| Summary: | This dissertation - entitled "Interstitial Dimensions: Anonymity, Asynchronicity, and Contemporary Media Culture" - is about the different ways users experience the social and emergent forms of subjectivity in online media. The focus is on media forms and cultures centered in Japan, but it is not explicitly about Japanese media or users of media in or from Japan. The horizon of interpretation is instead concepts such as anonymity, asynchronous experiences of time, and the ways that users watch, play, and communicate "as if" they were interacting in real time and experiencing media together. The question of being "between" different types of experience or representation is therefore at the front of how online media is analyzed. How do users recover disconnection as connectivity, such as asynchronous representations of time that requalify what "liveness" feels like? How does individual representation give way to aggregate forms of membership that allow for a distributed sense of subjectivity? In what ways do those trends correspond to actual world regimes of the social and contemporary affects? These are some of the questions this dissertation asks, posing them through the language of the interstitial: the experience of being between different nodes of identification, temporality, and spatial proximity. This experience of being between things is similarly met by an aesthetic of layers that overlap with one another, peel back to reveal new ways of seeing and looking, and cover things up, obscuring vision and access. What this dissertation argues is that online media cultures in and around Japan are entwined with a cultural logic and visual syntax of interstitiality that expresses ambivalence toward representation, media form and unity, and distinct experiences of time and space.
The interstitial is therefore part of the logic of how users learn how to interact with one another and contribute to emerging forms of subjectivity and public affect. In other words, the interstitial is not just about human-machine interfaces, but how cultural practices emerge through technology and how different users interact with one another in heavily mediated ways. Alongside related concepts such as anonymity and asynchronicity, the interstitial is best approached as part of the aesthetics of information society and network sociality. As with the network, the interstitial is deeply tied to a shift from individual forms of being to aggregate forms, and places the user in close proximity to archives of information. But it is also a way of representing those relationships, with distinct aesthetic forms and horizons of experience. Focusing on a limited number of case studies - the webforum 2channel, summary sites that collect information from social media, the video sharing website Nico nico, and online game media such as Demon's Souls - this dissertation investigates what it means and feels like to participate in a social organization of aggregate, deindividualized subjectivity. These are not necessarily dehumanizing forms of the social, but rather ones that can help to requalify what the experience of being human can look and feel like.
|
|---|
