Tony David Sampson

Tarde's phantom takes a deadly line of flight – from Obama Girl to the assassination of Bin Laden

This paper argues that a return to a theory of crowd contagion can potentially provide a valuable resource by which to think through the operations of the global. In short, the question of how certain events ‘go global’ can be usefully approached by acknowledging how they ‘go viral’. Yet, although popular discourses, particularly those dependent on the purported virality of internet memes, have been quick to grasp something of the logic of globalization, what spreads, and how it spreads, is all too often analogically reduced to the workings of an evolutionary code which problematically fixes contagious phenomena to stringent biological laws. Global virality is alternatively grasped here by way of a convergence between Gabriel Tardes society of imitation and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattaris concepts of assemblages and communicable ritornellos. This approach is intended to draw attention to the persistence of often small and mostly unpredictable perturbations and shock events that can, on rare occasions, become large-scale contagions. Referring to the recent example of Obama-love, the paper aims to provide a differently orientated ‘diagram’ of virality, which is neither exclusively biological nor social, but rather positioned at a junction point between the two. This is a diagram of global contagion increasingly put to work by those seeking to exploit the pass-on power of connected publics, but also, as Tarde argued, a diagram with extraordinary revolutionary potential.

Unthought Meets The Assemblage Brain

What transpires in the unmediated space-time excess that moves, at once, between and alongside cognition and recognition, between and alongside formation and information, between and alongside prehension and comprehension? Following upon their most recent books—N Katherine Hayles’ Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Unconscious (University of Chicago, 2017) and Tony D Sampson’ s The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture (University of Minnesota, 2016), the convergences and divergences that emerge and weave throughout this conversation are quite revealing.

Transitions in Human Computer Interaction: From Data Embodiment to Experience Capitalism

This article develops a critical theory of human–computer interaction (critical HCI) intended to test some of the assumptions and omissions made in the field as it transitions from a cognitive theoretical frame to a phenomenological understanding of user experience described by Harrison et al. (the three paradigms of HCI. Paper presented at the Conference on human factors in computing systems. https://people.cs.vt.edu/~srh/Downloads/TheThreeParadigmsofHCI.pdf, 2007) as a third research paradigm and similarly Bødker (when second wave HCI meets third-wave challenges. In: NordiCHI ‘06 Proceedings of the 4th Nordic conference on human–computer interaction: changing roles, 1–8. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1182476; 2006, Interactions 22(5):24–31; Bødker, Interactions 22(5)):24–31, 2015) as third-wave HCI. Although this particular focus on experience has provided some novel avenues of academic enquiry, this article draws attention to a distinct bridge between the conventional HCI disciplinary concerns with predominantly task-based digital work and use context and a growing business interest in consumer experiences in digital environments. Critical HCI addresses the problem of experience in two interrelated ways. On one hand, it explores the role market logic plays in putting user experiences to work. On the other hand, it engages with ontological understandings of experience hitherto realized in HCI by way of a phenomenological matrix (Harrison et al. The three paradigms of HCI. Paper presented at the Conference on human factors in computing systems. https://people.cs.vt.edu/~srh/Downloads/TheThreeParadigmsofHCI.pdf, 2007). The article concludes by bringing in an old thinker (A. N. Whitehead) to consider experience in novel ways that relate ontological concerns to a broader political concept of experience capitalism.

Cosmic Topologies of Imitation: From the Horror of Digital Autotoxicus to the Auto-Toxicity of the Social

This article expands on an earlier concept of horror autotoxicus linked to digital contagions of spam and network Virality.1 It aims to present, as such, a broader conception of cosmic topologies of imitation (CTI) intended to better grasp the relatively new practices of social media marketing. Similar to digital autotoxicity, CTI provide the perfect medium for sharing while also spreading contagions that can potentially contaminate the medium itself. However, whereas digital contagions are perhaps limited to the toxicity of a technical layer of information viruses, the contagions of CTI are an all pervasive auto-toxicity which can infect human bodies and technologies increasingly in concert with each other. This is an exceptional autotoxicus that significantly blurs the immunological line of exemption between self and nonself, and potentially, the anthropomorphic distinction between individual self and collective others.

The Self–Other Topology: The Politics of (User) Experience in the Like Economy

This chapter will argue that the politics of experience R.D. Laing described back in the 1960s have been dramatically intensified by social media networks, and continues, as Laing did, to test assumptions about the discreteness of the self/other relation. It further contends that this escalation of mediated social connectivity in the 21st century becomes manifest in two specific ways, both of which challenge a self-concept widely understood as a phenomenal self-experience (structured through representations of the external world experienced from a first-person perception). Firstly, the chapter observes how Laing’s alienating politics of experience now arises from new kinds of commodity production focused increasingly on shared experiences. Secondly, it challenges the conventional, yet problematic, split between the psychological experience of self (the so-called inner world of experience) and the shared social self (the experience of the outer world) in ways that Laing only hints at.This chapter will argue that the politics of experience R.D. Laing described back in the 1960s have been dramatically intensified by social media networks, and continues, as Laing did, to test assumptions about the discreteness of the self/other relation. It further contends that this escalation of mediated social connectivity in the 21st century becomes manifest in two specific ways, both of which challenge a self-concept widely understood as a phenomenal self-experience (structured through representations of the external world experienced from a first-person perception). Firstly, the chapter observes how Laing’s alienating politics of experience now arises from new kinds of commodity production focused increasingly on shared experiences. Secondly, it challenges the conventional, yet problematic, split between the psychological experience of self (the so-called inner world of experience) and the shared social self (the experience of the outer world) in ways that Laing only hints at.

Comment on Peckham: contagion–epidemiological models and financial crises

A number of contradictory metaphors are interwoven with network culture. Perhaps the most striking is the computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee’s image of a spider’s web, which is used to represent the open interstices of communication, but also raises questions about network vulnerability. For example, is being on the web tantamount to the experience of a spider or a fly? Indeed, the World Wide Web was preceded by a host of Internet creepy crawlies: namely, the viruses and worms, which surfaced as a threat to the culture of sharing in the 1980s. The viral metaphor was keenly implemented by early computer security researchers who made fairly close, but often crude, analogical comparisons between digital viruses and their biological counterparts, as well as drawing on immunology to inspire a business of viral containment. The dangers of too much connectivity As Robert Peckham argues in relation to the global interdependencies revealed by financial crises since the 1990s, 1 over the last three decades a paradigm shift has taken place: a shift away from a culture of free sharing towards a culture in which proliferating connectivity has given rise to new anxieties about infection. As the age of networks mutated into the age of contagion, the metaphor of virulent infection turned out to be a perfect justificatory device for an indiscriminate security paradigm. While diverse and conflicting interests, including those of marketers and anti-capitalist groups, sought to harness the ‘positive’ viral potential of this network, too much connectivity was deemed to be harmful. The purported danger posed by excessive connectivity provided a rational for organizing and exerting control over a network via, for instance, the application of epidemiological models of disease emergence in the social sphere, but also via the widespread imposition of generalized immunological defenses, anomaly detection and the obligation of personal hygiene. My own work in this area began by asking if we can look beyond these ubiquitous biomedical metaphors of viral infectivity to locate a different kind of contagious property inherent in the physics of network culture itself. 2 Might it be possible, in other words, to redirect theoretical discussion away from conventional biomedical analogies that have dominated discussion of the viral media ecology towards a new understanding of the ‘virality’ of communication? Here, my approach overlaps with Peckham’s critique of contagion theory in economics. While pervasive biomedical analogies have shaped (and constrained) popular discourses surrounding the networked nature of the contemporary media—fueling fears and propelling an ‘antivirus’ industry—the problem of too much connectivity readily dissipates into a transcendent comparison that fails to grasp the specific material relations of network culture. In contrast, ‘virality’ might be understood, not in terms of a divisive pseudo-biological threat that comes from without to disrupt, but as a quality intrinsic to contemporary network culture, where different forms of ‘contagia’— biological and cultural, human and non-human—interact: from trivial video virals and so-called ‘memes’ to more sobering ‘outbreaks’ of financial and emotional contagion.