resistance in the 'face' of relentless conviviality
DESCRIPTION
In the age of Facebook and pervasive and often voluntary surveillance, the meanings of what has previously been described as the modern body have been changing and mutating. By looking specifically at how the bodies and identities of Facebook users are configured in their profile information –and how this information can be used by Facebook and its advertisers—this paper shows how conflicting strategies and priorities are negotiated in this social networking service. Such an examination indicates the options for agency and resistance afforded by such a network to be limited in important ways - specifically by the “social” nature of its architecture. It is designed to encourage convergence, conviviality and consent while actively discouraging disagreement, disapproval and dissent –to say nothing of its panoptic tracking abilities. But when brought into relation with bodies on-line, in conflict, and their possibilities for acting in concert, as the basis of civil society, the convergence and coordination enabled by these social media can sometimes open up new possibilities and forms for action and resistance.TRANSCRIPT
Resistance in the Face of Relentless Conviviality: Body Politics in an Age of Ubiquitous Media
N. Friesen & S. LoweNew Media Studies Research Centre, http://nms.tru.ca
The Body & Discourse Networks
The body is the site upon which the various technologies of our culture inscribe themselves, the connecting link to which and from which our medial means of processing, storage, and transmission run. (Wellbery in Kittler, 1997)
The Gothic Bodythe world of spirits often makes its appearance through vampires. Dracula, marked 'the end of gothic,‘ where the gothic 'body‘ experiences excesses or non-organistic energies. These causal energies are often enacted by monsters or vampires because they are 'as associated with instinctual, primitive and animalistic energies.' And at the end of the gothic period, booked-ended by Dracula, 'monsters...find themselves increasingly humanised' as the fright goes in to, since quelled by, the machine.
Kittler: Dracula’s Legacy
Regardless of whether Vlad the Impaler once ruled with gruesomely precise commands, his shadow Dracula-as he alone survives under technological conditions-has become nothing more than the stochastic noise of the information channels.