Ironies of Web 2.0听
Professor Damon Young
Film & Screen Studies MPhil Conference
Monday May 6th at 6pm in the McCrum Lecture Theatre, Corpus Christi College Keynote Lecture
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Contemporary media cultures evince a crisis of authorial perspective, experienced as a collapse of the distinction between sincerity and satire, seriousness and irony. This indeterminacy can generate comic effects, or serve political ends, as in the claim that an offensive or controversial utterance was 鈥渏ust a joke.鈥�
Sianne Ngai has identified听the 鈥渮any,鈥� the 鈥渃ute,鈥� and the 鈥渋nteresting鈥� as the three 鈥渁esthetic categories鈥� that predominate in contemporary media cultures. To this list, I add two more, which tend to supplement or saturate each of those initial three: the ironic, and the sexy. The paper tracks the reoccurrence of irony and sexiness, together and separately, across a range of contemporary media sites, including YouTube vlogs, Instagram, and the film听Spring Breakers听(Harmony Korine, 2012).
What Kierkegaard termed the 鈥渁bsolute negativity鈥� of irony鈥攅mbedded into the technological platforms of Web 2.0鈥� creates transformed conditions for aesthetic judgment, authorship, and politics, as well as producing a new kind of sexual subject.
Damon R. Young is Assistant Professor of French and Film & Media, and in the Program in Critical Theory, at the University of California, Berkeley. He is author of听Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies听(Duke University Press, 2018) and co-editor of听鈥淭he Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalism,鈥� a special issue of听Social Text听(2016).
