Digital tendencies: intuition, algorithmic thought and new social movements

ABSTRACT

With the rise of new digital, smart and algorithmic technologies, it is claimed, ‘the human’ is being fundamentally re-mediated. For some, this is problematic: digitally colonised by capitalism at the level of gesture, affect and habit, it is argued, we are now increasingly politically disaffected. There are also, however, more hopeful socio-political visions: Michel Serres, for example, argues that, in delegating habits of mental processing and synthesising to digital technologies, millennials have honed cognitive conditions for a more ‘intuitive’ mode of being-in-the-world. While there is no necessary link between intuition and progressive social transformation, there are, this essay argues, significant resonances between the ‘intuitive digital subjects’ that Serres imagines and the logics and sensibilities of new networked social movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter. Vitally enabled by digital technologies, these activisms combine a tendency to oppose exploitation and oppression with a capacity to sense change as it is happening and thus remain radically open to alternative futures.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Joshua Barnett and Kevin DeLuca for inviting me to speak at the fantastic ‘Affect, Activism and New Media’ workshop at University of Utah in 2017, as well as for all of their editorial expertise and hard work in putting together this special issue. Thank you also to the other workshop participants, and particularly Chris Ingraham, Betsy Brunner, Donovan Connolly, Ben Burroughs and Kate Drazner Hoyt, all of whom read an earlier version of this paper and provided extremely helpful feedback. I am also indebted to Vince Miller and Marina Franchi for their valuable advice along the way and to the two external reviewers, who, alongside Joshua and Kevin, provided excellent suggestions for improving the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Carolyn Pedwell is Reader (Associate Professor) in Cultural Studies at the University of Kent (UK). She is the author of Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy (Palgrave, 2014) and Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice (Routledge, 2010). Her new book, Transforming Habit: Revolution, Routine and Social Change, is under contract with McGill-Queen’s University Press.

ORCID

Carolyn Pedwell http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4651-5766

Notes

1 While Thumbelina extends Serres’ rich analysis of the relationship between media technologies and the emergence of a new humanity in Hominescence (2001), his discussion here is more speculative and he provides little scholarly evidence to support his claims. Although he acknowledges that humans have always been ‘formatted by media’, Serres is interested in what might be distinctive about the forms of cognitive and embodied mediation that digital technologies, from social media to smart phones, entail. For more detailed empirical analyses of these techno-social dynamics, see Van Dijck 2013; Malin 2014; Twenge 2017.

2 For example, a study by Microsoft published by Time magazine in 2015 claimed, based on surveys of 2,000 participants in Canada and EEG analysis of the brain activity of 112 others, that ‘since the year 2000 (or about when the mobile revolution began) the average attention span dropped from 12 seconds to eight seconds’ (McSpadden, 2015).

3 See Durham Peters 2015.

4 The OED defines an algorithm as ‘a process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer’ (2018) – for example, the ‘promise to be able to identify the relations of AB in association with XY, where W is also present’ (Amoore 2013: 43).

5 Social and media scholars have been increasingly interested in how algorithmic technologies condition our very existence. This work addresses ‘the algorithmic imaginary’ constituted by how users ‘imagine, perceive and experience algorithms’ (Bucher 2017: 31) and ‘the extent to which people are aware that “our daily digital life is full of algorithmically selected content”’ (Eslami et al. 2015 cited in Bucher 2017: 31). But it also maps how the ‘algorithmic condition’ has generated ‘a practice-based shift in knowledge production and acquisition’, while producing ‘a logic’ which ‘alters the cultural and social reality it organises, through its procedural dynamics’ (Coleman et al. 2018: 9).

6 See, for example, Fuchs 2014; Benkler et al. 2018.

7 Serres does not draw directly on neuroscientific research to flesh out his claims. Indeed, it is not clear that mainstream neuroscientific frameworks would support the emergent intuitive subjectivity that he envisions. What is important to underscore here, however, is that Serres is working in speculative mode that aims to read dominant scientific claims against the grain to explore how they might work differently. As William Connolly writes in Neuropolitics, such a philosophy of science involves translating ‘findings into a perspective that is not entirely that of neuroscientists themselves’ (2002: 7). In this way, Thumbelina resonates with other critical engagements with contemporary neuroculture such as Tony Sampson’s The Assemblage Brain, which aims ‘not to uncover the mechanisms that determine the experience of conscious awareness but to politically grasp affective realms of sense making beyond the limits of locationist doctrines in philosophy and science’ (2016: xiv).

8 See also Durham Peters 2015.

9 For example, ‘18-year-old Houston native Tyler Atkins … posted a picture of himself after a jazz concert in his highs school, wearing a black tuxedo with his saxophone suspended from his neck strap. This was juxtaposed with a photo taken while filming a rap video with a friend, in which he is wearing a black T-shirt and a blue bandanna ties around his head and his finger is pointed at the camera’ (Bonilla and Rosa 2015: 8).