Paranoia is real : algorithmic governance and the shadow of control

In some ways the media question has become more uncertain than ever. Media theory seems eclipsed by the ubiquity of its objects. As technologies of mediation increasingly find their way into societies of sensation and economies of calibration, the monopoly of knowledge hitherto enjoyed by the discipline of media and communications is now harangued in a world where everyone is an expert. Within the academy, many disciplines claim the authority to speak about digital technologies – mathematicians, urban planners, engineers, biologists, health scientists, sociologists and architects, to name just a few. Across society at large we are all invited to comment and find it increasingly difficult to extricate ourselves from the pressure to connect. Yet a crystallization of thought often enough emerges from moments of crisis – if that is indeed the current situation of media theory. While many of us identify with transdisciplinary methods or embrace forms of disciplinary promiscuity, there remains a distinction of media theory within environments governed by digital objects. As media approach a universal condition of integration with labour and life, the organic and inorganic, the question of power becomes amplified. Media theory asserts its ontological and epistemological dimensions when a curiosity in the material properties and tendencies of communications media is coupled with a critical interrogation of the operation of power.