{"id":21557,"date":"2016-09-08T09:25:18","date_gmt":"2016-09-08T13:25:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=21557"},"modified":"2016-09-08T16:01:37","modified_gmt":"2016-09-08T20:01:37","slug":"review-antisocial-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2016\/09\/08\/review-antisocial-media\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Antisocial Media"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Unknown\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This is a review of Greg Goldberg\u2019s<\/a> (2016) article \u201cAntisocial media: Digital dystopianism as a normative project.\u201d It is available in <\/em>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<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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<\/em> Professor Greg Goldberg analyzes the dystopian narrative common in popular writing on the internet, arguing that this discourse is \u201ca normative project linked to domination.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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\u2019s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains<\/em> and Sherry Turkle\u2019s Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less from Each Other. <\/em>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<\/em> and National Public Radio<\/em>. Cyborgology<\/em> 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\u2019s extensive work on the augmented reality framework, which rejects the idea that \u201creal life\u201d is in opposition to the internet. In his recent essay<\/a> on Turkle\u2019s Reclaiming Conversation<\/em> (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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s work, he writes: \u201cThe identification and analysis of neurological and psychological transformations engendered by internet use occur alongside the valuing of certain forms of embodiment, intellect, and psyche\u201d (790). But Goldberg pushes beyond these surface concerns of dystopian internet writing to \u201cinterpret these as proxies for the social field and, in particular, responsible forms of sociality\u201d (791).<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, \u201cAnxiety becomes an approach to objects<\/em> rather than, as with fear, being produced by an object\u2019s approach.\u201d <\/em>Anxiety produces a feeling that one\u2019s subject position is endangered, and these dystopian narratives index the anxious loss of subject position among the elite.<\/p>\n

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<\/em>, that \u201cit draws into question the utility of the concept of the real, laying bare its normative foundations\u201d (792). From here, Goldberg presents dystopian anxieties as productive of a certain moral imperative: \u201cthe maintenance of a responsible sociality which is anxiously projected on the body\u201d (792). In order for the internet user to remain a responsible member of society, they must do the work<\/em> of \u201cmaintaining an independent, autonomous self;\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

These writers\u2019 ultimate conclusion is that \u201creal\/valuable relationships are those that require various kinds of hard work: compromise, sacrifice, and responsibility\u201d (793). It is a moralizing effort, inviting internet users to monitor their responsibility to \u201creal\u201d relationships, but also a \u201cmoralizing suspicion of pleasure as that which impedes and undermines relations of responsibility\u201d (794). Concluding with a queer theory perspective, Goldberg investigates passivity<\/em> as a concept oft used to undermine queer pleasure, that being penetrated, \u201cbottoming,\u201d are inextricably bound to this irresponsible pleasure. He then poses the question: \u201cHow much of this [dystopian] body of work similarly values the active, responsible, and the self-sovereign?\u201d (797). He concludes that the \u201cirresponsible,\u201d \u201cpassive,\u201d \u201cunproductive\u201d use of internet for pleasure may be politically queer, \u201cinsofar as users find joy and excitement precisely in abandoning normative orientations that solicit their responsibility\u201d (798).<\/p>\n

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 \u201cgoodness\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Britney is on Twitter<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a review of Greg Goldberg\u2019s (2016) article \u201cAntisocial media: Digital dystopianism as a normative project.\u201d 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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1931,"featured_media":21559,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/files\/2016\/09\/Unknown-1.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1931"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21557"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21562,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21557\/revisions\/21562"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}