Digital Timber: Remediating Resource Economies and Automating Sustainable Futures
Megan Wiessner
Through a study of the emerging mass timber industry in the Pacific Northwest of North America, this dissertation shows how manufacturing supply chains and resource futures are co-constituted with media technologies and the conceptual architectures that underpin them. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork following supply chains for architectural timber across Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, I demonstrate that when architectural sustainability is assessed and managed through media forms that privilege connectivity, modularity, and optimization, it becomes reimagined as an ecologistical challenge to which commodity lumber is uniquely suited. While taking those formal logics seriously, the dissertation offers a view of industrial digitization as a set of practices and beliefs inevitably grounded in older political ecologies and unfurling in their affective wake. The first chapter shows how ecological concepts, managerial systems discourse, and computational imaginaries are articulated to the Pacific Northwest’s specific history as a resource economy and to current debates over that legacy, through a reading of projects to redesign supply chains for low-carbon timber architecture. The second analyzes software for calculating carbon flows across a building’s life cycle. By showing how debates about forest management and the region’s contested history of logging materialize in data methodologies, I theorize architects and engineers’ use and development of this software as participation in a kind of distributed industrial rhetoric. My third chapter shows how, under current conditions and in relation to earlier forms of standardization developed in the forest products industry, the tools that people use to work with timber incentivize modular design and industrial automation, and thus reveals how low-carbon construction is entangled with wider industrial imperatives. My fourth chapter shows what is left out of the imaginary of the sustainable manufacturing system by constructing an alternative picture of the supply chain oriented around labor. Collectively, the chapters demonstrate how attempts to use technology to manage the built environment and to design socially productive flows of carbon tie timber into new affective, industrial, and political relations. As digital media systems and informatic imaginaries redefine sustainability as a logistical endeavor, a resource economy is remediated, revived, and reinvested with new meanings.
Digitizing Law: Legal Pluralism and Data-Driven Justice
Salwa Tabassum Hoque
States, tech-companies, and law-firms worldwide have been advocating to digitize and automate law to improve the course of justice and provide a fairer legal system. This dissertation problematizes this view by locating the harms of using digital technologies for legal decision-making support. A critical contribution of this research is expanding on the concept of legal pluralism – which decenters studying law from a Eurocentric and state-centric perspective – and applying it to study how law is mediated in the construction of digital technologies. I apply the concept of legal pluralism to note the failures of AI in the legal landscape by analyzing law as a broader category and including perspectives from alternate frameworks of justice such as Islamic legal thought and community-based justice systems. The goal is to show how these exclusions can result in unjust and prejudiced outputs (by humans and machines) that discriminate against marginalized communities, particularly Muslim women in South Asia and beyond. To demonstrate my argument, I conducted two years of ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and semi-structured interviews to examine Bangladesh’s state court and community-based non-state court called shalish to compare how law is datafied and represented in the design of two prominent technologies: 1) digital legal databases (that are used to store and retrieve data), and 2) AI Judge models (that use artificial intelligence systems to (help) generate the verdict of cases). My research demonstrates how the construction of databases and AI Judge models are not neutral, highlighting how preexisting offline social biases and modern legal epistemic frameworks of state law are reinscribed in the digitizing and automating of law; shalish, Islamic legal thinking, and rural women’s experiences of law are erased and distorted in this process. This dissertation bridges digital media studies, legal anthropology, and Bangladesh postcolonial feminist theory to show how the discriminatory outputs are tied to gendered and racialized power structures that are in part a legacy of colonialism. Dismantling the binary between online-offline spheres and studying their interdependent relationship shows how power plays a central role in the design of digital technology, and aids in reinscribing the marginalization of those who are already in the margins.
Grime Refusal: Navigating the Sounds of Crisis and Resistance Through Grime Music
Cheraine Donalea Scott
This dissertation explores the impact of Grime music on British youth culture and politics, recognizing it as a cultural force that extends beyond entertainment. Utilizing listening as a critical methodology, the study examines audible moments when Grime challenges established norms, unveiling its subversive potential within the political, social, and cultural landscape of contemporary Britain. It scrutinizes the role Grime played in the UK 2017 and 2019 general elections, serving as a significant tool for young people advocating for social change. Investigating this fusion of music and activism, the dissertation explores Grime's pivotal role in providing a platform for collective resistance, fostering community bonds, and facilitating political mobilization. Additionally, it critically analyzes the British establishment's tendency to downplay Grime's cultural relevance and its disparaging treatment of Grime artists. The study uncovers hidden influences contributing to transformative moments in Grime, exposing disparities in public discourse. It demonstrates how Grime disrupts the prevailing status quo and amplifies the voices of marginalized communities. Drawing from various academic disciplines, including British cultural studies, Black studies, visual culture, sound studies, and musicology, this interdisciplinary study employs ethnographic methods. These methods allow for an exploration of how Grime intersects with various aspects of young people's lives, challenging and reshaping societal norms across diverse dimensions such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.
Unsettling the Contemporary: Race, Redress, and Revolutionary Times in South African Anticolonial Visual Culture (1994 – 2021)
Anna Stielau
Unsettling the Contemporary: Race, Redress, and Revolutionary Times in South African Anticolonial Visual Culture (1994 -2021) investigates how post-apartheid artists and activists use visual media to reclaim – and remake – time itself, contending with some of the most insidious legacies of colonization. In South Africa, as elsewhere, efforts to transform institutions and remedy racial inequalities have been driven by liberal ideals of inclusion, inviting African artists into histories, archives, and museums. Drawing on 12 months of interviews, observations, and archival research, I theorize the limitations of these approaches by attending to an underlying imperial drive to arrest otherness baked into those very structures, where time has long been composed to sustain racial domination. I explore how local artists develop a more radical methodological agenda by identifying temporality as a site of persistent colonial violence, as well as a critical problem, resource, and instrument for decolonial struggle. Each chapter tracks the implementation and effects of a racialized regime of temporal capture and elaborates a set of tactics for intervening in that regime. By connecting recent scholarship in queer and media studies to mid-twentieth century anticolonial literatures, I show how the post-apartheid state homogenizes populations to one clock, forcing consensus around key issues of history, heritage, and identity even as experiences of the present diverge along race lines. I argue that local artists working in various media employ alternative strategies for organizing time – from repurposed queues to collaborations with decomposition – to restage these issues, with implications for studying race, redress, and art’s history more broadly. I locate their methods in the context of regional settler colonialism and in relation to the history and reproduction of racial inequalities, demonstrating that artistic expression in the Global South can not only engage the colonial past anew, but also envision decolonized futures. Taken together, the artists I study ultimately activate a new sense of art’s “contemporary”: ways of being, knowing, and relating that remain generatively out of synch with a homogenous national present.
Starting-Up With the State: Computing, Entrepreneurship, and the Governance of Aspiration in India
Sandeep Mertia
This dissertation examines the imaginaries, infrastructures, and practices of digital future-making at the intersections of the state and technology start-ups. The federal government’s flagship ‘Startup India’ program, launched in 2016, now has 1,00,000+ registered start-ups, many also supported by allied initiatives of state governments across small cities. Rajasthan—widely considered to be an ‘economically backward’ (Bimaru) state—set up India’s largest “Techno-Hub” in Jaipur in 2018 to incubate 700 start-ups. In addition to mentorship and monthly stipends, the state offers start-ups a dedicated platform called RajStack—India’s only “one-stop digital infrastructure” to access government Application Programming Interfaces. Based on two years of in-person and virtual ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and eighty in-depth interviews in New Delhi, Jaipur, and Jodhpur, this dissertation is the first long-term, critical study of India’s booming digital start-up ecosystem. By ethnographically studying Startup India—and its acceleration during the COVID-19 pandemic—this dissertation critically investigates how narratives of digital futures are re-assembled at a human scale in postcolonial and global South contexts. Drawing on archival research at Software Technology Parks of India (est. 1991), the first section of my dissertation offers a novel history of the shifting ontologies and territorialities of computing in the global South in the period from Y2K to the “cloud.” The second section focuses on public digital infrastructures that allow the state and start-ups to interface with each other and with growing collectives of smartphone users to cultivate data and aspirational subjectivity as raw materials for future-making. The third section offers an ethnographic account of the normalization of the pandemic—which commenced as my fieldwork began—as a ‘dreamy disruption’ among entrepreneurs who leveraged remote work to re-spatialize digital futures in small cities. Mapping the growing mediascapes of start-up success stories—even as more than ninety-percent of start-ups fail—the final chapter theorizes the emergence of a digital media-enabled, post-democratic governance of aspiration in contemporary India and beyond. Bridging Media Studies, Science & Technology Studies, and Anthropology, this dissertation contributes to a growing body of interdisciplinary work that seeks to expand the current geography of critical understandings of computing and digital media.
Data and Borders: Tracking Media Technologies of Migration Control in Europe
Michelle Pfeifer
Data and Borders: Tracking Media Technologies of Migration Control in Europe examines how media-technological state projects use language and algorithmic analysis for the purposes of border control in Germany and Europe. Chapter I traces the history of technological reform in response to political framings of migration as crisis by analyzing electronic registration and identification infrastructures in relation to the history of the German Central Foreigners Register. Chapter II traces the shift from expert linguistic analysis to automated language recognition used in asylum administration to demonstrate how the voice manifests as a border that extends into the nation’s spatial limits, what I call border sonics. Chapter III provides a genealogical account of sound recordings made in a German prisoner of war camp during WWI to show that the administrative, scientific, and spatial infrastructures of listening and captivity resonate in the present. Chapter IV analyzes the practice of smartphone data extraction in relation to discourses on smart borders to argue that while smart borders’ supposed immateriality is constructed as a more humane form of migration and border policing, they are coterminous with bodily and material violence. Drawing on 18 months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Europe, archival research, and critical documents, policy, and discourses analysis I demonstrate that data-driven projects that are framed as governmental reforms purportedly meant to fix the perceived crises of migration function to deepen inequalities and enhance border policing. This data-driven form of border and migration control reorders articulations of personhood, belonging, and recognition by valorizing racial and ethnic identification as means of surveillance and policing. I situate contemporary border technologies within a colonial genealogy of producing cultural and racial difference in Europe. This genealogical approach decenters temporalities of crisis and emergency and reveals the postcolonial continuities of digital border regimes. My research contributes to critical analyses of algorithmic bias and race focused on Germany and Europe and in the areas of border and migration control and, thus, sheds light on how discrimination is enhanced and reproduced through digital border policing.
Queer Enchantment: Contours, Cruising, Crystal Visions, and Other Queer Tactics for (Not) Being Seen
Harris Kornstein
This dissertation examines the intersections of queerness and surveillance capitalism, proposing “queer enchantment” as a set of tactics by which queer and transgender people have avoided, mitigated, or directly challenged observation in ways that deviate from standard discourses of privacy. Surveillance against queer and transgender individuals has historically taken many forms in the US: from the historic policing of national and municipal “decency” laws to attempts to computationally classify “deviant” gay faces, voices, and behaviors. While both mainstream LGBTQ and privacy organizations often promote values of equity, openness, and transparency in response, such approaches often fail to adequately respond to asymmetries of information, finances, and computing resources that state and corporate actors wield. Drawing on media theories of obfuscation, misuse, and refusal, I propose queer enchantment as a contrasting mode for resisting extractive forms of data collection and processing, not by concealing information, but by foregrounding practices of hyper-visibility, play, and intuition. I focus on three case studies of queer enchantment in San Francisco in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as a hub not only of Silicon Valley technology but also queer arts and activism. I draw on multiple methods including ethnographic interviews, discursive analysis of media objects and platforms, and art-practice-as-research that directly experiments with technologies. In Chapter 1, I argue that drag queens’ performative transformations (including drag makeup) offer a unique theory of information that privileges noise over signal by adding rather than withholding data. In Chapter 2, I consider how the car service Homobiles, which directly inspired ride-sharing services like Lyft, engages queer approaches to data through techniques of ignorance, ephemerality, and intimacy. In Chapter 3, I explore queer femmes’ engagement with mystical practices of tarot, astrology, and witchcraft, comparing their algorithmic and ludic qualities to digital media, arguing that these mystical practices function as alternative technologies of self-tracking and prediction, albeit rooted in intuition, agency, and doubt. Thus, rather than promoting values of “fairness, accountability, and transparency” common within critiques of computing, queer enchantment reflects on-the-ground queer tactics that overwhelm both the senses and the sensors.
Landscapes of Violence: Documentary Media, Countervisualities, and Archival Resistance on the Mexico-U.S. Borderlands
Ramon Resendiz
This dissertation examines how visual documentary media both reify and contest the imagined and material boundaries of the U.S. by analyzing settler-colonial state museums as historical archives, documentary films, and documentary media production practices. My research reveals: 1) how the culture of settler colonialism is visually encoded and sustained in everyday life; 2) the oral and storytelling practices of memory, remembrance, and resistance by Chicanx and Indigenous peoples against settler violence; and 3) how documentary filmmakers perform acts of countervisual refusals that reject settler mythologies of a Texas devoid of Mexican, Indigenous, and First Nations peoples prior to settler arrival. The first part takes a photoethnographic approach to examine the dominant settler narratives of Texas and borderlands history as visualized by state museums and public monuments, such as in San Antonio’s Historic downtown district. I demonstrate how state archival institutions co-construct and render visible the modern U.S.-Mexico border and the racial geographies of the U.S. from the Texas Revolution (1835-1836) and the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), to the passing of the Secure Fence Act of 2006 and the current era of the U.S. border wall. I investigate how settler colonial discourses frame historical imaginings of terra nullius, national history, the state, and the whitewashing of violence against Indigenous peoples to literally see the borderlands as legitimate products of manifest destiny The second part discusses the works of sixteen award-winning filmmakers who expose systemic racial violence through interviews and documentary analysis. I show how these filmmakers create documentary media that resist the dominant visualities and settler narratives of state museums and monuments, foregrounding questions about production practices, politics, and professional experience. This section crystallizes the power of documentary media and the labor of cultural producers to contest state violence, especially in refuting white supremacist amnesiac processes like white replacement theory. Through my findings, I interrogate the visual and archival processes that enforce the “borders” on the material and racial geographies of Texas, the U.S., Mexico, and the borderlands. My research posits that documentary filmmakers create counternarratives that destabilize dominant conceptions of nationalism, race, and the logics of geographic borders themselves.
Kumva Meze Neza: Sounding Blackness in Rwanda
Victoria Grubbs
Twenty-seven years after the ethnic divisions of a colonial imaginary, decades of resultant civil war, and widespread genocidal violence turned ordinary Rwandan citizens collectively against themselves, Rwanda is celebrated domestically and internationally for its peace and security. In August 2017, Rwandan President Paul Kagame was re-elected for a third consecutive term with a public vision “to construct a united, democratic and inclusive Rwandan identity”. Key to this official state project of national unity is the narration and careful policing of a pre-colonial, de-ethnicized banyarwanda (people of Rwanda) identity. Despite these efforts, the production and circulation of popular music in contemporary Rwanda defies a politics of identity rooted in singular and anachronistic national origins. Alternatively, Rwandan popular music circulates feelings of blackness in the aftermath of genocide to produce the impossible condition of reconciliation. Drawing from long-term ethnographic field work amongst Rwandan music industry professionals and their audiences, this dissertation argues that collective investments in the sensory experience mobilized by Rwandan popular music result in the formation of a collective social body that exceeds traditional organizing categories. By connecting Charles Peirce’s semiotic theory of qualia to critical interventions in black studies and sound studies, this ethnography reveals how popular Rwandan musicians, their audiences, and the technocultural systems that connect them invoke, perform, and give meaning to blackness as a sensory experience and socio-ontological formation.
Television Siyasat: Genealogies of Electronic Media and Extralegal Politics in Pakistan
Asif Ali Akhtar
This dissertation on television siyasat (an Urdu term which can refer to both politics and order) considers the appearance of politics on private electronic media in Pakistan over two decades since the eclipse of the longstanding state monopoly on televisual broadcast in 2002. The regulatory laws promulgated under the military regime of General Pervez Musharraf (1999-2008) foreshadowed the emergence of private satellite and cable TV channels broadcasting news, current events, and political analysis around the clock. This development has certainly affected political discourses and practices. However, in view of the present media political impasse facing Pakistan, it will be argued that the electronic media apparatus has itself become implicated in the production of a crisis of politics. Approaching Pakistani television siyasat in its specific cultural context in terms of its conditions of possibility requires sustained genealogical analysis. The research methodology developed for this study entails a combination of archival research and ethnographic fieldwork to facilitate precisely such an analysis of antecedent practices and concepts associated with siyasat, regulation, and media. The genealogical account moves backwards from a recent point of rupture situated at the dawn of the twenty-first century to consider the colonial and pre-colonial eras, before returning to critically analyze the contemporary era. The Bengal Presidency under the East India Company between 1793-1823 has been identified as a prior point of rupture where media technologies, regulatory techniques, and political practices become bound up in mutually transformative processes of legal, technological, and epistemic change. This particular transformation of siyasat in conceptual and practical terms, as evidenced by colonial documents, significantly coincides with the emergence of print media technologies and regulatory techniques. The first three chapters present archival excavations of antecedent configurations of media technologies, regulations, and siyasat. The critical concepts and media artifacts retrieved from past eras will aid the interpretation of empirical data gathered from ethnographic fieldwork in Pakistan during 2017-18, documented in the later chapters. The principal object of critical analysis of this investigation entails the present political scenario [siyasi surat-e-hal] as it appears on television. The antecedent pre-colonial and colonial-era refractions of siyasat therefore inform this interrogation of the modes of technical production and regulation of political appearances in the present.
The Carceral Media Regime: Technologies of Disaggregation, Pacification, and Rebellion in US Prisons
Ian J. Alexander
The Carceral Media Regime follows a range of media technologies through their implementation in the US prison system over the last century: radio, mail, solitary confinement, telephone, cell phones, and digital tablets. As a series of media histories, each chapter tracks the specific conditions and effects of its media technological innovation at a different moment in the prison regime’s tumultuous history, affording different and often unforeseen uses for both captors and captives. As a more continuous history of the prison and the prisoners’ movement, the dissertation follows recurrent problems and contradictions across the prison’s implementation of media technologies. A central contradiction of the prison becomes visible in its media technological systems as multiple opposed groups mobilize the same technologies for radically different goals. Prison reformers and reformist administrators have historically plied prison media for educational and “rehabilitative” projects, while more revanchist wardens and guards have deployed them for punishment, torture, and more coercive forms of repression. They find agreement in their support of total surveillance. Meanwhile prisoners, and in particular imprisoned radicals, revolutionaries, and abolitionists, have used, evaded, produced, and hacked prison media systems for political education projects, better access to family and friends, and for what Stephen Wilson calls “dis-organizing the prison.” These contradictory affordances of prison media technology register (again) the prison and its media regime as sites of warfare so asymmetric that it can be difficult to recognize key moments of resistance against it. The Carceral Media Regime’s media historical approach opens new archives and methods for locating and understanding the prison regime and prisoners’ movements. The dissertation insists on the urgency of struggles over prison media technologies, from mailroom rules to digital tablet setup, as struggles over the very conditions of possibility for building and maintaining a strong prisoners’ movement. What appears to be a haphazard constellation of media systems coheres in the carceral media regime that isolates individuals, disaggregates groups, stymies prisoner organization, and endlessly strives to pacify rebellion inside and outside the prison.
Tropical Unknown: Technological Expansion and Racialized Territorial Formations in Colombia
Ángela Arias Zapata
This dissertation examines the relationship between telecommunications infrastructure and collective political action around land ownership in rural Colombia. I argue that the promise of technology-enhanced emerging markets generating material and social wellbeing relies on bringing to the present a racialized narrative of “empty warm lands,” inhabited by peoples “stuck in the past.” Drawing on archival materials, fieldwork, and interviews, I connect cultural imaginaries of territory, nature, and race characteristic of the late nineteenth-century —the period that saw Colombia’s consolidation as an independent republic— with the onset of the neoliberal economic and political turn in the late-1980s and early-1990s. I start by showing that late nineteenth-century political elites articulated their justifications to expand the reach of telegraphy and telephony around the need to erase racial differences and incorporate hinterlands into the nation. I then analyze the political and cultural context of the 1989 National Plan for Rural Telecommunications (NPRT), a national program to provide satellite telephony to rural populations. Finally, I engage with the struggles of the Indigenous movement from the Southwestern region of Cauca in the aftermath of the neoliberal turn. I show how Indigenous organizations have managed to sustain negotiations with different governments, in order to create and implement a Differential Policy for Indigenous Communications. Beyond the case of Colombia, this dissertation broadens the scope of inquiry about the obstacles to effectively provide access to telecommunication for rural racialized communities in the global South, with the intention to overcome the paradigm of stakeholder participation in civil society.
Conduits of (Im)Possibility: Mediating Solidarities
Rachel Kuo
This dissertation examines questions of political solidarity across uneven difference by focusing on how processes of information coordination, production, and circulation shape social movements formations. I demonstrate how shifting relationships between marginalized people and institutions of state and corporate power shape how groups differently engage and use technologies within social movements. Drawing on insights from multiracial and working class social movements alongside histories of computing and technology, this dissertation contributes to broader concerns in studies of critical race, digital media, and social movements by insisting upon both racial and class consciousness within projects of communication. This project addresses the question of contemporary digital media and social movements from a historical perspective by situating the emergence of different political subjectivities, particularly racialized, working class claims-making and politics, through political economic, technological and policy changes. Chapter 1 introduces Asian America as a mediated political formation to complicate presumptions around technology and solidarity, given its historical entanglements and encounters around U.S. capital, empire, and militarism, all of which also undergird histories of technological innovation. Chapter 2 draws from the archival materials of the Third World Women’s Alliance (1968-1979) to offer an alternate history of networking that foregrounds the politics of difference and highlight ways liberal individualism within dominant computing narratives can be a security threat to collective safety. Chapter 3 looks at the technological conditions for solidarity by juxtaposing the creation of information sharing infrastructures by state actors and progressive left movements during the 1990s, which is marked by both the popularization of the Internet alongside the expansion of anti-immigration and carceral policy reforms that created new punitive codes of racialization. These histories lead up to Chapter 4, which assesses how organizers navigate the competitive information marketplace in today’s digital landscape. Here, I discuss the convergence between the optimization of technological performance—the maximizing of efficiency, speed, and capacity—and performances of solidarity.
The Empire of Informatics: IBM in Brazil Before Modern Computing
Colette Perold
The Empire of Informatics: IBM in Brazil Before Modern Computing tracks the expansion of the International Business Machines (IBM) into Brazil, from its entrance into the country in the 1910s through its contribution to the U.S.-backed overthrow of Brazil’s democratically elected president in 1964. Despite the persistent impact that IBM had on Brazil for much of the twentieth century, there is little scholarship on IBM’s Brazil operations. This historiographic gap is surprising, as Brazil was in fact a strategic site for IBM’s global expansion prior to the advent of modern computing, as it housed the first major IBM subsidiary outside the United States, and was the largest and most stable market for IBM operations in Latin America for much of the twentieth century. With its regional manufacturing and services base in Brazil and a history of measurable influence on Brazilian policy, IBM was able to achieve near-monopoly status in South American markets by the 1960s. Using archival research and interviews, this dissertation documents the ways in which the firm’s complex negotiation of political upheaval, through both coups and revolutions, enabled it to capture South American markets at moments when other information-processing firms were forced out. It reveals how IBM was able to make itself, and as a result, information technology, indispensable to successive governments through the infrastructural power it wielded and the political coalitions it formed. Crucially, it argues that IBM’s ability to transnationalize across South America prior to modern computing owes to three under-explored sources: its embrace of the United States’ imperial relationship to Latin America, its close collaboration with Brazil’s twentieth-century authoritarian regimes, and its strategic location developing the data infrastructure for a hemispheric liberal order in the Americas. Placing Brazil at the foundations of modern computing and IBM alongside U.S. foreign policy actors, this dissertation reveals how data processing’s earliest corporate pioneers became central players in the maintenance of U.S. hegemony in the postwar period.
Steering by Sight: Data, Visualization, and the Birth of an Informational Worldview
Alexander Campolo
During the second half of the twentieth century, scientists across disciplines faced the problem of creating knowledge from a threatening deluge of information. Steering by Sight analyzes how data visualization emerged as a response to this crisis in knowledge. While most histories of the Cold War sciences focus on militarized cybernetic rationalities, algorithmic optimization, or formal modes of objectivity, this dissertation follows a heterodox group of thinkers who instead studied limits to rationality and the inability of digital computers to solve complex problems. As an alternative, they developed techniques to approach information through visual experience. Ultimately, they sought to rethink empiricism in a world of data. This history of sense and data draws new connections between actors and institutions to offer a different perspective on the midcentury sciences and our digital present. These include Allen Newell and Herbert Simon, who developed a psychology that conceived cognition and perception in terms of information; the French cartographer Jacques Bertin, who worked with structuralists to make hidden or unconscious relations visible; and the data analyst John W. Tukey, who opposed over-mathematization and even objectivity in statistics, advocating instead for visual methods of exploring data. Circulating between RAND, Bell Labs, and the École Pratique des Hautes Études, these ideas crystallized at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in Silicon Valley. Data visualization became a technique of human-computer interaction, both to augment cognition and control knowledge work. Today, data visualization is part of a wider informational worldview, a foundational element of the data sciences but also new modes of digital surveillance and control. Steering by Sight concludes by analyzing the political effects of this visual mode of knowledge. How might we resist both government by algorithm and insidious attempts to turn the limits of reason into obedience? One strategy, suggested by those studied in this work, is to develop new techniques of pluralism and creativity, against a data-driven world.
Climate and Class: A U.S.-U.K Comparison of Socially Stratified Knowledge Production in Digital Information Networks
Timothy Neff
Using Pierre Bourdieu's field theory and the comparative media systems perspective, this dissertation examines the relationship between socioeconomics and discourse about the social problem of climate change in news published on U.S. and U.K. news websites and on the social media platform Twitter. Algorithmic content analyses, coupled with manual content analyses, network analyses, and ethnographic techniques, indicate that news outlets with audience demographics leaning toward higher socioeconomic strata tend to produce news about climate change that foregrounds elite, expert-driven discourse. U.K. tabloid newspapers serving working-class audiences often use such discourse in spectacular ways that generate clicks or invite mockery while also producing news that emphasizes tangible, civil society dimensions of climate change. However, audience segmentation in the U.K. provides a structural condition for audience crossover, bringing expert information about climate change to audiences often skeptical of such information. On Twitter, discursive networks that form around climate change-focused hashtags are dominated by users among higher class strata. As Twitter discourse unfolds largely in the absence of the journalistic mediation of experts from the fields of science and economics, it predominantly features political and civil society voices. Moments of agonistic politics, such as protests, can shift Twitter discourse toward civil society concerns for global-scale issues and away from the more elite, expert-driven details of political processes. The dissertation underscores that although knowledge about climate produced in fields of expertise needs to find ways out of these fields and into the hands of democratic publics, it is a mistake to believe that this alone will persuade people to engage with the social problem of climate change. Knowledge about climate change is produced on a socially stratified terrain, and this terrain produces resonances and dissonances in the dissemination of that knowledge. Climate communication efforts that overlook these socioeconomic distinctions risk undercutting the engagement and inclusion of the broadest swath of democratic publics in addressing the social problem of climate change.
Feeling Fort Greene: On Spatial Mediations of Race, Affect, and Collective Being
Kavita Kulkarni
If ideology interpolates us as social subjects, space contours the dimensions of that process, serving as the site of discursive articulation and struggle over systems of signification, and over our adherence not only to certain identities, but to the subject form itself. This dissertation is a testament to the latter, and considers how social difference is mediated - that is, made material - in and by the spaces we inhabit. It builds off Henri Lefebvre's thesis that the production of space is a production of the social, and, as a field of practice and struggle, determines the reproduction of both. It also attempts to bear witness to lesser-examined ways in which social reproduction takes place: that is, through structures of feeling and ways of looking that mediate the affective register of racialized space and spaces of social difference. It asks, how do processes of social reproduction that take place in and through the social production of racialized space and the spatialized production of social difference mediate affect, but also affectability as a human capacity? To answer this question, this dissertation studies three cases of the production of space in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a historically Black neighborhood since white flight in the 1960s, which was home to a nexus of art and cultural production in the 1980s and 1990s, and which underwent what geographer Neil Smith termed third-wave gentrification in the early 2000s, transforming the use value of Black space into surplus and exchange value. Assuming an archaeological approach to this transformation of Fort Greene, this dissertation considers the mediations of affect and affectability in 1) the production of racialized space in New York City's postwar housing crisis; 2) in the making of the Sunday Tea Party, an alternative space of participatory art and culture in the 1990s; and, 3) in the production of the Soul Summit Music Festival, an outdoor, free, and open-to-the-public house music dance party that has taken place in Fort Greene Park since 2001. It finds that the mediation of affects and affectability in the first case - in the production of space marked by state and capital's logic of liberal humanism and corporate welfarism - directed social reproduction in a way that reproduced the social value of individualism, and in the latter two cases - in the production of space marked by the cultural logics of joy, care, and a radical humanism - reproduced a more collective sense of being.
An Art of Ambivalence: On Jean Rouch, African Cinema, and the Complexities of the (Post)colonial Encounter
Jamie Berthe
French anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch made over 100 films throughout his long career, the bulk of which were recorded in West Africa. Founder of the cinéma-vérité movement and pioneer of techniques like 'shared anthropology' and 'ethno-fiction,' Rouch used the medium of film to stimulate new ways of thinking about anthropological knowledge, cross-cultural encounters, and the apparent fixity of social roles in the (post)colonial world order. Furthermore, in his drive to 'share' anthropology, Rouch sought to use his skills and resources to assist his African collaborators in their own ambitions to make films, either with him or independently. But as a French man working in West Africa both prior to and following French colonial rule, Rouch's practice evolved out of a historical moment fraught with complexities and ambiguities. And in spite of Rouch's efforts to use film as a means to transform anthropology into a more collaborative and dialogic undertaking, many African filmmakers accused Rouch of having an imperialist vision of his African subjects. Rouch was also criticized - and not only by Africans - for his aversion towards politics and for what some perceived as a tendency to avoid political controversy in his films. This dissertation examines the evolution of Rouch's filmmaking practice, looking, in particular, at the role that French imperial culture and the colonial situation played in shaping his ideas about both anthropology and film. Rouch's life and work took shape in dialogue with both France's imperial project and West Africa's struggle for independence from (neo)colonial power. In light of this, I argue that Rouch's story needs to be retold, as one that is not altogether unique, or even specifically French, but rather, as part of a narrative about Franco-African (post)colonial history. Unpacking this history helps to resituate Rouch's film work as part of a larger discussion about the complexities of the (post)colonial encounter, and about the role that visual artifacts can play in helping contemporary thinkers work through those complexities.
Before Truth: Memory, History and Nation in the Context of Truth and Reconciliation in Canada
Naomi Angel
The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established in June 2008, and focuses on the mistreatment and abuse of Aboriginal children in the Indian Residential School (IRS) system. The system, run by the government of Canada and the Presbyterian, Anglican, United and Catholic Churches, separated Aboriginal children from their families and placed them in the Indian Residential School system. Children at the schools were forbidden from speaking their traditional languages or practicing their cultural and religious beliefs. When parents objected to having their children taken, their children were often forcibly removed. Many former students have now spoken out about the physical, emotional and sexual abuse that took place at the schools. The IRS system is now recognized as one of the major factors in the attempted destruction of Aboriginal cultures, languages and communities in Canada. Through an analysis of archival photographs from the Indian Residential School system, testimony taken at TRC gatherings, and popular representations of the IRS legacy in media and literature, this dissertation focuses on the complicated terrain of reconciliation in Canada. In particular, I concentrate on how reconciliation influences and is influenced by 1) understandings of Canadian nationhood, 2) the ways in which visibility and invisibility are negotiated through truth commissions, and 3) the dialectical relationship between remembering and forgetting. To discuss these three themes, I focus on the cultural dynamics and various mediated forms (performance, photography, artwork) involved in the representation of the Indian Residential School legacy. My project seeks to understand the normative orders of remembrance as dictated through the IRS TRC, and the ways in which individuals and communities take up/negotiate/and push back against these imperatives. By framing reconciliation as a way of seeing, I focus on the ways in which reconciliation is mediated through visual culture.
Book Typography and the Challenge to Linear Thought
Katherine Brideau
This is a shape-based study of typography as a medium. The analysis herein focuses on the structure, and to a lesser extent the infrastructure, of one of our most omnipresent yet overlooked media. Typographical shapes have been neglected by works in media studies that address "print media" and the threat of "digital media," and also by design fields that study the semiotic, socio-historical, or classificatory sides of typography. In contrast, I maintain that it is shape that most notably set the typographical medium apart from handwriting, and also that that which is essential to typography is its visuality, not the linguistic function to which it is often put. The motivation for this project is epistemological. Media philosopher Vilém Flusser argues that when we lack immediate access to an object, knowing that object requires we learn to read media. Building on his work, this project assumes an epistemological necessity to study the media we use to record, store, and communicate ideas. It explores how the structure of typography influences the structures of our daily thought. However, typography makes this structural analysis challenging, because of an inherent tension between typography's visuality and function--when we read type we most often fail to see type. In both practice and study, we ignore the visual thing before us, and instead look through typography at its linguistic, social, and symbolic functions. Both critiquing and bracketing these traditional function-focused studies of typography, this dissertation uses Flusser's concept of the techno-image and the model of the diagram, to propose a shape-based analysis of this medium. It identifies a series of features that come to the fore when one studies typography as shape, and it sketches out a diagrammatic analysis of eighteen character forms. The new typographical system proposed here highlights typography's technologies and its non-linear, quantized structure; and through the diagram it promotes typography as a functional visualization in which function no longer obscures visuality. This project presents an understanding of typography that better reflects its many details, an approach to media that stresses structure and infrastructure, and contributes to the study of visualization's role in knowledge production.
Digital Afterlives: From the Electronic Village to the Networked Estate
Tamara Kneese
Everyone with a web presence has the potential to live on as information. Today, numerous stories in the popular press examine the afterlives of social data, asking what happens to our online profiles, feeds, blogs, and accounts after we die? This dissertation traces the rise of digital estate planning, a new cultural field that organizes individuals' various online accounts and bequeaths control of these materials to designated kin members. I locate the origins of digital estate planning in the aftermath of the campus shootings at Virginia Tech in April 2007, when victims' loved ones petitioned Facebook to keep the profiles of those who were killed as virtual, interactive shrines. Virginia Tech was a particularly networked place, and the Blacksburg Electronic Village already shaped campus life. By connecting the valorization of Facebook pages to a longer history of web memorialization practices that appeared during 1990s net culture, I show how Web 2.0 logics about user-generated content and collaboration enabled profiles to become valuable objects worthy of preservation. Based on qualitative interviews with digital mourners and digital estate planning startup company founders alike, I discuss how Facebook memorialization precipitated the emergence of digital estate planning as a way of capturing what I call communicative traces, or the electronic ephemera people constantly create over a dense ecology of interfaces, platforms, and devices. In aggregate, communicative traces are speculatively valuable because of their connection to data mining as well as their potential to become meaningful heirlooms transferred across generations. Some digital estate planning websites are tied to transhumanism, a movement that promises immortality by uploading human consciousness into computers, thus connecting mundane actuarial practices to loftier techno-utopian goals. For surviving kin members, digital remains are complicated by the burdens of caring for them, which requires physical infrastructures, perpetual upkeep, and affective labor. Do we have obligations to digital souls, and what are the ethical, legal, emotional, and material implications of this kind of afterlife?
Divination Engines: A Media History of Text Prediction
Xiaochang Li
This dissertation examines the historical development of text prediction technologies and their role in the rise of so-called “big data” and machine learning. Historically, efforts to grapple with text computationally have played a pivotal yet largely unexamined role in both the technical development and popular imagination of computing, artificial intelligence, and data processing. In the present, predictive text systems continue to saturate our everyday experience, from the minute interventions of “autocomplete” and “autocorrect” software in our most mundane communications to the influence of text-mining as a core component for data analytics in areas such as business intelligence and public policy. Through archival research and original interviews, I map the discursive and material arrangements that brought language under the purview of data processing and the corresponding development of statistical techniques that today underwrite applications across diverse fields, generating financial models, genome sequences, and web search results alike. The pursuit of text prediction, I argue, prepared the conceptual terrain for predictive analytics as a distinct and pervasive form of knowledge work, where information could be unanchored from the demands of explanation. At the same time, it drove technical developments in natural language processing that were pivotal in making data “big,” transforming previously “unstructured” text into vast troves of computer-processable data used in modeling everything from cholera outbreaks to purchasing habits. Centering on two pivotal encounters between statistical modeling and text processing—first in speech recognition research beginning in the 1970s and then in text-mining in the 1990s—this project offers an account of how data processing became a means of not only transmitting, but also generating knowledge. By drawing out the history of its epistemic underpinnings, this research wrests data-driven analytics from the quarantine of technical inevitability, and highlights the sociotechnical arrangements in which such practices became not only technically feasible, but thinkable and desirable in the first place.
Far Corners of the Earth: A Media History of Logistics
Matthew Hockenberry
“Far Corners of the Earth” narrates the media history of logistics. In so doing, it follows the transformation of early forms of logistical media in order to historicize their impact on the development of decentralized manufacture and the arrangement of the productive apparatus over the prior two centuries. This argues for an understanding of logistics as a second-order operation, the optimization and encapsulation of networks already well understood. To this end, I examine the extent to which emergent mediators—sites like the warehouse, small shop, and factory; documents like the bill of lading, parts list, and catalogue—came to be inscribed within the pattern of production externalized by technologies of telecommunication like the telegraph, telephone, and telex. In developing these accounts, I consider how these mediators circulated between actors as they engaged in historic debates about the nature of production. By reading media forms like advertisements, pamphlets, and reports not only as functional documents, but as emblems and spokes-things reinforcing particular patterns of association, these forms emerge as the very mechanisms defining emergent practices of manufacture and trade. They become not only the raw material for new patterns of association, but often the very means through which those associations became durable. By leveraging manufacturing networks into pathways for product distribution, some early twentieth century companies were able to marshal vast numbers of suppliers as sources for other businesses. For the readers of their supply catalogues or owners of their order books, this promised a singular point of origin for material needs. The incarnation of modern production that has followed from these promises arose not, I argue, from some “logistics revolution,” but rather from the steady march of these communication technologies as they formed new assemblies of assembly. Through the work of the telecommunication and electrical industries—the companies of the Bell System, electrical manufacturers like Western Electric, and nascent computing concerns like IBM—the language of logistics has, I argue, become ingrained within the mechanisms of modern mediation.
Freud's Jaw and Other Lost Objects: Psychoanalysis and the Subjectivity of Survival
Lana Lin
This dissertation examines the psychic effects of cancer, in particular how cancer disrupts the security with which a body ordinarily feels coincident with the self. Using psychoanalytic theory and literary analysis of atypical pathographies, the study shows how cancer prompts a loss of feelings of unity, exposing the vulnerability of bodily integrity and agency. The thesis analyzes how three exemplary figures, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, poet Audre Lorde, and literary theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, grapple with life-threatening illness that is compounded with other violences to their identities, such as racism and homophobia. Cancer's destruction demands from each a creative response that mediates their relationship to morbidity and mortality. Freud's sixteen-year ordeal with a prosthetic jaw, the result of oral cancer, demonstrates the powers and failures of a prosthetic object in warding off physical and psychic fragmentation. Lorde's life writing reveals how losing a breast to cancer recapitulates the loss of the original "first object," the maternal breast, and the reassurance of wholeness and protection that it promises. Drawing on Lorde's critique of breast prostheses, I interpret the social pressure to reconstruct the absent breast as fetishistic. Sedgwick's memoir and breast cancer advice column function as explicitly reparative projects that seek to come to terms with impending death by disseminating a public discourse of love and pedagogy. I conclude by interrogating reparative efforts at the rival Freud Museums. In London, where Freud fled to "die in freedom," the analyst's possessions are mobilized to symbolically defy his death, while in Vienna, photographs taken prior to Freud's exile are recruited to compensate for the Museum's material and historical losses. Affliction has the capacity to uncover knowledge that is typically repressed in quotidian existence, for instance, awareness of death's immanence in life. Psychoanalytic intervention clarifies problems that physical trauma can pose, which cut across the tenuous divide between the conscious and unconscious. I argue that the habitual threat to life forces the unconscious to become conscious, a process that is disconcertingly destabilizing and itself divisive. However, the prospect of imminent destruction paradoxically incites a creativity that I suggest is a requisite albeit inadequate reparative endeavor.
Homework and the Bedroom-Study: Work, Leisure and Communication Technology
Elizabeth Patton
(Home)work and the Bedroom-Study: Work, Leisure and Communication Technology, investigates the myth of the bedroom as a space of sex and privacy and the disruption of the myth through the introduction of communication technology. This project examines the bedroom as a site of work, although it is commonly associated with modern notions of what constitutes the private sphere. Privacy has historically been reflected in the separation of home and work, the private and public spheres, respectively. However, as I argue, the bedroom has always been a space where the line between public and private is blurred. This research examines representations of the bedroom (and its co-evolution with the study/home office) to argue that the bedroom has always been a space of work within the system of capitalism. Within the home, the bedroom is a key site for this intersection of leisure and work. In examining the bedroom as a social space, this project reveals how representations in popular culture of the bedroom depict persistent and shifting American ideologies about family life, class, gender, and the relationship between work and leisure and potentially challenges them. Furthermore, this research reveals how the production and design of the hybrid bedroom-study have helped alter and consequently reveal transformations in the meaning of leisure and work life. That practices of the bedroom-study reveal how media and communication technologies have transformed social and labor relations within and outside the home by undoing spatial divisions between the sites of leisure (formerly coded as unproductive by disregarding unpaid labor) and sites of work/labor. This research contributes to the interdisciplinary areas of cultural studies, communication and media studies by combining the social history of the bedroom and media studies to understand the influence of long-term social processes on the present and to determine connections between media, space, technological development, and structures of power. Specifically, this research examines the social organization of space as a site of ideological meaning, where markers of difference such as class and gender are contested, negotiated, and transformed, and the role of communication technologies in those processes.
Humanity's Publics: NGOs, Journalism, and the International Public Sphere
Matthew Powers
As legacy news outlets slash foreign news budgets, international NGOs have been discussed as sources of both promise and caution with respect to the future of foreign news - for journalists, for advocates and for citizens. To optimists, NGOs provide original, insightful reporting from neglected areas of the world. To skeptics, the influence of such groups augurs a worrisome conflation of the lines between advocacy and journalism, with deleterious consequences befalling both parties. This dissertation tests these competing claims by asking what the information work of NGOs is, what types of news coverage they support and whether NGOs expand or reinforce established patterns of international news attention. The dissertation puts forward three primary findings. First, NGO information work is neither singular nor shaped entirely by the preferences of the news media. Instead, both NGOs and news media are internally differentiated between elite and general public sectors and the international differentiations correspond to different relations across sectors - making interactions between elite-oriented NGOs and the prestige press much more likely than interactions, and vice versa. Second, different relationships between NGOs and news outlets shape different types of news coverage, including a policy/elite set of discussions conducted in the prestige press and oriented towards high-level decision-making; and also a discourse of donation and charity in search of potential donors. Third, the capacity of NGOs to live up to their stated missions of raising awareness of neglected parts of the world depends on where they seek publicity. A group's capacity to bring countries from outside the media spotlight into it is most likely to occur in the prestige press, not the broadcast media. The dissertation concludes by evaluating the normative implications of the research findings. If one sees the role of public communication as mediating between experts, the data provide room of cautious optimism. NGOs that align with the prestige press constitute a modest expansion of elites and allow for civil society perspectives to be articulated in elite discussions. If, however, one sees the role of NGOs as raising general public awareness of issues outside the media spotlight, the space for optimism diminishes greatly.
Image Objects: An Archaeology of 3D Computer Graphics, 1965-1979
Jacob Gaboury
Image Objects: An Archaeology of 3D Computer Graphics, 1965-1979 explores the early history of 3D computer graphics and visualization with a focus on the pioneering research center at the University of Utah. The University of Utah is one of the most significant sites in the history of computing, but has been largely neglected by historians and digital media scholars alike. From 1965-1979 almost all fundamental principals of modern computer graphics were developed by Utah graduates and faculty, many of whom went on to found some of the most important research and technical organizations of the past fifty years, including Adobe, Pixar, Netscape, and Atari. The project begins with this history, but looks to pull apart familiar narratives of invention and innovation by engaging the challenges and failures of early research into computer visualization. As such the project is organized around a set of technical and cultural objects of particular significance to the early history of graphics. Chapter One introduces the project and its research site and the University of Utah, discussing methods, archives, and the history of the Utah program. Chapter Two offers a meditation on questions of vision and visibility, structured around the development of the "hidden surface algorithm" for graphical display from 1965-1969. Chapter Three offers an analysis of memory and materiality through the lens of early graphics hardware, with a focus on the development of the first commercial framebuffer in 1973. Chapter Four investigates objects and ontology through an analysis of the "Utah Teapot", a famous graphical object standard developed in 1974 and used widely in contemporary software, film, and research demonstrations. Finally, Chapter Five offers an analysis of language and text through an exploration of the object-oriented paradigm first conceived by Alan Kay at the University of Utah. By looking to the first moments in which visual computing is made possible this project critiques popular narratives that view the digital image as an extension of earlier visual forms, arguing instead that the development of 3D interactive graphics marks the moment at which computer science develops a concern for ontology and the simulation of objects in the world. Ultimately the project seeks to make the familiar strange, offering a theory of the digital image that refuses a genealogy of the visible.
Listening Intently: Towards a Critical Media Theory of Ethical Listening
Jessica Feldman
This dissertation considers how advances in the surveillance of cell phone data, decentralized mobile networks, and vocal affective monitoring software are changing the ways in which listening exerts power and frames social and political possibilities. The low- and middle-level design limitations and broad implementations of these communication media frame cultural circumstances in terms of what kinds of emotional expressions and social relations are both perceptible and acceptable. The first chapter looks at recent and contemporary software that seeks to identify emotions in the acoustic voice by ignoring words and instead measuring quantifiable parameters of sound. The design of these algorithms shows a change in their conception of the human emotional system as they evolve from truth-telling to predictive machines. The chapter views this techno-psychological shift as the enactment of an emerging mode of surveillance, which serves the risk economy by claiming to predict subjects’ behavior by coding and categorizing their emotional motivations. The second chapter traces the development and global dissemination of cell phone surveillance programs. Here, the research draws on declassified white papers, interviews, and legal scholarship to make a “fear-based standing” argument against ex-ante mass surveillance, showing how the capture and storage of real-time communications can cause low-level psychological trauma, and how the chilling effect obstructs political progress and experimentation. The third chapter considers non-hierarchical models for listening, consensus, and community governance, as practiced in the “movements of the squares”, together with a handful of emerging, but marginally adopted, circumvention apps and peer-to- peer networking tools that these movements developed in order to overcome blocking and surveillance. It concludes that these social movements experimented with autonomous zones of horizontal connectivity, but failed to sustain themselves in part because of a lack of resilient communications infrastructures to mirror and facilitate their politics. The fourth chapter is a whitepaper outlining the requirements elicitation for the amidst project, an ad-hoc peer-to- peer decentralized network for mobile devices, which is a collaboration between the author and three engineers. This project proposes a remedy to the critiques of surveillance, blocking, and infrastructural weakness elucidated throughout previous chapters.
Retreat: Hurricane Sandy, Home Buyouts, and the Future of Coastal Cities
Elizabeth Koslov
This dissertation explores the social and cultural dimensions of urban climate change adaptation through an ethnographic study of “managed retreat.” As storms grow stronger and sea levels rise, one response is to move away from certain places entirely, to “retreat” by relocating people, clearing land, and restricting future development. Research in urban and environmental studies consistently shows the devastating impacts of forced relocation; however, climate change is now rendering some places increasingly vulnerable – even uninhabitable. What are the social, political, and cultural consequences of these changes? How do individuals and communities mediate bodies of knowledge about climate change, risk, and vulnerability in ways that are in tension with government policies meant to alleviate those risks? Who decides when it is time to retreat, and how does this form of collective movement reshape the urban landscape and everyday life? While managed retreat is conventionally understood as a top-down process, this dissertation charts the rise of communities organizing from the bottom-up to enlist government support to move. It draws on fieldwork over four years in the New York City borough of Staten Island, where residents mobilized in favor of retreat after Hurricane Sandy, lobbying the government to buy out their damaged houses and return their neighborhoods to wetlands rather than rebuilding. It shows how this mobilization for retreat emerged and spread, analyzes the conflicting government responses to residents’ demands, and explores the fraught determination of which places are sufficiently at risk to be permanently un-built. Examining the paradoxical process of a community organizing to disperse itself, the dissertation argues that retreat is not the direct result of individual decisions or objective measures of imminent danger but rather is mediated by social and cultural dynamics, government policies, and contested technologies of representing risk. Understanding the lived experience of retreat on Staten Island, where moving away from the waterfront came to mean, for many, an empowering act of personal sacrifice for the greater good, but was ultimately only possible for a select few, lends insight into the complexities of responding to climate change in ways that are both environmentally sustainable and socially just.
That Signal Feeling: Emotion and Interaction Design from Smartphones to the "Anxious Seat"
Charles Luke Stark
This dissertation examines how computational interaction design has been influenced by theories of emotion drawn from the psychological sciences, and argues that the contemporary field of interaction design would be impossible without the developments in psychology that allowed human emotions to be understood as orderable and classifiable. Interaction design, or the process by which digital media are created and modified for human use, has grappled with theories of human emotion since its inception in the early 1980s. The project examines how the longer histories of psychology and psychiatry have changed conceptualizations of emotion in relation to cognition and behavior, and how shifts in these theories have shaped the development of a burgeoning array of digital tools for tracking and managing human emotions. Examining the continuum of humans and machines desired and configured by individuals throughout this history, the project explores how these subject identities, both imagined and made, have reflected broader changes in the exercise of social power and authority. The research draws on materials from several archives, including newspaper reports; the published works and archival materials of psychologists and computer science researchers; materials from the West Coast Computer Faire tradeshow in the late 1970s; interviews with designers; and psychological texts and textbooks. Alongside a design assessment of smartphone apps for mood tracking grounded in Values in Design (VID) scholarship, the project deploys historical, philosophical, and qualitative methods, including close reading and discursive and thematic analysis. The key mechanism for understanding emotion's role in digital media design is the drive to make human feelings both technically ordinal and scalable. Through these conceptual mechanisms, human feelings have become increasingly classifiable not only horizontally as different categorical types, but also hierarchically in ways that differentiate and assign value to the emotions and moods of individuals in relation to a larger mass of data. Accomplished through both natural and symbolic language, these mechanisms combine qualitative and quantitative modes of classification, enabling sociotechnical phenomena ranging from personal applications for digital mood tracking to the analysis of emotional "Big Data" by social media platforms.