that being the rhetoric oft used; rather, the concern is that the internet is too real, that “it draws into question the utility of the concept of the real, laying bare its normative foundations” (792). From here, Goldberg presents dystopian anxieties as productive of a certain moral imperative: “the maintenance of a responsible sociality which is anxiously projected on the body” (792). In order for the internet user to remain a responsible member of society, they must do the work of “maintaining an independent, autonomous self;” for Turkle this work is the face-to-face, spatially co-present work of maintaining social relationships that, for her, are more difficult than those cultivated online.

These writers’ ultimate conclusion is that “real/valuable relationships are those that require various kinds of hard work: compromise, sacrifice, and responsibility” (793). It is a moralizing effort, inviting internet users to monitor their responsibility to “real” relationships, but also a “moralizing suspicion of pleasure as that which impedes and undermines relations of responsibility” (794). Concluding with a queer theory perspective, Goldberg investigates passivity as a concept oft used to undermine queer pleasure, that being penetrated, “bottoming,” are inextricably bound to this irresponsible pleasure. He then poses the question: “How much of this [dystopian] body of work similarly values the active, responsible, and the self-sovereign?” (797). He concludes that the “irresponsible,” “passive,” “unproductive” use of internet for pleasure may be politically queer, “insofar as users find joy and excitement precisely in abandoning normative orientations that solicit their responsibility” (798).

While many criticisms of the dystopian writing tackled by Goldberg have attempted to refute or counter the claims made by Carr, Turkle, and many others, Goldberg seeks instead to understand where they come from and what work they do in a rapidly changing technological society. Ultimately, his call for a queer politics of pleasure that undermines the authoritarian, normative moralism of dystopian writing gives a new perspective on the anxieties of internet writers. My own takeaway is the extent to which centuries-old notions of the Protestant work ethic, the inherent “goodness” of self-denial and self-flagellation, and other repressive narratives firmly rooted in capitalist material and ideological relations remain a powerful voice in contemporary popular culture, particularly when presented to an elitist readership.

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