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Leading media theorist Mark Hansen here explains one of the most important but elusive results of new digital technologies: the expansion of sensibility through micro-computational sensing and the anticipatory, future-directed operation of data-driven media. His thesis is that humans can no longer conceive of themselves as separate, autonomous subjects who consume media or engage with media objects. On the contrary, in a world where computational media directly shape our world without human intervention, our experience is shaped by media "primordially. "From social media and data-mining to passive sensing and environmental microsensors, twenty-first-century media remains largely inaccessible to perceptual consciousness. We move, therefore, through an expanded domain of sensibility that can be accessed only through the new technologies themselves. Hansen concludes that we are in the midst of a reengineering of human experience by way of computational data-gathering and analysis."
About the author
Mark B. N. Hansen is professor of literature and media arts and sciences at Duke University, coeditor of
Critical Terms for Media Studies, and the author of three books, including
Bodies in Code: Interfaces with New Media.
Summary
Even as media in myriad forms increasingly saturate our lives, we nonetheless tend to describe our relationship to it in terms from the twentieth century: we are consumers of media, choosing to engage with it. The author shows that media is no longer separate from us but has become an inescapable part of our very experience of the world.
