This article examines mouse jigglers—devices that simulate user activity to prevent computers from sleeping—as a generative entry point into the study of media stimulation. Attending to their form and function, the article traces the semiotic and operatory chains within which these devices are inserted. Mouse jigglers intervene in technical systems that aim to render attention measurable and manageable, subverting the sensemaking activities of other actors who depend on conventional links between attention and its signifiers. In these settings, attention is best understood not as an internal human mental state, but as an object distributed across, and constructed by, sociotechnical systems. The use of mouse jigglers is a peculiar consequence of the role of attention in contemporary media environments: it is at once central and underdefined, manifested through proxies that are inevitably vulnerable to manipulation. By interfering in these operations, mouse jigglers reveal the infrastructural logics of legibility at work in contemporary attention tracking software.
This essay provides an introductory account of concerns over media stimulation through a series of critical lenses. Building on theoretical debates concerning the struggle for control of perception and the potential to rewire the human perceptual apparatus, we examine issues such as distraction, shock, and desensitization, and consider their significance in the contemporary mediascape. First, we map historical precedents theorizing the modern sensorium, including Georg Simmel’s account of the metropolis, Walter Benjamin’s concept of shock, and Marshall McLuhan’s notion of numbness. Second, we consider stimulation and overstimulation from a media-ecological perspective, which emphasizes entanglement between human subjects and computational technologies. We then reconsider pessimistic diagnoses of media (over)stimulation, seeking to nuance these accounts, and turn to emerging interfaces, such as neural media, to explore new frontiers of stimulation. Before introducing the inspired contributions to this special issue, we establish some guiding principles for a new media theory of (over)stimulation.
This article develops a conceptual framework for understanding how social media platforms engineer laughter as a stimulus within digital attention economies. Moving beyond interpretations of laughter as a secondary emotional response, we argue it functions as a platform-designed affective mechanism—bodily, social, and economic—intended to drive user engagement, amplify algorithmic visibility, and monetize participation. We introduce the concept of franchised laughter to describe how platforms transform laughter into a measurable and monetizable signal, operationalized through datafication, algorithmic curation, and emotional AI systems that detect, classify, and predict user responses. Historically connective, laughter now circulates as part of persuasive computing infrastructures that incentivize interaction and sustain the creator economy. These infrastructures rely on automated emotion recognition, UX design strategies, and affective analytics to convert emotion into actionable metrics, shaping recommendation systems, engagement loops, and platform governance. This shift challenges human-centric models of online behaviour and calls for a structural understanding of how platforms engineer and exploit emotional responses. We argue that the franchising logic underpinning these processes has profound implications for platform power, political discourse, and the circulation of misinformation. To illustrate these dynamics, we analyse the viral meme cycle “They’re Eating the Pets”, which originated during the ABC News U.S. Presidential Debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris and evolved into a case study of algorithmically amplified humour, affective contagion, and platform-driven engagement.
This article engages with the online trend of ‘rawdogging’ flights—where men endure long flights without any distractions, entertainment or amenities—to analyse the gendered logic behind digital detox cultures. We investigate this trend, a typical instance of digital detox, as a hegemonically masculine practice of resistance to what are experienced as the feminizing forces of digital technologies. Our contention is that this experience of emasculating stimulation is shaped by the tendency of networked devices to structure subjectivity in ways predominantly defined by vibes, flows and the capture of affect and attention. The immersive volatility of digital environments challenges perceptual control and corrodes the autonomous agency of the male self, thus triggering a defensive push-back. We conceptualise this response as a form of paranoid masculinity, which relentlessly polices the boundaries of the self and obsessively shores up fantasies of autonomy, rationality and (self-)control to ward off the supposedly emasculating forces of alterity, emotion and stimulation.
Affective robots, agentic AI, and post-mortem avatars have given rise to a growing interest in defining an internal domain limited to consciousness, one that has, in some respects, obscured the effects these entities exert on the world. As systems begin to generate synthetic phenomenology, does the problem of consciousness give way to an ontological question about the attribution of being, or does it remain a question about the functional and epistemic conditions of experience? This paper advances a philosophical account of presence as a relational and emergent mode of being that arises as an effect within the flow of pure experience. The analysis moves between phenomenology and synthetic cognition. Drawing on Husserl’s account of intentionality and its reconfiguration in robotic perception, it considers how synthetic phenomenology can be used to describe machinic forms of world-relation. In this regard, William James’s radical empiricism, particularly the provocation of ‘Does consciousness exist?’ (1904), offers a metaphysical agenda for understanding synthetic experience as continuous with natural processes of relation and effect. Such a reorientation recasts the metaphysics of experience as neither substance-based nor representational but processual and distributed. Presence appears as an emergent property of interaction among heterogeneous agencies, extending cognition beyond the biological and re-embedding epistemology within the material operations of computational infrastructures. This approach supports further inquiry into post-biotic modes of thought and the ethics of delegated cognition within the evolving panorama of artificial agencies.
This paper considers the stimulation afforded by ASMR NPC (autonomous sensory meridian response non-playable character) streams through the conceptual framework of ‘possession.’ First, it looks at several examples of popular ASMR NPC streams, noting the distinct manner in which ASMR NPC streamers become, like the non-player characters of role-playing video games, stuck in strange loops of repeated movements and phrases. I connect this framing of ASMR NPC streams/streamers, in its emphasis on an apparent objectification and loss of agency (or ‘possession’), to various popular commentaries on NPC streams, and video platforms in general. Drawing on media and communication studies scholarship on ‘digital possession,’ I then complicate this initial framing, asserting that ASMR NPC streams involve a more radically ambiguous and dispersed form of stimulation, in which the ‘possession’ of one individual or social group by another is subsumed by a more general sense of ‘possession,’ tied to the infrastructural character of audiovisual platforms under contemporary capitalism.
It is a truism that we live in hyperstimulated times. From the ubiquity of digital networks, screens and their associated information overloads, to the always accelerating flows of neoliberal capital to the dense and mobile populations of cities constantly on the move, to exist in the 21st century is to inhabit a structure of feeling characterised by sensory overload of always on 24/7 late capitalism (see Crary, 2014). One of the paradigms to emerge for thinking the digital transformation of cinema and related technologies is that of post-cinema (see Denson and Leyda, 2016). One aspect of this transformation concerns digital cinema technologies and techniques, and another side embraces an expanded field of related technological forms such as music video, gaming, VR, from which cinema is no longer separable. This article will argue that counter to this dominant tendency towards neoliberal accelerated post-cinematic aesthetics, there is another neuro-aesthetic tendency in audiovisual and other media, operating through drones, strobes and glitch that in some instances have been used for very different purposes than neoliberal information acceleration. This is not to claim that these technologies are radical in themselves as there are clear overlaps between these two audiovisual tendencies, and plenty of instances of these technologies being commodified, or even used in contexts of military domination. And even in their most creative or political functions, there is no claim being made here as to their political efficacy as part of any anti-capitalist project. Rather they are creative DIY misuses of technology that are definitely inventive, and potentially constitute therapeutic practices of the self and community that counter the pathogenic effects of dominant audiovisual media. This will be explored via a number of case studies from Dreamachines and Flicker films to the video work of E. Gabriel Edvy.
This paper explores how critical theory, art and performance develop alternatives to the dominant social media paradigm of psycho-social exploitation. Social media short-circuit experience and sense-making through a logic where modes of data exploitation take over the processes of affect and cognition. Tentacular and everywhere, corporate social media giants seem to present two options – either embrace them and their (false) promises or cancel them altogether. Digital reset explores another option: that of providing moments where the circuits of experience and sense-making can be reorganized and reinvented. The paper specifically focuses on three adversarial collaborations with digital infrastructures that rewire sense-making: questioning equivalences; parasitizing existing systems and animating malicious deceivers.
Drawing on the work of Susan Buck-Morss (1992) and Cressida Heyes (2020), this article develops the concept of “anaesthetic media”: media forms and practices that highlight social media’s role in numbing cognitive and sensory experience. While terms like ‘brain rot’, ‘zombie scrolling’ and ‘TikTok brain’ pathologise social media engagement, my focus here is how these ideas are taken up by young media users themselves as a means of expressing what it feels like to live in an age of ‘continuous compulsory connectivity’ (Lupinacci, 2020). Through an analysis of brain rot and lobotomycore content on TikTok and Pinterest, I consider how cognitive fatigue, emotional detachment, and sensory withdrawal are performed and embraced by Gen Z and Generation Alpha users. While these media work to aestheticise the cognitive strain and attentional fatigue of digital life, I suggest it is important to take seriously the desires for anaesthetic relief that are expressed through these youth cultures. As I argue, although these practices are often discursively constructed as strategies of affective or anaesthetic withdrawal, they participate in, and help to sustain, the demands of being a subject in an always-on culture.
In this era of digital permacrisis, users grapple with feelings of depletion and boredom, exacerbated by the loss of inner self and online disconnection. The question is: how do you cope? The concept of “copium” emerges as a quasi-drug that causes temporary numbness in a 24/7 online world. Copium resonates with a deeper nihilism and a quest for purpose in an increasingly indifferent world. The “whatever” state, characterized by an inability to feel genuine emotions, highlights a disconnect between human experience and robotic indifference, as we drift through life seeking meaning amidst chaos.
This article traces the ways in which men account for their embodied experience as they engage in the digital practices of visibility within the current sphere of social media. Building on empirical research on social media influencer men, the article theorizes the complexities of representation in the making of male bodies with digital technologies. Considering first representation as an event and second the space-off of representation, this article shows how the specific emotional, relational and embodied histories and presents of particular men affect the ways in which their body is put to work in the context of social media, and the ambivalent outcomes and significance of such practices of visibility for their embodied experience. Through careful empirical analysis of research interviews with two men, the article highlights the capacity of representation to both erase and hide embodied subjects and to bring them into being, and the capacity of representation to open worlds for subjects to inhabit and make their own. Finally, the article argues for the relevance of considering representation, not as opposed to materialities and affective intensities, but as a theoretical entrance point to the unstable material and semiotic engagements in which subjectivities and bodies are made.
Political philosopher Charles W. Mills provided us with nuanced, integral conceptions of the foundational role of race and racialization in structuring our political realities. His work was fundamentally concerned with personhood and how hegemonic power structures facilitate the denial of full personhood on the basis of race. Mills’ theorization of race and racial subjugation has implications for a wide variety of fields, including media studies. This paper specifically reflects of how his work might help us understand the social construction of race as a conspiracy, providing media scholars with a necessary perspective that allows us to more thoroughly and accurately understand the media-based information practices and behaviors of Black Americans, among other marginalized groups.
This article critically examines the legacy of Charles Mills’ concept of ‘white ignorance,’ raising concerns about the monolithic ways it frames white consciousness and advantage. I also examine conceptual problems with the wider field of ignorance studies. I suggest that critical engagement with the notion of ‘white ignorance’ helps to avoid re-fetishising racialized categories. It also helps to illuminate sometimes invisibilised cross-racial commonalities and reciprism among immiserated people of colour and immiserated white people across the world.
This short article introduces the special section, ‘Charles W. Mills and Media Theory’. It considers the contribution that Mills’ thought – on the relations between race and class, on the significance of race, whiteness and ignorance for understanding liberalism, and on the potential of liberalism to be made more radical, redistributive and egalitarian – for work on media and communication.
This article seeks to remedy the neglect of and ambivalence towards food techniques in communication and media studies. Such ambivalence is identified here with ancient and contemporary arguments as to the irrational and ‘nonsymbolizing’ nature of food-related operations such as cookery and farming. The analysis draws on applications of the theory of cultural techniques that rely on its often overlooked origins as an agricultural science and, therefore, claim food techniques as media. To overcome what the author identifies as an intellectualist and literate bias towards food techniques in the discipline, they perform a close reading of ancient texts typically included as the first works of literature and communication in the Western canon: Homer’s The Odyssey and the dialogues of Plato. The article argues that to rehabilitate food techniques as media in the discipline requires a critical reassessment of Plato, in particular, as the so-called first theorist of communication.
This article examines how data annotation in news organizations serves as a site of friction and world-making, shaping how AI systems categorize and interpret journalism. Through an ethnographic study in a Danish news organization, we identify three interrelated sites of friction: taxonomic constructions, organizational infrastructures, and aspirational realities. Rather than a neutral task, annotation is a contested process where journalistic epistemologies and machine learning logics collide, producing small acts of world-making that influence how journalistic knowledge is computationally instantiated. By centering friction as an analytical lens, we extend the infrastructural turn in media theory, showing how annotation practices – caught in between the journalistic and the computational domain - themselves function as infrastructural sites of negotiation and power. We thus show how AI is not seamlessly integrated into news organizations but shaped through ongoing struggles over classification, professional authority, and epistemic legitimacy, highlighting the infrastructural politics that underpin the computational turn in journalism.
This essay traces my research trajectory from my first book, The Cosmic Web (1984) to my latest book, Bacteria to AI (2025a). It begins with what David Beer calls the “articulation problem,” that is, the limitations that arise when one speaks from within the field (physical, social, mathematical, theoretical) in which one is located. These include paradoxes of self-reference and the impossibility of constructing a logical system that is both true and complete (Gödel’s Theorem). In How We Became Posthuman (1999), the articulation problem surfaced within cybernetics in the form of second-order cybernetics, which recognized that the observer himself/herself is located within a system that can be observed in turn. With Science and Technology Studies (STS) well-established by the late 1990s, the articulation problem took a wider significance when STS researchers argued that humans themselves always speak from the human umwelt (world-construction), so that the “laws of nature” science identifies are never about nature as such but about our experience of nature. Thus the articulation problem morphed into the species-construction problem, which I explored in my last three books, How We Think (2012), Unthought (2017), and Bacteria to AI (2025a).
This article systematically reconstructs Rosalind Krauss’s theory of the post-medium by redefining the concept of medium through a logic of double negation and reordering her discourse around the triadic structure of “medium–support–convention.” First, the medium is refigured as hypokeimenon (support): it is neither reducible to material properties (a negation of modernism), nor is it a purely signifying form devoid of reference (a negation of post-structuralism). Rather, the medium is dynamically constituted through conventions and recursive structures. Second, drawing from Stanley Cavell’s notion of “automatism,” Krauss conceptualizes convention as “semi-automatic”: the artist simultaneously inhabits and exceeds conventional procedures, and this internal tension propels the renewal of the medium. Finally, the post-medium operates through recursion – self-examination and redefinition – continually reconstructing its specificity. In doing so, it rejects the linear teleology of modernism while avoiding poststructuralism’s erasure of direction and standards.
Multimodality has in the last couple of decades been recognized as the new norm of the digital age. The term has broadly come to stand for how image, text, moving image, and so on, interact on the digital screen. This article investigates a media-historical practice of image projections before digital media, lantern lectures, in which still images were intermixed with texts of different kinds as well as with light, sequence and scale operations. The objective is to use the media-historical case of the lantern lectures to shed light on pictorial multimodality avant la lettre in order to discuss what this implies for our knowledge position towards the multimodal norm of the present. Additionally, the study’s focus on pictorial multimodality continues the analysis in the field of image studies of what an image is and develops a discussion about the transgressive relation between pictures and the concepts used to denote them.
Social networks are simultaneously information and media platforms, but Blackness becomes understood differently depending upon which frame is deployed. While Black media creators have been lauded for their inventive enlivening of digital and social media technologies, Black information users are often considered as lacking technical, written, or mainstream cultural literacies. Mills’ works – from ‘Alternative Epistemologies’ to The Racial Contract to one of his last, ‘The Illumination of Blackness’ – go beyond philosophy to inform media theory and science and technology studies. For example, Black Twitter shattered deficit models of Black digital expertise through discourse, affordances, and networked culture. I contend that Black Twitter illuminates the “racialized optics of modernity” (Mills, 2021: 18) and of computation through Black standpoint epistemologies mediated by digital practices and discourses. I find that Mills anticipated that Black aesthetics and philosophy are well-suited for alternative visions of digital practice, design, and use.
