New Media and the Loss of Individual Sovereignty

Manahari Adhikari 1 *
More Detail
1 Northern Illinois University, USA
* Corresponding Author
Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies, Volume 6, Issue 3, pp. 121-133. https://doi.org/10.29333/ojcmt/2561
OPEN ACCESS   2085 Views   1132 Downloads   Published online: 26 Jul 2016
Download Full Text (PDF)

ABSTRACT

This article explores the impact of new media on authentic existence. It argues that technology has reshaped humanity in inconceivable ways, but it is taking away individual sovereignty by facilitating and enhancing power for regimes both democratic and dictatorial. With its design and sophistication that make it possible to listen in on, record, and funnel content produced in the digital realm to locations of power,new media may lead contemporary society towards an era of centralized control and coercion. The likelihood of new media being used as an instrument of power, a devicefor monitoring the masses, begets an atmosphere of fear, which compromises cognitive habits, inhibits the capacity to engage society on a critical level,and gives birth to a culture of singularity. With our ontology reconstituted by the technological and with our growing reliance on new media,we are losing our authenticity assovereign individuals.
Keywords: (in) authentic existence, identity, monkey mind, singularity, subjectivity, technoregime, and techno-totalitarianism

CITATION

Adhikari, M. (2016). New Media and the Loss of Individual Sovereignty. Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies, 6(3), 121-133. https://doi.org/10.29333/ojcmt/2561

REFERENCES

  • .Adams, Hazard. (1992). Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Press
  • Attali, Jacques. (1985). Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press
  • Barthes, Roland. (1973) 1976.The Pleasure of the Text. 1975. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd.
  • Bataille, Georges. (1992). “The Notion of Expenditure.” Critical Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Press.
  • Bogard, William. (1996). The Simulation of Surveillance: Hypercontrol in Telematic Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Boyd, Danah. (2008). “Why Youth Love Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life.” Youth, Identity, and Digital Media.Ed. David Buckingham. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Collin, Allan and Richard Halverson. (2009). Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America. Forward. John Brown. New York: Teachers College Press.
  • Day, Michael. (2000). “Teachers at the Crossroads: Evaluating Teaching in Electronic Environments.” Computers and Composition 17, 31-40.
  • Doheny-Farina, Stephen. (1996). The Wired Neighborhood. New Haven: Yale U Press.
  • Ellul, Jacques. (1954)1964.The Technological Society.Intro. Robert Merton. Trans. John Wilkinson. New York: Vintage.
  • Foucault, Michael. (1994). The Order of Things. New York: Vintage.
  • Foucault, Michael. (1994). Ethics Subjectivity and Truth.Ed. Paul Rainbow. Trans. Robert Hurley et.al New York: New Press.
  • Foucault, Michael. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-77. Ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Gordon et al. New York: Pantheon.
  • Hayles, Katherine. (2005). My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: U of Chicago Press.
  • Kristeva, Julia. (1980). Desire in Language.Ed. Leon S. Roudiez and Trans Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Kristeva, Julia. (1984). Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press.
  • Kurzweil, Ray. (2005). The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Viking.
  • Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits.(1977) 2007.Trans., Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton.
  • Richard Lanham. (2007). The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Losh, Elizabeth. (2009). “Hacking Aristotle: What is Digital Rhetoric?” Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time. Massachusetts: MIT Press.
  • Marwick, Alice E. (April 25, 2014). “In Defense of Getting Personal on Twitter.The Chronicle of Higher Education
  • Miller, Carolyn and Dawn Shepherd.(2004). “Blogging as Social Action.A Genre Analysis of the Weblog.” Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs.
  • Reid, Alexander. (2007). The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition. West Lafayette: Parlor Press.
  • Richards, Neil. (20 March 2015). “The Electronic Panoptican.”The Chronicle of Higher Education.
  • Robins, Kevin. (2000). “Cyberspace and the World We Live In.” Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment. Ed. Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows. London: Sage
  • Ruppert, Evelyn. (2011) “Population Objects: Interpassive Subjects.” Sociology45(2): 218-33
  • Sella, Marshall. (2000) “The Electronic Fishbowl.”New York Times Magazine.
  • Sullivan, Andrew. (2002). “The Blogging Revolution: Weblogs are to Words What Napster was to Music.”
  • Warnick, Barbara. (2007). Rhetoric Online. New York: Peter Lang.