Abstract: This study advances our understanding of virtual reality (VR) as a tool for increasing both empathy and comprehension of microaggressions, using a unique intersectional dual-perspective approach. Through immersive VR video experiences, participants simultaneously experience and witness microaggressions focusing on racial assumptions about academic abilities. The VR video, developed and scripted by two undergraduate students of color, was recorded from two distinct perspectives: a Black student and an Asian American student, providing viewers an opportunity to witness differential treatment based on racial bias. We conducted a mixed-methods survey of 83 students who viewed the VR experience, focusing on self-reported affective and cognitive reactions. Findings indicate that the VR experience heightened participants’ understanding and empathy toward microaggressions. Notably, one perspective (the Asian American student), led to greater impact, suggesting the necessity for further exploration of VR experiences’ differential impacts and its implications for the intersection of VR and social justice.

Keywords: virtual reality, 360-degree video, microaggressions, racism, intersectionality.

Posthumanism fosters a more inclusive and less hierarchical approach to our entanglements with both human and non-human elements. Posthuman theory, particularly as articulated by N. Katherine Hayles and Rosi Braidotti, has long been influential in media and cultural studies. Ferrando (2020) argues: posthuman ethics invites us to follow on three related layers. First of all, as a post-humanism, it marks a shift: from universalism to perspectivism, from multiculturalism to pluralism and diversity. As a postanthropocentrism, it induces a change of strategy: from human agency to agential networks, from technology to eco-technology. As a postdualism, it requires an evolution of our awareness: from individuality to relationality, from theory to praxis. (147) This Special Issue of the Journal of Posthumanism therefore asks, how does such posthuman perspectivism, pluralism, agentiality, eco-technology, relationality, and praxis, apply to the future of media and cultural studies? How might we understand the very concept of future?

Since its release in late 2022, ChatGPT and subsequent generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools have raised a wide variety of questions and concerns for the field of technical communication: How will these tools be incorporated into professional settings? How might we appropriately integrate these tools into our research and teaching? In this review, we examine research published in 2023–2024 addressing these questions (N = 28). Overall, we find preliminary evidence that GAI tools can positively impact student writing and assessment; they also have the potential to assist with some aspects of academic and medical research and writing. However, there are concerns about their reliability and the ethical conundrums raised when they are used inappropriately or when their outputs cannot be distinguished from humans. More research is needed for evidence-based teaching and research strategies as well as policies guiding ethical use. We offer suggestions for new research avenues and methods.

This paper scrutinizes the micropolitical fascism latent in social media platforms’ algorithmic designs, which, according to Deleuze & Guattari (2009) and Crano (2022), foster desires for uniformity and control that may escalate into authoritarianism, threatening democracy and free speech. It considers the paradoxical nature of social media in enhancing connectivity while potentially inducing loneliness, an emotional state Arendt links to fascism, and their role in amplifying negative emotions, spreading disinformation, and conspiracy theories, such as QAnon. Delving into the mechanics of such designs, the paper leverages a monist informational ontology to dissect subjectivation processes and envisage overcoming these microfascist inclinations. It suggests a radical redesign of social media platforms that eschews analytics-driven narratives in favor of fostering joyful affect and novel subjectivities. This reimagining aims to detach social media storytelling from analytics and data exploitation, promoting a posthuman model for platform design that resists the generation of microfascist desires.

Abstract

Social media platforms have received increasingly bad press coverage over the course of the last decade for everything from problematic uses of algorithms to the ability of authoritarian regimes to leverage them as a way to impact elections. Unfortunately, this emphasis on critique, though justified, has led to a paranoid form of thinking in which many understand that such risks exist, but lack a technical grasp of how such platforms function. We argue that platform literacy should be a foundational aspect of a university education, as it is vital to understanding how to best apply one’s agency, especially as part of an engaged citizenry in an increasingly digitized world.

In developing the concept of assemblages, Gilles Deleuze draws at least some inspiration from Gilbert Simondon’s concept of information. While his acknowledgement of Simondon’s influence is almost entirely positive, Deleuze explicitly distances himself from the concept of information in order to avoid its link to the field of cybernetics. However, a Deleuzian informational ontology could instead be leveraged as an alternative to cybernetics. Drawing on the Spinozan link between the work of Deleuze and Simondon, it is possible to develop a hybrid informational ontology. This system can not only offer a different approach to information, data and technology than the essentialist concept of information embraced by cybernetics, but also aligns well with recent research in the biological sciences that has disrupted a long-held concept of individuals as entirely separate and autonomous. Shifting away from the Platonic Form to a Deleuzian/Simondonian in-formation furthers the post-human project aimed at understanding processes of subjectivation at multiple scales, including the micro (biome) and macro (city, population, planet). 

In their article, “BreadTube Rising: How Modern Creators Use Cultural Formats to Spread Countercultural Ideology,” J.J. Sylvia IV and Kyle Moody analyze the rise of BreadTube. Scholars have argued that YouTube’s algorithms lead to greater radicalization (Ribeiro et al.) and bad actors have weaponized algorithms to draw users into conspiracies (boyd, What Hath We Wrought?). This article adds to this by linking these practices to the commodification of social media that spread misinformation as adaptations of socially and rhetorically mediated technologies. It analyzes how the economics of YouTube and other platforms demand that user-generated content fit within paradigms of culture and economics. This ideological connection between conspiratorial thinking and economic incentives produced leftist and Marxist counter-narratives. The authors argue that the rise of BreadTube (Kuznetsov and Ismangil; Maddox and Creech) addresses this radicalization by re-deploying the mass-education model using the tenets of capitalism via normalized practices of YouTube algorithms to create pro-socialist and anti-right-wing content.

In connection with emerging scholarship in the digital humanities, media genealogy, and informational ontology, this paper begins the process of articulating a posthuman approach to media studies. Specifically, this project sheds new light on how posthuman ethics, ontology, and epistemology can be applied in order to develop new methodologies for media studies. Each of these approaches builds upon the foundation of an informational ontology, which avoids the necessity for pre-existing subjects that transmit messages to one another within a cybernetic paradigm. Instead, a posthuman paradigm explores methods that include counter-actualization, modulation, and counter-memory. Posthuman media studies emphasizes the need for experimentation in developing new processes of subjectivation and embraces an affirmative posthuman nomadic ethical subjectivity, linking true critique to true creation.

Widespread access to the internet and increasingly powerful computing has facilitated unprecedented change in our world. Perhaps no moment better captures this change than during the spring 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, when governments across the globe asked citizens to stay home and corporations encouraged or mandated that employees work from home, leveraging digital technology to maintain social connections and perform jobs typically done in person. Only a generation ago, this type of quarantine might have been more destabilizing. Much like the printing press, which facilitated a shift toward print culture and expanded access to information and ideas in unprecedented ways, the technologies of the digital frontier are typically understood to be a force of good in the world: democratizing societies through open access, connecting people across continents, and automating once-difficult jobs. But the emerging digital culture, which is constantly and rapidly shifting, also presents challenges. Tools that were initially used to support democratic practices have now been weaponized by autocratic governments. Uncompromising partisanship and nationalism are on the rise. The world is facing wicked problems such as climate change that can only be solved through sustained and collaborative actions across the globe. Understanding these challenges requires us to both connect and cross communities, countries, and campuses.

This paper explores how the concepts of information and technics have been leveraged differently by a variety of philosophical and epistemological frameworks over time. Using the Foucauldian methodology of genealogical historiography, it analyzes how the use of these concepts have impacted the way we understand the world and what we can know about that world. As these concepts are so ingrained in contemporary technologies of the information age, understanding how these concepts have changed over time can help make clearer how they continue to impact our processes of subjectivation. Analysis reveals that the predominant understanding of information and technics today is based on a cybernetic approach that conceptualizes information as a resource. However, this analysis also reveals that Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of technics resonates with that of the Sophists, offering an opportunity to rethink contemporary conceptualizations of information and technics in a way that connects to posthuman philosophic systems that afford new approaches to communication and media studies.

As COVID-19 spreads across the globe, new technologies are being leveraged to enforce social distancing requirements. I explore social distancing through the theoretical lens of Michel Foucault’s biopolitics, with an emphasis on recognizing unauthorized movement and controlling circulation. Although reporting and widely shared data visualizations about COVID-19 have made many people newly aware that their movements are being tracked and surveilled, governments are already implementing new measures such as geofencing and artificial intelligence (AI)–based facial recognition to facilitate the enforcement of social distancing. The tracking of COVID-19 spread and social distancing behaviors of the public has made more visible the practices of biopolitics but also generated new opportunities for even greater surveillance and control. The current moment offers an opportunity to shift public perceptions about data surveillance, technological control, and the racial disparities of biopower, much in the same way that public perceptions around social media shifted during and after the Arab Spring. How we collectively respond to these biopolitical processes will, in part, determine how such power relations are articulated in the future.

This article further develops a methodological approach to media genealogy that extends the methods of media archaeology by adding the concept of processes of subjectivation and experimental and artistic interventions. This begins with an analysis of how the work of scholars such as Foucault, Stiegler, and Kittler aligns with media archaeology practices in terms of discourse networks. Next, I consider how Foucault’s lectures from the Collège de France can be used to extend current media archaeology practices into a genealogical method. After surveying how recent work in several disciplines might match up with such a genealogical approach, the work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Anne Sauvagnargues is used to develop a genealogical method that emphasizes experimental processes of subjectivation.

Abstract

Mark Andrejevic, associate professor at Pomona College, and J. J. Sylvia IV, PhD student in the Communication Rhetoric and Digital Media Program at North Carolina State University, discuss the impact of the neo-materialist turn for media studies and the importance of critiquing surveillance through the theoretical framework of power in addition to that of privacy. Although the decline of symbolic efficiency, brought on at least in part by the rise of big data, seems to disrupt the link that Michel Foucault draws between power and knowledge, Andrejevic considers possibilities for reimagining the knowledge structures associated with big data’s infrastructure.

Abstract

Conclusion: