Contemporary culture is haunted by its media. Yet in their ubiquity,
digital media have become increasingly banal, making it harder for us to
register their novelty or the scope of the social changes they have
wrought. What do we learn about our media environment when we look
closely at the ways novelists and filmmakers narrate and depict banal
use of everyday technologies? How do we encounter our own media use in
scenes of waiting for e-mail, watching eBay bids, programming as work,
and worrying about numbers of social media likes, friends, and
followers?
Zara Dinnen analyzes a range of prominent contemporary novels, films,
and artworks to contend that we live in the condition of the "digital
banal," not noticing the affective and political novelty of our
relationship to digital media. Authors like Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers,
Sheila Heti, Jonathan Lethem, Gary Shteyngart, Colson Whitehead, Mark
Amerika, Ellen Ullman, and Danica Novgorodoff and films such as The
Social Network and Catfish critique and reveal the ways in which
digital labor isolates the individual; how the work of programming has
become an operation of power; and the continuation of the "Californian
ideology," which has folded the radical into the rote and the imaginary
into the mundane. The works of these writers and artists, Dinnen argues,
also offer ways of resisting the more troubling aspects of the effects
of new technologies, as well as timely methods for seeing the digital
banal as a politics of suppression. Bridging the gap between literary
studies and media studies, The Digital Banal recovers the shrouded
disturbances that can help us recognize and antagonize our media
environment.
