Haerin Shin

OVERVIEW:

The advent of computers, the internet and networked mobile devices throughout the latter half of the 20th century has brought abstracted flows of data to the fore of social interaction and communication. With ghost-like images flickering on computer screens, disembodied voices in phone conversations flying all over the globe, and faceless chat windows occupying our daily lives, the touch and feel of physical interaction appears to have lost its necessity, burying us in fragmented sensory inputs and free-floating information. The greater body of critical and scientific scholarship produced so far has seen this proliferation of immaterial, digitally codified data as either an evolutionary triumph of technology or a deterioration into a cold, inhuman dystopia. My dissertation (titled The Dialectic of Spectrality: Reality and Being in the Age of Digital Telecommunication Media) subverting the two contending views’ premise that material agents could be divorced from the content of consciousness and knowledge, asserts that digitalization technology in fact reinstates, rather than denies, the significance of our material body as a crucial constituent of human existence.