What we talk about when we talk about new media: digital subjectivity and Tao Lin's Taipei. Issue 8 (2nd August 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Sheu, Chingshun J.
• Is Part Of: Textual practice. Volume 34:Issue 8(2020)
• Page Start: 1269
• Page End: 1284
• Publication Date: 2020-08-02
• Subjects: Difference in kind -- contemporary fiction -- digital worldview -- new media studies -- N. Katherine Hayles; Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism -- Periodicals; Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals; Semiotics -- Periodicals; 801.95
• DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2019.1580763
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0950-236X

Abstract

ABSTRACT: New media studies has often focused on the difference between traditional and new media objects while neglecting the perspectival difference in worldview and subjectivity concomitant with the becoming-ubiquitous of the digital. In this paper, I first illustrate with some examples from science fiction the complex relation between difference in kind and difference in degree. This allows me to examine why some well-known demarcations between traditional and new media seem blurry and untenable. There is, however, one line of cleavage that does hold water: the binary of analogue and digital proposed by N. Katherine Hayles. To see why, I compare works of fiction that present media technologies via analogue subjectivity with Tao Lin's Taipei, a novel that presents lived experience through digital subjectivity, thereby revealing the continuing potential of new media studies for literature.