sitemap | recent | contact |

Hillhacks

'economy as media' and 'media as economy'

A Talk by eiennotoso, at Main Conference

Abstract

With the development of cryptocurrencies and the rise of financial technologies such as dark pools, finance has become the software underneath global network forever in the beta stage. 'Media' and 'economy' collapse into each other once we enter the realm of financialization, wherein the tangible notion of 'money' finds itself moving and settling in databases, a ledger. The talk shall look at the two concepts/categories, 'media' and 'economy' and trace how they interact with each other, with their locations of mediality more and more converging.

Main Description

The talk shall look at the two concepts and categories, 'economy' and 'media' understood in all it's complexity as being of a medial nature. The mediality of 'economy' and 'media' shall be unpacked and untangled. The convergence of these two categories in our contemporary state of condition/production/consumption has been widely noted, but serious and deliberate consideration about the convergence of two medial categories scaling a certain new discursive imagination and practice has not been delved on as much as it ought to be.

The notion of the economy, in Foucault's work for example showed us how, the economy, the oikonomia became the medium of governance for the state to target the bodies for governance. The media on the other hand, as elaborated through a Heideggerean school of thinking such as the work of David J Gunkel and Paul A Taylor has shown us how the media can be practically anything that acts as a medium, something that does something, and not merely 'is', after all we can apprehend a 'thing' by only what it does. These conceptions coupled with Stephen Crocker's reading of Serres's The Parasite, helps us locate the media as a 'parasite' as an entity that demands, necessitates acknowledgement or disregard.

The Parasite in our imagination is also remember, a 'bug'. A bug demands attention, but one doesn't know where one exists unless one runs into it. And, resolving a bug is never quite the final act. This metaphor of the media as the parasite, as a bug opens up the possibilities of both neo-liberal buzzword of 'innovation' and also a communist vision of rebuilding a 'new architecture' all together, discarding the old. The metaphors and abstract conceptions of our age are here, and it's time we start talking in them, about our media and about our economy.

Speaker

eiennotoso is debarun sarkar. He is sociologist by training and studied at Presidency University, Kolkata and English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Nowadays he divides his time between freelancing and writing.

sign up | Log In