Dr Dorothy Butchard (IASH Fellow): Contact, Control and "Absent Presence" in Transatlantic Literature
Abstract:
Over the past two decades, innovations in new media have significantly altered everyday ways of communicating across expansive distances. With the increasing availability of cheap, instant and reliable modes of interaction via digital platforms, technologies such as video calls and instant messaging are often welcomed as a way of eliding the effects of absence once ensured by geographical separation. However, although such developments may offer "more control over our social worlds," commentators have argued that they also subject users to "new forms of control, surveillance, and constraint" (Baym 2010:4). This talk will discuss the portrayal of digital communications - and their effects - in recent works of literature, focusing on how creative accounts of interpersonal contact across the Atlantic respond to, or are inflected by, contemporary concerns about data, surveillance and social interaction. I will begin by outlining the historical and theoretical context of this study, before turning to compare differing approaches to digital communications in works of fiction and poetry published in the new millennium. Literary representations often set out to capture the emotional and intellectual impact of social changes, and my talk will conclude by evaluating what these works can tell us about contemporary expectations and interpretations of new technologies.