Traveling Lecture Series (TLS)

Contemporary fiction increasingly defines itself in relation to digital media, platforms, and infrastructures. References to TikTok, Tumblr, YouTube, Instagram, and Co. have become pervasive features of the intermedial aesthetics of contemporary novels. Novels, this talk argues, offer a particularly potent space for negotiating the formal, socio-political, and affective affordances of digital media. They typically focus on the specific and particular: on individuals searching for digital connections, scrolling through social media, swiping on dating apps, exchanging messages, or becoming immersed in TikTok videos. In doing so, they portray how selves, attachments, intimacies, and affects are implicated in and shaped by digital infrastructures. Conveying what might be termed a sense of 'digital experientiality', novels foreground the embodied and situated dimensions of digital experience, rendering concrete the ways in which digital media become entangled with subject formation and the social relations in which subjects are embedded. Increasingly, novels draw attention to the affects that emerge in and through such experiences. Irritation, anxiety, embarrassment and shame, humiliation, envy, alienation, and boredom are among the negative affects novels such as Raven Leilani's Luster, Teju Cole's Tremor and Onyi Nwabineli's Allow Me to Introduce Myself explore as they zoom in on the digital practices of their protagonists.

How, the talk asks, do these negative affects, understood not as merely psychological and individual responses but as relational, embodied, and socially as well as technologically produced, illuminate the ways in which we "become-with digital media" (Dinnen)? How do affects shape the ways in which digital technologies participate in the co-constitution of subjects and social relations? And, just as importantly, what do literary explorations of negative affect reveal about the novel's self-positioning in the postdigital age? How do contemporary novels negotiate their own position in relation to the ubiquity of digital media and their intoxicating capacities for connection, participation, and immersion?

My talk draws on contemporary Anglophone novels, affect studies, and critical internet studies to explore these questions, seeking to shed light on the novel's self-ascribed role as a regulatory medium. The novel's regulatory function lies not in providing a solution to the challenges and ambivalences digital media entail under conditions of surveillance capitalism and filter bubbles; rather, it lies in the novel's mediating capacity to work through the ugly feelings, affective contradictions and vulnerabilities generated by digital experiences.

« Hide description

In this talk, I investigate social chatbots via the case study of character.ai, one of the world's largest social chatbot platforms. Using the results of my empirical study, I show how users of character.ai are often concerned with the quality and ontological status of chatbots and that cognitive poetic and narratological models of character can be adapted to account for these user responses. I argue that social chatbots epitomise the postdigital in their blurring of the digital and non-digital.

« Hide description

The term "post-digital" was coined by artists a quarter century ago to describe specific attitudes towards digital media and technology in art practices, as well as a broader social and cultural mindset toward digital technologies. Over the past decade, "post-digital" has spread to the humanities and social sciences, where it seems to be used and defined in a diversity of ways. In my talk, I will revisit the term's origins, discuss its continued usefulness in 2026 — spoiler: probably not for the arts — and explore its revisionist potential for new media studies (somewhat comparable to how post-structuralism related to structuralism and second-order cybernetics to cybernetics).

« Hide description