Blog for Dr. Tony D Sampson (academic, author)
Category: neuroculture
Although set for a July release in the UK, I’m told a print version is on its way to me this week! There’s also a link to the book on the Polity website. http://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509537402
Buy it for no other reason than Mikey Georgeson’s marvellous illustrations
While we wait for Covid-19 to do its dreadful thing
Before we can meet safely at the University of East London for A&SM#5 (https://viralcontagion.blog/asm5-summer-2020/)
Call for papers, performances and artworks
A full programme of links to pre-recorded videos, short position papers, artworks, performances, presentations, book launches, and online discussion groups, and so on… will be released throughout a two-day period in mid-July (tbc).
Before Covid-19, the concept of universal virality cut a hitherto marginal figure in media theory. References to contagion, immunology, epidemiology and viral networks were of ancillary concern. After all, media and communication studies were supposed to be about establishing connection; not the opposite of it! Viral metaphors referred to trivial contagions of fads, crazes and marketing hype. Some media theorists optimistically translated these metaphors into the media viruses and spreadable media of participatory culture. However, now, all of a sudden, unpredictably, and rather shockingly, viral media stands at the centre of contemporary issues both materially, economically, and socially. In the wake of global uncertainty and anxiety caused by the uncontainable spread of Covid-19, there has been an abrupt move to the viral – from the margin to the middle.
Covid-19 draws urgent attention to the workings of a viral logics that criss-crosses from biological to cultural, technological and economic contexts. Virality is a techno-social condition of proximity and distance, accident and security, communication and communication breakdown. Indeed, it is in the current context that our understanding of the movement of people and messages is framed by the logics of quarantine and confinement, security and prevention.
Virality automates affective reactions and imitative behaviours that relate to different visceral registers of experience compared to those assumed to inform the logic of the market. Which is to say, the mainstream cognitive models that are supposed to support the failing economic model of rational choice (if indeed anyone really ever believed in Homo Economicus) are replaced by seemingly irrational and uncontrollable financial contagion.
Recent outbreaks of panic buying of toilet roll and paracetamol, some of which have been sparked by the global spread of Instagram images of empty supermarket shelves, are spreading alongside scenes of isolated Italians, impulsively bursting into songs of solidarity and support from their balconies. All of these are bizarre contagions because, it would seem, they are interwoven with contagions of psychological fear, anxiety, conspiracy and further financial turmoil; all triggered by the indeterminate spread of Covid-19. Virality is resolutely non-metaphorical.
To think these contagions through is, for a number of reasons, a difficult task. We are after all dealing with an ecology of technological, biological, and affective realities moving about in strange feedback loops. Future predictions are taking place against a backdrop of contested epidemiological models, reliant on, for example, the uncertain thresholds of herd immunity or total social lockdown. Certainly, following a sustained period of comparatively stable risk assessment, mostly based on known knowns and known unknowns, we have just entered a vital, possibly game changing phase in which unknown unknowns will prescribe the near future.
We welcome suggestions inspired by, but certainly not limited to this list of topics
Deadline for short (250 word) proposals June 12th
Emailed to t.d.sampson@uel.ac.uk
Further information about A&SM#4.5 will appear here on the Virality Blog (https://viralcontagion.blog/asm4-5/).
Please note that this event is free for all. The organisers cannot pay for any content or content production.
The blurb for A&SM#4.5 is based on Les logiques nouvelles des médias viraux Par Tony D. Sampson et Jussi Parikka. Published in AOC Journal 09.04.20 https://aoc.media/analyse/2020/04/08/les-logiques-nouvelles-des-medias-viraux/
English version here: https://www.boundary2.org/2020/04/tony-d-sampson-and-jussi-parikka-the-new-logics-of-viral-media/
See also this video primer on Virality
Social media has taken a dark turn, encompassing both economic and political expropriation of the user experience. Users not only give away ownership of their community relations to big platforms, but the potential for positive change through revolutionary contagion is under threat. What was once the domain of pro-democratic movements has been annexed by the far right.
Tony Sampson focuses on the role social media play in this somewhat abrupt capitulation to the dark refrain of post-truth, fake news and hate speech. Positing online users as “sleepwalkers”, he argues that by understanding their collective behaviour we can identify the different lures that are used to capture them and which, in turn, produce their subjectivities.
Drawing on a wide range of theories, this book offers compelling ways to understand social media at a time when it is more important than ever. It is an important reference for students and scholars of media theory, digital media and social media.
There are two Assemblage Brain related articles published in the current issue of AI & Society journal.
I am more than a little excited about these publications since my school history teacher at an Essex comp in the late 1970s, Richard Ennals, set up AI & Society in 1986.
Firstly, Tero Karppi’s review of the book. See Karppi, T. ‘Tony D. Sampson: The Assemblage Brain. Sense Making in Neuroculture.’ AI & Society (2019) 34: 945. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-018-0826-8
And next, the first article I wrote after the book was published in Dec 2016.
See Sampson, T.D. ‘Transitions in human–computer interaction: from data embodiment to experience capitalism.’ AI & Society (2019) 34: 835. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-018-0822-z
This one develops on themes from the book, including Experience HCI and Capitalism, as well as many of the subsequent Whiteheadian ventures started in AB and picked up again in my next effort.
TS 20/10/19
Here’s today’s SSASS-y tidbit! Are you registered yet? If not, time to visit http://affectsociety.com/ … DON’T BE LATE FOR SSASS!
So, Tony D Sampson (that spam/virality/neuro guy) is co-convening seminar #4 with Mikey B Georgeson … Mikey was/is David Devant from the band ‘David Devant and His Spirit Wife.’ (See their video below!) With this convening duo, you are going to have all of your brain bandwidth and performance skills jammed with post-truthiness. Is this for real? Find out!
SSASSY SUMMER ’19 BABY
Mona Mannevuo’s long awaited paper first given an airing at the neuroaffect stream at the last affect theory conference in Lancaster PA.
There’s a video of the Reworking the Brain session at Transmediale 2019.
One of my students sent me this link to a review of Transmediale in Berlin earlier this month. It includes the Reworking the Brain session I contributed to with Hyphen Labs. It’s on the Contemporary Art from East Asia and East Europe website. Not sure who the author (EC) is, but if they want to become my agent, please let me know.
This is open and free, if you happen to be in Paris next week
VIRALITY 