BSA Annual Conference 2021: ‘Remaking the Future’, ‘The Viral Society: Covid-19 and Digital Computational Media’
The BSA 70th Anniversary Conference: ‘Remaking the Future’
Date: 13-15 April, 2021
Location: virtual conference
Session: Science, Technology and Digital Studies 1
April 13, 2021, 11.45-1pm
‘The Viral Society: Covid-19 and Digital Computational Media’
Tomoko Tamari
Abstract
The paper explores the implication of the Covid-19 pandemic for social life through the use of digital computational media. The ‘virus’ not only invades organic human bodies, but also has consequences for digital computer environments. Fear and uncertainty generated by the virus forces people to access online sources more frequently to obtain information. The increasing numbers of people accessing digital media provides not only the government, but also commercial companies, with greater opportunities for data-mining and establishing more sophisticated algorithmic systems. This suggests that dependence on digital technology becomes a more visible part of everyday life. This raises the question of what happens to human social life, when it becomes more dependent on digital computational media with algorithmic reasoning. To address this question, the paper draws on Hayles’s notion of ‘cognitive assemblage’ which explains complex interactions between human and nonhuman cognizers, and Stiegler’s notion of pharmakon which reflects the paradoxical double meanings: cure and poison, which operates in all digital technical devices. The pharmakon is clear in digital computerization, the latest aspect of the externalization of human knowledge, in which the reliance on algorithmic calculations and code result in what Stiegler refers to as ‘symbolic misery’. Consequently, the paper focuses on the risk of human alienation arising from the extension of contemporary digital computational media, and the difficulties of establishing an ethics and politics of digital technology in order to raise questions of digital media literacy in the emerging viral society.