[node-l] Studies in Evil Media @ UEL CCSR

[Matthew Fuller]

University of East London School of Humanities and Social Sciences and 
Centre for Cultural Studies Research present

Studies in Evil Media

October 7th 2009


14:00-17:00
University of East London
Docklands Campus
(Cyprus DLR - the station is literally at the campus)
Room EB.3.19 (third floor, main building, turn left on entering main 
square from station)
All Welcome


Matthew Fuller (Goldsmiths: Author of Media Ecologies)
& Andrew Goffey (Middlesex University: Translator of Isabelle  Stengers’ 
Capitalist Sorcery)

Evil Media

Evil Media updates Machiavelli's 'The Prince' for the era of networked 
digital media and corporate governance. Addressing a range of objects, 
practices, techniques and knowledges traditionally excluded from the 
purview of media studies, it explores the sophistry that is quite 
literally embodied by the sophisticated technologies of the knowledge 
economy. 'Evil' explicitly references the antagonistic ethical and  moral 
quality that an epoch gorging itself on progress has sought  unsuccessfully 
to banish; and so Evil Media offers a useful prospectus  of the ruses, 
subterfuges, deception, manipulation and trickery which  media technics 
make possible and effective.  By adopting a perspective  which counters the 
idealistic, liberal, assumptions encoded within the  notion of 
representation or facilitation and enabling, it aims to re- situate the 
study of media within a framework which includes forms of  media that are 
'below the radar' of most contemporary theory and  actively occluded by the 
framework of representation.  Here, media do  not so much tell us about 
things, but are themselves things that  exhibit behaviours.


Tony Sampson (University of East London: Author of Virality:Contagion 
Theory in the Age of Networks)

New Media Hypnosis

Drawing on the microsociology of Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904), and a  number 
of other "Tardean scholars", this presentation approaches the  idea that 
new media landscapes function increasingly as a mode of  hypnotic mass 
persuasion. Significantly, this is not a sociological  perspective that 
concerns itself with rational, self-contained  individuals, or indeed 
society as a whole, but rather responds to what  one viral marketer 
(following a decidedly similar trajectory to Tarde)  recently referred to 
as 'the invisible currents that run
between and among consumers'. These 'invisible currents', affective 
contagions (Thrift, 2007), or the radiation of imitation- suggestibility, 
as Tarde termed it, work at the intersections between  attention 
inattention, cognition/noncognition, social/biological  domains and 
consciousness/unconsciousness.
The talk focuses on examples taken from the new science of 
networks,epidemiology, HCI, emotional design, affective computing, eye 
tracking technology, neuromarketing and evil media studies.


Respondent: Paul Gormley
(University of East London: Author of The New Brutality Film: Race and 
Affect in Contemporary American Cinema)



_________________________________
Dr. Matthew Fuller
David Gee Reader in Digital Media

Centre for Cultural Studies
Goldsmiths College
University of London
New Cross
London SE14 6NW

e: m.fuller at gold.ac.uk
t: +44 (0)20 7919 7206
w: http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/cultural-studies/staff/m-fuller.php