Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive
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Book Overview
Blog Theory develops a critical theory of contemporary media. Advancing her account of communicative capitalism, Jodi Dean explores how new media practices like blogging, friending, and texting capture their users in networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance. Her wide-ranging and theoretically rich analysis extends from her personal experiences as a blogger, through media histories, to newly emerging social network platforms and applications. Dean details the myriad ways networked media undermine oppositional politics by inducing users to highlight communication and awareness and neglect organization and revolt.
Set against the background of the economic crisis wrought by neoliberalism, the book defends the provocative thesis that complex networks are best understood via the psychoanalytic notion of the drives. The 'newness' of new media is less a matter of technology than of the capture of political ideals and energies in ever-intensifying circuits of exploitation and submission. Dean contends that reading networks in terms of the drives reveals their real, human dimension in the feelings and affects that make our submission automatic, obvious, and fun.
A polemic against Web 2.0 and participatory media fantasies, Blog Theory exposes our underlying entrapment in the media net.
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