Grant Bollmer

Social media's connectivity is often thought to be a manifestation of human nature buried until now, revealed only through the diverse technologies of the participatory internet. Rather than embrace this view, Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection argues that the human nature revealed by social media imagines network technology and data as models for behavior online. Covering a wide range of historical and interdisciplinary subjects, Grant Bollmer examines the emergence of “the network” as a model for relation in the 1700s and 1800s and follows it through marginal, often forgotten articulations of technology, biology, economics, and the social. From this history, Bollmer examines contemporary controversies surrounding social media, extending out to the influence of network models on issues of critical theory, politics, popular science, and neoliberalism. By moving through the past and present of network media, Inhuman Networks demonstrates how contemporary network culture unintentionally repeats debates over the limits of Western modernity to provide an idealized future where “the human” is interchangeable with abstract, flowing data connected through well-managed, distributed networks.

“Part an archaeology of connectivity, part critical analysis of contemporary culture, Inhuman Networks offers an inspiring take for media studies. Grant Bollmer's rich, multi-layered book shows that social media does not just mediate but performs a subtle yet effective moral code: the networks prescribe senses of the self, community, value and direction. The so-called human exists only if it routes.” –  Jussi Parikka, Winchester School of Art, UK author of Digital Contagions (2007) and Insect Media (2010)

“Bollmer's Inhuman Networks represents the best of the cultural studies tradition of taking the object seriously, learning everything one can about it, putting it into historical and cultural contexts, and then rigorously critiquing it. Combining media archaeology and genealogy, Bollmer crafts critiques of the admonition to connect or be considered inhuman. However, he also challenges misguided calls for total refusal of connection, instead insisting we humans re-engage with practices of collectivity and commonality.” –  Robert W. Gehl, Associate Professor of Communication, University of Utah, USA, and author of Reverse Engineering Social Media

“Bollmer's Inhuman Networks issues a bold and welcome critique of social media's culture of connectivity. This accessible, provocative analysis of the “network” concept is shaped by network theorists predating the network society: anatomists deciphering the flow of bodily fluids, railroad conglomerates arguing about rail gauge, defenders of branch banking, and conspiracy theorists. Bollmer deftly shows how the conjunction of these early modern discourses of the network combine with contemporary digital technologies to forge “nodal citizenship,” a reduction of the human to an information node in a broader technological network. A must-read for anyone interested in communication, media studies, cultural theory, and political economy.” –  Damien Smith Pfister, Department of Communication, University of Maryland, USA and author of Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics

“Inhuman Networks masterfully exposes the stunted understandings and logical fallacies undergirding widespread economic and cultural assertions that unless we are connected through social media we are less than human. Bollmer convincingly argues that enlightenment understandings of “human nature” are being supplanted by neoliberal and normative narratives of networked communications as the way to finally achieve full humanity. Yet this is a disempowered form of “humanity” constituted through capital and data alone and ultimately less important than the inhuman(e) routers through which individuals “connect” in empowered and irrelevant ways.” –  Ken Hillis, Professor of Media and Technology Studies University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill USA

“As social media becomes more pervasive in many people's lives globally, the complex entanglement of the human and inhuman across practices, cultures, flows and networks are yet to being fully understood. Grant Bollmer's Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection offers a thorough and thought-provoking discussion of how we might re-imagine social media beyond a human-centric model bolstered by problematic metaphors around connection. From metaphors such as “networks” to “contagion”, Bollmer takes us on a fascinating journey in and around the messy relationality between technology, desire and humans. This book puts the complex human and beyond-human dimensions of social media in context historically and conceptually in ways that are both poetic and inspiring.” –  Larissa Hjorth, RMIT Distinguished Professor School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Australia

A major claim about virtual reality (VR) is that it can foster empathy through digital simulations. This article argues, however, that technologies intended to foster empathy merely presume to acknowledge the experience of another, but fail to do so in any meaningful way. With empathy, the experiential grounds upon which ethical and moral arguments are made require an essential transmissibility, and that which cannot be expressed in seemingly 'universal' terms cannot be acknowledged. This article makes its arguments through a discussion of VR as an 'empathy machine', and contextualizes empathy in digital media by suggesting it repeats not a psychological construct, but a concept derived from late 19th-century German aesthetic theory and its conceptualization of Einfühlung. It proposes radical compassion as an alternative to empathy, and suggests that empathy is a limiting and problematic concept that effaces another's experience unless it can be made sensible. Empathy machine refers to any attempt to make sensible to oneself the emotional experience of another via technology, often with the goal of inhabiting another body. This term has regularly been used to describe virtual reality (VR), as VR, at least ideally, permits one to see through another's eyes, embodying their experiences, thus 'empathising' with them. Empathy machines can also refer to various technological means for identifying subtle movements of the human face in order to create realistic digital models of facial expressions mapped to emotional states, which are used both in popular games and in the context of autism therapy (e.g. Kandalaft et al., 2012), often as a troubling method to 'cure' autism through VR-based avatars and simulations. Digital media are thus assumed to provoke an empathetic response from an individual while playing games, communicating within virtual worlds, and beyond – if these technologies are properly designed. But the specific association of VR with something called empathy, occurring throughout

Facebook presents itself as a tool in the service of humanism: it connects people through the sharing of information and experience. This article contests these assumptions about the innate humanness of Facebook’s connections through an examination of its information management and network architecture. It argues that Facebook depends on a number of radically different milieus expressed by way of different, competing conceptualizations of time that it does not or cannot negotiate. Consequentially, Facebook should not be imagined as a single network of human connectivity that will somehow realize newly identified human rights through technology. Facebook should be thought of as a multiplicity of incommensurate networks, not all of which can be brought into human experience. The time of infrastructure directs us to an uneven ‘social’ that emerges from the negotiation of multiple, often obscured forms of temporal difference, managed through multiple, often obscured systems of hardware and software that forever remain beyond the conscious experience of most Facebook users.

One of the most notable challenges to emerge from the materialist turn in media studies is the rejection of the “active audience” paradigm of British cultural studies. And yet, in spite of the increasing attention to materiality, many of the problems associated with the split between German media studies traditions and those derived from cultural studies persist today. While no longer concerned with representation, privilege is nonetheless often granted to the material agency of “real people” as that which shapes and determines the materiality of technology. This article is primarily a theoretical and methodological reflection on how materiality challenges—but sometimes relies on—long standing and often veiled traditions from cultural studies, especially as they move out of academic discussion and into the popular imaginary of social media and its “user-generated content.” I focus on some deliberate attempts at excluding materiality found in cultural studies’ history, arguing that an emphasis on the agency of “real people” can only happen through the deliberate erasure of the materiality of technology. Drawing on Ien Ang’s Desperately Seeking the Audience (1991), which argued that television “audiences” must themselves be understood as produced in relation to the demands and interests of broadcasting institutions, I suggest that digital media “audiences” are produced in relationship to the infrastructural power of servers, algorithms, and software. This demonstrates that any attempt to identify “human agency” must also look at how this agency is co-produced with and by technological materiality.

UNCORRECTED PROOF PLEASE CITE PUBLISHED VERSION

This essay argues for an alliance between media archaeology, the archaeological analysis of material culture, and the digital humanities. This alliance would be devoted towards understanding the materiality of hardware and the performativity of software, accounting for the past, present, and future of born-digital cultural artifacts that have no original medium beyond the computer. It claims that more attention needs to be given to the specific material conditions required to preserve and maintain digital storage, which is too often imagined as both ephemeral and everlasting. It provides a series of questions and provocations that would potentially be addressed by this alliance.

Forthcoming in 'Traffic: Media as Infrastructures and Cultural Practices,' Marion Näser-Lather and Christoph Neubert, editors (Leiden: Brill)

Many critiques of ‘post-Fordist’ forms of capitalism argue that the biological has been remade into an informational network, both discursively and materially. This chapter contextualizes these claims by examining how the human body – specifically the nerves and blood vessels – were imagined as a vital network that maintains the life of the body within the anatomy of the 18th and 19th century. The embodied networks of the 1700s and 1800s serve as a model for a kind of naturalistic traffic management that conflates the biological and the technological, a model that persists in contemporary discussions of ‘natural’ networked flows.

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A review of

Andrew Dubber
Radio in the Digital Age
Polity, Cambridge, 2013

Charles Ess
Digital Media Ethics, Second Edition
Polity, Cambridge, 2014

Graeme Kirkpatrick
Computer Games and the Social Imaginary
Polity, Cambridge, 2013

Dhiraj Murthy
Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age
Polity, Cambridge, 2013

Jill Walker Rettberg
Blogging, Second Edition
Polity, Cambridge, 2014

This essay examines affect and the limits of experience in the work of performance artist Marina Abramović. Abramović’s early performances play with the boundaries of pain’s transmission, emphasizing the social character of its expression and its use in constructing surfaces and margins. Recent works cast these limits aside in favour of a holistic understanding of affect, in which the space of performance produces sensible ontological affects that unite bodies. This shift in Abramović’s work mirrors debates surrounding the politics of affect in cultural theory and provides the grounding for The Marina Abramović Institute to train bodies to “properly” experience affect.

This essay juxtaposes the ontological variant of affect theorized by cultural theory with what Catherine Malabou terms the ‘new wounded’ – bodies defined by their inability to produce and experience specific neurological affects. Ontological affect theory positions the capacity of a body to affect and be affected as the foundation for relation both beyond and between individuals, often drawing on neuropsychology for the legitimation of its claims. The new wounded, however, exist as a form of life that cannot be acknowledged by these theories. The varied pathologies that comprise the new wounded are identified specifically by the inability to produce the affects that supposedly ground the ontology of relation. The first part of this essay examines how neuropsychology constructs and identifies the pathological other of the new wounded through discursive, medical and technological means. A body's capacity to experience affect is not something biologically given, but is instead produced through techniques that sort proper and improper bodies, defining the new wounded as less than fully human. The second part discusses the mobilization of neuropsychological norms in ontological affect theory. The turn to the biological in affect theory, often made in order to theorize a non-representational sphere of existence beyond the symbolic, relies on but cannot acknowledge the discursive and technological production of affective and affectless bodies in neuropsychology. The ontology of affect, consequentially, should be thought of as a normative political construct defined by the absent and erased other of the affectless body. I conclude by claiming that a politics of ontology must acknowledge how materialist and realist constructs of the ontological such as affect are inherently produced within and mobilized by historical contingencies, contexts and conjunctures.

This article examines cultural anxieties surrounding the life and death of online data. Through the examination of a wide range of discourses, including “lifestyle” news articles, online user comments, essays and books by novelists and engineers, and the websites of information management services, I argue that death online—defined as the persistence of informatic remainders after the death of the human user—reveals how networked data are constructed as both an authentic duplicate of identity and as a threat to personal identity that must be managed. Because humans are understood as finite and mortal, while data are immortal and everlasting, the “life” formed out of online data is understood as beyond any possible control of the user. With the death of the user, the perceived connection between the user and data is revealed as a contingency rather than a necessity. Information is produced as autonomous. It is nearly identical to yet separate from the user; it belongs to nobody except, perhaps, the network itself.

Why should we desire political connection? And what happens when connectivity becomes a prerequisite for entry into the political? This essay argues that the demand to connect comes with the normalization of a model of citizenship. In this model, individuals are compelled to properly manage network connections and information flows or else be rendered unworthy of inclusion in the social. Those who are marked as unable to manage connections are rendered subjects that must be excluded for the operation of the political. Current debates about social media and political action reduce democracy and the political to little more than the ‘freedom of speech’ and the associated ‘freedom to connect’. Through the examination of the controversy surrounding the blog ‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’, I claim that the current formation of social media demands the fixing of identity and a willingness to ‘transparently’ divulge all personal information to others. Disregarding the often tortuous negotiations of publicity and privacy necessary for the political action of marginal populations and identities, the demand to connect requires subjects to submit to a uniform ideal of openness. Those who refuse to agree to the demand to connect are rendered morally impoverished and undeserving of acknowledgement as citizens.

In recent years, ‘collective memory’ has been used to describe the organization of a group identity that either supplements or replaces identity categories. Despite the apparent emphasis on the ‘collective’, most theories of collective memory rely explicitly on ontological models derived from modes of thought that privilege the psychic memory of individuals rather than collective phenomena. This article sketches the beginnings of an ontological model for collective memory that defines collective memory as an active process via which collectivities are produced through embodied movements that serve to differentiate entities from a larger environment. While not the only form of movement, the article examines the role of material technologies in the shaping and transformation of embodied rituals, consequently transforming how collectives are produced through memory as embodied actions.

This essay argues that the contemporary foreclosure crisis should be understood through the articulation of citizenship and community with financial networks in American culture. Much of the populist outrage over the contemporary financial crisis is related to the massive amount of money bailing out financial service corporations and banks on “Wall Street” while little goes towards helping Americans on “Main Street.” However, the dominant discourse surrounding community, homeownership, and banking in the United States defines this opposition as an illusion. This essay traces the history of this articulation, first through how debt and citizenship have been understood historically, then through representations of community and banking that equate the two. I examine, first, the popular film "It’s a Wonderful Life" (1946), which defines community as an effect of banking policy and the liquidity of credit, and, second, the contemporary representation of banking as the locus of community. This discourse ideologically defines the role of citizenship as one in which community relations are defined as nothing other than networked flows of capital. The social network of a community is equated to the financial network of global capitalism. A good citizen is, consequently, defined as one who keeps capital flowing through their connectivity to banking and financial networks.