Communication Media and Space Suits for Modernity: An immunological reading of media addiction
Communication Media and Space Suits for Modernity: An immunological reading of media addiction

Summary/Abstract: This paper approaches media addiction as a key term in modernity’s relationship with technology, as well as an expression of a tense yet inseparable bond between technology and notions of life and humanity. Immunity and contagion, as Donna Haraway demonstrates, are an intrinsic part of the dialectics of Western politics,expressing its reliance on the recognition and misrecognition of self and other, of normal and pathological (Haraway 1991, 204). Media and technology are no strangers to the powers exerted by these metaphors, which not only reinforce the otherness of technology in the face of an imaginary of what counts as human, but also reinscribe ‘proper’ life as something that must be distinctly unaffected by media. In theory as well as practice, notions of immunity and contagion are used to identify and critique that which is seen as harmful and external to the self, the community, the social in general. But would it be possible to reverse the negative connotations of the immunity/contagion figuration, and rework media addiction in such a way that it no longer relies on practices of exclusion, isolation and ontological separation of media and their users?

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