Media & Paranoia

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With the rise of digital media, a shift from a mass-media logic to a social-media logic has taken place. As a consequence, the public sphere, previously mediated by mass media, has dissolved into fragmentary, networked publics. Attempts to compensate for this erosion, both on the individual as well as the cultural level, have ultimately given rise to paranoid ideas, as can be seen from recent debates over Big Data and the Internet of Things, which are often characterised by the fear that human subjects will dissipate in a world of algorithmic circuits. As a tool of diagnosis, paranoia offers a framework for analysing the cultural transformation caused by massively distributed systems of computing resources, data generation, and networking devices. A 'paranoid thinking machine' ultimately allows to focus on the growing tensions between an open society and homophilic tendencies of digital media, which work by segmenting people to closed sets of interests, political views, or sexual orientation. As a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Global Emergent Media Lab at Concordia University, he will examine the reciprocal relationship between paranoia and media in order to better understand sociopsychological aspects that have emerged in the last three decades through the engagement with digital media. Paranoia, in this regard, is understood as a significant and long-standing mode of knowledge and interpretation throughout media history. The question of how the public sphere is culturally, socially, and technologically shaped has interested media scholars from the beginning. However, the question 'Who speaks', central for the analysis of paranoia, becomes paramount in a time, when racist bots (Microsoft), dreaming networks (Google), and self-learning algorithms (Facebook) set the tone of our everyday media life. In his research project, he takes up both historical and recent analysis around media and paranoia and extend them by current debates about an increasingly data-driven and networked public sphere.