The Promiscuity of Network Culture: Queer Theory and Digital Media [1 ed.] 1138816515, 9781138816510, 9781315746050

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction: "Are We Sluts?"
1 Virality Minus the Virus
2 Frictionless Sharing
3 Media Whore
4 Index Case
5 Contagious Acts
Conclusion
Index

Citation preview

The Promiscuity of Network Culture

Liking, sharing, friending, going viral: what would it mean to recognize these current modes of media interaction as promiscuous? In a contemporary network culture characterized by a proliferation of new forms of intimate mediated sociality, this book argues that promiscuity is a new standard of user engagement. Intimate relations among media users and between users and their media are increasingly structured by an entrepreneurial logic and put to work for the economic interests of media corporations. But these multiple intimacies can also be understood as technologies of promiscuous desire serving both to liberalize mediated social connection and to contain it within normative frames of value. Payne brings crucial questions of gender, sexuality, intimacy, and attention back into conversation with recent thinking on network culture and social media, identifying the queer undercurrents of these current media dynamics. Robert Payne is Assistant Professor of Global Communications at the American University of Paris, France.

Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture

1 Cyberpop Digital Lifestyles and Commodity Culture Sidney Eve Matrix 2 The Internet in China Cyberspace and Civil Society Zixue Tai 3 Racing Cyberculture Minoritarian Art and Cultural Politics on the Internet Christopher L. McGahan 4 Decoding Liberation The Promise of Free and Open Source Software Samir Chopra and Scott D. Dexter 5 Gaming Cultures and Place in Asia-Pacific Edited by Larissa Hjorth and Dean Chan 6 Virtual English Queer Internets and Digital Creolization Jillana B. Enteen 7 Disability and New Media Katie Ellis and Mike Kent 8 Creating Second Lives Community, Identity and Spatiality as Constructions of the Virtual Edited by Astrid Ensslin and Eben Muse

9 Mobile Technology and Place Edited by Gerard Goggin and Rowan Wilken 10 Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games Analyzing Words, Design, and Play Christopher A. Paul 11 Latin American Identity in Online Cultural Production Claire Taylor and Thea Pitman 12 Mobile Media Practices, Presence and Politics The Challenge of Being Seamlessly Mobile Edited by Kathleen M. Cumiskey and Larissa Hjorth 13 The Public Space of Social Media Connected Cultures of the Network Society Thérèse F. Tierney 14 Researching Virtual Worlds Methodologies for Studying Emergent Practices Edited by Ursula Plesner and Louise Phillips 15 Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages Edited by Daniel T. Kline

16 Social Media, Social Genres Making Sense of the Ordinary Stine Lomborg

22 Locative Media Edited by Rowan Wilken and Gerard Goggin

17 The Culture of Digital Fighting Games Performances and Practice Todd Harper

23 Online Evaluation of Creativity and the Arts Edited by Hiesun Cecilia Suhr

18 Cyberactivism on the Participatory Web Edited by Martha McCaughey 19 Policy and Marketing Strategies for Digital Media Edited by Yu-li Liu and Robert G. Picard 20 Place and Politics in Latin American Digital Culture Location and Latin American Net Art Claire Taylor 21 Online Games, Social Narratives Esther MacCallum-Stewart

24 Theories of the Mobile Internet Materialities and Imaginaries Edited by Andrew Herman, Jan Hadlaw, and Thom Swiss 25 The Ubiquitous Internet User and Industry Perspectives Edited by Anja Bechmann and Stine Lomborg 26 The Promiscuity of Network Culture Queer Theory and Digital Media Robert Payne

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The Promiscuity of Network Culture Queer Theory and Digital Media Robert Payne

First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of Robert Payne to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Payne, Robert, 1973– The promiscuity of network culture : queer theory and digital media / Robert Payne. pages cm. — (Routledge studies in new media and cyberculture ; 26) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Online social networks. 2. Promiscuity. 3. Intimacy (Psychology) 4. Digital media—Social aspects. 5. Sex in mass media. 6. Queer theory. I. Title. HM742.P38 2015 302.30285—dc23 2014031934 ISBN: 978-1-138-81651-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-74605-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments

ix xi

Introduction: “Are We Sluts?”

1

1

Virality Minus the Virus

19

2

Frictionless Sharing

41

3

Media Whore

63

4

Index Case

93

5

Contagious Acts

119

Conclusion

146

Index

153

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Figures

3.1 3.2 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2

Interior. Leather Bar. (2013). Director James Franco reacts to queer sex. Interior. Leather Bar. (2013). Actor Val Lauren reacts to queer sex. Contagion (2011). “Index patient”. Contagion (2011). Beth’s punishing postmortem. Contagion (2011). Heteronormativity restored. Standard Operating Procedure (2008). Lynndie England: “Whatever. Just taking pictures”. Standard Operating Procedure (2008). Sabrina Harman: “just something I did”.

84 85 98 102 103 130 131

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Acknowledgments

Conceiving a first book and releasing it into the world has required constant reassurance and boosts of confidence from friends and colleagues, and so a number of people deserve my sincere thanks. Participants at the Cultural Studies and the Popular conference, organized by my colleagues at the American University of Paris in June 2011, are first on the list because it was they who first encouraged me to see the early thinking in this project as part of something greater. I am especially grateful to Jayson Harsin, Mark Hayward, and Jack Bratich, and to James Hay whose generosity and mentorship at this event and since have meant so much to me. Melissa Gregg deserves special acknowledgment for her comment in the question time of my presentation: “It’s great to hear promiscuity being talked about at this conference”. She helped me to name what I was trying to say, and has been equally insightful in commenting on early drafts of some parts of this book. I have subjected other colleagues at the American University of Paris to material from this book, too, and they have responded with gracious and helpful feedback. They include Christy Shields, Stephen Monteiro, Elaine Coburn, Waddick Doyle, Justin McGuinness, and Julie Thomas. In the last year, my colleagues on the Portland Team—Kerstin Carlson, Alice Craven, Madeleine Czigler, Robert Earhart, and Charles Talcott—have helped immeasurably to keep me sane and inspired. Much of the fundamental thinking for this book happened in and around the classroom at AUP, especially with my graduate students who over several years have made classes like Global Digital Cultures and Media, Gender and Globalization such fun to teach. And Cary Hollinshead-Strick and Elizabeth Kinne have patiently labored through whole chapters of this book, and I thank them sincerely for their insights and for the intellectual and emotional structure of our writing group. I need to acknowledge the professional mentorship and intellectual guidance of some key people from earlier stages in my career. During my time at the University of Western Sydney, I was welcomed and supported and encouraged by Greg Noble, Sara Knox, and above all David McInnes, without whose trust and deep friendship I may not have had an academic career at all. During my doctorate at the University of Sydney, Melissa Hardie helped immeasurably to steer my work in more interesting directions. And I reserve

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Acknowledgments

special mention for Bruce Gardiner whose extraordinary undergraduate teaching, more than anyone or anything else, and more than I understood at the time, showed me what thinking could be. Thanks are due to the people who have been instrumental in helping get this project to publication, including Kerry Robinson, Kane Race, and the anonymous peer reviewers of this book’s proposal and of the earlier versions of two of its chapters. At Routledge, I gratefully recognize the efforts of Emily Briggs, Felisa Salvago-Keyes, and Andrew Weckenmann. Earlier versions of two chapters of this book have been published previously. A version of Chapter 1 appeared as “Virality 2.0”, Cultural Studies 27.4 (2013): 540–560. A version of Chapter 2 appeared as “Frictionless Sharing and Digital Promiscuity”, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 11.2 (2014): 85–102. I am grateful to Taylor and Francis (www.tandfonline.com) for permission to reproduce both. Finally, heartfelt thanks go to my family, to my dear friends in Sydney and Paris and elsewhere, to the late Tina Chen who was the very model of strength and integrity, and to my exhilarating Vincent Bos. My deepest gratitude must go to Cristyn Davies who has always been a better friend and collaborator than anyone could hope for, and to Geoff Gilbert without whose fierce loyalty as friend and colleague and troublemaker this book would not exist.

Introduction “Are We Sluts?”

What might happen if we were a little more promiscuous about promiscuity itself, if we defined it more broadly, permitting promiscuity to affect all forms of attention, all those moments when our regard approaches and touches something else?1

In an episode of the third season of the television series Sex and the City, first screened in 2000, the character Miranda discovers that she has contracted a sexually transmitted infection. Because this is her first diagnosis for such things, her doctor encourages her to contact all of the people with whom she has been sexually active so that they too might be tested. With some effort, Miranda makes a list of all of her sexual partners during thirteen years of dating in New York City, calculating what she calls her “number” (it is 42). Now in a committed monogamous relationship, Miranda uses this exercise to give herself a hard time about how high she thinks her number is and what the number means morally, ultimately asking herself the question which gives the episode its title, “Are We Sluts?” When Miranda shares her number and her concerns about it with her boyfriend Steve, she discovers that his number is probably higher than hers and that the moral meaning of his number might not be determined by the same criteria as hers. As a white heterosexual male—and a bartender, which he thinks explains everything— Steve shows us that the “we” in the question “Are we sluts?” is not freely interchangeable.2 This book is not about Sex and the City, but it is interested in the ways that popular media texts frame promiscuity—and sometimes frame it out. Sex and the City has been recognized for its significant contribution to how viewers of various genders, sexualities, ages, and locations have come to think about intimate relationships since the late 1990s, and for encouraging many to think more promiscuously about what kinds of intimate relationships exist. This particular episode declines to provide an easy answer to the question of its title and to pin down who is best described by the “we” and the “sluts” in question. Nonetheless, we could say that to read the title within the ideological frames of the show on the whole allows us to infer that the “we” in question is not used to having the word “sluts” applied to it. If anything, the

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episode works to erase negative moral meanings for this “we”, whose social position is otherwise shored up by the show’s celebration of neoliberal, postfeminist, heterosexual romance. In other words, the show’s answer to its own question “Are we sluts?” is something like, “Maybe, but not in a bad way— at least, not if you’re white, straight, independent, and affluent”. This book is interested in thinking more promiscuously about promiscuity. It makes the core claim that the networks of contemporary media culture are structured by kinds of promiscuity, even though they are not usually named as promiscuous. This is not to say that contemporary media are obsessed with representing promiscuity, or debating it, or least of all promoting it. All of these claims were likely made about Sex and the City and other examples of popular media that followed it, and some of the claims may have value, but they do not take us anywhere new. Nor is this to say that contemporary media consumers are more promiscuous by some series of effects of representation, as has also been argued; this too is a dead-end avenue of enquiry. Rather, my claim is about what counts as promiscuity and how it can be understood as a modality of networked media engagement, more than simply as a trope of representation. If promiscuity is one word to describe an individual’s multiple intimacies, including but not limited to sexual intimacies, then promiscuity is a key attribute of how contemporary media culture is structured around the proliferation of the multiple intimacies of media use. Certain intimacies are presumed, enabled, encouraged, and rewarded. Some are coercively instrumentalized. Other intimacies are erased. How and why these intimacies proliferate unevenly, in relation to a range of cultural norms and ideologies, is the central concern of this study. The Promiscuity of Network Culture proceeds on the basis that these are questions for queer theory as much as for media studies. If promiscuity characterizes contemporary media culture, it is a structuring presence for a range of intimate relations among media users, and between users and their media. Most clearly, the recent developments in online social networking can be understood as a multiplication and complication of intimate relations, the promiscuous mingling of self with other, self with self, user with interface, private with public, individual with social, and leisure with labor, among other elements. The recent history of intimate media and intimate media use serves to reframe the concept of intimacy itself. How I approach it owes a debt to the influence of several queer theorists who have identified the complex, murky, and typically disavowed undercurrents troubling claims to order and stability in social relations. Using some of their work, I suggest that network culture’s multiplication and instrumentalization of intimacy illustrates how, as Lauren Berlant has written: intimacy builds worlds; it creates spaces and usurps places meant for other kinds of relation. Its potential failure to stabilize closeness always haunts its persistent activity, making the very attachments deemed to buttress “a life” seem in a state of constant if latent vulnerability.3

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3

Examples of the transformed relations of intimate mediated spaces will be central to this book’s arguments, and, inspired by Berlant, I too hope to show how “the utopian, optimism-sustaining versions of intimacy meet the normative practices, fantasies, institutions, and ideologies that organize people’s worlds”.4 In some contemporary media contexts, such as digital journalism, the impact of social networking and the proliferation of mobile devices for accessing and redistributing content have led to an explicit use of the language of promiscuity. Writing about a survey of the habits of digital news consumers in 2010, which found that 65% of this sample did not have a favorite online news source, one industry specialist blogged that “news consumers are far more likely to be promiscuous” because “the web makes it so easy to sample many media sites (and they are largely free)”.5 Similarly, the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal’s digital arm told an industry conference in 2012: “The promiscuity of our audiences is only going to dramatically increase”.6 Another media industry blogger interprets these trends as “The Promiscuous Reader Problem”.7 The “problem” for news providers is clearly one of market share. A proliferation of media sites from which news and other content can be accessed has challenged the existing economic model of scarcity. According to the Long Tail theory of Web 2.0, the ability of more and more niche products to achieve a sustainable market share goes hand-in-hand with the expectation of consumers to be able to “sample” multiple and diverse sites at will. But while the “promiscuous reader” trend is consistent with patterns of heterogeneous, cross-platform, transmedial consumption that industry and academia have been documenting for some time (the work of Henry Jenkins has led this field), why it has attracted the particular language of promiscuity, and why this naming occurs in some contexts and not in others, remains less clear. While the examples above from digital journalism frame promiscuous consumption as problematic, their use of the language of promiscuity carries only implicitly negative connotations. Addressing client relations more generally on the website Social Media Today, another blogger asks whether clients have become “irreversibly promiscuous” or whether they “still value long-term relationships”. Evidently for this writer, long-term relationships are of value and this value only used to be recognized. His telling conclusion is that “there are enormous benefits to be gained by both parties from a secure and mutually rewarding marriage”.8 Promiscuity may not in itself be overtly valueless or even offensive, for these authors, but it is negatively valued in direct opposition to less controversial relations: the mutual rewards of marriage, loyalty, and even “deep and meaningful engagement”.9 The tone of these select examples offers initial evidence that the language of promiscuity might be in the process of being recoded for a changing media context, placing less overt emphasis on sexuality and morality. The resilient codes of heteronormativity, however, remain strongly present.

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A core contention of this book is that promiscuity has become a generalized but often unnamed characteristic of contemporary network media culture and that its most normative meanings have been retained and regenerated in line with dominant ideological assumptions around the broad concepts of identity, capital, and media use. In this way, the turn to promiscuity represents a double movement. On one hand, a kind of liberalization structures how and where media users interact, corresponding to a sense of freedom and agency to do so. On the other hand, neo-conservative values frame and monitor interaction and the objects and ideas around which interaction takes place. It may be no accident, for instance, that campaigns for recognition of same-sex marriage and civil partnership in a number of countries have again been taken up so fervently at the same time as the explosion of online social networking. Not unlike the “double entanglement” that Angela McRobbie has identified in popular post-feminism, and intimately connected to the complicities embedded within what Jasbir Puar calls “homonationalism”, some aspects of the same-sex marriage cause bring together the strange bedfellows of socially progressive liberalization and forces of neo-conservatism.10 There is a curious logic to the arrangement by which promiscuous social media have been the venue for so much renewed activism in these recent debates. Attending to the queer contradictions within these media may help to critique the consolidation of their normalizing tendencies. “YOU HAVE MY DIVIDED ATTENTION” Promiscuity names a mixed bag of intimate relations, not just sexual, between and among individuals or elements drawn from heterogeneous contexts. Promiscuity brings these elements together, without predetermined order or discrimination, into a new multiplicity where they mingle and become intimate. Currently, the multifunctionality of personal digital networking devices like smartphones and tablets materializes the possibilities of promiscuous media use. Simultaneous engagement across multiple and separate interfaces and lists of contacts is limited only by the restrictions of hardware, including the quality and speed of network connectivity, the number of applications functioning on the device, and the number and availability of contacts connected to the user. A generalized promiscuity is presumed within the design of these devices, and the individualized multimodality enabled by design is carried out within an economy of availability and desire. At the same time, multifunctionality may encourage personal mobile devices to become objects of monogamous engagement, insofar as users may recognize themselves to be in a committed relationship with their Blackberry, iPhone, or iPad (“I’d be lost without it”, one might hear) or to feel wedded to one company that produces a range of such devices. In this case, desire can be fleeting and commitment short-lived, in function of the device’s technological or cultural

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obsolescence. Smartphones and tablets are promiscuous media not just for their radical, customized multimodality. More than this, their multimodality presumes divided attention as the preferred mode of engagement. In turn, attention to any one device is itself divided among any number of brand competitors in a market of rapid turnover, even as brands work hard to foster consumer loyalty through techniques ranging from affective persuasion to technical capture. The promiscuity of divided attention resonates with earlier media technologies of multiple intimacies. The “call waiting” feature of modern telephony, first introduced in the early 1970s, offered phone users the ability not to miss in-coming calls, and was therefore part of a vision of more efficient and productive use of phone technology. In effect, however, call waiting gave phone users the means and the excuse not to have to commit to only one call. For the in-coming caller, it eliminated the unwelcoming sound of the “busy” signal (called the “engaged” signal in some Anglophone countries), effectively signaling the user’s continued availability without giving any impression that the object of their attention might already be committed. For some callers, being asked to wait while one’s conversation partner takes another call provoked feelings of confusion, inadequacy, and betrayal, as if that person had not been completely committed to the conversation in the first place and would jump at the first chance to interrupt it. At the same time, phone users’ promiscuous desires were often thwarted by an inability to master the switching technology, or by its failure to function, and this combination of factors became a staple of TV and film comedy. In the Hollywood film Mother (1996), for instance, a twice-divorced man in his forties (Albert Brooks) neurotically fears that his mother’s (Debbie Reynolds) enthusiasm for call waiting confirms her flighty disinterest in his life and career. Each of her cheery but failed attempts to retrieve an in-coming call he takes as a slap in the face (“It’s still me, Mother!”) from the parent who will never understand him or what she thinks is his inability to stay married. For both mother and son, classic Oedipal dynamics occlude recognition of how her (failed) promiscuous phone habits might speak to larger commitment issues that the two share.11 If call waiting altered the tone and dynamic of phone conversations in the domestic sphere, it did so partly because it introduced an entrepreneurial logic into communications in this otherwise familial space. Private homes now joined workplaces in enjoying the benefits and profits of more than one phone line. Switching between lines and callers multiplied the potential outcome of each call, in proportion to time spent, by dividing the resource of attention. Callers were positioned as competitors for this limited resource, and in this way call waiting operated as a rudimentary attention economy. Current network culture instrumentalizes divided attention in much more overt and complex ways. My use of the term “network culture” is in direct reference to Tiziana Terranova’s understanding of “a cultural formation (. . .)

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that seems to be characterized by an unprecedented abundance of informational output and by an acceleration of informational dynamics”.12 Further, she maintains, this is a culture with both a physics and a politics. The physics and the politics of divided attentions and multiple intimacies are fundamental to how I understand the promiscuities of network culture. “THANKS FOR SHARING” If promiscuity characterizes contemporary network culture, it is also structurally absent from how relations are named. Promiscuity exists where multiple intimate relations among media users or between users and their media are not recognized as promiscuous, or when recognition of them depends on a selective account of the meaning of promiscuity. Like Sex and the City, attention to selective meanings of promiscuity effaces other significant meanings or the identities of those attached to them. In its exploration of these dynamics of invoking and obscuring and effacing promiscuities, this book will depend upon queer models of intimacy, which it reframes within an account of emerging culturally hegemonic forms of media use. Recently a language of “sharing” has come to dominate descriptions of user activity within the world of online social networking. Users no longer simply communicate or transmit or forward material to each other; they share. Networked media users share with each other, and media services and corporations share with users. This language is of interest for a couple of main reasons. First, in appearing to describe all of these modes of communication as acts of generosity and exchange, the language of sharing flattens out differences in motivation and in context. For instance, an automatically generated retweet of corporate advertising risks being framed as more or less equivalent to, say, an individual like myself posting photos of his nieces and nephews on Facebook. If both are examples of “sharing”, then the risks of merging these two very different engagements in a common language are that my avuncular pride is tinged with entrepreneurialism, and that the machine-like operation of corporate advertising feels like human care. In fact, I can now pay to “promote” any of my postings on Facebook, realizing the always-already entrepreneurial potential of sharing. The second point of interest is that this all-purpose discourse of online sharing, which tends to include words like “conversation”, “participation”, and “leadership”, recalls and rebrands different kinds of intimate interaction from other cultural contexts. One of these kinds of interaction is sexual attachment. If the language of sharing has come to dominate and over-simplify a range of modes and motivations of media activity, then it is important to unpack the ideological conditions that have legitimated this language at the expense of other meanings and values to which this language also refers but which remain illegitimate or contested. Media that encourage and reward

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sharing are essentially endorsing user promiscuity, but where promiscuity becomes the leveraging of multiple intimate relations among media users and between users and their media. On the other hand, media use animated by non-monogamous desires does not appear to enjoy the same social validation when it is framed by the language of promiscuity. Examples offered above suggest that named promiscuity describes relations lacking depth, loyalty, resilience, and meaning. Significantly, as the episode of Sex and the City reminds us, the discourse of promiscuity is shadowed by anxieties around virality. In its various contexts, virality is measured by an index of promiscuity, deployed on the understanding that measurement will lead to containment of the viral object. Miranda questions her relation to the word “slut”, and her male partners’, because a medical diagnosis has declared her a potential viral threat. Practices and identities associated with viruses and virality are at the center of a struggle for legitimacy, because of their implication within dominant discourses of promiscuity. Gay men are one of several groups who have known this from experience for at least thirty years. No longer only understood in certain contexts as a viral threat, gay men everywhere are still disproportionately tainted by resilient associations to HIV/AIDS. At the time of writing, men who have or have had sex with other men are still prohibited from donating blood in many countries, including the United States and much of Europe (and curiously, blood is “given” rather than “shared”). In other countries, such as the UK, the ban has only recently been lifted or moderated, or the lifting of the ban announced. Just prior to being elected president of France in 2012, François Hollande signaled his intention to lift that country’s ban. He called it “devastating at every level” to give credence to a presumption of HIV positive status among gay men, adding: “There is no population at risk, only risky practices”. Two years later and the French ban remains in place, though under legal challenge.13 This book claims that unnamed promiscuity helps to structure a new cultural logic in which the promiscuous circulation (“sharing”) of media content occurs in a constructed version of viral transmission. As I will outline, the new virality borrows selectively from earlier viral modalities, including the spread of harmful computer viruses and stigmatized human viruses like HIV, among other sexually transmissible infections. Like the sharing of content in digital networks, computer viruses and HIV are both conventionally evaluated in terms of scale and connectivity, arguably more than impact. In both cases, questions of individual and social responsibility are posed in this process of evaluation, and are informed by dominant values of morality, ethics, and health. In turn, dominant values are shaped by norms of embodiment, citizenship, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. In the partial transfer of viral dynamics to digital sharing, attention to these questions seems to have waned. The legitimation of successful media virality instead constructs a different relation to individual responsibility and a networked consumer position which I name “the sharing subject”.

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Conceived as legitimate promiscuity, the dynamics and success of digital sharing are inevitably but ambiguously tied up with cultural meanings of virality. “Going viral” has now become a desirable goal in the world of digital media, an aspiration that is not shared in other viral contexts where the emphasis of social responsibility is generally on containment. (The phenomenon of barebacking, discussed in detail in Chapter 2, provides an illuminating counterpoint.) For this reason, we need to ask what validation of promiscuity is transferred along with the new will to virality, as well as what kind of promiscuity. Moreover, if promiscuity is the basis for successful sharing, then how is success measured? In Sex and the City, Miranda uses her “number” as an index of promiscuity, and her calculation provides her with a moral index of viral scale and connectivity. That is, whether or not she is a “slut” relates to how responsible she may be for having spread a sexually transmissible infection, and how widely she may have spread it. A decade later, new digital metrics have emerged to positively evaluate the scale and connectivity of promiscuous network activity. Virality in media is now planned and manufactured, and hubs and nodes of digital network distribution are identified and exploited for their catchy potential. In one recent digital application, individuals are scored on the success of their sharing activity. These scores, discussed below, are the Web 2.0 equivalent of Miranda’s number. They are part of a short history of the more or less continuous social networking innovations made in the name of “better sharing”, as Facebook used to describe its services. One of this book’s key motivations is to consider the norms which determine “sharing” a priori as good and always potentially better, which frame recognition of sharing subjectivities according to this hierarchy, and which disavow their own relation to promiscuity. VIRALITY WITHOUT VIRUSES? Discussion of viral media in the present social networking context is manifestly uneasy about its relationship to viruses, but it also depends significantly on this relationship. In the world of digital marketing, for instance, the viral spread of ideas and brands is desired and often consciously manufactured. It seems that distribution should move content through networks in the manner of a virus, but the content should not be called a virus. Calling something viral names a successful distribution campaign: the leveraging of network relations to maximize audience or market exposure. Calling something a virus names an insidious agent of attack and raises questions about the host body’s defenses and hygiene and about that individual’s responsibility and morality. These questions come to us framed by the terms of a number of prolific discourses, particularly those of computer viruses and human viruses, which share a number of cultural

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associations. What is clear is that the computer virus and HIV are the two touchstones for how virality is discursively framed in our time—but somewhere in this very recent history of digital media, virality has dropped explicit reference to them. Likening media content to a virus also shifts the balance of discursive power away from the current media studies orthodoxy around the active participatory role of consumers. Where a virus is thought to act upon host bodies, it is therefore a source of various control anxieties. Applying the viral metaphor to media circulation risks positioning consumers as passive victims of transmission. For this very reason, Henry Jenkins is one vocal opponent of the language of media virality, preferring to talk of “spreadable” media.14 This word emphasizes potential for movement as the result of active consumer choices and meanings. The effort here is to deny the virus agency, and despite their different contexts and critical purposes there is some convergence between Jenkins and proponents of digital marketing in terms of a shared fundamental belief in the individual consumer’s potential to activate media change. This overlap makes more sense if we consider how the discourse of Web 2.0 owes a significant debt to theories of fan culture, of which Jenkins was a major pioneer and which continue to inform his critical perspective. As one discussion of Web 2.0 and user-generated content puts it, “we are all fans now”.15 But here again, like the question “Are we sluts?”, I ask who is named or not named or less named by the “we” of this statement. Which factors contribute to recognition of agency of this claimed subject position, and which diminish it? In Chapter 1, I name the new cultural logic of uncontained sharing postviral virality. The preferred subject position of post-viral virality is entrepreneurial and promiscuous. To some degree, the language of the virus speaks of a recent past: conditions in which the media consumer was not yet fully imagined as responsible for constructing and acting upon his or her own mediascape and his or her own networks of circulation. But these are also conditions (by no means past) in which social subjects are held responsible for the health and integrity of their organisms, including their bodies, their computers, and their communities, understood analogously to each other. The concept of post-viral virality addresses this double logic: that in the context of Web 2.0, and the conditions that this term assumes, viruses are relegated to the recent past but still structurally exploited. In a cultural and economic landscape in which online media instrumentalize user participation and interactivity, virality is put to work in the name of “communicative capitalism”. This is Jodi Dean’s concept for how networked communication technologies bring about “the strange merging” of capitalism and an unresponsive democracy.16 Furthermore, where communicative capitalism constructs and captures neoliberal networked subjects, post-viral virality reinscribes those subject positions with normative values drawn from earlier discourses of viral anxiety.

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The discourses to which I will pay most attention are the heteronormativity of HIV/AIDS panic and what Jussi Parikka calls “viral capitalism”, in which “the seemingly contradictory themes of the virus as the threat and the essence of capitalism are, in fact, intertwined and operate in sync”.17 New metrics that measure and rank social network activity exemplify the double logic of post-viral virality, both in their efforts to predict and track and thereby instrumentalize sharing, and in their construction of bad, good, and better sharing subjects. MEASURING PROMISCUITY A number of new digital analytics start-ups have recently begun to develop algorithms to measure the social networking success of individuals and other account-holders such as brands. The best known is a tool called Klout, launched in 2008 and connected to Facebook and LinkedIn in 2011. After the individual signs up, Klout trawls through his or her activity on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and other networks and calculates a percentage score. The score is updated daily, and claims to be an index of the user’s influence: “Influence is the ability to drive action. When you share something on social media or in real life and people respond, that’s influence.” Already, a clearly individuated sense of agency and capacity for social change are presumed as the bottom line. Moreover, “Everyone has Klout and Expertise”, and Klout’s mission is to help “millions of people unlock their influence and grow their Klout”. A cynical response would be that Klout’s real mission is to profit from millions of people’s anxiety about their influence and social visibility—on a daily basis, no less. But it is less helpful to offer a psychological reading than to ask questions about digital subjects’ apparent willingness to submit to this standard. One of Klout’s stated incentive structures is that high-scoring users can receive “exclusive rewards” from partner services. “All you have to do is be yourself”. This means in simple terms that partner companies purchase from Klout the potential network reach of high-scoring users as vectors for brand extension. Also, where Klout claims to help individuals leverage their influence with tips to improve their score, it positions itself as a kind of life-coach for better sharing.18 The flipside of this service, however, is that Klout’s algorithm for calculating scores, and the possibility of Klout scores being misused in reallife professional contexts, have both been the subject of viral speculation. Furthermore, Klout collects publicly available information about people connected to Klout users but who may not themselves have signed up. In other words, you may have a Klout profile without knowing it. For this reason, one particularly critical blogger describes Klout as “the internet equivalent of herpes”, “just as hard to get rid of” and that “you risk infecting all your friends”.19 In deploying this particular viral anxiety, though, this blogger’s attempted hyperbole misses its target—precisely because the viral

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media metaphor no longer directly signifies viruses. Instead, the viral spread of Klout (or clout) through social networks contributes to an already normalized and largely destigmatized, even hegemonic, mode of transmission. The unpleasant possibility of “infecting all your friends” is less motivating when all your friends are, in a sense, always already infected. Their network presence and participation as subjects of post-viral virality is based upon transmissible sharing that is already registered and rewarded as good, and continuously monitored for its potential to be better. Surveying some of these and other complaints about Klout, an article in Businessweek concludes that the social web needs reputation-ranking systems “to function properly” and that “the most we can hope for is that the process is relatively obvious and that we get some benefit from allowing ourselves to be tracked”.20 By now, critical theory has come up to speed with the structure of reward that encourages users to pragmatically accept that their online activity, content, and personal information will be monetized by Google, Facebook, and other companies. Critical concepts such as “immaterial labor” and “free labor” help to understand this process as potentially exploitative.21 To summarize this argument, the networking activities carried out regularly by users, such as friending, generating content, circulating content, and so forth, must be recognized as kinds of work concealed by the cloaks of leisure, positive affect, autonomy, and a range of other user experiences. The cultural value of these experiences feels adequate in exchange for the much greater economic value produced for media corporations and advertisers. Within this emerging body of literature, Mark Coté and Jennifer Pybus make a compelling contribution. They add to this discussion the important elements of recognition and legibility which structure how the laboring social media user is composed as a subject. Borrowing from Judith Butler’s understanding of subjection within fields of norms, Coté and Pybus argue that social network users learn through their labor, in the manner of performativity, to become successful subjects—and, importantly, to continue to be recognized as such. By “learning to immaterial labor”, the user becomes and aims to stay legible as subject to the norms of sharing.22 The social network user who ceases to share ceases to be. So too, the Klout user who fails to connect and fails to influence drops in score and ceases to matter. It is not simply that my Klout score allows me to be recognized as a particular kind of subject, and it is not just that my “Miranda number” renders me precisely legible within a certain field of norms. Perhaps a Klout score of 90 does mean I am extremely influential, and perhaps Miranda’s number of 42 does mean she is a “slut”. More than this, the normative composition of these indices suggests that not everyone’s influence matters, despite what Klout claims. For them, influence is only imagined as measurable, and only measurable influence can be imagined. By this I don’t mean that the scoring system is less “democratizing” than it claims to be; the claim is unconvincing, and so is a simple counter-claim, largely because “democracy” is not the right concept here. If there is a democratization at work, it is the widening

12

Introduction: “Are We Sluts?”

of the field of individual users for whom mediated tools of influence, impact, and social change are presented to feel like achievable democratic realities. If Klout is a tool to democratize influence, it is in the name of what Jodi Dean calls “the democracy that talks without responding”.23 Within this formation, the structures of communicative capitalism reinforce an ideological belief in participation as contribution and, as Dean continues, where circulation as opposed to understanding is “the setting for the acceptance or rejection of a contribution”.24 In fact, Klout provides a perfect example of one of the inherent contradictions of communicative capitalism. Jodi Dean calls this “the fantasy of abundance” and argues: even as it emphasizes [communication’s] multiple expansions and intensifications, this abundance, the fantasy occludes the resulting devaluation of any particular contribution. It presumes that all contributions, all sites, are equal, equally likely to be heard or to make a difference. Enthusiastically reiterating the idea that anyone and everyone can participate, contribute, express themselves, and create, the fantasy of abundance also prevents us from recognizing the underlying inequalities inextricable from complex networks.25 Klout takes one audacious step further by measuring inequalities, in fact openly trading on its own manufacture of them, even as this measure is also how it claims to recognize and value everyone’s contribution. But the abundance of influential contributors that it fantasizes, and the promise that any of them can increase their influence, depends upon a thoroughly neoliberal perspective that presumes, monitors, and rewards a structure of individual upward mobility. Under the heading “Everyone has Klout and Expertise”, the site universalizes and qualifies this opportunity by stating: everyone who engages with you will help your Klout Score. Interacting with people who have higher Scores will help raise yours more, but interacting with someone with a lower Score will never hurt yours.26 Only in a structure of fundamentally competitive and coercive individualism would such a penalty make sense, where association with the weakness of a peer might be perceived both as disadvantage and opportunity. Here, the process of learning the immaterial labor of networking is explicitly instructed and extended into the processing of negative affect. Even projected shame produces positive cultural value for the user, and increased economic value for Klout and its partners. To reassure the user that “interacting with someone with a lower Score will never hurt yours” is a bit like saying, “It’s OK to sleep with the unpopular girl or boy because you can help and exploit her or him at the same time. She or he needs to learn the value of opportunity.” In these ways, Klout

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is an encouragement to maximize scale and connectivity, to leverage even the negative value of those connections, and to monitor daily the quantity and quality of one’s connections in relation to a new frame of subjective norms. Promiscuity tends to be named in circumstances perceived to transgress particular social norms, particularly around morality and health. In this case, the naming works to reinforce those norms and promiscuity comes into being in function of them. Klout reinscribes the current social norms of networked upward mobility by encouraging and quantifying promiscuity without naming it. Within this curious new logic, transgression of norms is measured by the absence of promiscuity—failure to share, to influence, to leverage, to contribute to “the conversation”. The dominant discourse of promiscuity more precisely names failure to conform to heteronormative standards, and serves to police sexual subjects according to narrow frames of intimacy and morality. And where the discourse of promiscuity has been so closely shaped in recent history by viral anxiety and notably by panic around HIV/AIDS, as many scholars have chronicled, it is precisely those failed heteronormative subjects whose perceived promiscuity is constructed in parallel as viral. If all of this is correct, then something interesting is taking place at the level of generalized networked media use. The structuring of sharing activity by the new language and affects and algorithms of network culture amounts to both a call to promiscuity and a silence around certain meanings and practices that this term has conventionally indexed. So perhaps, in a sense, we are “sluts”, at least if we succeed in learning the kinds of promiscuous labor given value by Klout and other tools of better sharing. But if, as this book claims, post-viral virality is the convergence of a heteronormative discourse of virality and the entrepreneurial discourse of viral capitalism, then the better sharing of networked media promiscuity is both a new moral hygiene and a new competitive upward mobility. The continuously networking and self-monitoring subject has replaced the virus as the fantasized agent of aggressive mobility. Queer failure is finding new life in regimes of circulatory measurement and recognition. “A LITTLE MORE PROMISCUOUS ABOUT PROMISCUITY ITSELF” In making the central arguments of this book, I want to avoid claims that risk totalizing a heterogeneous media culture. Promiscuity is a key characteristic and modality of digitally networked media structures and practices. Promiscuity is not, however, a universal frame that binds all structures and practices; to claim otherwise would be critically suspect, not to mention a contradiction in terms. While I am especially interested in how promiscuity comes to be instrumentalized at the intersections of media use, politics, and

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Introduction: “Are We Sluts?”

capital, as the example of Klout neatly illustrates, this book also pays attention to some of the spaces and forms of promiscuity that cannot be or have not been put to work, and which might generate critical openings outside of dominant institutional and capital enclosures. An understanding of these enclosures needs to include those of academia where, in some institutions, measurement of network influence is intensifying and shadowed by greater workplace precarity for many.27 The material discussed in this book, then, must demonstrate something of my own intellectual and disciplinary promiscuity. I come from mixed disciplinary parentage and I think promiscuously, queerly. By refusing to see different kinds of “media” and “culture” in wholly distinct categories (perhaps a “queer art of failure”), I aim to build something richer, less definable, and less falsely stable than a monogamous commitment to a single intellectual discipline.28 My examples and analyses are the results of cruising and mingling, trawling and sampling, and from divided critical attentions. They represent a promiscuous methodology that prefers to see what might happen when disparate elements are allowed to come into a new intimate relation. To quote Judith Halberstam, my own project is queer in that it “finds insights in eccentric and unrepresentative archives”.29 Like queerness and promiscuity itself, eccentricity and unrepresentativeness name a range of failed relations to normativity, and this book aims to keep some of its divided attention—at least one eye—on what has been relegated to categories of failure by the workings of cultural, sexual, economic, and intellectual norms. A couple of clarifying points on terminology are also necessary. This book refers to “media” and to media “users” in an intentionally open and inclusive way. While a significant focus of this book is on recent digital media, particularly online social networks, I draw on and analyze a range of media forms. I aim to echo Richard Grusin’s recent assertion that it no longer makes sense to distinguish between “old” and “new” media. I am less interested in categorizing media by form, even though form is important, and more interested in paying attention to the “mediality”, to use Grusin’s term, common to a range of forms. “Media are not stable entities but are agents or forces of translation and interaction”, Grusin continues.30 The work, investments, and assumptions behind these mediating effects of translation and interaction are what motivates my attention. Similarly, “media users” is a term that allows for a description of multiple modes of engagement, even if not all modes should be considered equivalent. This choice is based on the fundamental understanding that it no longer makes sense, in the age of digitally networked media, to maintain a sharp distinction between “producers” and “consumers”. Distinctions between kinds of media use, however, will be made where necessary. Parallel to the producer/consumer distinction, the binary construction of active/passive media use limits understanding of the complex dynamics of contemporary media. Chapter 1 takes up the challenge posed by a description of digital media as “viral” to think beyond positions of media

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use as active or passive. Where a recent media studies orthodoxy insists on the active producerly capacities of all digital media users, I interrogate the circulatory dynamics of post-viral virality, arguing that the will to activity feeds an explicitly entrepreneurial and implicitly heteronormative account of circulation and interaction. In Chapter 2, the rebranded virality of contemporary media promiscuity is examined more closely for its paradoxical investments. Now called “sharing” and, in one dominant context, recently declared “frictionless” by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, social network promiscuity is premediated by digital interfaces as a means of capture, but in such a way that attempts to disavow this intervention and its economic rationale. I outline how the humanist claims behind “frictionless sharing” can be tested in comparison to the virus-sharing activities of queer barebacking subculture. There, participants’ ideological investment in the willing transmission of HIV forces a rethinking of how subjectivity relates to risk, and the risks and ethics of networked intimacies must also be re-examined. The normative evaluation of sharing activity is at the center of Chapter 3. In considering the possibility of oversharing, the chapter moves towards a sense of what is “too much information”. Gendered and sexualized perceptions of excess frame analysis of the promiscuous figure of the “media whore”. I ask what it means, in the age of digitally networked media, where the activities of all users constitute transactions within an economy of attention, to call someone a media whore. The complicated transmedial presence of Kim Kardashian provides one case study of the viral construction of celebrity around an individual who is accused of media whoring while also celebrated as a social media success story. Actor/writer/director/Instagrammer James Franco provides rich ground for a second case study, in which I argue that his media presence attempts a self-consciously queer intervention into the nature of celebrity. Also attending to ambiguous gendering and sexualizing, Chapter 4 returns to how network dynamics are measured, first offering a reading of two recent Hollywood films in which the identification of an “index case” of network circulation converges with a heterosexist discourse of non-monogamy. The adulterous wife character resurfaces as vector of contagion, in Soderbergh’s Contagion (2011), and of corporate efficiency in Reitman’s Up in the Air (2009). Then, as a counterpoint to these films’ limited view of networks of mobile intimate labor, I turn to the Google corporation’s recent foray into the digital mapping of global human trafficking in order to ask whether such technological efforts also reconstruct “victims” or “cases” of human trafficking as functional, objective indexes of network mobility—overshared in illicit economies and objects of corporate and institutional capture. The containment and outbreak of the intimate stuff of network culture is approached from another angle in Chapter 5, by examining an infamous example of digital sharing before it was called “sharing”. Given the media scandal of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib constituted the breaking out of a

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shocking affective relation to certain gendered, sexualized, and racialized bodies, I turn to the circulation of affect through ordinary digital media habitus. Analysis shifts between mediations of the Abu Ghraib scandal, notably in Errol Morris’s documentary Standard Operating Procedure (2008), and a recent “meme” of videos of US soldiers dancing and lip-synching. Without collapsing important differences here, I ask what contagious erotics might be at play across these examples. The politics and affects of network formations themselves are scrutinized in order, in conclusion, to imagine promiscuity not coerced by regimes of sharing. These chapters are not telling a morality tale, or a story of intimacies lost and connections failed. Nor are they launching a battle cry for a crusade to reclaim the simple joys of promiscuity, affirming our right to be “sluts”. In taking up the trope of promiscuity, this book is ultimately a hard reflection on whether we have led ourselves into a space of intimately networked connection—with others we know, with others we don’t know, with ideas and practices and cultures, and with technology itself—which is fully, richly, and freely a space of mixture and indiscrimination. It is also necessarily a critique of the definition of this mythical “we” of which I write. I am reminded of the question recently posed by Joshua Weiner and Damon Young: “is there a queerness today that is not only produced through an act of determinate negation and phobic interpellation?” And so this book proceeds with their critical challenge in mind: Under what conditions might queerness name, then, an epistemological caesura in the field of the social, a radical uncertainty about what any event of coming together or bonding will have meant, and for whom?31 For finally, the promiscuity of network culture might lead us further into the immeasurable pleasures of “queer bonds” rather than deeper into the battlegrounds of the “we”.

NOTES 1. Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 5. 2. Nicole Holofcener, “Are We Sluts?,” Sex and the City (HBO, July 16, 2000). 3. Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 282. 4. Ibid. 5. John A. Byrne, “Why Digital News Consumers Are So Promiscuous,” C-Change Media, 2010, accessed May 2, 2014, http://www.c-changemedia.com/2010/03/ why-digital-news-consumers-are-so.html. 6. Craig Silverman, “Narisetti: ‘The Promiscuity of Our Audiences Is Only Going to Dramatically Increase,’ ” Poynter, July 13, 2012, accessed May 2, 2014, http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/180842/narisetti-thepromiscuity-of-our-audiences-is-only-going-to-dramatically-increase/.

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7. Jason Zaragoza, “The Media Oxpecker: The Promiscuous Reader Problem,” AAN: Association of Alternative Newsmedia, accessed May 2, 2014, http:// www.altweeklies.com/aan/the-media-oxpecker-the-promiscuous-readerproblem/Article?oid=6423191. 8. Jonathan Farrington, “Have Our Customers and Clients Become Irreversibly Promiscuous?,” Social Media Today, accessed May 2, 2014, http:// socialmediatoday.com/jonathanfarrington/576736/have-our-customersand-clients-become-irreversibly-promiscuous. 9. Byrne, “Why Digital News Consumers Are So Promiscuous”. 10. Angela McRobbie, “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture,” Feminist Media Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 255–64; Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 11. Albert Brooks, Mother (Paramount Pictures, 1996). 12. Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 1. 13. Marianne Murat, “Les Homosexuels Doivent-Ils Pouvoir Donner Leur Sang?—Le Point,” Le Point, July 16, 2014, accessed July 25, 2014, http:// www.lepoint.fr/politique/les-homosexuels-doivent-ils-pouvoir-donnerleur-sang-16-07-2014-1846649_20.php#xtor=CS1-31. My translation. 14. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013). 15. Martin Lister, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant and Kieran Kelly, New Media: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2008), 221. 16. Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 22. 17. Jussi Parikka, “Digital Monsters, Binary Aliens—Computer Viruses, Capitalism and the Flow of Information,” Fibreculture 4 (2005), accessed May 2, 2014, http://four.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-019-digital-monsters-binary-aliens%E2%80%93-computer-viruses-capitalism-and-the-flow-of-information/. 18. “Klout Score,” Klout, accessed May 2, 2014, http://klout.com/home. 19. Charlie Stross, “Evil Social Networks,” Charlie’s Diary, November 7, 2011, accessed May 2, 2014, http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/11/ evil-social-networks.html. 20. Mathew Ingram, “Like It or Not, the Reputation Graph Is Here to Stay,” BusinessWeek: Technology, January 4, 2012, accessed July 17, 2014, http:// www.businessweek.com/technology/like-it-or-not-the-reputation-graph-ishere-to-stay-01042012.html. 21. Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, trans. P. Colilli and E. Emery (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133–47; Terranova, Network Culture; Mark Andrejevic, “Exploiting YouTube: Contradictions of User-Generated Labor,” in The YouTube Reader, ed. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009), 406–23. 22. Mark Coté and Jennifer Pybus, “Learning to Immaterial Labour 2.0: Facebook and Social Networks,” in Cognitive Capitalism, Education and Digital Labor, ed. Michael A. Peters and Ergin Bulut (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 169–94. 23. Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 22. 24. Ibid., 27. 25. Ibid., 28. 26. “Klout Score.” 27. Rosalind Gill, “Academics, Cultural Workers and Critical Labour Studies,” Journal of Cultural Economy 7, no. 1 (2014): 12–30.

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Introduction: “Are We Sluts?” 28. Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 29. Halberstam quoted in Carolyn Dinshaw, Carolyn Dinshaw, Lee Edelman, Roderick A. Ferguson, Carla Freccero, Elizabeth Freeman, Judith Halberstam, Annamarie Jagose, Christopher Nealon, Nguyen Tan Hoang, “Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, no. 2–3 (2007): 181. 30. Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 9. 31. Joshua J. Weiner and Damon Young, “Introduction: Queer Bonds,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17, no. 2–3 (2011): 228.

1

Virality Minus the Virus

Media theorist Richard Grusin has recently argued that the first decade of the twenty-first century inaugurated an era of “mediality”, when “virtually all textual, visual, and audio media are produced, circulated, and remediated via networked digital technologies”.1 This book will further claim that the start of the second decade of this century was when it became clear that mediality is characterized by virality—and by virality replicating itself virally. An online advertising campaign from 2011 signals the shift to metavirality. The commercial, for a brand of bottled water, employs actor Jennifer Aniston as part of a self-reflexive parody of its own strategic attempt to manufacture virality. Staging a “how to make a viral video” manual, Aniston interacts with a variety of elements of already-proven viral campaigns, including puppies, dancing babies, and lip-synching YouTube phenomenon Keenan Cahill. In addition to harnessing Aniston’s Hollywood star power, the video’s metatextuality relies upon an understanding of the actor’s premium online searchability. The producers within the narrative eventually decide to call the video “Jen Aniston Sex Tape”.2 From one perspective, the commercial is another clever example of a recent trend of counter-intuitive advertising where the brand or product is ultimately secondary to textual strategy or gimmick. The commercial for Cadbury chocolate from 2007 is the epitome of this mode, featuring a gorilla playing drums to a Phil Collins song and no direct reference to the product. From a different perspective, the Smartwater commercial could be seen as an affirmation of post-feminist individualism where Aniston chooses to capitalize on her status as sex object using tongue-in-cheek gestures to pre-feminist pastness. Differently again, the commercial could be analyzed to tell us something about regulated and deregulated structures of celebrity and how they collapse and converge online. All of these themes will emerge in later chapters of this book in reference to other recent examples of promiscuous network circulation. Most relevant to this chapter, however, is a brief moment of discursive slippage that speaks to changing structures of media distribution and how we talk about them. Talking to camera, Aniston

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introduces herself as having to promote the brand of water in a more complex way than simply stating its values: ANISTON: Hi, I’m Jen Aniston. And I’m here to talk to you about Smartwater. But in this day and age, apparently I can’t just do that, can I? (. . .) I have to make a video, apparently, that turns into a virus. PRODUCER Viral. We need the video to go viral. (OFF-CAMERA): ANISTON: Right. Sorry, viral. Thank you. This is why I have these three lovely Internet boys here to help me.3 Parodying her role of highly paid but poorly informed celebrity spokesperson, Aniston performs misunderstanding of the strategic purpose of the video, and she has to be corrected by the industry experts supervising production. Of course, what the “Internet boys” do want, in a sense, is for the video to turn into a virus, in terms of rapid and unpredictable peer-to-peer transmission, but they cannot use that language. The language of the virus transposes connotations of danger, fear, and poor hygiene on to the brand and the product itself, which is especially problematic for a consumable. In this chapter I will outline the first of this book’s core arguments: that the virality of networked media, “in this day and age”, is in a specific sense post-viral. Use of the trope of virality in and around a Web 2.0 context marks an observable shift away from an earlier discursive convention that was centered on the figure of the virus as an agent of attack upon vulnerable points within uncontained networks. Computer viruses of this sort still exist, including spyware and malware, but it is curious that what is now called “virality” seems to connote a successful and desirable kind of media circulation rather than an intrusive and destructive one. Digital media that “go viral” are usually appraised positively in this description, despite the arbitrariness of the phrase. Viral ad campaigns are coveted by marketing professionals and even purposely manufactured for their expansive and catchy potential. So while the means of transmission of harmful computer viruses and desirable viral media may be similar, and while both may be the result of deliberate and strategic production, anxieties around the danger or nuisance of the former do not seem to have transferred evenly into the latter. The Smartwater commercial is a carefully produced metatextual parody of the concept of manufactured virality. It is also, however, another commercial that wants to go viral. Beneath its tricksy humor, it takes seriously the semantic distinction between “virus” and “viral”. It is also through this humor that the commercial draws attention to its own anxiety about that very distinction. My purpose, then, is to ask how and why virality ceased to be about viruses. The commercial’s virus joke is a joke of periodicity: aside from danger, fear, and poor hygiene, media viruses connote cultural pastness— a past in which Aniston herself is implicated. This chapter investigates the

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new imperatives, cultural anxieties, and instruments of ideological hygiene that require viruses be symbolically relegated to the past but still structurally exploited. I will argue that the discourse of post-viral virality is motivated by twin logics. The first is that in a context characterized by online social media that instrumentalize user participation and interactivity, virality is put to work in the name of “communicative capitalism”. Here I refer to Jodi Dean’s concept for how networked communications technologies are the site of “the strange merging” of capitalism and an unresponsive democracy.4 The second logic is that according to the means through which communicative capitalism constructs and captures neoliberal networked subjects, post-viral virality reinscribes those subject positions with normative values drawn from earlier discourses of viral anxiety. In elaborating on the logics of post-viral virality, my thinking is structured by three main points of departure. First, virality now rebrands “risky” behavior as “sharing” and “participation”. Second, its modes of circulation may be as much about systemic functionality as they are about transmission by active users. And third, the post-virus discourse of digital virality fetishizes the active user-subject at the expense of other positions and pleasures. These claims also force a rethinking of how popularity is registered by the viral spread of digital content, because it is too simple to assume that virality is a transparent confirmation of a media power shift towards an unregulated, horizontal, and democratic structure of consumer choice and agency, or a kind of pure popularity. Different instances of digital content achieve virality in different ways—some through the efforts of marketing strategies, some through an unplanned mode of transmission that seems random or accidental. Moreover, virality is not always desired by those involved or implicated in the content. Viral ad campaigns may have a different relationship to circuits of distribution than entertainment or amateur videos that go viral. What interests me is the overlap of these kinds of content. As the Smartwater commercial demonstrates, ad campaigns are circulated virally through online social networks alongside music videos, laughing baby videos, and other less manufactured content, now making use of these amateur codes. As Jean Burgess and Joshua Green have shown in relation to YouTube, “amateur and professional media content, identities and motivations are not so easily separated”.5 When marketing and advertising campaigns purposefully appropriate and mimic the idiosyncrasies of more personalized amateur content, and inversely when individual consumers work to manufacture their content and its transmission in the style of marketing campaigns, then something interesting is taking place at the level of content. But something interesting is also happening at the level of political economy whereby content may be taking a back seat to the mode of distribution that brings attention to it, despite continued belief in the common media industry catch-cry “content is king”. In other words, the specific content of a given item may account for its viral success at the same time as having little or nothing to do with the successful functioning of social networks as distributors of content.

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This paradox at the heart of the relationship between content, structure, and participation vexes an easy understanding of popularity, and of subject positions of cultural producer and consumer. For this reason, the complexities of post-viral virality index problematics of capital, labor, subjectivity, and control—beyond the immediate environment of digital media—which continue to motivate cultural studies scholarship, and so this book is also motivated by the idea that virality spreads in and around media as a new modular structure of cultural norms. Such concerns lead me to consider the ways in which these norms are inherently gendered and sexualized, particularly through analysis of assumptions around intimacy and sociality. SHARING ACTIVITY The first principle of the new discourse of post-viral virality is that risky behavior is rebranded using a language of sharing, conversation, and participation. Consumers, businesses, and even politicians “share” material with each other. Sharing contributes to something called “the conversation”. In 2011, the New York Times Research and Development unit published details of Project Cascade—a digital tool which provides an intricate visual metric of the movement through social media networks of a single communicational event such as a tweet. It refers to this movement as “sharing activity”. As explained in the accompanying video: This tool illustrates the connections between readers and publishers, helps identify influential contributors to a conversation, and cleanly displays the life-cycle of a new sharing conversation in an intuitive way.6 Furthermore, as Suzanne Labarre states in her article on the project, “both the mining of the data and the artistic presentation could go a long way toward solving the riddle of how a story goes viral”.7 Clearly, this riddle is one to be solved in order that organizations and brands can more accurately make things go viral. For the New York Times, the challenge of brand awareness and influence lies in the following question: “How can The Times use this information to expand its impact in the conversation, to maintain its position as a news and information leader in this complex environment?”8 Providing “leadership” in a complex environment can be otherwise understood as trying to maintain control over circulation of content in an unpredictable and even uncontrollable mediascape. Given a wide field of competitors for “impact” and “leadership”, control stands very much at odds with the complex plurality of “sharing” that takes place in “the conversation”. This language of sharing and conversation also works to render more intimate and tangible the rapidly multiplying, uncontained, and partly unknowable network edges that may ramify from the node that is any single Twitter or Facebook user. These complexities are central to how

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danah boyd has developed the concept of “networked publics”. For boyd, affordances such as persistence, replicability, scalability, and searchability define network architectures but equally may render communications with network publics somewhat unstable.9 Moreover, Project Cascade’s language of intimacy and generosity alleviates potential anxieties that may arise if one imagines “the conversation” not as a safe space for sharing—perhaps some idealized version of digital public sphere—but as an uncontained free-for-all in which undesirable content may circulate unchecked. The benign intimacy of sharing content may well be stymied by something like a virus, for instance. Note how the tool offers to display network circulation “cleanly.” As a number of scholars have examined, anxieties around uncontained transmission and unsafe contact were prevalent in public discourse relating to computer viruses that emerged as a significant perceived threat in the 1990s. Deborah Lupton elaborates on the widespread viral metaphor pertaining to computing at this time. She discusses the ways in which the adoption and uses of the metaphor drew on a range of discourses not limited to immunology, but also those more generally shaping how humans and technology relate to one another. Common discursive frames include “the seductiveness of the human/ computer, Self/Other relationship and the cultural crisis around issues of bodies, technologies and sexualities at the fin de millénnium”.10 Similarly, Stefan Helmreich demonstrates that anxieties about computer viruses propelled a discourse of sexual contamination which is flexibly responsive to key social dynamics of the late twentieth century. Anxieties depend upon “images of foreignness, illegality, and otherness”, and the securing of “compromised networks” is likened to the “ ‘bodies’ of nation-states under military threat from without and within”.11 Lupton and Helmreich both draw attention to the function of the virus as a cultural trope, invested with multiple ideological meanings transferred from contemporary moral, legal, and ethical discourses. Two broad ideological frames deserve particular attention here and are central to the claims this book is making about the promiscuity of network culture. First, images of viruses and virality in a range of contexts have been inseparable from the weighty cultural presence of HIV/AIDS since its detection in the early 1980s. Jussi Parikka writes that AIDS “sparked the use of viral concepts” in computer discourse and elsewhere, not through simple cause and effect but as a kind of “feedback system where causalities are multidirectional”.12 The pervasive homophobia and heteronormativity that characterized many public and institutional responses to HIV, and which led to full-blown AIDS panic in many contexts through the 1980s and 1990s, deeply color how other viruses and forms of viral circulation are represented. A second broad discursive formation is what Parikka calls “viral capitalism”, demonstrating how circuits of viral transmission can be appropriated for purposes of capital expansion, and how a neoliberal ethos of self-regulation and individual responsibility interfaces between capitalism,

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consumerism, and public health.13 Through a range of examples, we will see how the two discourses animate each other. In the case of manufactured panic around human viruses, notably HIV, a number of interlocking discursive patterns emerge. Images of attack and hidden threat attempt to single out contaminating bodies and to mark them according to norms of individual and social responsibility. Intercorporeal practices assumed to be associated with these kinds of marked bodies are branded risky and their erotic, social, and cultural meanings reduced to transmissible potential. Individuals and practices unrelated to direct risk of transmission are tainted by generalized symbolic association to particular cases. As authors such as Simon Watney and Douglas Crimp started pointing out soon after the appearance of HIV/AIDS, and as is still apparent in more recent evidence, a language of promiscuity has frequently provided a moralistic and normalizing explanatory framework for HIV transmission since its first reported cases, working to equate HIV with gay men and gay men with promiscuity. Gay men were the first major targets, in conjunction with scientific and statistical framing of the first clusters of HIV infection. Other socially marginalized groups, such as IV drug users and people of color, continue to be singled out. For Watney, public discourse on HIV/AIDS consolidated the ideological packaging of kinship, home, and sexual identity in defensively heteronormative terms. He writes: the axiomatic identification of AIDS as a sign and symptom of homosexual behavior reconfirms the passionately held view of “the family” as a uniquely vulnerable institution. It also sanctions the strongest calls for “protectionist” measures, of an ever intensified censorship that will obliterate the evidently unbearable cultural evidence of that sexual diversity which stalks the terra incognita beyond the home.14 The malleable language of home and protection can be deployed, of course, to defend against any number of perceived threats. (The excessive media presence of the “media whore”, which I analyze in Chapter 3, offers one interesting variation on viral circulation and public calls for its containment.) The contemporaneous advent of personal computers in many of the same homes that figure in Watney’s illustration gives rise to the efficient transfer of protectionist logic between the discursive framing of computer and human viruses. Parikka notes that the computer “as a (presumably) rational machine offered, at least until the end of the 1980s, a perfect fantasy object for the clean body”, after which it too, like the human body and the body politic, “had its own share of white noise and dirt”.15 Sharing disks and other acts of intimate connection between computers found, in the heteronormative protectionism of AIDS panic, a new language of risk and promiscuity. Debates around promiscuity continue to this day, still fundamentally sustained by but also moving beyond the blueprint of homophobic suspicion

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in North America, Australia, Western Europe, and elsewhere.16 One of the key points that Watney is making is that this version of the discourse of promiscuity comes into being precisely because of the ways in which the social and sexual behaviors that it claims to describe fail to adhere to a model of intimacy centered on institutionalized heterosexual monogamy. Queer theorists and activists have long been motivated to militate against such normative logics, particularly since AIDS. One rich queer enterprise has been to document the multiple alternative social and sexual cultures of same-sex intimacy that are not reducible either to the frame of the heteronormative dyad or its evil twin, promiscuity.17 Douglas Crimp, writing in the same journal issue as Watney in 1987, was quick to reclaim and resignify the word “promiscuity” as a kind of community-building. In a context ravaged by HIV transmission, networks of multiple sexual relations constituted a sharing of embodied knowledge and practice—a habitus of care and safety. Rather than magnifying risk, Crimp argues, promiscuity functioned to promote individual and social responsibility through the community’s invention of safe sex. Due to gay male sexual culture’s proliferation of what counts as sexual pleasure, Crimp maintains that “promiscuity should be seen instead as a positive model of how sexual pleasures might be pursued by and granted to everyone if those pleasures were not confined within the narrow limits of institutionalized sexuality”.18 I am interested in how this positive model of promiscuity could be understood as a “queer art of failure”, to quote Judith Halberstam. In her discussion of the normative rigidity of intellectual disciplinarity, which her work attempts to counter, she echoes Foucault’s call to rethink “‘subjugated knowledges,’ namely those forms of knowledge production that have been ‘buried or masked in functional coherences or formal systematizations’ ”.19 Crimp offers an example of what Halberstam also calls “knowledge from below”.20 It may be interesting to trace how this knowledge illustrates the failure of the limits of institutionalized sexuality, while also having been taken up in wider contexts of health education and public discourse. There, such knowledge recirculated as part of a normalized epistemology of “safe” intimate relations. Moreover, it strikes me that what Crimp is describing is something quite like a loosely organized but highly effective pre-digital viral marketing campaign. Networks of promiscuity are built and maintained by the individually embodied but socially structured habitus of sharing, and sharing names a variety of modes of intimacy—including the educational—not contained by institutional limits. With this in mind, consider the following frequently quoted definition of viral marketing from industry specialist Ralph Wilson: Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.21

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Interestingly, this is one example of the discourse of media virality that does acknowledge its virological parentage, even though in this case viruses are explicitly recoded in positive terms as a means of taking strategic market advantage. In fact, it would not be too much of a reach to suggest that Wilson is celebrating the power of deliberate viral transmission by, in effect, advocating a model of promiscuity. Inversely, for Crimp, promiscuity names the widespread mode of transmission that leads to responsible communitybuilding and networking and the dissemination of messages and information about sex and health, and many things besides, rather than being conflated with the spread of HIV itself. What does it mean, then, for the current discourse of media virality to implicitly recall social and cultural formations deemed risky and marginal within its language of active, individualizing, participatory, sharing, networked practices? That a model of intimacy branded as a failure of institutionalized heteronormativity could find itself rebranded in a language of capitalist success speaks to the expansive hegemonic functions of capital, even if it would be too simple to conclude that queer subcultural formations are only co-opted and commodified by structures of late capitalism.22 Jussi Parikka’s work helps to contextualize these traces. His concept of “viral capitalism” names a second major discourse of virality circulating through the new virality I am describing, more closely connecting it to questions of political economy. In his media archaeology of computer viruses, Parikka points out that the virus is a central figure of post-industrial information capitalism, both because viruses produce symptoms that can best be overcome through the purchase of specific products, and, more fundamentally, because their movement analogizes capital’s own expansive accumulation dynamics. Parikka writes: The seemingly contradictory themes of the virus as the threat and the essence of capitalism are, in fact, intertwined and operate in sync. The ideas of risk control, safety measures and the construction of the responsible user are thus to be read as integral elements of viral capitalism: with these elements, or discourses, the fear of computer viruses has been turned into a part of the flows of consumer capitalism, products and practices that “buy off” anxiety.23 The capitalism at work in this description is one which conjoins and appropriates strategies of governmentality and risk management as core elements of late modernity’s structures for the formation of individual subjects. “Buying off anxiety” constitutes the responsible consumer-driven action of the self-regulating individual who, as I will suggest in later chapters of this book, comes to deploy a version of viral circulation in his or her own promiscuous network relations. To revisit Project Cascade, we see an explicit attempt to measure and predict events of media virality. The subject at the center of these control

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manoeuvers is a brand rather than an individual; only a small leap to the adjacent activities of individuals on social networks allows the brand/individual overlap to become clear. In the explanation of the Project Cascade tool, we can also observe that a transmission of marketing terminology has led to the valorization of a multi-network space of promiscuity—that is, a dense map of intimate connections—as a “sharing conversation”. Its most impactful proponents are singled out as “influential contributors”, even as “leaders”. As a device for tracking the movement of circulating objects, Project Cascade also resembles the function of a range of surveillance measures within the overlapping viral contexts discussed by Parikka. One clear example comes from medical research, notably epidemiological maps that aim to identify and isolate individual hubs of transmissive activity. The hunt for the so-called Patient Zero of HIV is perhaps the best-known instance, and I will turn to what it teaches us about digital networks in Chapter 3.24 But Project Cascade is also manifestly motivated by rechanneling anxieties around lack of brand control into the development of a map that allows the brand not just to follow or predict circulation, but to “premediate” it, that is to contain it within certain possible futures or projected “life-cycles”.25 I will unpack some of the implications of Grusin’s concept of premediation below. Not unlike the tracking of Patient Zero, Project Cascade illustrates a tension within the circuits of virality between risk and security, threat and control. Circulating in and around these spaces, the viral object is not only a source of risk and threat but a necessary component. Because it has been constructed to signify normatively as a special kind of risk and threat, the viral object becomes a functional medium of emergent, premediating regimes of security and control which claim to restore displaced norms— even in advance. Examples range from community and governmental policing of safe-sex practices, to the development and marketing of anti-virus software, as Parikka points out, to algorithms of digital content sharing currently standardized on social media platforms like Facebook. In the following sections, I will examine the paradox by which the virus is tracked as the object of the “conversation” of post-viral virality while being, in a sense, unspeakable and invisible. In turn, the conversation develops a new syntax for capturing and putting to work the viral object and its agents. INTERACTIVITY If viral objects are discursively constructed within their spaces of circulation for certain cultural and ideological functions and futures, we must question what factors enable and limit circulation. Also, if media virality is taken as a measure of popularity and a result of promiscuous network participation, it is worth questioning whether promiscuity and viruses are registers of the same kind of popularity. I have claimed that a series of cultural shifts has led to a complex of discourses of human and computer virality reproducing

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themselves within a new media ecology. The rebranding of viral circulation as sharing has been of most concern, and I turn my attention now to some of the ways that sharing is structured. In the cultural move from computer viruses to post-viral digital sharing, one major point of tension exists around questions of agency and the voluntary. No one really chooses to receive a computer virus, even though someone has chosen to produce and release it. This is the difference between the actions of a very small number of virus-producers and the assumed inaction or negligence of thousands of users who were not responsible enough to protect themselves. And while these same users may not always choose to receive particular examples of viral media (such as memes) that appear on their social networking applications, the virality of these objects depends upon two interrelated modes of network participation. The first is that a maximum number of receiving users retransmit the object throughout their own networks. The second is that a maximum number of users who have created more influential and far-reaching networks retransmit the material throughout these wider and denser networks. Arguably the second model is more efficient because of its reliance on the activity of promiscuous network hubs, or “influential contributors to the conversation”. These are social media users with high Klout scores. In the rush to acclaim these influential contributors and to proclaim every user’s inherent capacity to become more influential, however, perhaps something simple is being overlooked. While it is obvious to say no sharing happens without an architecture for sharing, it may also be that virality results as much from the systemic functionality of basic features as from acts of deliberate transmission by mythologized media users. Henry Jenkins offers the term “spreadable media” in place of viral media, partly in an attempt to shake off the negative connotations of viruses. He argues that the term “viral” “mystifies how the process [of circulation] works”: It is a kind of smallpox-soaked blanket theory of media circulation, in which people become unknowing carriers of powerful and contagious ideas which they bring back to their homes and work place, infecting their friends and family.26 In this formulation, reception of viral content is unwilling and passive, and retransmission is unknowing. Jenkins is concerned that the individual’s agency and activity in the circulation process is exactly what is not recognized. As is now a familiar strain from many years of his work on media audiences and participatory culture, Jenkins prefers to highlight how the “spreadability” of media is more than just circulation of the object. Crucially, it also involves the investment of that object with multiple meanings, modifications, and uses that resonate culturally. In other words, elements of active participation in and around the object propel its circulation. Without individually motivated uses of the object, it would not circulate, and this is the basis of Jenkins’s current catchphrase: “if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead”.27

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Jenkins directly critiques a claim in Wired magazine that media virality is based on a culture of “media snacks”, or easily obtainable items that are bite-sized, tasty, and addictive but not very nutritious. Rather, he claims, viral media objects “travel through the web because they are meaningful to the people who spread them”, and therefore they are not “nutritionally bereft, meaningless ‘snacks’ ”. It is precisely because of their meaningfulness to each individual involved in circulation, who is more than simply a “host” of viral content, that objects spread. Spreadability is therefore about use as much as movement: Few of the ideas [of viral content] get transmitted in anything like their original form: humans adapt, transform, rework them on the fly in response to a range of different local circumstances and personal needs. Stripping aside the human motives and choices that shape this process reveals little about the spread of these concepts.28 The vernacular phrase “on the fly” nicely describes spontaneous or otherwise unplanned acts of manipulation and modification, similarly to what Mark Deuze calls the “bricolage” of digital culture.29 Borrowing an anthropological principle from Claude Lévi-Strauss and, more recently, from Michel de Certeau, Deuze highlights the everyday tactics of “making do” that are central to participatory culture. Bricolage on the fly is the basis of “grassroots” media consumer activity so celebrated by Jenkins in his work on fan culture and convergence culture.30 Jenkins’s focus on individual user motives and choices is, as always, laudable, and I want to believe that each person that spreads any given media object does so for a different reason from the next person. But the architecture that generates media virality (or spreadability) may not allow us to discern fully between individual motives and choices, circumstances, and needs. It may be the case that some of the most commonly used modes of circulation are themselves responsible for “[s]tripping aside the human motives and choices”. If so, the interactive basis of dynamics of spreadability may be reduced, along with claims to interactivity as a register of empowerment and democratization. I will take four simple examples here and offer observations. The first is the “Like” feature on Facebook, now so pervasive as to be present as a sharing option on most other online applications, as well as having entered everyday vernacular. The Like button is a binary switch: you click it and the object spreads; you don’t click it and nothing happens. But clicking Like may not only mean “I like this” or “I enjoyed this item”. It could mean a whole host of possible responses, including “I think this is amazing”, “I think this is reasonably interesting”, “I think this is stupid”, “I want to increase traffic to this page”, and “my friend is pressuring me to Like her page and I don’t really like it but I like her so what else can I do?”. In some circumstances, given the lack of alternatives, Like could even mean Dislike, and people on Facebook are frequently posting comments lamenting the lack of a Dislike

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button. This alone suggests some desire to share without having to comment. By the same token, not clicking Like does not necessarily mean Dislike, nor does it necessarily register disengagement. The point is that all of these motivations for clicking Like—and all of them are valuable—lead to the same result of the item increasing in circulation, and possibly going viral, but nothing of these outcomes registers the multiplicity of kinds of user engagement. Like flattens out this multiplicity and becomes more about technical functionality, a bodily reflexive, a way of interacting with the media object without having to express individual motivation. Unlike the Like button, the “Share This Link” feature now present on many websites does allow users a more explicit opportunity to express motivations for sharing, usually in the form of a text box where the user can choose to write a short comment. This is a space where the range of responses—from “I think this is amazing” to “I feel obliged to share this”—can be elaborated. Each response aims to have some element of personal interpretive influence on the contacts who receive the item, but in the key cases of sharing to Facebook and Twitter the individual’s comment is limited to a certain number of characters. Moreover, at the level of reception, it is not clear whether comments produce qualitative value or impact differently from each other or from no comment at all. Like the Like feature, I would argue that movement and circulation, or “sharing”, are privileged over motivations and modes of engagement. While no less crucial to individual experience of circulating items, these cannot adequately be transmitted along with the object. The “retweet” function on Twitter demonstrates this most obviously. Retweeting allows the user to copy a tweet that individual has received and to forward it to his or her own network of followers, and for this reason it can be crucial to rapid circulation and virality because of the possibility of exploiting the network density of most influential or “followed” users. These hub-moments are exactly what Project Cascade aims to measure. And while retweeting, like the Like button, may be thought to be a clear endorsement of the copied content, it remains a flat endorsement at best and perhaps nothing more than a mechanical gesture. Available research suggests, like other sharing activity, that various motivations exist behind retweeting behavior. From their study of a sample of retweets, boyd, Golder, and Lotan offer a list of motivations, including, among others: “to amplify or spread tweets to new audiences”; “to publicly agree with someone”; “as an act of friendship, loyalty, or homage”; and “self-gain, either to gain followers or reciprocity from more visible participants”.31 Despite this intriguing possibility that the user him or herself might be a significant component of what is circulated—over and above content—the researchers conclude somewhat blandly: Participants’ social and informational goals vary, and accordingly, so do their retweeting practices. Regardless of why users embrace retweeting, through broadcasting messages, they become part of a broader conversation.32

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Again, like Project Cascade, the simple fact of “conversation” through multiple points of participation is affirmed without adequately examining how participation functions—how it may be limited or enabled structurally by architectural design and network dynamics, such as the particular densities of connectivity that are exploited by users for self-promotional purposes. Finally YouTube, the video-sharing site through which much of the above activity also travels, also offers an architecture which promotes circulation in ways that are not always about motivation or even content. Jenkins rightly discusses how YouTube operates as a center for participation around media objects themselves and sometimes interactively with them. Making a similar argument, Jean Burgess gives evidence of intricate intertextual and metatextual engagements with popular videos—notably parody—that form the basis for new kinds of community.33 The commercial for bottled water discussed above is one such example. While dependent on the existing notoriety of the original video, parodies posted on YouTube also divert traffic back to the original, thereby increasing its circulation. But so do unrelated videos that may have found themselves “tagged” with similar search terms on YouTube. Moreover, YouTube automatically diverts traffic to those videos that are already highly viewed, amplifying their circulation in what may be called an artificial or mechanistic fashion. As Burgess and Jenkins both point out, the value or success of a YouTube video—or indeed any viral media object— lies in its breadth of circulation. On YouTube, this is measured by the index labeled “number of views”. But given the feedback loops that account for at least some of the intensity of circulation of videos with the highest number of views, this index does not transparently reflect widespread peer-to-peer transmission or reasons for it. Further research is certainly required to better understand the dynamics of sharing activity. It seems to me that the politics of network formations are a good place to start. But if these observations are correct, then the individualized and motivated active user engagement of which Jenkins speaks is somewhat fantasized. This is not to say that it doesn’t exist; surely it has always existed. Rather, moments of transmission or sharing may be closer to performative or citational gestures whose preinscribed discursive framework cannot fully register the complexity of each engagement. From her study of a sample of most highly viewed YouTube videos, Burgess writes: it isn’t evident on the basis of a textual reading why—or, more importantly, in what ways—these videos were so popular during the period in which the study was conducted. It is only by looking at the creative activity that occurred around these videos that we can begin to understand just how important participation is to popularity.34 Anyone who has ever questioned the value, purpose, or interest of a viral video or why it was forwarded to them will nod in agreement with Burgess here. Textuality or content itself may yield less clear information on sharing

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than cultural—and political and economic—formations in which the content is shared. Jodi Dean may agree with Burgess too, although she takes quite a different line in claiming that the very principles of value in communication change in the context of “communicative capitalism”, including Web 2.0 and the “fantasy of abundance” which characterizes it. Dean writes: The exchange value of messages overtakes their use value. So a message is no longer primarily a message from a sender to a receiver. Uncoupled from contexts of action and application (. . .) the message is simply part of a circulating data stream. Its particular content is irrelevant. Who sent it is irrelevant. Who receives it is irrelevant. That it need be responded to is irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is circulation, the addition to the pool.35 If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead. Nonetheless, we might still conclude that all kinds of content should circulate widely, as evidence of a robust and unpredictable popular culture. But I would also apply a little pressure to the ideas of popularity and participation here. Is it the same thing to say that a video is popular because it received several hundred thousand hits on YouTube, or because it received more Like thumbs up than most? Is a blog or article popular simply because it was posted on more Facebook profiles or retweeted more than others? Burgess’s passing reference to the “quantitatively popular” opens the door to these questions.36 It also takes us back to Stuart Hall’s critique of “the ‘market’ or commercial definition” of popularity.37 Another way to phrase these questions, adding a new twist to this old cultural studies debate, would be: Is digital content deemed popular because it has been Liked by many? If these interactive mechanisms have become a key measure of popularity, how successfully does this measurement acknowledge what we might call “qualitative popularity”, that is, something closer to Hall’s “descriptive” or “anthropological” definition of popularity? There used to be a brand of non-alcoholic whisky-flavored beverage that was advertised in Australia with the catchphrase “The drink you have when you’re not having a drink”. The sharing mechanisms discussed above are the active, participatory user engagements you have when you’re not really being active, participatory, or engaged. It is not that they are wholly about inactivity, lack of participation, or disengagement; rather, they are ways that the user can partly outsource their activity, participation, and engagement to the medium itself. Like non-alcoholic whisky (and bottled water?) these built-in features are counterparts to what Slavoj Žižek calls the “chocolate laxative”. In this category, Žižek also includes decaffeinated coffee, fatfree cream, “the redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration and tolerant multiculturalism as an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness”.38 All are items, writes Paul A. Taylor, “whereby the qualitative feature . . . is extracted/reversed by the form in which it is presented so that

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it now involves the agent of its own containment”.39 To this list of chocolate laxatives, I add viral media: virality minus the virus. In the case of interactive digital media it is precisely the ideology of interactive user participation that masks what Žižek calls interactivity’s “uncanny double”: interpassivity. As a number of people have argued following Žižek, this is a mode in which interaction with the object—say, forwarding a YouTube video or retweeting a link, compared to “just passively following the show”—is replaced by the situation where “the object itself takes from me, deprives me of, my own passivity, so that it is the object itself which enjoys the show instead of me, relieving me of the duty to enjoy myself”.40 In Taylor’s explanation of the concept, interpassivity reframes interactivity in line with an understanding of certain imaginative and interpretive uses of digital media having already been “necessarily pre-inscribed with systemic qualities”, a situation which “automatically circumscribes and undermines the extent to which they can be substantively reappropriated for authentically transformative purposes” and thus represent some kind of democratic power shift.41 He continues: In the context of the inter-passive subject of digitalized power and governance, just as the very thing that constipates is used as a laxative, so the inherently anti-participatory, (in a spatially grounded, traditional conception of city-state democracy) immaterial tendency encapsulated in the Internet is presented as the very vehicle and constitutive mode of new forms of democratic interaction—digital citizenship etc. Similarly, computer-mediated activity that is non-sensually circumscribed by preencoded binary operations of computers is represented as the acme of activity when, in fact, to repeat, interpassivity more accurately describes the process.42 Dean has made a similar claim, arguing that the interpassivity of digital media communications constructs a “fantasy of participation” in which contributing to the circulation of content feels like “communicative action”; through interpassive investment, the fetish object is active in our place. Users “believe they are active, making a difference by clicking on a button” whereas “the frantic activity of the fetish works to prevent actual action, to prevent something from really happening”.43 The fantasy of “making a difference” contributes to Dean’s larger claim for communicative capitalism as “democracy that talks without responding”.44 Following Taylor’s and Dean’s claims, I would argue that social protocols of interactivity emerging from increasingly immersive, even inescapable networked media use may even produce coercive dynamics of participation. Jonathan Sterne also makes this point plainly: “While interactivity can be imagined as the ‘like’ or ‘retweet,’ it also encompasses the ‘agree to terms’ button”, and he goes on to ask whether “interactivity is now one of the central hinges through which power works”.45 The only viable alternative or real oppositional mode

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to this scenario is opting out altogether. In such a coercive context, it is also worth reconsidering the relationship between popularity and promiscuity, where the ability to persuasively perform the density and influence of one’s network participation (or “leadership”) positions the networking subject him or herself as the self-created viral object—the convergence of qualitative and quantitative popularity as the ultimate Web 2.0 success story. For Mark Coté and Jennifer Pybus, drawing on Judith Butler’s work, the viability of such a subject position demands recognition within a space that is “intensely social and performative”. For this reason, the “desire to signify amongst networks of friends establishes modes of intelligibility” within “an ontological space grounded in the affective and constitutive relations of users”.46 The primacy of the subject, then, constituted in relation to norms of intelligible sharing, allows us to complicate bland and depoliticized notions of “conversation”. THE SHARING SUBJECT A major element of Web 2.0’s privileging of interactivity and participation within various kinds of “sharing conversation” is the construction of what I call the “sharing subject”. Dean argues that within the fantasy of participation that structures communicative capitalism, individual networked media users are “accustomed to putting their thoughts online” but moreover that they believe “their thoughts and ideas are registering”.47 We could say that by clicking Like or retweeting a link, we believe ourselves to be “contributing to the conversation”, to use the language of Project Cascade. The result, Dean continues, is that contributing has “a subjective registration effect”, which I read to mean both an effect of having one’s impact or contribution registered, and the effect of one’s subjectivity registered.48 In this sense, the belief in impact or contribution effected by circulating content inaugurates and ratifies the subject, and does so within a space determined by particular norms of intelligibility. As Dean’s wider project makes clear, current modes of intelligibility normalize the neoliberal subject produced within the framework of communicative capitalism in which “[n]etworked communication and information technologies are exquisite media for capturing and reformatting political energies” as “contributions to the circulation of content”.49 Dean’s ideas are largely consistent with a number of other scholars who have theorized the “putting to work” of interactive consumers for purposes of capital accumulation. Mark Andrejevic also employs the concept of interpassivity to critique assumptions that interactive media, including some aspects of television viewing and related online activities, produce unequivocally favorable conditions for audience agency.50 Complicating this picture, he finds, are ways in which user interactivity is exploited as marketing strategy by media producers. Possibilities for creative or subversive activity are not entirely foreclosed but co-exist alongside production strategies which both allow and are captured by them. In a slightly different context, Melissa Gregg has identified the pervasion of neoliberal discourse in the increasingly

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entrepreneurial leisure practices of social networking sites, including the adding of “friends” to one’s list of contacts as a kind of purposeful labor.51 In both Andrejevic’s and Gregg’s work, strategic manipulations of positionality and popularity emerge as complications to the ordinary sociality and participation appearing to take place. As I have briefly discussed above, the mutual influence of digital marketing techniques and so-called amateur or ordinary user practices and aesthetics shows further evidence of the penetration of neoliberal and capitalist logics into everyday digital media practice and the appropriation of this practice in and as new forms of circulating value. This trend is clearly exemplified by the capture of the potential of unlikely YouTube phenomenon Keenan Cahill in several corporate structures following the massive circulation of his lipsynching videos. Cahill has now been folded into promotions for top-selling performers 50 Cent and Katy Perry, as well as the brand of bottled water with which this chapter begins. All are examples of retrospective attempts to capitalize on Cahill’s unmanufacturable virality, that is the extraordinary qualities of an ordinary amateur YouTube user. The recognition of virality as capitalist opportunity, however, found its momentum prior to Web 2.0 marketing techniques, as Parikka’s work on viral capitalism makes clear; indeed he maintains that construction of viral threats is not merely consistent but “intertwined” with capitalist structures. Likewise, Helmreich writes that the emerging and unpredictable threat of computer viruses from the late 1980s provoked a need to construct systems characterized by “flexibility and adaptability—virtues connected to market ideals of advanced capitalist production and also to contemporary descriptions of the immune system”.52 In both theories, a framework of subjectivity is constructed around the user’s encounter with the virus where viral attack must be met by offensive rather than defensive manoeuvers. Helmreich is describing a biopolitics of responsiveness to viral threats and projected viral futures, where qualities drawn from the discursive construction of nationalist and capitalist frames of citizenship—and these in turn from the racial, gender, and class inscription of normative bodies—converge in the construction of the responsive and responsible subject. The sharing subject is one who, like viral content and the viruses themselves that they mimic, can embody the neoliberal values of flexibility and adaptability, even so as to rebrand cultural threat as market leadership or popularity. This manipulation of the virus in current discourses of virality, loaded as the figure of the virus has been with a range of sociocultural fears, registers the more specific anxiety around the erasure or instability of the agentic subject. As is apparent in Jenkins’s metaphor of the “smallpoxsoaked blanket”, the media consumer is thought to be positioned as powerless to resist the agency of the virus itself. In the language of viral marketing, however, and perhaps even in Jenkins’s theory of “spreadability”, this very agency is celebrated under a different set of names and transferred to the user, and the possibilities of nuisance incurred upon the involuntary host of the virus seem more or less to be overlooked.

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Tying these strands together, the interactive agency that characterizes the sharing subject must be recognized as an instrumentality of the regimes of capital to which virality is central. In other words, the individual sharing activity that propels viral circulation is put to work. Adapting Lazzarato for the Web 2.0 context, Coté and Pybus call this process “learning to immaterial labour 2.0”, in that the ways users work at online social networks demonstrate how they “enthusiastically respond in the affirmative to the call: ‘become subjects!’ ”53 Insofar as this subjective labor secures the continuity and strength of network formations, and the potential for media corporations and advertisers to capitalize upon them, it participates in what Grusin refers to as the contemporary logic of “securitization”. Securitization occurs through everyday media networks and the detailed archiving of user data: The disciplinary regime of securitization not only depends upon but also encourages the proliferation of transactions and other data so that its algorithms can connect the dots. Premediation operates in the current security regime to ensure that there will always be enough data (enough dots) in any particular, potential, or imagined future to be able to know in advance, before something happened, that it was about to happen.54 Rather than securing against the risk of uncontained viral futures, postviral virality reinforces the conditions for their proliferation—precisely so as to capture their potential. Sharing subjects participate in these futures by working at “pleasurable, embodied affective interactions” with networking media devices, their labor given normative social value by a language of agency, flexibility, sharing, and, implicitly, democracy.55 In addition, mere participation on any level in the networks of post-viral virality risks being taken as consent to the hegemony of interactivity, mitigated by the constant promise of potential for impact that will balance out necessary moments of relative passivity to other users’ “sharing”. Far from the horizontal redistribution of power and influence presumed in popular discussions of online social networks, a new hierarchy emerges around degrees of sharing success. More than a contest for popularity that sharing might initially indicate, successful sharing is measured according to the persuasive enactment of performative and citational codes constituting the field of intelligibility for the sharing subject. BEYOND ACTIVITY? The ability of sharing subjects to perform flexibility and adaptability marks a significant component of their success; as such the sharing subject can transform him or herself into viral object. I will conclude by claiming that the subject’s stability and instrumentality is also defined within a heteronormative logic, one in which the alternative intimacies of promiscuity must

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be rebranded as active sharing and market leadership. In her critique of 1990s hypertext theory, Michelle Kendrick notes the inability of key male thinkers such as George Landow to read transformations of textual practice and power relations brought about by this technological moment outside of a “phallocentric” and “Eurocentric” literary theoretical tradition. Specifically, she argues that their celebration of hypertext’s overturning of “[l] inearity, hierarchy [and] the submission of a passive reader to a controlling author” manages to make “no more than cursory mention” of second-wave French feminists who had identified equivalent ruptures two decades earlier within the tradition of écriture féminine.56 Rather than using the opportunity of hypertext to destabilize the ideological and specifically gendered construction of subject positions, Kendrick maintains that “the hypertext boys” instead reconstitute the subject around the glorification of “masculine cognition” in the figure of the reader, now “granted supposed unlimited agency within controlled and selective abundance”.57 Expressed in these terms, agency correlates with the “fantasy of abundance” identified by Jodi Dean within communicative capitalism. While I am not necessarily advocating a return to 1970s feminism, at least not without a critique of its own essentialist tendencies (as Kendrick herself points out), I am calling for the need to re-examine instances of contemporary media and cultural discourse that may too easily fall back on normative impulses. This may particularly be the case of norms that could otherwise have been erased by the theoretical opportunities of the digital. A rethinking of pleasure is one such opportunity, and in this context Kendrick reminds us of the French feminists’ claims on agency: we see agency in their theories as, not necessarily, founded on notions of control and power; certainly not about centering oneself and “penetrating” the text; rather agency was often for them pleasure. Bodily pleasure that is specific, and localized and yet amorphous and multiple. Think for a moment about the pleasure of orgasm; It is at once bodily in an absolutely direct way, but it is also a cognitive act, culturally shaped and informed.58 Subverting normative codes that determine the location of pleasure and acts involved in producing pleasure works to resignify agency beyond a paradigm of “activity” and its passive other. In the context of a Web 2.0 frenzy to turn everyone into active (“phallocentric”) user-subjects, one aspect of the experience of viral media that remains overlooked is precisely the affordance of pleasure beyond the hegemony of recognition and sharing success that over-emphasizes the agency of “leadership”. One such pleasure may be that of relinquishing control to the promiscuous, viral flows of content— in all of their unmanufactured, immoderate, multiplying intensity. Revisiting the theoretical provocations of second-wave French feminism and queer critique emerging in the first years of HIV/AIDS draws attention to what has not been achieved and what has been undone in the more recent

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turns to neoliberal, post-feminist, and homonormative discourses, including those policing sexual, social, and cultural pleasures and their corresponding imagined risks. With this in mind, I return to Leo Bersani who, alongside the interventions of Crimp and Watney quoted above, argued: a gravely dysfunctional aspect of what is, after all, the healthy pleasure we take in the operation of a coordinated and strong physical organism is the temptation to deny the perhaps equally strong appeal of powerlessness, of the loss of control. Phallocentrism is exactly that: not primarily the denial of power to women (although it has obviously also led to that, everywhere and at all times), but above all the denial of the value of powerlessness in both men and women. I don’t mean the value of gentleness, or nonaggressiveness, or even of passivity, but rather of a more radical disintegration and humiliation of the self.59 Such a reconfiguration of power relations—mutually constitutive of sexual relations, as Bersani points out, through the gendered politics of positionality— seems to me the missed opportunity of virality. To understand viral media circulation only within the emblematically heteronormative positions of active/ passive, and to come down on one side of this dyad as both Jenkins and those he critiques seem to do, is to overly reify the coherent subjectivities that sexual and digital networks could otherwise so pleasurably disperse. Despite its appropriation of the modalities of uncontained circulation, the new virality works to secure the agency, labor, and affects of sharing against a range of broadly conceived risks. Risks include that networks not expand, that applications not mine user data, that ordinary users not continue to produce catchy content. Risk, however, is a source of pleasure and not just a frame that contains it. The ultimate paradox of post-viral virality might just be that ultimately, implicitly, it calls its subjects to exceed their own instrumentality. NOTES 1. Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 6. 2. “Jennifer Aniston Sex Tape (Keenan Cahill and Jennifer Aniston) for Smartwater,” accessed June 1, 2014, YouTube, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=kgX_IJPOifs. 3. Ibid. 4. Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 22. 5. Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, “The Entrepreneurial Vlogger: Participatory Culture Beyond the Professional-Amateur Divide,” in The YouTube Reader, ed. Pelle Snickars and Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden/Wallflower Press, 2009), 90. 6. “Project Cascade,” NYTLabs, 2011, accessed July 7, 2014, http://nytlabs.com/ projects/cascade.html. 7. Suzanne Labarre, “Infographic of the Day: 3-D Model Unlocks Secrets of Twitterverse,” Co-Design, accessed July 7, 2011, http://www.fastcodesign.

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8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

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com/1663694/infographic-of-the-day-3-d-model-unlocks-secrets-of-twitter verse-video. “Project Cascade.” danah boyd, “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications,” in A Networked Self: Identity, Community and Culture on Social Network Sites, ed. Zizi Papacharissi (New York: Routledge, 2010), 39–58. Deborah Lupton, “Panic Computing: The Viral Metaphor and Computer Technology,” Cultural Studies 8, no. 3 (1994): 558. Stefan Helmreich, “Flexible Infections: Computer Viruses, Human Bodies, Nation-States, Evolutionary Capitalism,” Science, Technology and Human Values 25, no. 4 (2000): 473. Jussi Parikka, Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 130. Parikka, Digital Contagions. Simon Watney, “The Spectacle of AIDS,” October 43, Winter (1987): 77. Parikka, Digital Contagions, 132. The relationship between institutionalized homophobia, the presence of HIV/AIDS, and the politics of globalization and postcoloniality in some parts of the world, for instance in Uganda, is a rich field for study but well beyond the scope of this discussion. For instance, see Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 547–66. Douglas Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” October 43, Winter (1987): 253. Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 11. Ibid. Italics in original. Justin Kirby, “Viral Marketing,” in Connected Marketing: The Viral, Buzz and Word of Mouth Revolution, ed. Justin Kirby and Paul Marsden (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2006), 88. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005). Jussi Parikka, “Digital Monsters, Binary Aliens—Computer Viruses, Capitalism and the Flow of Information,” Fibreculture 4 (2005), accessed May 2, 2014, http://four.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-019-digital-monsters-bi nary-aliens-%E2%80%93-computer-viruses-capitalism-and-the-flow-of-infor mation/. Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic”; Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). Grusin, Premediation. Jenkins interviewed in Nikki Usher, “Why Spreadable Doesn’t Equal Virus: A Conversation With Henry Jenkins,” Nieman Journalism Lab, 2010, accessed July 7, 2014, http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/11/why-spreadable-doesntequal-viral-a-conversation-with-henry-jenkins. Henry Jenkins, “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead (Part One): Media Viruses and Memes,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, 2009, accessed July 7, 2014, http:// henryjenkins.org/2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html. Ibid. Mark Deuze, “Participation, Remediation, Bricolage: Considering Principal Components of a Digital Culture,” The Information Society 22, no. 2 (2006): 63–75. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Revised edition (New York: New York University Press, 2008).

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Virality Minus the Virus 31. danah boyd, Scott Golder, and Gilad Lotan, “Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter,” (Proceedings of the 43rd Hawaii International Conference on Social Systems, IEEE: Kauai, HI, January 6, 2010), p. 6. 32. Ibid., 10. 33. Jean Burgess, “ ‘All Your Chocolate Rain Are Belong to Us?’ Viral Video, YouTube and the Dynamics of Participatory Culture,” in Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, ed. Geert Lovink (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008), 101–9. 34. Ibid., 3. 35. Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 26. 36. Burgess, “ ‘All Your Chocolate Rain Are Belong to Us?’ Viral Video, YouTube and the Dynamics of Participatory Culture,” 3. 37. Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’ ” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey (Harlow: Pearson-Prentice Hall, 1998), 446. 38. Slavoj Žižek, “Iraq War, Chips and Chocolate Laxatives,” Times Higher Education, January 30, 2004, accessed May 2, 2014, http://www.times highereducation.co.uk/features/iraq-war-chips-and-chocolate-laxatives/ 182609.article. 39. Paul A. Taylor, “Critical Theory 2.0 and Im/materiality: The Bug in the Machinic Flows,” Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture 1, no. 1 (2009): 103. 40. Slavoj Žižek, “The Interpassive Subject: Lacan Turns a Prayer Wheel,” How to Read Lacan, 2009, accessed July 7, 2014, http://www.lacan.com/essays/?p=143. 41. Taylor, “Critical Theory 2.0 and Im/materiality: The Bug in the Machinic Flows,” 102. 42. Ibid., 102–3. 43. Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 31. 44. Ibid., 22. 45. Jonathan Sterne, “What If Interactivity Is the New Passivity?,” Flow TV 15, no. 10 (2012), accessed July 18, 2014, http://flowtv.org/2012/04/the-new-passivity/. 46. Mark Coté and Jennifer Pybus, “Learning to Immaterial Labour 2.0: Facebook and Social Networks,” in Cognitive Capitalism, Education and Digital Labor, ed. Michael A. Peters and Ergin Bulut (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 176. 47. Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 31. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 31–32. 50. Mark Andrejevic, “Watching Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans,” Television and New Media 9, no. 1 (2008): 24–46. 51. Melissa Gregg, “Thanks for the Ad(d): Neoliberalism’s Compulsory Friendship,” Online Opinion, September 21, 2007, accessed July 7, 2014, http://www. onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6400. 52. Helmreich, “Flexible Infections: Computer Viruses, Human Bodies, NationStates, Evolutionary Capitalism,” 473. 53. Coté and Pybus, “Learning to Immaterial Labour 2.0: Facebook and Social Networks,” 170. 54. Grusin, Premediation, 124. 55. Ibid., 125. 56. Michelle Kendrick, “The Laugh of the Modem: Interactive Technologies and L’écriture Féminine,” Rhizomes 4 (2002), http://www.rhizomes.net/issue4/ kendrick.html. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” October 43, Winter (1987): 216–17.

2

Frictionless Sharing

In September 2011, at Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a keynote address in which he launched another round of changes to Facebook profiles and how users connect with each other on the platform. Regular changes to the format of profiles since Facebook’s inception have been subject to user critique and frustration, demonstrating the intimate relationship users maintain with the application and its functions, and with its interface design. Zuckerberg’s address offered a narrative in which the most recent changes were to be seen as a logical, even inevitable next step in an overall plan. Having built a massive user base, it was time to fine-tune user experience and engagement. Two main changes were featured. First, user profiles would now be formatted as Timelines, enabling “a new way to express who you are”, as Zuckerberg put it.1 Emphasizing the role of the profile in mediating social connection, Zuckerberg worked through a metaphor of conversation that is now familiar within the world of social media. Differently from the use of the metaphor to highlight control and leadership by the developers of Project Cascade, as discussed in Chapter 1, here conversation focused on interpersonal exchange. Zuckerberg’s narrative of profile format development culminated in this summary: So if the original profile was the first five minutes of your conversation, and the stream was the next fifteen, then what I want to show you today is the rest. It’s the next few hours of a great, in-depth, engaging conversation, whether it’s with a close friend or with someone you just met. It’s the heart of your Facebook experience, completely rethought from the ground up.2 The second main change announced, an update of the site’s Open Graph format, would involve the increased integration of external applications into users’ profiles. As a user listens to music or reads news or makes purchases on other websites and applications, more of these activities would be more efficiently visible to more of that user’s contacts. By seeing more of the activities of their contacts, users are encouraged to learn more about each other and their tastes and interests. Of course, they are also encouraged to

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learn more about selected other sites and applications in the process. If a significant amount of the user’s activities are understood as “sharing” content with friends, and these activities are “naturally social”, then these new “social apps” would serve to automate that process.3 Zuckerberg was keen to celebrate three desirable outcomes of the new system. The overall effect would be to enhance the “social experience” of “finding things through your friends’ activity”, and patterns of sharing discovered among users would reinforce community. In addition, Facebook’s ability to connect “all of these dots that are out there”, meaning the multiple nodes of activity comprising any user’s network, would produce moments of “real-time serendipity”. The element of fortunate discovery through sharing activity is emphasized here, but notably also through the construction of mediated liveness. Sharing happens in “real time”, as if during a face-to-face conversation. To bring about serendipity, a ticker would appear on the side of the user’s profile, not unlike live updates to news headlines and stock prices on certain TV broadcasts. The ticker offers a live flow of opportunities for connection and community. And most significantly, Zuckerberg affirmed the ease and efficiency of these sharing experiences: that instead of having to continue to prompt users to share, sharing would become “frictionless”.4 This chapter examines the meanings and implications of “frictionless sharing” within a broader discussion of digital intimacy. Any account of digital media’s entry into the everyday lives of individuals must include a focus on intimacy. The development of various digital networking technologies has fostered an increasingly open display of everyday intimacies, and individuals have also come to engage in increasingly intimate relationships with digital interfaces themselves. In some of the most recent updates to this account, it is online social networks like Facebook that best illustrate the many levels of intimate relations—self with other, self with self, personal with collective, private with public, user with interface, and so on. All are now undertaken on intimate and portable digital devices that continue a transformation of space, mobility, and connectivity into experiences of more and more precisely networked being. Throughout this book, modes of intimate sharing illustrate these dynamics. This sketch of digital intimacy has two significant implications. First, the concept of intimacy itself is in the process of being reframed, necessarily reimagined because of the complex mediations of the social by recent forms of everyday technology. It may no longer be possible to describe intimacy without reference to the “infrastructures” through which it is established and negotiated.5 In fact, it may never have been possible, but the increasing immersiveness of digital forms of sociality makes this task even less imaginable. Far from destroying intimacy, as some would claim, emergent digital mediations of community, connection, and geolocality, among other things, shift the ground on which intimate relationality can be imagined. Therefore as a second major implication, we cannot settle on concepts of the self and the body that remain unchallenged by the adaptive relational forms of digital intimacy. Always differentially inscribed by relations of gender,

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sexuality, class, and ethnicity, and always complexly intertwined with technology, selves, and bodies resist a singular ontology more than ever if we recognize a multiplication of intimacies through which they would be defined. If promiscuity is one word to describe an individual’s multiple intimacies, then this book’s chief motivation is to ask how the language of promiscuity alters accounts of everyday digital intimacy. It takes up the challenge to be “a little more promiscuous about promiscuity”: to “define it more broadly” and to permit it “to affect all forms of attention, all those moments when our regard approaches and touches something else”.6 Can the multiple forms of attention, regard, and touch undertaken by the social network user, for instance, be considered promiscuous? The first chapter of this book began to build a case for the affirmative, but with a major caveat: before applying the language of promiscuity, it is important to identify some of its biases and blind spots, to pay attention to the selective and contingent ways in which the language has previously been applied. Towards that objective, I outlined in Chapter 1 how online sharing activity currently referred to as “viral” rebrands promiscuity and erases connotations of risk that have conventionally attended to it. Virality is widely celebrated in worlds of digital media, especially as a tool for marketing, but I suggested that a kind of cultural amnesia limits this celebration to particular kinds of intimacy. Moreover, this version of post-viral intimacy very often finds itself happily, if not always easily, deployed as an instrument of capital accumulation. In this chapter I will argue that in some of the most recent changes to the sharing arrangements of social networking, a multiplication of forms of attention, regard and touch is precisely what is facilitated, and that these changes aim for an enhanced structure of intimate, promiscuous connections. They are not free from contradiction, however, or from their own intimate entanglement with the desires for efficiency of late capitalism. My first main focus is on the changes to sharing heralded at the F8 event, and some of the user response to those changes. Then, in being a little more promiscuous about promiscuity, I will need to draw from a wider field of ideas beyond that of current social networking in order to examine what else is exchanged in the close encounter that I am proposing. I will suggest that in the current discourse of social networking intimacies, “frictionless sharing” can more richly be examined in the light of queer interventions made in response to mediations of HIV/AIDS, which have aimed to resignify the negative and even fatal connotations of promiscuity. For several queer scholars and activists, intimacies of and around non-normative sex provide not merely a model but the reality of alternative conceptions of sociality and ethics. Specifically, the phenomenon of barebacking, as it is investigated by Tim Dean and Leo Bersani, offers a series of productive counter-points—indeed, points of friction—to the kind of sharing advocated by Zuckerberg. Barebacking expressly courts risk as the basis for new social and sexual relationalities, which are constructed around the signifying absence of friction of various kinds. As these authors describe it, barebacking offers a strong example of

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queer sociality, based upon a critical positioning of queerness as “at once the site of a symbolic disruption (which is also an antisocial negativity) and a particular relational inventiveness”.7 The point here is not exactly to argue that Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitious vision of sociality is queer. Rather, ideas of queer sociality may help to think beyond the normative humanism inherent in the kind of sharing proposed by Facebook. I will argue that by premediating and instrumentalizing user activity, Facebook risks alienating its sharing subjects while claiming to restabilize them. In turn, users are apparently willing to be put to work and to hold firm to active subject positions. Friction frames how users wish to invest their sharing activity with irreplaceable human capacities for intimacy, as becomes clearer when frictionlessness is proposed as an efficient alternative. These contradictions and queer couplings are important elements of the growing account of digital intimacy. My speculative pairing of primary material responds to current literature’s lack of discussion of two central factors of social media. First, in attempts to think about the sociality of circulation within networks, more attention needs to be paid to structures of desire, including the phobic and the irrational, which animate affective investment in digital intimacy. Second, a more nuanced critique of subjectivities of digital media and desire is necessary to move beyond the binary tendencies of debates over user agency, as well as the resilience of a parallel neoliberal-tinged humanism in popular discourses of gender, sexual, consumer, and worker identities. Inspired by theories of queer sociality, the language of promiscuity helps to name both the proliferation of intimacies and normative mechanisms of their capture that currently characterize social media practices, shifting discussion to the thornier problematics of relationality, risk, and ethics embedded in the everyday language of sharing. “SHARING IS HUMAN” In launching new modes of “frictionless” sharing of online content at the 2011 F8 event, Mark Zuckerberg continuously underscored the “social experience” of online networks. While the new arrangements evidently support a more precise commodification of patterns of use of Facebook and its new partner applications, Zuckerberg was more interested to affirm that the changes would bring about discovery of self, discovery of new interests, and intimate unplanned connections across users’ networks. As may be the case with all promiscuity, here intimacy is placed in “a tug-of-war” with openness, as one journalistic account describes it.8 The scale and reach of potential connectivity that Facebook aims for is balanced up against the closeness of encounter that keeps users compelled. Any suspicion that these changes might have been designed to privilege the interests of corporate partners more than the self-expression of users would be confirmed in the second half of Zuckerberg’s presentation when

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a few of those corporate partners were invited on stage to sing Facebook’s praises. Nonetheless, Zuckerberg’s language, even when in direct reference to the business potential of these arrangements, remained unabashedly touchy-feely. Corporate partners’ upbeat performances of gratitude for shared business opportunities were supported by Zuckerberg’s endorsement of the commonsense logic of platform distribution, in which Facebook’s growth to date provides a stable platform for the launch of new joint ventures: this next wave of companies understands that if you can help people discover in order of magnitude more content than they could before, then that enables all kinds of new models to work.9 Here Zuckerberg plays into a conventional digital frontiersman role, propelling the “next wave” in order to develop “new models” and to facilitate “discovery”. Moreover, to borrow Lawrence Lessig’s terminology, Zuckerberg purposely represents Facebook as a key contributor to a “sharing economy”, in a display of language and affect that aims to conceal more competitive “commercial economy” imperatives.10 Even so, his term “frictionless sharing” pays homage to the dream of “friction-free capitalism” projected by dotcom guru Bill Gates in 1996 to name a new generation of efficient business practices, and whose language serves to conceal the labor required to produce such efficiency.11 Zuckerberg’s narrative of Facebook’s evolution over several years carefully avoided naming how users have labored to build the application’s unrivalled network coverage through practices of “friending” and “sharing”. Using humor as one concealment strategy, Zuckerberg’s address was introduced by comedian Andy Samberg. Samberg opened the event by impersonating Zuckerberg, a warm-up performance which including bragging that counting of the numbers of Facebook users had stopped somewhere around 800 million. Setting this tone of self-congratulation for the F8 event, Samberg-as-Zuckerberg appeared on stage to the sound of recent hip-hop hit “All I Do Is Win”, pumping into the audience a message less satirical than perhaps intended. These rhetorical reframings of the corporate are consistent with the wider discursive production of Web 2.0 activities in which a multiplication of forms of user and worker labor are rebranded in terms of affective exchange. A structure of reward encourages users to pragmatically accept that their online activity, content, and personal information will be monetized by Facebook, Google, and other seemingly indispensable services. As outlined in Chapter 1, much scholarship has recently emerged to detail these and other complexities of digital labor, elaborating on new variations of immaterial labor and free labor.12 To briefly reiterate one core argument, the networking activities carried out routinely by users, such as friending, generating content, and circulating content, must be recognized as kinds of work concealed by the cloaks of leisure, positive affect, autonomy, and a range of other user

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experiences. The cultural and social value of these experiences feels adequate in exchange for the much greater economic value produced for media corporations and advertisers.13 Tim O’Reilly, advocate for the open source movement and developer of the concept of Web 2.0, makes the terms of exchange plain: “Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era”.14 The “network effect”, also outlined by Siva Vaidhyanathan as one basis for Google’s market dominance, refers to how the value of a product or service grows with the number of its users. This means it makes good sense to enhance user experience to attract more users, but it also means satisfied users can be relied upon to do the work of network expansion. A brief survey of tech blogs written in response to Zuckerberg’s F8 address provides some evidence that the established practices of monetization are of less concern to some than are the social and cultural effects of arrangements that effectively outsource sharing. It may be one thing to accept the free labor users perform if it can be reconciled with a return on investment, that is, a quality service. Furthermore, the effects of that labor can be leveraged by users for their own entrepreneurial purposes.15 It may be another thing, though, to accept the loss of individual control implied by automated sharing. One blogger, Molly Wood, reviewing Facebook’s new Open Graph for the technology website CNet, complains that Facebook is “ruining sharing” by handing it over to the interface. She writes: Sharing and recommendation shouldn’t be passive. It should be conscious, thoughtful, and amusing—we are tickled by a story, picture, or video and we choose to share it, and if a startling number of Internet users also find that thing amusing, we, together, consciously create a tidal wave of meme that elevates that piece of media to viral status. We choose these gems from the noise. Open Graph will fill our feeds with noise, burying the gems.16 Mixed metaphors aside, Wood’s critique here is notable for echoing the general tone taken by Henry Jenkins, among others, who insists that circulation of media objects occurs as a function of their adaptable meaningfulness to individual media consumers. Not the interface, it is users who collectively and actively “spread” that object. For Jenkins, as we have seen, “if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead”: the life of the spreadable object depends upon active users.17 In this model, it is resolutely the user who acts as agent of circulation, rather than the media object circulating autonomously in the manner of a virus that acts upon unwilling host bodies. Accordingly, Wood advocates consciousness, thoughtfulness, and above all active choice as propellants of the digital “tidal wave” that results from collective appreciation of rare “gems”. An undertone of democratic idealism can also be interpreted in Wood’s language, as if to liken sharing to voting. Her “tidal wave” recalls a “landslide” election.

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What Wood calls choice in sharing and profile construction, other bloggers call “curation”. For Philip Bump, writing in The Atlantic, the matter is simple: “Sharing is human”. He argues: “Facebook moving curation from us to its algorithms means we could lose some of our personality in what we present”.18 Consistently, but stronger again, Mike Loukides writes on O’Reilly Radar: “Frictionless sharing isn’t better sharing; it’s the absence of sharing. There’s something about the friction, the need to work, the one-on-one contact, that makes the sharing real”.19 An algorithm cannot curate or share, these writers maintain; it can only calculate and distribute. Sharing requires interpersonal work: “something” incalculable and irreducible to programming or mechanics. Agreeing to automated sharing, writes Wood, will open the door to “a horde of zombie posts” that will “deaden us to the possibility of organic discovery”.20 Removing friction, by outsourcing sharing to an algorithm, risks diminishing values associated with the social, the personal, the real, even the human. Friction is lively and enlivening, and furthermore these attributes seem to guarantee intimacy. Despite their overt criticisms of the new Facebook, all of these writers share with Mark Zuckerberg a fundamental conception of what sharing can or should be. Facebook is “the story of your life” and “a new way to express who you are”, Zuckerberg believes.21 His critics do not seem to disagree, and they look to online sharing for opportunities to share aspects of themselves. If they disagree, it is in terms of how the fullness of interpersonal, human, social contact can be facilitated, not that it can be achieved. In this sense, these writers endorse a fundamental humanism that is ultimately not so different from Zuckerberg’s core stance. Unlike Zuckerberg, friction is the baseline of their humanism, and its absence in service of economic efficiency endangers real sociality. Wood’s main gripe with Open Graph draws attention to a complication within the humanist logic. As she explains, sharing content on Facebook via partner applications requires the user’s authorization. An “intercept” pops up on the user’s screen when attempting to access shared content, and the user must click either to agree or decline the terms of access; once authorized, the application will automatically share on the user’s behalf in all future instances. Describing this “annoying” interruption, Wood writes: “In search of ‘frictionless’ sharing, Facebook is putting up a barrier to entry on items your friends want you to see—that is, they’re creating friction.”22 Wood argues that the ideal of frictionless sharing is destroyed by friction of another kind: barriers that interrupt what would otherwise be fluid exchanges between friends. But Wood is also recognizing that frictionlessness is mediated, and this point has an unintended backlash effect on the values of friction that she and other bloggers had previously celebrated. Friction is the location of the organic, the real, and the intimate. It causes, however, a disruption to the natural flow of sociality and desire (what “your friends want you to see”). If both of these statements are true, then friction is no less constructed or contested an ideological value than its

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absence—frictionlessness. And if this is the case, then the fortress of lively, human, subjective agency that these writers are defending begins to crumble. Investments in the concept of friction, particularly its absence, will also serve as the medium for the exchange I propose in the next section. Tim Dean’s Unlimited Intimacy, published just as Facebook began to seem ubiquitous, presents an in-depth study of the subculture of barebacking: the practice of anal sex without condoms among gay men. Despite obvious differences in subject matter, Dean’s work is of peculiar value in thinking about the intimate relations illuminated and concealed by the ubiquity of Facebook, allowing a new direction for the broad project of queering concepts of community, sociality, and ethics. From its position of relative social and academic marginality, the specific example of barebacking as sharing applies much-needed critical pressure to current concepts of circulation too often taken for granted within the context of digital media. In offering this comparison, my aim is neither to generalize the specific implications of barebacking for a dominant digital media context, nor necessarily to politicize everyday digital media use. If anything, I am arguing that the discourse of frictionless sharing depoliticizes an intensely complex field of social and capital relations (and Dean’s account of barebacking courts the same risk). Nor do I wish to imply that the stakes of these different kinds of promiscuity are equivalent, that is the expansion and leveraging of digital network connectivity as compared to multiple unprotected sexual acts. My aim, rather, is to demonstrate that the celebrated rhetoric of online sharing, recently declared frictionless by the innovations of market leader Facebook, implicitly recalls and disavows the rich collective intimacies of post-HIV queer cultures. Although limited to discussion of male participants, the example should not be taken to stand in for all queer cultures or relations or a realization of queer potential. As will become clear, a problematic gender-bias is present in certain aspects of the subculture, and this fact will be used as evidence of the inherent contradictions of the ideology of frictionlessness. “NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR KINSHIP” In Unlimited Intimacy, Tim Dean focuses on a range of pornographic films, personal ads, private gatherings, and interviews with participants as evidence of the social, sexual, and representational codes of the barebacking subculture. Dean’s discussion frames barebacking activities very much as modes of frictionless sharing, even though this is not the language he uses. Frictionless on more than one level, an ethics of sharing permeates the practices in each of the subculture’s domains, most obviously in terms of the circulation of HIV as both virological and cultural object. Dean outlines how HIV operates as a mediating device, possibly transmitted through unprotected sex, sometimes desired and sometimes given as “gift”, and always invested with the abstract, ritualistic capacity to structure desire and to connect disparate

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bodies across class, ethnic, and generational lines. In these ways, barebacking epitomizes for Dean what he and others have claimed to be the creative and generative value of sexual promiscuity, an argument built in direct opposition to conventional homophobic reactions to HIV/AIDS since the 1980s. Dean writes: Rather than being understood as self-destructive behavior, promiscuity could be redescribed as promoting reciprocal care and self-protection. In this line of thinking, promiscuity is not merely defended in the face of AIDS panic but is actually promoted as the route to something new. . . . Not so much a compulsive repetition of the same, promiscuity would be a name for discovery of the new.23 In making these claims, Dean is drawing on the work of earlier queer scholars such as Douglas Crimp, Simon Watney, and Leo Bersani, who, as I discussed in Chapter 1, were among the first in the immediate advent of AIDS panic to critique the emerging, normalizing discourse of promiscuity. In their view, promiscuous sex is consistently represented as a threat to institutions and spaces of heterosexual monogamy, notably the family and the home. In outlining “how to have promiscuity in an epidemic”, Crimp defended the efforts of “a sexual community whose theory and practice of sex made it possible to meet the epidemic’s most urgent requirement”.24 Embedded within diverse sexual practices, safe-sex initiatives energized promiscuity as an ethical mode of embodied social and sexual networking.25 Taking up the work of these authors in the last chapter, I argued that the current discourse of virality that is central to online social media embraces an unacknowledged promiscuity by encouraging interpersonal and communicational strategies that leverage network density and the rapid circulation of content by quasi-virological means. In these terms, digital virality is closely associated with promiscuous relations normatively framed as risky. The current rhetoric of virality is post-viral in the specific sense that circulation mimics virology while disavowing that the circulating object is a virus. In simple terms, virus is a dirty word with undesirable connotations of lack of control and passivity, as well as associated moral and hygiene concerns swirling around the meanings of intimacy. As such, in a move that I argue is implicitly heteronormative, post-viral virality recentralizes the active user or sharing subject at the expense of other positions and pleasures. Endorsement of the coherent subjectivity of active users is equally evident in the humanist accounts of sharing analyzed above. Barebacking is a culture of promiscuous circulation that returns the virus to virality—symbolically, at the very least. At face value, this move would seem to exacerbate risk and even to set back the gains of activism and community described within the accounts given by Crimp, Halperin, and others. For Dean, however, what may be more compelling is the building of new structures of relationality via what he calls the “impersonalist ethics” of

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promiscuous sexual activity. He writes: “In its refusal of the pernicious ideology of safety, bareback subculture infers that the pleasures of intimacy may be worth the risks”.26 Barebacking involves intimacy with strangers “without predicating that intimacy on knowledge or understanding of the other— that is, without the subtle violence that usually accompanies epistemological relations”.27 In this sense, it is another example of how “[the] AIDS epidemic has given gay men new opportunities for kinship, because sharing viruses has come to be understood as a mechanism of alliance, a way of forming consanguinity with strangers or friends”.28 Using HIV as a queer alternative to intergenerational procreation is one barebacking community practice that Dean examines to demonstrate “new opportunities for kinship” in the face of widespread heteronormative exclusions. The claim to queer sociality is partly indebted to Samuel R. Delany, whose celebratory accounts of cruising for anonymous gay sex Dean quotes at length. In particular, Delany distinguishes between two structures of intimacy: the fully promiscuous “contact” of everyday random encounters, such as those in cinemas and public toilets; and the more instrumentalized “networking”, which is more clearly delimited by social structures like class. Delany adds of the pleasures of contact that “specific benefits and losses cannot be systematized, operationalized, standardized, or predicted”, as encounters within a space of networking are more likely to be.29 This language is strikingly familiar. Delany’s “networking” intersects with professionally and even entrepreneurially framed opportunities for connection which likely reinforce rather than break down social divisions. On the other hand, it could be noted that what emerges in Delany’s account of “contact” is oddly similar to the spirit of unplanned discovery and connection that Mark Zuckerberg calls “realtime serendipity”—in the physical and conversational “intercourse” that “blooms” in moments of contact.30 If Delany’s distinction is valid, then, and if it helps to think about different modes of intimacy beyond the queer spaces of cruising for sex, then perhaps it also gives context to the kind of shift in sociality Facebook claims to be producing. In the name of “real-time serendipity”, Zuckerberg seems to be privileging “contact” over “networking”, despite the ways in which Facebook evidently favors entrepreneurialism. Having built the platform’s network, Open Graph now intends to focus on enhancing quality of user experience, encouraging “great, in-depth, engaging conversation, whether it’s with a close friend or with someone you just met”.31 In adopting Delany’s framework, Dean attributes to barebacking another layer of frictionlessness—a social frictionlessness, beyond the physically frictionless experience of sex without a condom. Barebacking, too, is the organization of intimate contact, he maintains, in ways that break down social divisions of age, class, and ethnicity between men. As Dean’s title implies, intimacy is “unlimited” when it avoids these kinds of friction as much as when it avoids the friction of condoms. And just as Zuckerberg describes how Facebook’s new interface facilitates frictionless sharing, that is brings it about where it did not apparently already exist, Dean also draws

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attention to the mediation of frictionless exchange within cultures of barebacking and sexual promiscuity. Two examples of medium or interface serve to illustrate different layers of frictionlessness in barebacking intimacies. First, in describing his “partly ethnographic” research methodology, Dean highlights the importance of flow in conversation as well as the spaces that tend to facilitate it:32 I have found the conversations to be better in gay bars with back rooms than in gay bars without them, perhaps because the proximity of the overtly sexual space helps dissolve some of these barriers and pretensions that constrain verbal exchanges elsewhere.33 Leaving aside the viability of his logic (because the reverse of his claim may also be true), Dean endorses one kind of social/sexual space over another as more efficiently bringing about the easy, cross-categorical “contact” advocated by Delany. In doing so, Dean writes, he is “thinking partly of their architectural layout but also of the configurations of verbal and corporeal exchanges that are encouraged by these spatial designs”.34 The dissolution of “barriers and pretensions” is brought about by design. A greater sense of flow results; a lessening of friction, he implies. Furthermore, the spatial facilitation of “cruising” has implications for the constitution of the social and sexual subject. Dean explains: One goes to [sex clubs] with the paradoxical aim of aimlessness; unpredictability is part of the pleasure. The sex-club patron resembles Baudelaire’s flâneur, who readily loses himself in a stream of bodies and whose individuality thus consists in the disappearance of individuality. It is less that the flâneur represents the kind of person who goes to a sex club than that a cruising ethos conduces to this impersonalizing effect; in other words, a sex club creates the kind of space that militates against self-consolidation.35 Anyone familiar with any kind of space in which sexual encounters are negotiated might have trouble being convinced by the claim that subject positions fall away there. Leo Bersani also argues that “we leave ourselves behind” in the acts and spaces of cruising—or “ideal cruising”—especially in gay bathhouses.36 For Bersani, anonymous sex practitioners experience a “shedding” of personality that coincides with the shedding of their clothes, mostly because “the common bathhouse uniform—a towel—communicates very little”. While he does admit that “there are of course ways of wearing a towel”, he does not mention any of a number of other bodily codes through which personality and social subjectivities are surely conveyed, even in the absence of clothing and verbal communication.37 Where kinds of person may mingle thanks to this kind of space, surely kinds of subject emerge in and around the spatialization of mingling. Within the “stream of bodies”,

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a whole range of complex negotiations surely produce different and differently valued subject positions, suggesting the influence of structural factors more complex than the abstract “real-time serendipity”.38 Some more critical pressure can be placed on Dean’s and Bersani’s claims by a second example of mediated frictionlessness that is significant to Dean’s account of barebacking rituals. While a physical or genital frictionlessness is positively attributed to the absence of a condom during sex, in Dean’s interpretation it is symbolically transposed into the performance of enhanced masculinity: The prophylaxis afforded by condoms is reserved for those who can’t handle the real thing. Rather than offering protection, condoms make a man and his masculinity vulnerable to doubt or derision. Latex compromises not only sensation and intimacy but also masculine identity.39 The compromise of friction is at once physical, interpersonal, and gendered. Condom use acts as one very significant measure of status and power relations. And even if these relations are variable and contingent, as may well be the case, it would appear that subject positions have everything to do with the rituals and spaces of promiscuous sex, at least the forms of “impersonalizing” contact staged within barebacking communities. In this case, frictionlessness is mediated by the signifying absence of the condom, and what counts as frictionlessness must also include the naturalization of hegemonic gender positions and relations, singling out and subordinating out “those who can’t handle the real thing”. No longer just a medium or interface in itself, and no longer simply a barrier to fluid exchange and exchange of fluids, the absent condom becomes a projected prophylactic object of friction— an imaginary other. The paradox at the center of this fantasy requires deeper attention, and it will bring the discussion back to Zuckerberg’s fantasy of frictionless social networking. PARADOXES OF FRICTIONLESSNESS I have outlined how Tim Dean presents the barebacking subculture as an example of a new impersonalist ethics emerging from queer sociality and sexuality, in which various material and symbolic relations to the medium of HIV are transmitted among a community of men. In turn, I have interpreted these relations as aspiring to an ideal of frictionlessness. Furthermore, examples from Dean’s work analyzed above invite a reading of frictionlessness as ideology and as fantasy: an illusory quality of intimacy the potential achievement of which is imagined to be hindered by intervening forms of friction. Measures are undertaken to construct frictionlessness via mediating devices, including spatial design, codes of social and sexual performance, and the projection of meaning on to absent objects like the condom. Through these

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devices, the ideal of frictionlessness is contrived and circulated via collective, subcultural codes. Paradoxically, the invention and intervention of forms of friction are necessary to the maintenance of the ideology of frictionlessness. They demonstrate the presence of a constitutive other that allows its own absence to signify positively within the collective fantasy. To repeat tech blogger Molly Wood’s lament about Facebook’s Open Graph, “[i]n search of ‘frictionless’ sharing . . . they’re creating friction”.40 The ideals of sociality and exchange espoused by Mark Zuckerberg are achievable only through a mechanism which has been criticized for reducing sociality and commodifying exchange. It is a mechanism which incorporates its own counter-function, like Žižek’s concept of the chocolate laxative discussed in Chapter 1. Zuckerberg’s goal of frictionlessness operates in tension with the humanist logic shared among those who equate friction with choice and curation. But frictionlessness too requires friction, in the form of Facebook’s own mediating mechanism which serves to instrumentalize users’ curatorial choices. Mediation and immediacy, friction and frictionlessness appear to be working in parallel and at odds with each other. As such, this double movement offers at first glance a striking example of what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin describe as the “double logic of remediation”, by which “contemporary culture seeks simultaneously to proliferate and to erase mediation, to eliminate all signs of mediation in the very act of multiplying them”.41 Why else would Facebook need to announce the mediating mechanism of Open Graph, and its claim to render sharing more immediate, if not to draw attention to its own value as the medium? Why else would Mark Zuckerberg share the spotlight at this announcement with corporate partners, in a performance of shared opportunity, if not to refocus the spotlight on himself as facilitator of these arrangements? It could be argued, then, that Facebook has successfully remediated the concept of sharing, fully recognizing the paradox through which this has come about. That is, sharing feels immediate and frictionless, but only because of the friction of mediating devices installed by Facebook. Facebook cannot lose within this double logic because the more it mediates sharing to appear immediate, the more sharing will occur, and the more Facebook will be indispensable for sharing. It is a striking confirmation of O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 lessons. To repeat one: “Network effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era”.42 In Richard Grusin’s update of the theory of remediation emerges a more compelling explanation of frictionless sharing. I have already argued for the relevance to promiscuous network culture of the premediating strategies for designing and containing possible futures, as well as “the creation and maintenance of an affective orientation” towards them.43 Grusin’s analogy to digital game design helps to clarify my claims here about Facebook: Premediation would in some sense transform the world into a video or computer game, which only permits certain moves depending on where

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Also collapsing the divide between leisure and labor, Facebook premediates sharing not simply because of an interface design which opens up and limits the range of possible sharing “moves”, but also because the future of sharing itself is mediated by Facebook’s “protocols and reward systems”. In turn, these contain the ontological and affective range of sharing activity. For early evidence of the impact of this premediated future, one need only return to the humanist anxieties of the bloggers discussed earlier in this chapter who are already mourning the loss of the personal, the organic, and the authentically intimate. For Tero Karppi, the efficiency of Facebook’s capture is such that not sharing—attempting to disconnect from Facebook—is also evidence of “how premediation works as a design principle”. The continued storage of user data, available “as a potential resource for exploitation”, is maintained by a range of interface blocks and affective lures that Facebook has designed to prevent absolute deactivation of accounts by users.45 Sharing continues to feed frictionlessly into Facebook’s business model, and that of its corporate partners. More important, future sharing continues to feel possible—as intimate, as natural, and not as labor—because of Facebook’s declared erasure of its own premediating presence. At the same time, Facebook’s seizure of the mechanism of sharing and users’ “affective orientation” towards it does not simply secure continuity of its own instrumentalization of sharing, but also secures its right to continually modify this mechanism of capture, through an ongoing and coercive program of interface changes of which Timeline is only one of the latest examples. Facebook’s fantasy of sharing is further illustrated by various other examples. One feature raising similar questions about coercive interface design is Promoted Posts. This recent initiative allows individual users to “promote” items they have posted, positioning them higher in their friends’ News Feeds to “help them notice it”.46 The user pays Facebook directly for this service, and the post is then (very discretely) marked “Sponsored”. Despite being described as an easy way to “help” others “discover” shared items, promoted posts merely collapse the narrow distinction between sharing and advertising. Because the cost of promotion depends upon the user’s location and the number of people reached, users are recognized more openly and targeted for their entrepreneurial tendencies, as well as evaluated for their economic potential to Facebook.47 In simple terms, payment eliminates the friction of sharing and more efficiently yields Facebook and its partners a wider audience. Promoted Posts mimics the wildly successful strategy employed by Google to privilege paid search engine results, not always distinguishable from other

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“most relevant” results. Despite the fact that sponsored Facebook posts are nearly identical to non-sponsored posts, the company makes no pretense about its categorization of Promoted Posts as advertising. Users are directed to Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines page for answer to questions such as “What kind of posts can I promote?” And it is within these parameters that a further regulatory function becomes apparent—more kinds of friction to the possibilities of sharing that promotion claims to facilitate. Advertising is subject to fairly standard, if not unambiguous, guidelines prohibiting content that is deemed to promote, among other things, “adult products”, “dating sites with a sexual emphasis”, drugs, gambling, pharmaceuticals, and certain kinds of software. Moreover, the guidelines continue: Ads, or categories of ads, that receive a significant amount of negative user feedback, or are otherwise deemed to violate our community standards, are prohibited and may be removed. In all cases, Facebook reserves the right in its sole discretion to determine whether particular content is in violation of our community standards.48 While it is beyond the scope of this discussion to investigate the vexed concept of “community standards”, familiar from a range of legal and regulatory disputes in which individual expression is at stake, suffice to say here that Facebook’s “sole discretion” to determine such standards may function to limit the kinds of sharing permitted of individual users in two main ways. First, these guidelines apply a loose jurisdictional framework to personal and other content on the assumption that sharing is inseparable from advertising. And second, relying on an unspecified quantity of free labor in the form of “user feedback” suggests a more insidious outsourcing of censorship to the sharing “community”. Facebook’s stated ethos of discovery through sharing is directly challenged by countless examples of censored personal content. One documented example is the removal of a photograph of two men kissing posted in 2011 to promote a political event.49 Across all of these cases, the multiplication of explicit and implicit kinds of friction works to secure—even in advance of sharing—the space and quality of intimate exchange between consenting users. Within this context of secured intimacy and complicity, questions of risk need to be rethought. If risk constructs the subject, inasmuch as recent sociology teaches us that the modern subject comes about partly through an ability to negotiate risk, then how do we make sense of the subject who courts risk, or a structure of risk that erases the subject?50 Is the subject even the right place from which to think sociality? QUEER SOCIALITY AND RISK In his critique of claims for the intergenerational viability of the barebacking subculture, Bersani questions whether “unsafe sex is a better transmitter of

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sexual values than safe sex”. Even if promiscuity is a strongly established form of queer sociality, that is one that militates against the impositions and limitations of heteronormative frames of intimacy, “unsafe sex is in no way necessary as a guarantee of gay male promiscuity in the future”.51 Moreover, Bersani maintains that “the rich social bonds” Dean argues barebacking creates “are entirely reducible to single individuals’ awareness of the interpenetration of fluids within their own bodies”.52 Bersani is concerned with the tension, within practices of intimacy, between social formations and individual subjectivities, and where each is used to project a fantasy of the other. The social and political claims of barebacking are reduced to instances of individual projection, he argues, experienced and validated collectively but without amounting to anything resembling actual community. Not merely fantasy, however, Bersani interprets barebacking as “a ritual of sacrificial love”,53 albeit an irresponsible one, and as an “ascetic discipline” in which “the subject allows himself to be penetrated, even replaced, by an unknowable otherness”.54 Merging with an entirely imagined community, the receptive barebacking partner’s subjectivity is “absorbed into the nameless and faceless crowd that exist only as viral traces circulating in his blood”.55 In Dean’s description, barebacking inverts a conventional logic of risk. “The risks of intimacy are more profound than the risks of disease”, he claims, and barebackers face up to this by courting the risk of disease and reworking codes of intimacy, constructing an alternative social and sexual ethics.56 For Bersani, a further risk opens up in the loss of subjectivity, but one which, finally, might prove productive. He concludes that barebacking’s virus-sharing practices are “implicit critiques” or but not resistance to: the multiple forms of ego-driven intimacy: from the most trivial expressions of sexual vanity . . . to the prideful exclusiveness of the family as a socially blessed, closed unit of reproductive intimacy, and even to the at once violently aggressive and self-shattering ego-hyperbolizing of racial, national, ethnic, and gendered identities.57 Promiscuous sex for Bersani is valuable for its potential to maximize what he calls “self-shattering”, not in literal terms related to viral infection, as barebacking might sometimes bring about, but for a kind of ascetic dismantling of the self that “provides the basis on which sexuality is associated with power”, notably phallocentrism in its various social manifestations.58 The spurious and contradictory community-building attempted by barebacking, in his view, come closer to expanding egos rather than shattering them. For both Bersani and Dean, then, promiscuity sets up opportunities for multiple intimate relations which might force a reinscription of ethics, precisely where the coherent self and its capacity for ethical violence would be threatened. Between their diverging perspectives on barebacking we can trace elements of the debate among queer theorists over the political position and formation of the social in what is claimed to be queer. Joshua Weiner

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and Damon Young have offered a helpful account of this debate, which they describe as “an interplay between a centrifugal drive away from sociality and a centripetal pressure toward sociable belonging and linkage”.59 In this space of interplay, they are interested in locating a rich history of queer thinking that in different ways demonstrates a shared premise: if an askew relation to the normative terms of sexuality occasions a certain negative relation to the social, this means it also precipitates a certain reinvention of the social, of the nature of “bonds,” a reinvention that is sometimes invested under the sign of transgression, sometimes of utopia. Queer is at once disabled and inventive sociality.60 Without taking a particular stance here on transgressive or utopian models of the social, we can nonetheless conclude that the critical appeal of queer sociality—including promiscuity—is its desire for reinvention of bonds that have historically been constructed and practiced to violently exclude, marginalize, and misrecognize particular social subjects: those with “an askew relation to the normative”. Accordingly, the conceptual provocation of Dean’s work is that it imagines the construction of social futurity only through an embrace of risk, and the transmission of community values only through a medium that might otherwise destroy the very possibility of community. In doing so, Dean troubles an easy understanding of the construction of subject positions, not least because subjectivity comes about within a behavioral mode conventionally recognized as destructive. And even if the means to Dean’s critical end may not always be successful, inviting a close encounter with some of the risks and contradictions of intimacy promiscuously opens a new relation with other social spaces, including the much less critically framed space of online social media where a dominant language of sharing often falls back on ideas of untroubled subject positions. Framed in this critical language, the risks of Facebook’s frictionless sharing are high—at least for users holding on to friction as reminders of their subjective liveliness. Constructing the new Open Graph algorithm as “the ascetic discipline necessary [for users] to be replaced, inhabited by the other”61 threatens these users with a “zombie” futurity, as one writer fears.62 Always already premediated by sharing algorithms, individual selves become reduced to automatic Timelines—a function of the algorithm. But are such fears founded, and is such a risk analysis warranted, when Facebook users have allowed consecutive iterations of interface design to usher them into this media future, precisely with the fulfilled promise of further opportunities for “ego-driven intimacy”? This conception of risk only makes sense when the subject is presumed to exist prior to its algorithmic mediation and premediation, or when an account of the history and future of digital intimacy is imagined not to include the intimate mutual constitution of human subject and technological interface. Digital media theory has long elaborated

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ways in which digital devices provide opportunities—even templates—for the construction of alternative or extended subjectivities inseparable from these interfaces, challenging the assumption of a coherent prior subject. Any understanding of risk at the level of social media users is complicated, then, by recognition of the ways in which their subjectivity is compromised by interface mechanisms that undercut agency while promising and rewarding autonomy and interactivity. If risk for Dean and Bersani offers a productive opportunity for rethinking the centrality of the subject, by contrast Facebook’s greatest risk is that its users will stop sharing. Structures of frictionless sharing are designed to alleviate that risk, but only do so by courting it at the same time. Instrumentalizing multiple intimate encounters, frictionless sharing offers promiscuity without ascesis. The version of digital promiscuity infrastructurally mediated by Open Graph, Timeline, and Promoted Posts discursively reinforces the pre-shattered self of the user-subject as chronologically coherent, futurecurated, and more than ever, intimately self-monitoring and risk-averse. Users are drawn into Facebook’s logic of “securitization” which, as Grusin argues, “not only depends upon but also encourages the proliferation of transactions and other data so that its algorithms can connect the dots” of user activity.63 Accordingly, the premediating technology of frictionless sharing aims to secure a situation in which “there will always be enough data (enough dots) in any particular, potential, or imagined future to be able to know in advance, before something happened, that it was about to happen”.64 Sharing subjects are positioned as the necessary object of these mechanisms of control. Mimicking the dynamics of virology, online sharing activity requires a viral object, even as conventional understandings of risk and security tend towards containment of the viral object. Where viral objects have been discursively constructed within normative frames of risk and threat, they become functional media within emergent, premediating regimes of security and control which claim to restore displaced norms—even in advance. Community and governmental policing of safe-sex practices offers one clear example, a regime directly resisted by participants in the barebacking subculture. Parikka’s work on computer viruses and the development and marketing of anti-virus software provides another example. Parikka points out that computer viruses are an essential component of both the expansive dynamics and containment measures of viral capitalism.65 In turn, where viral capitalism has helped to establish conditions for the recent explosion of social media virality, then algorithms of digital content-sharing such as Facebook’s Open Graph and Promoted Posts are among the most recent examples of securitization technologies. It is not new to argue that social networking applications collapse distinctions between subject and object, that they offer opportunities for subject construction at the same time as enabling modes of self-objectification by users. What has been missing from this discussion is recognition of how

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some network use establishes infrastructures of promiscuity connectivity and circulation upon which user subjectivity is based and valued, and their erasure of normative meanings of promiscuity in the name of entrepreneurialism. For all of Mark Zuckerberg’s lofty rhetoric that Facebook Timeline is creating “all kinds of new models”, “a new language for how people connect”, and new ways “for you to express yourself”, his company’s real innovations are in more efficiently constructing, policing, and commodifying the sharing success of entrepreneurial subjects.66 The mechanistic outsourcing of their sharing, however, and crucially its commodification via a widening network of corporate partners, may in fact reconstruct and recirculate the user-subject in double service as viral object. If the sharing user-subject is also viral object, then more attention needs to be paid to users’ complicity in reconstructing spaces of virality as networks of security, instrumentality, and normative control. Anecdotal evidence suggests a greater awareness among some users of the everyday exploitations of social media, and some level of discomfort. Semester after semester, for instance, many of my graduate students express intimate awareness of these conditions, and some critical discomfort, while also demonstrating a profound apathy to them. On the other hand, some friends have recently quit Facebook for reasons that have to do with the clash of personal and corporate ethics. And while these individuals are not representative of Facebook’s reported one billion users worldwide, their attitudes do offer some insight into the contradictions that structure the investment of users in a digital media context that consistently requires its participants to be active and promiscuous agents of desires they can never fully own. To conclude this chapter, it may be helpful to briefly consider a critical account of digital intimacy that offers a promising model of how to think queer sociality. In a recent article focusing on how digital devices constitute infrastructures of intimacy, Kane Race counteracts claims that new technologies limit or destroy sociality and community. As he points out, a particularly nostalgic turn in some recent queer discussion laments the downturn of spaces of gay social and sexual encounter supposedly brought about by the rise of digital networking devices such as hook-up applications. Race’s research shows, instead, that applications of this kind such as Grindr are being used in “speculative” and “pragmatic” ways that proliferate rather than limit kinds of intimacy. Specific affordances of devices, such as geolocalizing and recording features, frame new modes of “sexual sociability” across time and space, which include cruising interactions in textual and visual form, and the maintenance and sharing of archives of intimate encounters. Indeed because hook-up apps measure the proximity of other users, they offer the “novel experience of social space oriented towards the production of homosexual encounters”.67 Crucially, they enable a “default logic” of sexual encounters that are “ ‘no strings’ or commitment-free” but without “confer[ring] on the no-strings encounter any essentialised status”.68 The technical detailing of these apps therefore defaults away from those

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temporal and spatial expectations of social and sexual encounter embedded in heteronormative (and homonormative) life worlds.69 This research provides a compelling account of queer sociality for a number of reasons, two of which are most relevant to my purpose here. Adaptive and contingent practices open up the sites and formats of intimate encounter— by mobilizing, we might say, multiple modalities of erotic attachment—and Race privileges them over neat frames of sexual, consumer, and citizen subjectivity. Like other social networks, dating and hook-up apps lend themselves to analysis of how these subject positions are reductively produced in conjunction with various tools of data profiling, an emphasis which may in some cases overlook the everyday tactics of non-normative relationality that occur between and around profiled subjects. So too by focusing on the co-active role of technological devices in social practice, we loosen the stranglehold of the normatively defined human agent in networks of multiple intimate encounters. In early twenty-first-century network culture, sociality is medial, as Grusin might put it. Research into intimate attachments within any kind of networked space—social, sexual, digital—must be live to the medialities with which selves and bodies come into connection, and come through connection to be recognized or misrecognized as kinds of self and body. The following chapters of this book will attempt to unravel some of the strands of the queer politics of intimate connection, beginning with the normative discursive construction of some selves and bodies as excessively connected. NOTES 1. “F8 2011 Keynote,” YouTube, 2011, accessed May 2, 2014, http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=9r46UeXCzoU&feature=related. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Kane Race, “Speculative Pragmatism and Intimate Arrangements: Online Hook-up Devices in Gay Life,” Culture, Health & Sexuality, 2014, doi:10.1 080/13691058.2014.930181. 6. Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 5. 7. Joshua J. Weiner and Damon Young, “Introduction: Queer Bonds,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17, no. 2–3 (2011): 225. 8. Don Ball, “Will Google+ Trump Facebook with Digital Intimacy?,” Forbes, 2012, accessed May 2, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/sites/gyro/2012/01/30/ will-google-trump-facebook-with-digital-intimacy/. 9. “F8 2011 Keynote,” 2011. 10. Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in a Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin, 2008). 11. Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Penguin, 1996). 12. Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, trans. P. Colilli and E. Emery (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133–47; Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004).

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13. See for instance Mark Andrejevic, “Social Network Exploitation,” in A Networked Self: Identity, Community and Culture on Social Network Sites, ed. Zizi Papacharissi (New York: Routledge, 2011), 82–102; Melissa Gregg, Work’s Intimacy (Cambridge: Polity, 2011); Trebor Scholz, Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory (New York: Routledge, 2012). 14. Tim O’Reilly, “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software,” O’Reilly Media, 2005, accessed May 2, 2014, http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html. Italics in original. 15. In discussion with my graduate students, this point is instinctively clear and even obvious to them, in a way that it was not for me. Their experience as job-seekers and communications professionals has enriched my perspective enormously. 16. Molly Wood, “How Facebook Is Ruining Sharing,” CNet, November 18, 2011, accessed May 2, 2014, http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-57324406-256/ how-facebook-is-ruining-sharing. 17. Henry Jenkins, “If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, February 11, accessed July 7, 2014, 2009, http://henryjenkins.org/2009/02/ if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html. 18. Philip Bump, “The Problem with Facebook’s New Frictionless Sharing,” The Atlantic, September 23, 2011, accessed May 2, 2014, http://www. theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/the-problem-with-facebooksnew-frictionless-sharing/245578. 19. Mike Loukides, “The End of Social,” O’Reilly Radar, September 5, 2011, accessed May 2, 2014, http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/12/the-end-of-social.html. 20. Wood, “How Facebook Is Ruining Sharing.” 21. “F8 2011 Keynote,” 2011. 22. Wood, “How Facebook Is Ruining Sharing.” 23. Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, 5. 24. Douglas Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” October 43, Winter (1987): 250. 25. For a fuller account, see David Halperin, What Do Gay Men Want?: An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007). 26. Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, 211. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 6. 29. Delany in ibid., 190. 30. Delany in ibid., 188. 31. “F8 2011 Keynote,” YouTube, September 24, 2011, accessed May 2, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r46UeXCzoU&feature=youtube_ gdata_player. 32. Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, 37. 33. Ibid., 34. 34. Ibid., 35. 35. Ibid., 36. 36. Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 60. 37. Ibid. 38. Evgeny Morozov has argued that Facebook and frictionless sharing are largely responsible for the death of “cyberflânerie”, the kind of serendipitous browsing celebrated during early Internet days. Evgeny Morozov, “The Death of the Cyberflâneur,” The New York Times, February 4, 2012, sec. Opinion / Sunday Review, accessed May 2, 2014, http://www.nytimes. com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/the-death-of-the-cyberflaneur.html. 39. Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, 52.

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Frictionless Sharing 40. Wood, “How Facebook Is Ruining Sharing.” 41. Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 38. 42. O’Reilly, “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.” 43. Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11, 48. 44. Ibid., 46. 45. Tero Karppi, “Digital Suicide and the Biopolitics of Leaving Facebook,” Transformations 20 (2011), accessed May 2, 2014, http://www.transforma tionsjournal.org/journal/issue_20/article_02.shtml. 46. “Promote an Important Post,” Facebook, accessed July 30, 2014, http:// www.facebook.com. 47. I was quoted 5.23 euros to promote a post to 296 friends. 48. “Facebook Advertising Guidelines,” Facebook, June 4, 2014, accessed July 31, 2014, https://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php. 49. Amy Lee, “Facebook Apologizes for Censoring Gay Kiss Photo,” Huffington Post, April 19, 2011, accessed May 2, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ 2011/04/19/facebook-gay-kiss_n_850941.html. 50. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991). 51. Leo Bersani, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 47. 52. Ibid., 49. 53. Ibid., 55. 54. Ibid., 53. 55. Ibid. 56. Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, 211. 57. Bersani, Intimacies, 55. 58. Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays, 25. 59. Weiner and Young, “Introduction: Queer Bonds,” 223. 60. Ibid., 226. 61. Bersani, Intimacies, 50–51. 62. Wood, “How Facebook Is Ruining Sharing.” 63. Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11, 124. 64. Ibid. 65. Jussi Parikka, Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (New York: Peter Lang, 2007). 66. “F8 2011 Keynote,” 2011. 67. Race, “Speculative Pragmatism and Intimate Arrangements,” 3. 68. Ibid., 6. 69. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005).

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Media Whore

In April 2012, a minor scandal broke out in the heady world of celebrity gossip blogs, illustrating the differential standards for how celebrity is constructed and evaluated. Rumor spread that rapper Kanye West had referred to his new girlfriend, reality TV personality Kim Kardashian, as “my Beyoncé”. In this supposed comparison of his new and very publicly speculated relationship to the marriage of his colleague Jay-Z and the performer Beyoncé Knowles, West was believed to be inappropriately leveraging the enormous cultural capital of the Jay-Z–Knowles brand: a long-standing and widely celebrated romance, marriage, and musical partnership between two of the world’s biggest-selling recording artists. The social legitimacy of this supercouple had recently been further cemented by the birth of their first child. When the rumor was published online by celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton, in a story on West’s denial of its veracity, comments posted by readers were universally negative.1 Most responses resorted to derogatory descriptions of the new couple, especially Kardashian. In many comments, one or both parties were referred to by the term “whore”. “They are both media whores especially Kim,” wrote one reader, adding “could care less if I ever see either one of them again”.2 “These two media whores deserve each other”, commented another.3 For another reader again Kardashian was “a talentless vapid whore”.4 Spelling things out more clearly, unkindly named reader Okra Panfry’s Bucket-O-Wings added, “These two are not together; Kanye needs a whore on his side to get media attention for his new CD, and Kim will do anything for a buck”.5 Hilton himself made sure to draw attention to the “interesting take on modern communication” presented by West in his denial of the rumor. West was quoted as saying: of course there are a lot of media inaccuracies surrounding this past couple of weeks, especially the “She’s my Beyonce” quote. I would never compare anyone to my friend’s wife. . . . Come on now, that doesn’t even sound like me, If I don’t say something in a rap or on Twitter, it’s not true.6 How Hilton sees his and his blog’s own relationship to the communication of truth is unclear. West, however, in his “interesting take”, singles out

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two formats of contemporary mass media discourse as preferred venues of truth—rap music and Twitter. As the source of this quote is not disclosed by Hilton and seems to be neither rap nor Twitter, what makes West’s take most “interesting” may well be its self-reflexive contradictoriness. Both the rumored claim (“She’s my Beyoncé”) and its denial scan as West playing with the excesses of media attention paid to him and which he also courts in a range of forums including Twitter. As is evident from the aggressive comments posted by Hilton’s readers, though, Kardashian comes off worse than West in this story. While the subject of the rumored sentence, “she” exists only as a version of another, named woman. As West’s possession (“my Beyoncé”), she is ultimately positioned more as object than subject. Together the rumor and reactions to it shape Kardashian as an unstable item whose value is mostly determined within an economy of circulation: she is possessed by West more than by herself; she circles around but never achieves the Beyoncé standard; and she is deemed excessively visible. More “whore” than West, Kardashian is also devalued in relation to norms of talent, where she is perceived primarily as paid attachment to the musician (“whore on his side”). It is worth noting that West’s denial of the rumor also reduces Beyoncé to the status of “my friend’s wife”. But the power relations of this narrative are complicated by the claim that West “needs a whore (. . .) to get media attention for his new CD”. This comment recognizes that the “whore” in question may be a higher premium commodity than the output of West’s musical career. In this sense, Kardashian’s presence in a media economy of circulation and attention is both of particular value and subject to misogynist attack. This chapter emerges from an awareness of these curious double standards. What does it mean in the age of promiscuous network culture to call someone a “media whore”? A central claim of this book so far is that the current social and economic organization of networked media positions all “sharing subjects” as more or less promiscuous and entrepreneurial, at once rewarded and exploited for leveraging multiple networked intimacies. In this context, networked media have profoundly shifted the ground on which celebrity culture is constructed. No longer exclusively the product of major capital investment or institutional backing, celebrity is now achieved by individuals who are particularly astute or determined or lucky in their online social networking activity (singers Justin Bieber or Lana Del Rey, for instance) as well as those who find themselves the inadvertent object of network attention dynamics (such as Britain’s infamous “Cat Bin Woman”).7 Within these conditions of “prosumer” distribution and self-distribution, criteria for how and why individuals are paid mass attention have rapidly diversified. The norms and values by which those individuals are then publicly judged, however, may be slower to catch up. The reviled figure of the “media whore” emblematizes this problematic. The term is a common vernacular description of an individual perceived to inappropriately seek excessive media attention. As was elaborated in one of Perez Hilton’s reader’s comments quoted above, the term’s reference to

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prostitution adds at least one layer of claimed inappropriateness, where some form of payment accompanies and cheapens the individual’s public exposure. When applied to Kim Kardashian, for instance, we see that the term claims inauthentic and undeserved attention. Kardashian’s excessive public profile equals “whore” when viewed in juxtaposition with the authentic values displayed by Beyoncé Knowles whose media attention is consequently deserved. Where Knowles is celebrated as top-selling recording artist, multiple award winner, actor, wife, and mother, Kardashian is cast in relief as spectacular divorcée and inconsequential TV personality, without a proven relationship to any traditional categories of talent. One Perez Hilton reader crudely expresses this opposition: “beyonce see she is a star a MOVIE STAR a beautiful MARRIED WOMAN with a new BABY all the things kim is not NOT movie star NOT beautiful AND not married NAD DOESNT have a baby althou most of the time looks pregnant . . . [sic]”.8 The excesses of the media whore are measured not just in relation to quantity of attention but qualities exposed, and those qualities plotted on an axis that measures how successfully or failingly the subject embodies standards of gender. Because the figure of the media whore exists in this complex relation to attention and merit, as excessively and undeservingly attention-seeking, the transformation of attention into a premium commodity within network culture may alter what currently counts as media whoredom. In particular, the affective intensity invested in the media whore as an exceptional figure may no longer be sustainable when arguably all sharing subjects trade on their networking capacities and potentials to some degree in the economy of capitalized attention. On the one hand, the promiscuously transmedia presence of Kim Kardashian makes her an easy target for the kind of vitriol quoted above (and these are far from isolated examples). On the other hand, she is also one of the world’s most followed social media users, a status which she harnesses for the purpose of lucrative product endorsements.9 What does it mean, then, for one person to be both social media success story and accused media whore? Analysis of the media presence of two public figures will illustrate how networked media are leveraged in the creation of both as models of promiscuous sharing, and the gendered and sexual framing of both creations. Accused by many of oversharing, Kim Kardashian occupies a space of transition in media culture in which the value of network circulation and perceptions of its excessiveness are in flux. Branded as both old school “media whore” and Web 2.0 entrepreneur, Kardashian is a paradigm case of the ambiguous values of network promiscuity. Also garnering media coverage recently for his prolific and promiscuous output, actor/director/writer James Franco draws attention to attention itself. Not unlike Kardashian, he engages with social media as a vector to sites of selffocused intertextuality—a network of self-referential projects. I will also argue that his knowing “the name of the game”, as he puts it, extends to a self-conscious flirtation with queer subculture. Not just for reasons of their apparent transmedial ubiquity, Kardashian and Franco both exemplify versions of viral celebrity. Viral celebrity aims

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to describe how fame or infamy accumulate contagiously around an individual’s public presence, as if by viral transmission, moving from consumer to consumer and site to site in increasingly dense and overlapping mediating networks. Viral celebrity also refers to the convergence of multiple mediated spaces or channels through which an individual accumulates fame or infamy, and, importantly, the activities undertaken by the individual to manufacture or amplify his or her own network circulation. As a correlate of the model of virality outlined in Chapter 1, viral celebrity combines the network dynamics of promiscuity or multiple intimacy and entrepreneurialism. In these ways, the concept acknowledges recent scholarship on how digital media have transformed celebrity discourse. In particular, Theresa Senft’s work on “microcelebrity” outlines how the current culture of self-branding permeates social media activity and depends upon “the proprietary organization of the attention of others”.10 For the individual social media user, the various forms of immaterial labor that constitute practices of microcelebrity are motivated by “the lure of recreating the self as star/corporation”.11 Also building on this base, Alice Marwick and danah boyd view celebrity as practice, specifically in their study of the practice of social media strategies, and as a “continuum” of strategies practiced “across the spectrum of fame”, rather than being a quality embodied by a pre-ordained few.12 In the examples of Kim Kardashian and James Franco, and in the promiscuous agency of gossip bloggers like Perez Hilton who act as vectors of stars’ viral celebrity as well as their own, we see again a collapse of viral subject into viral object, of agent of transmission into the item transmitted. In the age of virality, celebrity itself is transmitted virally, growing upon itself as much as it forms around a singular catalyzing event. KEEPING UP WITH THE PROMISCUOUS The Kardashian family first came to my attention on a visit to the United States, some time after their reality television show Keeping Up With the Kardashians had become popular.13 I was staying with friends whose home-life includes a significant amount of TV watching and gossip magazine reading. Sharing these pursuits with them has become a genuinely pleasurable and informative part of visiting their home, a solid component of a friendship that was founded on the consumption and critique of American popular culture. (We had met as graduate students many years earlier at a conference where my friend was presenting a paper on the TV show Charmed and I was presenting on talk show TV.) Watching TV one night with my American pop culture informants, a comedic round-up of the week’s reality TV narratives left me puzzled about the apparently well-established fame of the Kardashians. “Who is that family, and why do they have their own show?” I asked, only semi-rhetorically. “What are they famous for? Should I know who they are?”

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My friends laughed. Perhaps they found charming the naïveté of their overseas visitor who had remained thus far untouched by this particular contagion. But their laughter suggested they may have shared the incredulity and implicit judgment of my questions. One of them attempted to clarify, explaining that the late Robert Kardashian, father of three of the family’s daughters, had been a defense attorney for O. J. Simpson when he stood trial in 1994 for the murder of his wife. This clarified nothing, and only left me more puzzled. After all, the Simpson trial had taken place more than twelve years earlier and the show didn’t seem to have anything to do with either the trial, O. J. Simpson, or Robert Kardashian. I couldn’t understand how the daily life of the extended family of a deceased former participant in a murder trial, even the massive media event that it was, could justify public attention. For me, it was not a justification at the time or over a decade later. If the spectacle of the Simpson trial was being offered as one point of origin for the celebrity of the Kardashians, my failure to understand was more properly an inability to trace the transmission of celebrity as contagion across the intervening time and space. Read in this way, of course my questions were naïve, and laughter was probably a more appropriate response than any attempted explanation. Now that Keeping Up With the Kardashians is a mainstay of the reality TV scene, is broadcast internationally, and has generated several spin-off series, I need to be asking different questions. This chapter is motivated by some of those questions: more informed, less incredulous, and less judgmental. They are posed less specifically about reality TV and more generally about the structure of attention of a media culture in which certain individuals such as Kim Kardashian thrive. This member of the Kardashian clan has come in recent years to emblematize a particular kind of celebrity fuelled by the promiscuous convergence of activity on various media platforms, notably reality TV, social media, and gossip magazines and websites. There is an important difference, however, between this proliferating public presence and earlier kinds of celebrity based on multiple fields of activity, such as the show business “triple threat” (singer/actor/dancer). It is the transmediality and transmissibility of Kardashian’s activities, rather than their intrinsic quality, that determine their value and hers. In short, value is determined by circulation—real or potential. Alongside multiple zones of chosen exposure, Kim Kardashian has been the object of massive negative attention in a range of media and private discourse; the Kanye West “She’s my Beyoncé” controversy is really just a blip on the radar. Reality TV participants are already, in some venues, dogged by bad press in a way that frequently rehearses normative gender and class critiques to produce a narrative of inauthentic, inappropriate, and undeserved celebrity. The Kardashian family’s ostentatious displays of wealth, for instance, are commonly criticized as betraying an inauthentic class position, that is aspirational or nouveau riche. The name of their TV show, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, a play on the idiom “keeping up with the Joneses”, itself registers a class-inflected narrative of neighborly

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competitiveness, whether or not this is self-conscious and tongue-in-cheek. Kim Kardashian’s personal fame reaches beyond the popularity of her family’s show, beyond her endorsement of countless products, and into the realm of infamy because of a number of other instances of public exposure perceived by some to tarnish her moral reputation. Earliest among these were the commercial release of an amateur sex tape and a nude pictorial in Playboy magazine. Most notoriously, though, a media circus came to town around the various stages of Kardashian’s 2011 marriage to basketball player Kris Humphries, including engagement, dress speculation, prewedding rehearsals and gatherings, the wedding ceremony itself, and finally the announcement of her decision to file for divorce after 72 days. On the TV network that screens Keeping Up With the Kardashians (E!), in partner publications and websites, and on almost every other source of pop culture and tabloid news, Kim’s wedding event was (briefly) ubiquitous.14 A former publicist of Kardashian’s was among those to claim that the wedding to Humphries was no more than a publicity stunt, and in turn the publicist was also accused of opportunism.15 Given its comprehensively and willfully mediated nature, the wedding event certainly cannot be separated from the category of public relations, and so to enquire into the authenticity of the couple’s relationship is to ask the wrong kind of question. Moreover, the counter-accusation casting doubt on the publicist’s motives once again implicitly underscores the leverageable economic value of the accused media whore by imagining that other parties strategically position themselves within range of her publicity stunt—and its fallout. The attention economy in which the Kardashians thrive as a premium commodity not only seems to destabilize a clear hierarchy of value in relation to exposure but also operates around the contagiousness of celebrity. Celebrity no longer only refers to being famous for “well-knownness”, as Daniel Boorstin put it in 1962, but to being famous for being associated with someone else’s wellknownness.16 Once marginally famous by association to the scandalous presence of others such as Paris Hilton and O. J. Simpson, Kim Kardashian has now become leverageable in her own right. Among the world’s most “followed” social media users, her public relations activity is a complicated exercise of manufactured virality. One zone of activity contagiously transmits attention to another, producing networked self-brand ubiquity. From this privileged multiple positionality, attention is selectively directed at other brands and branded selves, and occasionally at individual fans, for whom a momentary Kardashian glow could contribute a significant network boost. Kardashian has been active on Twitter since 2009. Her account of being initiated to the social network and its potential are telling: Ryan Seacrest was like, “You’ve got to get on Twitter. Just try it. Please.” So I went to Mexico, and got the craziest sunburn. I tweeted a picture of it, and within an hour it was on CNN in Mexico. I was like, “I don’t understand this,” but I’ve been addicted ever since.17

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Initial naïveté has given way to the knowingness of addiction and skill, as current evidence firmly illustrates. A simple analysis of Kim Kardashian’s recent activity on Twitter demonstrates the mechanics of expert celebrity impression management. Taking all tweets sent from the @KimKardashian account in March, April, and May 2014 (a total of 448)18, I determined fourteen categories into which content could be grouped. The three highestscoring categories were Link to Own Instagram Account (87 tweets), Endorsement of Own Brands (69), and Direct Response to Fan (47). The lowest-scoring categories were Link to Press Unrelated to Self (1 tweet), Political Awareness or Charity Publicity (12), and Link to Other’s Social Media Account (14). Senft defines her concept of microcelebrity as “the commitment to deploying and maintaining one’s online identity as if it were a branded good, with the expectation that others do the same”.19 With this foundation, my primary interest in Kim Kardashian’s Twitter activity is in the degree to which it participates in forms of branding and self-branding. From across the initial fourteen categories, I was able to estimate that 144 of the total tweets (about 32%) constitute overt or covert branding of products or services. This figure includes: direct endorsement of other brands (mostly fashion); direct endorsement of brands within the Kardashian stable (including several lines of clothing and cosmetics, related boutiques and cafés); direct publicity for episodes of Keeping Up With the Kardashians; and endorsement of other brands masked as activity update.20 A further 230 tweets (about 51% of the total) constitute the more nebulous work of selfbranding. Not making direct reference to branded products or services, this category includes clearly recognizable ways in which Kardashian distributes attention among the various vitrines of her carefully manufactured public image, including: links to press about her; photographs of her on her Instagram account and website; photographs of her with other famous people; fashion tips, featuring photographs of her; direct response to fan questions about her; and links to fan blogs, all of which feature photographs or artwork of Kardashian and/or her family. Kardashian is an entrepreneur of her own self-perpetuating celebrity. Some of the numerical calculations here must remain necessarily imprecise. A quantitative study, even one more adept and sustained than this sketch, cannot fully account for the nuance and overlap between kinds of social media activity, and indeed this book is built on the argument that those ambiguities are put to work ideologically. Nonetheless, these initial results are worth framing within existing scholarship on how social media instrumentalize celebrity capital. Taking a standard line from the sociological study of digital media, Alice Marwick and danah boyd argue that one of Twitter’s appeals to ordinary users is “the perception of direct access to a famous person”21 who consequently creates “the illusion of ‘backstage’ ”,22 thus maintaining both the proximity and the distance which constitute construction of the celebrity persona. Also working with the spatial metaphor of celebrity as a theatrics of concealment and revelation, Nick Muntean

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and Anne Helen Petersen distinguish between “intrusion” and “disclosure” as modes of public access to the backstage of celebrity authenticity. In an effort to circumvent intrusion, they suggest, famous people are taking tools of publicity into their own hands, and in so doing aim to control the process of celebrity signification: Disclosure, e.g. Tweeting, emerges as a possible corrective to the endlessly associative logic of the paparazzi’s conspiratorial mindset. In other words, through Twitter, the celebrity seeks to arrest meaning—fixing it in place around their own seemingly coherent narrativisation.23 In Muntean and Petersen’s analysis, spatiality of access combines with temporality to approximate the desired authenticity behind the star’s constructed subjectivity. In addition to the “seemingly unrehearsed quality” of celebrity tweets, an effect of “immediacy and casualness” is also achieved by their “ostensible spontaneity”.24 Like other digital media, Twitter remediates the effect of liveness that was crucial to the ideological function of earlier media, notably television, in constructing a fiction of access to a shared social reality—and access now, not later.25 Kim Kardashian’s Twitter use both enhances and diminishes its intended shared social reality, that is Kardashian’s daily life. An average of five tweets a day installs the appearance of habit, in accordance with Nick Couldry’s understanding that liveness is “written into daily habits which embody our dependencies on media flows”.26 By her own account, Kardashian is “addicted”. Instantaneous access to the shared social reality of Kardashian’s life is troubled, however, by a significant proportion of the content tweeted which is not live in any sense but essentially an aggregation of photographs and press content published earlier or elsewhere. Moreover, it is virtually impossible to verify when the star herself is tweeting rather than a representative, even when some tweets more overtly approximate the authentic and spontaneous voice of a person. In their study of celebrity Twitter accounts, Marwick and boyd apply a range of necessarily subjective analytical measurements to determine authenticity, concluding with confidence that “the majority of accounts maintained by famous people are written, at least in part, by the individual themselves”.27 They acknowledge, however, that determining the authenticity of a celebrity “is not entirely the point” and that “it is the uncertainty that creates pleasure for the celebrity-watcher on Twitter”.28 The Reply sections beneath Kim Kardashian’s tweets abound with fans requesting acknowledgment. To have one’s Twitter account “followed” by the star is a sure way to increase one’s own social capital. But it may also register an implicit anxiety about the authenticity of Kardashian’s online presence. In my sample, forty-seven followers were singled out to have their direct questions to Kardashian responded to. Given their appearance in a cluster of seven or eight at the same time, these responses read more

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as arm’s-length curation than sincere connection. Indeed, a weekly tweet linking to Tumblr Tuesday, which showcases a choice of one Kardashianthemed fan blog every week, makes this carrot-dangling explicit. The short feature on each chosen blog ends, “Don’t forget to comment links to Tumblr blogs to possibly be featured as next week’s Tumblr Tuesday shoutout! Xo”.29 These examples of self-brand curation should come as no great surprise and should confirm that authenticity is “not entirely the point”; it is an ideological effect. Kardashian’s activity on Twitter conforms to the contradictory logic of frictionless sharing, discussed in the last chapter. Spontaneity, immediacy, genuine connection, and authenticity are of secondary importance and are ultimately instruments in service of viral capital expansion, in this case of the star’s self-brand: Kim Kardashian™. In Chapter 2, I referenced how Facebook’s automated sharing algorithms were received by some as a threat to individual agency and social capacities. As one blogger wrote, “Sharing and recommendation shouldn’t be passive. It should be conscious, thoughtful, and amusing (. . .) we, together, consciously create a tidal wave of meme that elevates that piece of media to viral status”.30 My discussion here has aimed to show how the frictionless, mechanized network circulation of Kim Kardashian’s public image is open to a similar critique. To my reading, though, it is not that her selfbranding efforts reduce her authentic human qualities; access to such qualities has always been a manufactured element of celebrity discourse and therefore they have always been at stake in the maintenance of a star’s success. Rather, I am arguing that the immaterial labor of Kim Kardashian’s celebrity self-brand epitomizes a form of viral capitalism.31 It combines control of the entrepreneurial infrastructure of prolific network circulation with commodification of her image as freely transmissible. The ideal promiscuous, entrepreneurial sharing subject, Kim Kardashian is both viral subject and viral object. UPDATING THE MEDIA WHORE It is clear that the discourse of the media whore is built upon a gender hierarchy. Not only does it appear to be used to label females more often than males, but it claims to describe kinds of femininity. In turn, when labeled, males are feminized by association to women whose presence within the public sphere has conventionally required justification. The media whore label accesses a long history of the misogynistic construction of feminine sexuality, and continues to pool ideas of excess, uncleanliness, and virality, particularly when the whore is drawn in opposition to the figure of the virgin. Joshua Gamson has argued that the perennial virgin-whore binary—the two poles of female sexuality historically used to contain female desire— remains in force even in a contemporary context in which many of the

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core values of second-wave feminism have been integrated into mainstream social, political, and media spaces. He argues: confronting the dichotomy with a liberal-feminist-derived, woman-aspublic-agent frame does not necessarily make much of a dent in the virgin-whore narrative. As long as women’s publicity itself is narrated by analogy to sex—the virtuous woman protects her chastity from predatory media, the woman who seeks out media attention is a harlot— the independent woman, even when she is of the out-of-my-way-mister, I’m-my-own-commodity variety, is easily absorbed back into the role of prostitute.32 Gamson offers as his main example of media whore Jessica Hahn, who was at the center of the sex scandal that brought about the fall from grace of US televangelist Jim Bakker in the mid-1980s. In her successive media appearances at the time of the scandal, Hahn was constructed to embody both sides of the virgin-whore binary. First virgin, Hahn claimed she had never had sex before Bakker and a colleague allegedly raped her. Later whore, Hahn sold her story to various publications, including Playboy magazine where she featured in two nude pictorials, the second displaying the results of cosmetic surgery procedures reportedly paid for by the first. As Gamson notes of this transition in media characterization, Hahn responded to claims that she had become whore by deploying a lightweight quasi-feminist discourse of control regained; this was internally challenged, though, when she spoke of her preference to leave life decisions in the hands of a patriarchal Christian god.33 In simple terms, the shift from virgin to whore is positively recoded as a claim to individual agency. Gamson’s treatment of the Jessica Hahn example may also confirm that the media whore is primarily a construction of broadcast and print media. More precisely, the media whore’s meanings are drawn from the particular venues of her exposure and their relationship to the media culture of the time. When featured largely in tabloid and pornographic media, as was Hahn’s case, gendering of the media whore is amplified by class prejudice because of the perceived low status of those media genres which trade in her story and image. Beyond this moment, though, the media whore’s most resilient meanings are drawn from earlier cultural forms in which virgin-whore narratives resonate, and appear to extend into current, post-broadcast media formats. At the most basic level, the recent proliferation of interactive media applications such as online forums, blogs, and social networks allows limitless opportunities for a proliferation of anonymous or throwaway comments that traffic the media whore discourse. A fuller discussion, however, needs to consider the function of this accusatory discourse in relation to the established media spaces and conventions which the media whore irritates. Since Raymond Williams, many authors have outlined how the integration of broadcast media such as television in the domestic realm gradually

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reconfigured the cultural coding of public and private space.34 In this context, the mass media figure of the media whore accrues particular intensity as reviled agent of disturbance of normative moral and gender codes associated with the home and its occupants. The excesses of the media whore invade the private space of the home and its idealized social formation of family with an inappropriate display of unproductive sexuality and pecuniary interest. Like all folk devils, the media whore provides a convenient screen for domestic viewers to fantasize and disavow their relation to these excesses. Given that the location of media production, distribution, and consumption has become so unfixed with the infrastructural changes of network culture, it is now much more difficult to single out what counts as an invading presence and which spaces are deemed at risk of invasion. In this sense, the media whore figure now feels anachronistic. It may also be true, however, that the recent multiplication of mediated spaces in which any accused whore may seek and gain excessive attention renews conditions for continued, flourishing use of the term. A quarter of a century after Jessica Hahn’s moment of dubious fame, criticism of Kim Kardashian functions to fulfill a remarkably similar gender characterization. Kardashian’s narrative, however, is more complex than the neat teleology of Hahn’s. Where Hahn is first cast as virgin in order to slide into whore, Kardashian begins at whore (the sex tape and the Playboy spread), is then abruptly repositioned as modern take on virgin (“Kim’s fairytale wedding”, as the E! network trumpeted) only to return once more to whore upon divorce and subsequent very public relationship with fellow accused media whore Kanye West.35 As Gamson claims, whore tends to trump virgin in a post-feminist space of female visibility. A neo-conservative backlash finds the trope of whore more widely applicable to certain versions of female autonomy and economic and sexual independence. In other words, both Hahn’s and Kardashian’s momentary casting as virgin rings false, despite attention to signifiers of character authenticity, such as Hahn’s position as church secretary pre-affair, and Kardashian’s appearance in white dress and tiara at her 2011 wedding. Kardashian’s mobility on the virgin-whore spectrum offers evidence for two main points. First, the contested features of post-feminism appear to be alive and well in the mediascape that rewards the celebrity labor of the likes of Kardashian and Paris Hilton. Adopting the language of Angela McRobbie’s influential description of popular post-feminism, Kardashian’s career is propelled by second-wave feminism having been “taken into account”, that is both positively deployed and disposed of as having “passed away”.36 She is cast to move efficiently between attributes of both virgin and whore in a way that demonstrates the “double entanglement” of post-feminism: “the co-existence of neo-conservative values in relation to gender, sexuality and family life . . . with processes of liberalisation in regard to choice and diversity in domestic, sexual and kinship relations”.37 Kardashian’s online activity exhibits all of these dynamics. From the predominance of bodily display,

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aesthetic improvement, and commodity consumption in photographs, to the relentless self-focus of an overwhelming majority of content posted, to the collapse of all elements of the personal into the entrepreneurial, Kim Kardashian is precisely symptomatic of the post-feminist “sensibility”. As outlined by Rosalind Gill, this includes: the notion that femininity is a bodily property; the shift from objectification to subjectification; the emphasis upon self-surveillance, monitoring and discipline; a focus upon individualism, choice and empowerment; the dominance of a make-over paradigm; a resurgence in ideas of natural sexual difference; a marked sexualization of culture; and an emphasis on consumerism and the commodification of difference.38 If this is the case, then it follows as a second point that the virgin-whore character typology needs to be rethought beyond an outdated binary structure, and that a more complicated and contradictory set of subject positions is in play. As Gill and others note, the characteristics by which girls and women are positively appraised within the logic of post-feminism are also turned against them in a neoliberal atmosphere of increased competitiveness and social surveillance. One woman’s empowered sexual subject is another’s whore. Complicit in both the elevation and condemnation of stars, online gossip helps to illuminate the murky gender politics of post-feminism and their deployment in viral celebrity. VECTORS OF VIRAL CELEBRITY Gossip blogger Perez Hilton’s ambiguous relationship to media whoredom is relevant to this chapter for several reasons. As one high-profile facilitator of the “She’s my Beyoncé” rumor with which I began, Hilton falls within the frame of promiscuous opportunism by positioning himself within range of the publicity stunts of the famous and wannabe-famous. His pseudonymous imitation of over-exposed socialite Paris Hilton can no longer be regarded as critical when he arguably does as much to court media attention as those he viciously exposes on his blog.39 Trading so openly on the commodified public presence of others, Hilton erases a clear distinction between celebrity and celebrity commentator by making himself and his own commentary the story. The faux-childish scrawl of derogatory comments that Hilton photoshops on to photographs of stars imposes a literal inscription of his own persona in the foreground of the celebrity arena. Like the proponents of rumor and gossip in all contexts, Hilton uses the tone of this persona to foster a kind of intimacy with his readers which, as Kirsty Fairclough notes, distributes complicity with the blatantly ideological underpinnings of his commentary. Fairclough singles out Hilton for his leading participation in a contemporary “Bitch culture”, notably illustrated by the “Bitch persona” adopted

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by many gossip bloggers in their unrelenting criticisms of the bodies and activities of (mostly female) celebrities. Fairclough argues that the “Bitch persona” is compelling because it speaks to the complicated layers of the current “postfeminist cultural landscape”: It functions as a figure of pseudo-empowerment by seemingly promoting a “shared” attitude toward the celebrity that is couched in a tone of humorous, ironic discourse. Yet it clearly vilifies female celebrities who have been afforded all of the freedom that second wave feminism offered, while labeling them “sluts”, “has-beens”, “fame-whores” and “trainwrecks”.40 The sharing of “bitch persona” attitudes among readers—and readers who remain pseudonymously protected, as is the case on blogs like Hilton’s— tightens the double bind of post-feminism identified by McRobbie and Gill. A seeming liberalization of attitudes towards the display and circulation of images of self-determined and empowered female sexuality is shadowed by the constant potential for their capture within conservative frames of surveillance and censure. In this context, the outpouring of vitriol towards Kim Kardashian quoted at the start of this chapter is not only in line with the tone set by Hilton himself but authorized by a cultural ambiance in which women and their bodies are at once the site of individual agency and drives to consumerist self-improvement and available for punitive critique. The circulation of such “shared” attitudes through the circuitry of gossip can be understood as an affective contagion. Indeed the success of Perez Hilton’s blog may be attributed in large part to the wider relationship between affect and media that several scholars have recently explored. Anna Gibbs argues that “what is co-opted by the media is primarily affect, and that the media function as amplifiers and modulators of affect which is transmitted by the human face and voice, and also by music and other forms of sound, and also by the image”.41 Furthermore, Gibbs continues, “media and bodies appear as vectors, and affect itself as the primary communicational medium for the circulation of ideas, attitudes and prescriptions for action among them”.42 With this language in mind, the contagious properties of celebrity become clearer—notably the affective composition of the circulation of celebrity as contagion. The movement of affects constituting the “bitch persona” of Perez Hilton and others, “shared” among readers in order to naturalize an ideological position on femininity, offers a map of the terrain of celebrity itself as it accumulates around any given individual. Hilton acts as vector for this contagious circulation, and in turn vectors his own co-celebrity in parallel to those public figures whose affect-producing antics his site shamelessly traffics. Arguably, the interactive features of gossip blogs reinvigorate the affective transfer between celebrity commentator and readers, and among

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readers, because of the effect of intimacy produced by the affordances of the digital interface. The authentic voice of the blogger’s “bitch persona” simulates personal connection, and the reader’s ability to participate in commentary simulates sharing and community. But by being able to position themselves more promiscuously in relation to celebrity, that is to be more widely, more densely, and more intimately linked to the networks of contagious affect that produce contemporary celebrity, gossip bloggers harness these forms of affective labor in order to transform the place of celebrity and the place of celebrity commentary. For Marwick and boyd, Perez Hilton “uneasily walk[s] a line between insider and outsider”; he is both commentator and celebrity, or perhaps neither.43 More precisely, the virally constructed celebrity of the gossip blogger himself circulates through overlapping networks of information rather than accessing discrete venues of secrecy to be disclosed. Melissa Jane Hardie examines the movement between inside and outside performed by the gossip columnist, and questions how the recent transfer of gossip discourse to online social media alters this spatiality. In particular, Hardie is concerned with how the “inside knowledge” of celebrity gossip functions as an epistemology of the closet, taking Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s influential formulation of the structural imperative of Western male hetero/ homosexual definition to shape knowledge itself. Inside knowledge, Hardie writes, “permits the gossip columnist to regulate and proliferate the speculation that surrounds the conundrum of privacy and celebrity”.44 She positions this intermediary role at the center of a cinematic model of celebrity emerging from code-era Hollywood, where censorship complements gossip in a Foucauldian logic of “incitement to discourse”.45 Because gossip columnists and celebrities alike are taking to social media in ways that interrupt the spatiality and exclusivity of insider information, and in ways that Muntean and Petersen saw as circumventing “intrusion”, perhaps closet-bound speculation on the private lives of celebrities loses currency. As Hardie writes: “Social media offers an alternative orientation to the ‘source on-hand’, whose reportage conforms to the logic of inside knowledge. Can it be that one effect of the remediation offered by social media is that the closet itself may be remediated?”46 The second part of this chapter will take up this compelling question. In the prolific multimedia activities of James Franco we find a public figure preoccupied not only with closet formations but with queer-inspired attempts to dismantle them, albeit from a position of privilege not usually shared by those for whom the closet may provide the illusion of safety. Toying with public speculation about his sexuality, and also versed in some basic principles of queer theory, Franco uses attention to his public presence to try to realize Hardie’s hope that “the closet becomes less ramifying than redundant, as social media organise new venues that interrupt the logic of disclosure and reinscription an epistemology of the closet requires”.47

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“HOLLYWOOD’S MOST IRREPRESSIBLE META-ARTIST” In April 2014, actor/director/writer James Franco appeared on a morning television show to promote a new film, but found himself on the back foot when asked about his recent use of photo-sharing application Instagram. The story had spread that Franco had attempted to arrange a hotel hookup with a seventeen-year-old girl after their contact on Instagram. The girl, named Lucy, had taken a photograph of herself with Franco at the stage door of the Broadway theatre in which he had just performed, posted it on Instagram, and the two later exchanged private messages on that application. In order to verify his identity online, Lucy asked Franco to take and send photographs of himself, including one in which he was to display her name on a piece of paper. She told him she would only accept his request to meet under these conditions. He complied. Lucy then ended the conversation, and later proceeded to release screen-captures of it online. Explaining himself a few days later on Live! With Kelly and Michael, Franco admitted to being “embarrassed”, noting that the incident illustrates how “social media is tricky”. “I used bad judgement,” he continued, “and I learned my lesson”.48 Reporting on the incident just prior to Franco’s televised disclosure, a writer for Entertainment Weekly asked, “Is this crazy James Franco story a viral campaign for his new movie?” The columnist spells out options for how to make sense of the story, including that it might be true or that the screencaps might be fake. She takes a third approach, suggesting the screencaps might well be fake and part of “a stunt plotted by Franco himself in order to stealthily advertise his new movie”. Furthermore, such a ploy for attention would be “just the sort of thing we’ve come to expect from Hollywood’s most irrepressible meta-artist”.49 Known for many years primarily as an actor, “meta-artist” Franco has recently made a name for himself in a proliferating array of activities, including as poet and writer of fiction, screenwriter, film director, luxury brand spokesmodel, teacher of acting and filmmaking, graduate student, and social media enthusiast. Promiscuously active, this list also suggests his ability to take advantage of his status as Hollywood star for the benefit of other projects—and the benefit of those attached to those projects. One might speculate whether his poetry and short stories, for instance, would have attracted the attention of major publishers without established celebrity behind them. Within the conceptual framing of celebrity offered in this chapter, Franco’s public profile also reads as a contagious accumulation of attention across multiple sites. But as is clear both from the barely concealed disdain of the term “meta-artist” and from the same writer’s hunch that Franco fabricated the Instagram scandal for “viral” promotional purposes, his transmedial presence appears to some to be carefully and entrepreneurially curated. If this is the case, then James Franco might have more in common with Kim Kardashian than meets the eye, and so part of the aim of the rest of this chapter is to determine the degree to which Franco’s media

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promiscuity overlaps with the viral celebrity embodied by Kardashian. Of course, Franco first achieved fame within a normative understanding of successful achievement, as an actor regarded to be talented, rather than by contagious association to someone else’s well-knownness. Yet part of what viral celebrity entails is its own mutation, casting in doubt the originary nature of any one scene of attention, as celebrity accrues to itself as much as to actions propelling it. An examination of the circulating public presence of James Franco needs, then, to think as much about the movement of attention between zones of activity as the attention-gaining activities themselves. Network-formed, viral celebrity operates through edges as much as within nodes. Analyzing the composition of two significant nodes in Franco’s recent career network will also allow a perspective on his attention-trafficking efforts: both sites of activity are treated as opportunities for celebrity labor, albeit as attempts to deconstruct what counts as celebrity. In particular, I will argue that Franco attempts a queer intervention into the nature of the contemporary celebrity attention economy, partly through a self-conscious deployment of promiscuity. On Instagram and in his film Interior. Leather Bar., Franco remediates cruising: he uses attention to his public image to flirt with the erotics of identity and knowing, that is with an epistemology of the closet. In both of these sites he shows a preoccupation with closet erotics, and appears perhaps to engage “the logic of disclosure and reinscription an epistemology of the closet requires”, even if in the service of an imperative of self-evident subjective transparency.50 “HELLO, THIS IS ME” Attempting and failing to seduce a teenager was not the only cause of James Franco’s recent social media notoriety. In a number of interviews in late 2013 and early 2014, in the context of publicizing film and other projects, Franco was called to speak about his relationship to “selfies”. Selfies, a term that was famously inducted into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013, refers to self-portraits taken on smartphones. Selfies have recently become ubiquitous on social networking sites and applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, used for profile photos, tourist shots, updates on mood, location, and companions, and, less conventionally, in any number of other situations including after sex, at funerals, at concentration camps, and on the red carpet.51 As was humorously illustrated at the 2014 Academy Awards ceremony, when a handful of A-list Hollywood actors clambered over each other to show a face in host Ellen DeGeneres’s phone company– sponsored selfie, famous people also love selfies. Fans love selfies of famous people too, and, as was DeGeneres’s hope, the Oscars selfie broke records by being forwarded on Twitter more than two million times before the end of the ceremony telecast.52

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James Franco appears to love selfies, and posts them regularly on his personal Instagram account to a following of more than two million other users. He posts selfies in bed, in cars, with friends and other famous people, at work, and in his bathroom. When major television interviews with Franco turned to this topic, such as on The View in April 2014 and The Late Show With David Letterman in May 2014, sample selfies displayed to the audience to illustrate the phenomenon were all of Franco shirtless. So too, Franco confirmed to Letterman, these are the kind that garner the most “likes” on his Instagram account. Downplaying the importance of such a self-representation for Letterman’s laconic bemusement, Franco continued, “It’s not that I enjoy posting pictures of myself, or whatever, but I just know that’s what gets attention”.53 This response is surprisingly offhand, given the suggestions of detailed thinking on the topic also apparent in the same interview, such as referencing an article he had written. The article in question, “The Meanings of the Selfie”, was published in The New York Times in December 2013 and offers a somewhat critical account of the contemporary cultural economy, the “age of too much information”, in which attention is “the name of the game”.54 Within this broadly drawn picture, Franco uses the article to distinguish between celebrity and noncelebrity selfies, the latter of which provide “a chance for subjects to glam it up, to show off a special side of themselves”. By contrast, the celebrity selfie constitutes “a pseudo-personal moment”, indeed “the prize shot that the paparazzi would kill for”. With this suggestion of privileged access in mind, Franco recognizes how social media has become a space of attentionnegotiation within an expectant celebrity culture: “I’ve found that Instagram works much like the movie business: You’re safe if you trade ‘one for them’ with ‘one for yourself’ ”. It is unclear whether “them” refers to fans or to studio executives, both of whom might demand output different from a star’s preferred material and upon which the star must pragmatically compromise in order to retain a certain status. Either way, strategic deployment of the celebrity selfie confirms that stars “know the power of their image, and how it is enhanced when garnished with privileged material”.55 In this account, the space between “glam” non-celebrity and “pseudopersonal” celebrity recalls the continuum of celebrity practice (“microcelebrity” for Senft) discussed by Marwick and boyd, as well as the play between ordinary and extraordinary qualities outlined by other scholars of celebrity.56 The claim to intimacy and authenticity of the celebrity selfie taken in a private moment follows the same logic as the effect of “backstage” access Marwick and boyd attribute to famous people’s use of Twitter. Crucially, Franco also notes that the “one for me, one for them” alternation is a method of shortcircuiting the intrusive spotlight of paparazzi, in line with Muntean and Petersen’s discussion of celebrity disclosure on social media. In other words, Franco’s discussion of the selfie’s “meanings” proves reasonably insightful. Despite his recognition of the selfie’s performative elements, however, Franco persists with a more basic claim to transparency, and he concludes: “In our

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age of social networking, the selfie is the new way to look someone right in the eye and say, ‘Hello, this is me’ ”.57 Despite the simplicity of this claim, Franco’s practical relationship to the selfie is complicated and even contradictory, oscillating between pragmatics and desire, cynicism and celebration. The selfie is at once evidence of “too much information” and a direct channel through to unmediated human connection: “ ‘Hello, this is me’ ”. This tension is illustrated by the affective register of some of Franco’s recent selfie posts on Instagram (under the account name jamesfrancotv). At one end of this range, coquettish self-awareness is evident in shirtless photos taken in bed, with captions such as “APPLE SLICES IN MY BED—I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU DIDNT SHOW UP!” (April 18, 2014; he is holding a slice of apple) and “WTF HAPPENED? I was waiting for you!!!!!” (April 26, 2014). Another recent bed shot, in which his upper body is clothed and his tongue is poking out, is captioned, “BED SELFIE!!!!!! I’M NAKED BELOW!!!! NAKED!!!!!” (May 22, 2014). In a different affective register, the shame of selfie excess is apparent in two photographs that were deleted by Franco shortly after being posted, both taken with Franco posing shirtless in front of a mirror, as if in the process of undressing. The first became notorious—viral, perhaps—in recent media coverage of Franco, posted in the early hours of the morning of May 2, 2014, and removed shortly after. Widely circulated online as a “nude selfie”, the photo displays Franco standing at a bathroom mirror in only underwear lowered to his hips, one hand holding his smartphone and the other hand covering his genitals.58 The second, posted and then removed on May 23, 2014, offers a similar pose to the first. Franco has unbuttoned his pants to display the top of his underwear, and one out-stretched arm emphasizes muscle tone. On the wall next to the mirror in which we see his reflection is pasted a reproduction of a shirtless self-portrait by celebrated queer artist Robert Mapplethorpe; Franco appears to be imitating Mapplethorpe’s stance.59 Confirming the shame of “too much information” that this selfie provoked before he removed it, Franco posted another selfie later the same day, May 23, 2014, showing only his forehead and hair. It is captioned “Too many selfies. Even for me. ☺”. On one level it is clear that Franco’s deployment of semi-clothed or suggestive selfies is part of his “one for me, one for them” strategy, in recognition of the attention-garnering value of his body as sexual object. Often, this is simply (and perhaps cynically, on his part) a ploy to bring additional publicity to projects in which he is involved. An Instagram post from June 13, 2014, for instance, offers an extreme close-up of his exposed armpit and face, taken as if he were lying in bed beside the viewer. The caption reads, “SIGN UP FOR ONLINE SCREENWRITING CLASS with ME! NOT EXPENSIVE AT ALL!!!!!!” The intimate “backstage” access offered in these examples intersects with a purposeful bodily self-commodification of a kind not dissimilar to a high proportion of Kim Kardashian’s Instagram posts. In simple terms, Kardashian is merely one of the most consistent

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proponents of how controlled bodily exposure can be harnessed in service of product endorsement. Franco, however, appears to be toying with the gender conventions of the objectifying gaze. Selfies, especially as practiced by young women and girls, have recently been the subject of much popular press, most of which tends to rehearse a common post-feminist debate between ideas of enhanced female body image and sexualization as self-empowerment or as repackaged objectification.60 Feminist scholars have also taken up this debate. Jennifer Ringrose et al., for instance, have noted the gender inequities and sexual double standards inherent in how teenagers engage in “sexting”, the circulation of sexually suggestive photographs via smartphone. Their research offers examples of how “boys’ image collections of girls’ bodies can garner them variable value and ratings” while girls who send such images “are at risk of moral sanctioning and ‘slutshaming’ ”.61 A scan of Franco’s followers’ responses to his more suggestive selfies reveals a high number of sexually aggressive comments and requests, sometimes pornographic. Whether he participates further in such exchanges is not known, beyond the leaking of the Lucy incident discussed earlier. What is clear is his provocative flirtation with the erotics and politics of the selfie, and moreover his conscious attempts to underperform the seriousness and aesthetic requirements of this kind of exposure, the expectations of which are raised by the likes of Kim Kardashian and her team of stylists and publicists. Franco knows “the name of the game”, by his own admission, but wants us to believe he doesn’t care too much for it. I believe a more satisfying analysis of the sexy selfies emerges if we trace a little of the history of the subcultural expression that Franco appears to be referencing, most especially in the shame-inducing excess of the mirror shots. It is here that “too much information” can be examined for its normative textures. To my eye, Franco’s deleted underwear and naked torso selfies most resemble a convention of sexualized self-representation that has long been standard on gay men’s hook-up sites. In short, he looks like he is cruising online for gay sex. A number of authors have outlined the importance of strategies of visual self-representation on dating websites and applications, within an understanding of such spaces as marketplaces of commodified and normative identities.62 In addition, in his discussion of men’s dating website Gaydar, Greg Young notes how users often invest their profiles with elements of a star aesthetic. Consistent with Senft’s concept of “microcelebrity”, Young proposes the term “mycasting” to describe how users produce themselves visually as online celebrities, global in their potential reach but local in their points of physical connection with other users.63 These visual strategies confirm “the proprietary organization of the attention of others”.64 Crucially, however, selfies on dating sites and elsewhere also suggest a more complicated organization of the attention of the self. Elsewhere I have argued that online dating profiles such as those on Gaydar are continually tended by the user not just as extension of the self but as a separate commodifiable artifact. This assemblage of uploaded images may in fact constitute a template of

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desire to which the user behind the same profile then aspires.65 The labor of profile and photo maintenance constructs both dating profile and its owner as commodities in a network which presumes promiscuous attention. The doubling of the commoditizing gaze is amply illustrated on the website Guys With iPhones, which has been archiving self-portraits of shirtless men in mirrors since 2009, that is before the term “selfie” existed in mainstream circulation.66 Not unlike the layout of dating applications like Gaydar and Grindr, Guys With iPhones is simply organized in a visual grid formation which emphasizes the unmistakable likeness among photos posted; the viewer may scroll through months and months of selfies of men in mirrors holding iPhones, usually shirtless and often naked, sometimes flexing substantial muscles, sometimes performing sexually suggestive actions. The site currently claims some 125,000 user-posted photographs. With only minute variations of each other, the overall effect forces the viewer to wonder what dynamic of imitation or contagion has led to this accumulation of bodily normativity. Certainly a competitive masculinity, not unknown on gay dating sites, would account for some of this display, although perhaps the parodic logic of the Internet meme plays a role too. In an early interview, site founder Guille says: To be honest, the idea started as a joke. A friend of mine sent me a picture of some random guy he knew and asked me if I thought he was hot. Since the guy in the pic was standing in front of a mirror holding you-know-what, I sarcastically said: “I don’t think that guy is available, he’s already in love with his iPhone.”67 In this account, erotic admiration of the male body mingles with facetiousness and light critique. Curiously, the comment evinces something of the double entanglement of post-feminism, both celebrating particular versions of sexualized bodily display and exposing them to competitive critique. At least in the representational world of selfies, homonormativity and postfeminism feel remarkably close. It is hard to read James Franco’s mirror selfies as parodic. They do, however, offer an interesting variation of the “mycasting” phenomenon by downplaying his own celebrity in a performance of “Hello, this is me” ordinariness. The “me” performed, though, trades on and reinforces his celebrity as prior commodity. Both images are a self-satisfying display of homoerotic narcissism, because Franco is gazing at his own reflection or at his own image on his phone rather than back at the viewer. But they also constitute a demand for attention in which disclosure itself attains equal commodity status as the unclothed body now rendered visible. Moreover, the disclosure undertaken is infused with the energy of queer refusal of norms of “too much information” by Franco’s attempt to appropriate representational strategies of the homoeroticized male body from spaces of relative

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cultural marginality. Twenty-five years after his death, Mapplethorpe has now achieved a slightly dubious queer canonical status. Much of his more explicitly queer-themed work was dogged by controversies around obscenity and the public funding of artists, which, combined with his own battle with HIV, positions him as a viral celebrity of a different kind. Franco uses this selfie to gesture to a tradition of anti-establishment provocation, positioning his own body as the momentary visual double to the body of photographer Mapplethorpe, and implicitly associating his own public image with the much censored queer artist’s body of work. Similarly, whether deliberate or not and whether parodic or not, his imitation of the visual bravado and normativity of gay men cruising online for sex intends to deconstruct heteronormative standards of excess, that is to naturalize homoerotic bodily disclosure as merely transparent presentation of self. Ironically, or perhaps deliberately, by removing both images from view, Franco generated a greater flurry of attention—to his own attention-grabbing tactics, probably more than to the norms he appeared to be questioning. Remediating cruising, James Franco himself has been branded “too much”. In the final section of this chapter, I follow one of the auto-intertextual links with which Franco uses his social media presence to vector attention. “THE FRANCO FAGGOT PROJECT” In 2013, Franco co-directed the film Interior. Leather Bar. with Travis Mathews, who had already begun to build a reputation for his documentarystyle explorations of gay male intimacy.68 Explicitly positioning itself as a response to the censorship of queer film content, Interior. Leather Bar. is billed as a reimagining of the unseen forty minutes of film that director William Friedkin was obliged to cut from his cult classic Cruising before its release in 1980.69 Cruising was as dogged at the time of its production by gay activist opposition as it was by the censorship board. It depicts the investigation of a series of brutal murders of gay men in New York City, all killed during sexual encounters in spaces of cruising. A young police officer (played by Al Pacino) goes undercover into the city’s gay leather scene as bait for the murderer, and finds himself emotionally and (perhaps, the film allows us to imagine) sexually compromised by the experience. Many of the film’s sexiest scenes take place in lower Manhattan bars, featuring real patrons as well as actors, as Pacino’s character witnesses and to some degree participates in the sweaty erotic groupings of leathermen on dance floors, in slings, and in dark corners. Some gay activist groups protested against what they saw as another in the phobic Hollywood tradition of films equating homosexual desire with homicidal tendencies. Certainly the film does little or nothing to sever such a connection, going so far as to explicitly homosexualize the act of knifing someone to death through images of penetration and ejaculation.70

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Interior. Leather Bar. remediates Cruising. Premised upon the quantitatively known absence of forty minutes of homosexually explicit material from Cruising—that film’s open secret of “too much information”— Interior. Leather Bar. swirls promiscuously around a range of interiors. As the title suggests, it is a film about interiority. Inside a leather bar, inside actor motivation, inside a film production, inside James Franco: all of these forms of “insider knowledge” are self-consciously disclosed, or more correctly, disclosed as oblique. For in the end, the film is also about its own failure to illuminate very much beyond male heterosexual discomfort with gay sex. This, however, seems to be Franco and Mathews’s point. Rather than attempting a narrative recreation of the missing forty minutes, the film narrates the circulation of affect around its own production. About halfway through, we witness Franco giving an impassioned pep-talk to his lead actor, Val, whose reticence about the project has so far shaped the film’s trajectory. The camera follows Val as he drives to the set, as he listens to a phone message from his wife reminding him “don’t take it, give it”, as he listens to a phone message from his agent expressing concern about Val’s involvement in “the Franco faggot project”. We follow him as he talks to other actors on set about their comfort levels with homoerotic contact, and as he gapes wide-eyed at the filming of an unsimulated S&M sex scene between men.

Figure 3.1

Interior. Leather Bar. (2013). Director James Franco reacts to queer sex.

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Immediately after watching this scene together, Franco and Val head outside and have the following on-camera exchange: FRANCO: “I don’t like the fact that I feel like I’ve been brought up to think a certain way. I don’t like thinking that. I don’t like realizing that my mind has been twisted by the way the world has been set up around me. And what that is is straight normative kind of behavior and it’s fucking instilled into my brain. And it’s . . . yeah, I’ll say it, it was a little shocking to me at first when I was watching [the S&M scene] but only, I believe, only because of the world around me. Because every fucking toilet paper commercial has a man and a woman living in a house together. And every fucking love story is a dude that wants to be with a girl. And the only way they’re gonna end up happy is if they walk off in the sunset together. I’m fucking sick of that shit. So if there’s a way for me to just break that up in my own mind, I’m all for it. And that’s, I think, why you want to be an actor and be an artist.” VAL: “You think it should be, like, in movies and people should be able to see it?”

Figure 3.2

Interior. Leather Bar. (2013). Actor Val Lauren reacts to queer sex.

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“Yes! Fuck yes! Yes, sex should be a tool, a story-telling tool. But we’re so fucking scared of it. Everybody talks about sex but then don’t dare put it in a movie. It’s like, what the fuck. Or you’re allowed to talk about it in certain ways, like fucking locker room humor or frat house kind of humor. But don’t show gay sex. Don’t do that. That’s the fucking devil. Show in previews show fucking people getting blown away and killed, but don’t show gay sex.”

Here as throughout the film, Franco clearly displays his ideological colors. From his position of privilege, he wants to queer established conventions of film representation. Making gay sex more visible—forcing it out of its closets—is a way to tell stories differently and to disrupt assumptions about romance. In fact, a direct reference to Michael Warner’s The Trouble With Normal in the opening minutes of the film lays the ground for its anti-heteronormative and anti-homonormative, sex-positive stance. The challenge of this strategy is focalized through Franco’s loyal friend and collaborator Val, who admits to liking and respecting but not to understanding Franco’s “mission”. And as stand-in for Cruising’s Pacino, who was also reportedly uncomfortable with that film’s shoot, Val is asked to bear the weight of evidence of homophobia’s continued presence thirty years later. Sure enough, placing straight men and their discomfort at the center of a film purportedly about gay sex is an odd choice, perhaps even an offensive one. Framing the film as a complicated example of cultural appropriation and as a “mockumentary”, one reviewer disagrees, asking, “So what do gay men get out of having their culture examined and harvested for the sake of straight men’s comfort? For one thing: Titillation”. Jumping on Franco’s sex-positive bandwagon, the review continues: “Heterosexual discomfort and compliance with gay sex seasons this movie and it’s delicious. Straightguy fantasies may betray internalized homophobia or fucked-up prejudice about gay men’s capacity for masculinity, but whatever: This isn’t a therapy session, and hot is hot”.71 The hotness of straight men’s proximity to gay sex is here implicitly recognized as an erotic charge of the epistemology of the closet, even though the possibility of this explanation is ultimately dismissed as irrelevant to the self-evidence of homoerotic desire: “but whatever”. In this sense, the film treads and trades on the “quicksands” of unknowing and disavowal of the homoerotic that Sedgwick identifies beneath the continuum of homosocial desire among heterosexual men.72 As one actor in the film puts it, “I know there’s a bunch of straight guys in the cast and I don’t know how they’re going to react to the vibrating homosexuality that’s going to be all around them.” Most especially, it is Franco’s relationship to these vibrations that creates a buzz of anticipation, as the following on-set exchange among a group of actors illustrates:

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“The gays will be excited for Franco doing a gay porno thing.” “Hopeful.” “Titillated.” “Everybody’s going to want to see him naked. But I think that there’s going to be a whole segment of our community that’s going to be angrily waving signs and writing blog posts about ‘why is this straight dude touching this?’ ” “Maybe that’s part of the point, though.” The titillation of “hot is hot” homoerotic ambiguity imagined around Franco by one actor is then balanced up against expectations of gay territorialism by another. That such critique might be “part of the point” Franco wants to make speaks both to the post-identitarian queer motivations of Interior. Leather Bar. and to the desirable symmetry of this film not just remediating Cruising but remediating the controversy it generated. Even though it is the well-meaning Val whose narrative of discomfort is at the center of the film, his manipulation into this position by queer-friendly agitator Franco firmly reminds us that the film is ultimately about Franco’s celebrity. He is the film’s multivalent, metatextual floating signifier. About ten minutes before the film ends, as Val and cast discuss the experience of the day’s shooting, Val’s narrative reaches a point of quiet redemption. “I’ve learned something”, he tells the other actors. “I don’t know what it is, but I’m definitely not the same guy I was when I came in here this morning.” Warmed by this disclosure and its positive reception, he proceeds to compliment the tenderness of the gay couple whose unsimulated sex scene the film requires he and the audience witness. It is a touching moment, and what Franco would want, but we are once again reminded that queer sex is primarily validated in this film by its relation to levels of heterosexual comfort. Meanwhile Franco, with whom Val wants to connect post-shoot and presumably share his glow of transformation, has disappeared from set, like a superhero who must attend to others in need. Much anticipated onset before shooting, the film ends with the Hollywood star’s presence now measured by its weighty absence. In their analysis of Cruising, several scholars discuss the trope of contagion as it pertains to the film’s provocative depiction of male homosexuality. Ambiguity around the ending of Cruising disallows the viewer the certainty that the undercover detective Burns (Pacino) is neither the killer nor homosexual; the final scene, read within what some see as the film’s phobic logic, implies he might now be both. For both Rob Faunce and D. A. Miller, the film presents Burns’s deep exposure to gay subculture as contagiously effectual in causing his transformation: “night-sweats lead to thinking in peculiar ways; normative, missionary-position sex with his girlfriend stops being satisfying; and, ultimately, a cat-and-mouse with the killer threatens to transform [Burns] into a killer himself”.73 Noting, like Faunce, that contagion operates in the film via looking, Miller argues that the disturbing final shot in which Burns

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gazes at his own reflection in the mirror (and at the viewer) “insists that, however far he has removed himself from the scene, he will never remove its inscription from his pupils”.74 Further, for Guy Davidson, the final scene “as potentially unsettling the viewer’s self-identification similarly relies on a model of ‘contagion,’ of an entanglement of audience and text”.75 We too are now implicated in what we have seen. Back to Interior. Leather Bar., and an equivalent contagion of exposure seems to lead to Val’s transformation. He is, after all, imitating Pacino playing Burns going undercover, and is directed by Franco to “fit in”, to “get down with what’s going on”. “But you can’t get found out”, he cryptically insists. So too Val, like Burns, cannot unwitness troubling scenes, even though Interior. Leather Bar. permits its protagonist to re-emerge from the interiority of undercover into a space of optimism and self-improvement. My argument, however, is that the film’s highly self-aware remediation of Cruising displaces the debate about the contagiousness of homosexuality which Franco and Mathews approach as outdated. Rather, by openly flaunting heteronorms of “too much information” they offer an idealization of the redundancy of the categorical difference between homosexual and heterosexual, replaced by the defiant self-evidence of “Hello, this is me”. Cruising, of course, can now scarcely be read without the uncomfortable anticipation of AIDS lurking around the corner, without the chilling sensation that a large number of the men whom the film depicts may not have survived the decade that the film ushers in. We might say AIDS is the open secret of Cruising, adding a sharp edge to readings of contagious homosexuality. D. A. Miller makes the connection plain, in a provocative claim worth quoting in full: Faced with [Cruising’s] coolly furious fantasy of gays loving/killing each other and—as we contract their homosexuality through our vulnerably wide-open eyes—turning each of us into a gay lover/killer, too, one is almost tempted to say that, if the AIDS epidemic hadn’t happened, our culture would have had to invent it, as its exorbitant defense against the spill of gay sexual radicalism. Right after Cruising, in fact, the culture would proceed to do just that: invent AIDS, “the gay disease,” Nature’s rebuke to unnatural practices, God’s way of weeding his garden, and all the rest. The film’s banal paranoia would become horribly so. We must give the protestors this credit: before AIDS, they recognized the structure of AIDS panic.76 In examining Franco and Mathews’s remediation of Cruising some thirty years after its release, we might also ask how or if the indelible history of AIDS and AIDS panic figures in their treatise on “gay sexual radicalism”. As Warner’s The Trouble With Normal is deployed in the film to remind us—more than a decade after its release—Interior. Leather Bar. intervenes into a sociopolitical context where homosexuality signifies less as homicidal contagion and more

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as opportunity for capital accumulation.77 If AIDS figures in the film at all, my hunch is that it only does so, like in Cruising, as something just beyond the frame, in a space where it is now often imagined as overcome; recloseted. Franco and Mathews’s attempt to repoliticize gay sex is therefore well timed. My concern, though, is that what most circulates throughout the film is not politics but celebrity. The viral object of James Franco moves in and out, metatextually accumulating attention to the power of his own celebrity. The open secret of his heterosexuality structures the film, providing a space in which other actors too can come out of the closet as straight and queer-friendly and demand the audience’s attention, as if in imitation of their famous director. Once again in the promiscuous and entrepreneurial labor of celebrity, we see contemporary network culture’s dependence on virality. But now having shaken off the virus whose devastating circulation provided one of its major models, virality can be avowed, owned, celebrated. After all, as Kim Kardashian continues to prove, whole careers now depend on it.

NOTES 1. Perez Hilton, “Kim Kardashian Is NOT Kanye West’s Beyonce!,” Perez Hilton, April 17, 2012, accessed June 25, 2014, http://perezhilton.com/2012-04-17kanye-west-denies-beyonce-comment-kim-kardashian#.U6xtIF4xFlI. 2. norma, comment on ibid. 3. linwoo, comment on ibid. 4. Babycakes!!!, comment on ibid. 5. Okra Panfry’s Bucket-O-Wings, comment on ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. “Cat Bin Woman” was so named in the press when she was fined for having put a cat in a bin, an act caught on CCTV and circulated worldwide. Patrick Barkham, “Cat Bin Woman Mary Bale Fined £250,” The Guardian, October 19, 2010, sec. World news, July 31, 2014, http://www.theguardian. com/world/2010/oct/19/cat-bin-woman-mary-bale. 8. perez posse member 777, comment on Hilton, “Kim Kardashian Is NOT Kanye West’s Beyonce!”. 9. At the time of writing in June 2014, Kardashian had some twenty-one million followers on Twitter and fifteen million on Instagram. 10. Theresa M. Senft, “Microcelebrity and the Branded Self,” in A Companion to New Media Dynamics, ed. John Hartley, Jean Burgess, and Axel Bruns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), 350. 11. Ibid., 5. 12. Alice Marwick and danah boyd, “To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies 17, no. 2 (2011): 141. 13. Keeping Up With the Kardashians (E! Entertainment Television, 2007). 14. Kardashian celebrated her third marriage, to Kanye West, in May 2014, two years after the “She’s my Beyoncé” moment and one year after the birth of the couple’s first child. On May 7, 2014, she took to Twitter to downplay rumors about the scale of the upcoming wedding, writing “Its VERY small and intimate”, “We are not filming our wedding for Keeping Up With the Kardashians”, and “As much as we would love to share these memories on camera,

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15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

we’ve decided to keep this close to our heart & share thru photos” “Kim Kardashian: Official Website,” Kim Kardashian: Official Website, accessed July 17, 2014, http://kimkardashian.celebuzz.com/tag/tumblr-tuesday/. “Kim Kardashian Suing Ex-Publicist Jonathan Jaxson,” Huffington Post, November 14, 2011, June 26, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/ 11/14/kim-kardashian-suing-ex-publicist-jonathan-jaxson_n_1092652.html. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Vintage, 1992). Mickey Boardman, “Kardashians Dot Kom,” Papermag, April 23, 2012, June 25, 2014, http://www.papermag.com/2012/04/kardashians_dot_kom. php. Three tweets with broken links were excluded from this total. Senft, “Microcelebrity and the Branded Self,” 346. For example, the May 22 tweet “A Beautiful Day in Paris” links to a blog entry featuring paparazzi-style photographs of Kardashian and West in the street, with copy below reading, “In Paris this week having so much fun. We’ve been going to all of our favorite spots. I’m wearing an American Apparel bathing suit, an Ermanno Scervino suede skirt, Gianvito Rossi pumps, and Saint Laurent sunglasses! Perfect beautiful sunny day in Paris!” A full 10 percent of the sample is content of this kind. Marwick and boyd, “To See and Be Seen,” 142. Ibid., 140. Nick Muntean and Anne Helen Petersen, “Celebrity Twitter: Strategies of Intrusion and Disclosure in the Age of Technoculture,” M/C Journal 12, no. 5 (2009), June 26, 2014, http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/ mcjournal/article/view/194. Ibid. Jane Feuer, “The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology,” in Regarding Television: Critical Approaches—an Anthology, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1983), 12–22; Nick Couldry, “Liveness, ‘Reality’, and the Mediated Habitus from Television to the Mobile Phone,” Communication Review 7, no. 4 (2004): 353–61. Couldry, “Liveness, ‘Reality’, and the Mediated Habitus from Television to the Mobile Phone,” 359. Marwick and boyd, “To See and Be Seen,” 143. Ibid., 144. “Kim Kardashian: Official Website.” Molly Wood, “How Facebook Is Ruining Sharing,” CNET, November 18, 2011, May 2, 2014, http://www.cnet.com/news/how-facebook-is-ruining-sharing/. Jussi Parikka, Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (New York: Peter Lang, 2007). Joshua Gamson, “Jessica Hahn, Media Whore: Sex Scandals and Female Publicity,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18, no. 2 (2001): 170. Ibid., 167. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Routledge, 2004); Roger Silverstone, Television and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 1994); David Morley, Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity (New York: Routledge, 2000); Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). For a more detailed analysis of how Kardashian constructed her public presence on a complex performance of racialized, sexualized, and class embodiment, see Alexandra Sastre, “Hottentot in the Age of Reality TV: Sexuality,

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36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59.

60.

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Race, and Kim Kardashian’s Visible Body,” Celebrity Studies 5, no. 1–2 (2014): 123–37. Angela McRobbie, “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture,” Feminist Media Studies 4, no. 3 (2004): 255. Ibid., 255–56. Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture,” in The Gender and Media Reader, ed. Mary Celeste Kearney (London: Routledge, 2011), 137. Marwick and boyd, “To See and Be Seen.” Kirsty Fairclough, “Fame Is a Losing Game: Celebrity Gossip Blogging, Bitch Culture and Postfeminism,” Genders 48 (2008): para. 17. Anna Gibbs, “Disaffected,” Continuum 16, no. 3 (2002): 338. Ibid., 339. Marwick and boyd, “To See and Be Seen,” 40. Melissa Jane Hardie, “The Closet Remediated: Inside Lindsay Lohan,” Australian Humanities Review 48 (2010): 48. Ibid. Ibid., 67. Ibid. Ariana Bacle, “James Franco Talks Instagram Scandal on ‘Live! With Kelly and Michael’: ‘I’m Embarrassed’—VIDEO,” EW.com, accessed June 18, 2014, http://popwatch.ew.com/2014/04/04/james-franco-instagram-teenager/. Hillary Busis, “Is This Crazy James Franco Story a Viral Campaign for His New Movie?,” EW.com, accessed June 18, 2014, http://popwatch.ew. com/2014/04/03/james-franco-teenage-girl-palo-alto/. Hardie, “The Closet Remediated: Inside Lindsay Lohan,” 67. Jessica Durando, “Auschwitz Selfie Girl Breanna Mitchell Defends Her Controversial Picture,” Huffington Post, July 24, 2014, accessed July 31, 2014, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/24/auschwitz-selfie-girl-breannamitchell_n_5618225.html. Esther Addley, “Ellen’s Oscars Selfie Most Retweeted Ever—and More of Us Are Taking Them,” The Guardian, March 7, 2014, sec. Media, accessed June 19, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/mar/07/oscarsselfie-most-retweeted-ever. Late Show With David Letterman (CBS, May 8, 2014). James Franco, “The Meanings of the Selfie,” The New York Times, December 26, 2013, sec. Arts, accessed June 26, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/ 12/29/arts/the-meanings-of-the-selfie.html. Ibid. Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979). Franco, “The Meanings of the Selfie.” Rebecca Rose, “James Franco Just Posted a Nude Selfie to Instagram,” Jezebel, accessed July 17, 2014, http://jezebel.com/james-franco-just-posted-anude-selfie-to-instagram-1570700455?utm_campaign%3Dsocialflow_ jezebel_facebook&utm_source%3Djezebel_facebook&utm_medium %3Dsocialflow. “James Franco Went All Mapplethorpe in Latest Revealing Selfie, Then Immediately Deleted It,” Queerty, accessed July 17, 2014, http://www. queerty.com/james-franco-went-all-mapplethorpe-in-latest-revealing-selfiethen-immediately-deleted-it-20140523. Erin Gloria Ryan, “Selfies Aren’t Empowering. They’re a Cry for Help,” Jezebel, accessed June 26, 2014, http://jezebel.com/selfies-arent-empoweringtheyre-a-cry-for-help-1468965365; Meghan Murphy, “Putting Selfies Under a Feminist Lens,” Straight.com, April 3, 2013, accessed June 26, 2014, http:// www.straight.com/life/368086/putting-selfies-under-feminist-lens.

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4

Index Case

Viral celebrity illustrates intrinsic qualities of twenty-first-century network culture, as this book defines it. Nonetheless, the phenomenon may not be so new. Two infamous twentieth-century figures provide recent historical context for how narratives of promiscuity—real or imagined—intersect with those of contagion, agency, and personal responsibility to produce an adjacent version of viral celebrity. Priscilla Wald’s fascinating history of “outbreak narratives” demonstrates how accounts of contagion work to reinforce models of social organization and attempt in part to make visible the networks of interpersonal contact through which a communicable disease spreads.1 Within these narratives, the invention of a figure most responsible for transmission helps also to flesh out the quality of contact: an individual is chosen to embody certain features identified as threats to social order. Mary Mallon, the woman dubbed “Typhoid Mary” in early twentieth-century New York, and Gaetan Dugas, the Canadian man dubbed “Patient Zero” of HIV/AIDS in the early 1980s, both perform a narrative role in their respective outbreaks to combine quantity of network circulation and particular qualities of contact. Wald points out that Typhoid Mary and Patient Zero were also celebrities of their time for reasons that speak more accurately of normative cultural values than of epidemiological truth. Both figures were famously constructed to warn of certain uncontained gender and sexual threats, either implicitly or explicitly imagined as amplifying the epidemic in question. The unique combination of quantity and quality of network connections produces both Typhoid Mary and Patient Zero as “index cases”. Following Wald, this chapter will use the term “index case” to refer to individuals singled out to measure the scale, efficiency, and perceived dangers of promiscuous network circulation. Wald argues that both of her examples “become mythic in [accounts of contagion] because of the simultaneous demonic and representative, even redemptive, but also distinctly social—one might even say, theosocial—functions that they perform”.2 They appear to tell a story that needs to be told about what circulates and how, and as characters they are drawn both to describe and to limit human responsibility within the compelling public spectacle of contagion. In both cases, of course, the responsibility

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attributed to the individual for his or her singular role in the spread of disease asymmetrically matches the lack of agency each experienced in his or her dubious achievement of celebrity. As I argued in the last chapter, contagion and celebrity operate as parallel dynamics in mass mediated dramas. Moreover, the contagious properties of celebrity can be harnessed strategically. One example is offered by Douglas Crimp in his highly critical reading of journalist Randy Shilts’s 1987 book And the Band Played On, in which Patient Zero is first publicly named and shamed. Crimp argues: Shilts’s painstaking efforts at telling the “true” story of the epidemic’s early years (. . .) resulted in two media stories: the story of the man who brought us AIDS, and the story of the man who brought us the story of the man who brought us AIDS. Gaetan Dugas and Randy Shilts became overnight media stars.3 I outlined in the last chapter how TV and Twitter star Kim Kardashian has played a proactive and entrepreneurial role in the construction of her own viral celebrity, positioning herself as a role model of promiscuous sharing subject. At the same time, the quantity and perceived quality of Kardashian’s network connections across multiple media platforms have made her the object of sometimes harsh criticism aiming to police her highly mediated performance of gender and sexuality. Actor James Franco plays with these conventions in his performance of viral celebrity. And while both are very different kinds of media product from Typhoid Mary and Patient Zero, not least because of questions of agency, there are notable consistencies between the construction and use of each figure—as index of measurable viral dynamics, be it epidemiologically or transmedially, and as dramatic characterization of normative cultural values. This chapter moves away from questions of celebrity but holds focus on two problematics central to the book: the unstable distinction between sharing subjects and viral objects; and the double movement just described, namely the co-presence of forces of liberalization and capture in the same circulating items or spaces of circulation. Like Kardashian, Typhoid Mary, and Patient Zero, and Franco to a lesser extent, the index cases examined below also build on highly gendered media narratives, intertwined with those of the “whore”, to measure, model, and ultimately to contain the multiple intimacies of contemporary network culture. The first cases are drawn from contemporary cinema. Two recent Hollywood films, Contagion (2011) and Up in the Air (2009) work within very different genres but are centrally concerned with dynamics of circulation and mobility within the dense networks of transnational communication, finance, and politics that characterize the contemporary moment.4 Despite their explicit narrative interest in the contemporaneity of these conditions, both films resurrect versions of the figure of the scheming, adulterous wife who is singled out as index case, that is a measure of both the quantity and quality of network mobility

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and connection. The promiscuity of network relations that both characters successfully perform as mobile, entrepreneurial subjects ultimately fails to shake off its associations to a punitive and gendered moral code. The second part of the chapter zooms out from Hollywood’s tight framing of global networks as best measured by the autonomous mobile intimacies of privileged Westerners. To recognize differences between kinds of mobility and kinds of labor mobilization in contemporary global networks is also to address the complexities of network politics and the different tactics and motivations for measuring network circulation. Moreover, and more simply, surely some kinds of mobility and network circulation elude measurement. What happens, then, when the Google corporation brings its increasingly sophisticated methods of data capture to the task of interrupting global networks of human trafficking? Only estimates exist of the number and pathways of trafficked individuals, and Google’s recent partnership with anti-trafficking NGOs is a clever attempt to pin down notoriously slippery practices. Important questions must be asked, though, about this project’s role in the political economy of “big data”, about the compatibility of Google’s “data-driven approach” with the informal economies of “illicit networks”, and about the framing as “cases” of individuals whose mobility and agency already tend to be discussed in overly simplified ways.5 Together, these case studies interrogate the relationship between kinds of network mobility which are subject to attempts at measurement and the means of measurement itself. In this way, they illustrate what Nancy Fraser identifies as contemporary “postfordist governmentality”: the globally expansive social ordering practices which shift away from disciplinary regulation of subjects and towards the “marketized ordering mechanisms” that are consistent with a neoliberal, transnational political economy.6 In the post-Foucauldian model Fraser proposes, “the new subject of governmentality is the actively responsible agent”: “subject of (market) choice and a consumer of services”, “obligated to enhance her quality of life through her own decisions” and “responsible for managing her own human capital to maximal effect”.7 The neoliberal governmental agenda described here shares with new models of virality a positive view of the freedom of mobility, and Fraser identifies the dynamics of network formations and “flexibilization” as two privileged modalities of such circulation. As the case studies will all show, however, flexible network circulation must also face up to often aggressively restrictive measures of discursive containment, including on the part of what Elizabeth Bernstein calls “carceral feminism”.8 Ambiguous versions of promiscuity once again provide this double service. INDEX PATIENT Steven Soderbergh’s film Contagion (2011) is primarily concerned with the rapid spread of an unknown deadly human virus, attempts to identify and

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vaccinate against it, and the social and political fallout which results from this epidemic. Equally, the film is about the global infrastructures through which communication circulates contagiously. In his discussion of the film, Jayson Harsin writes that technology itself is a character in Soderbergh’s vision of contemporary global networks, and that it plays a central role both in the detection and containment of the virus and in the “communication catastrophe” which shadows the virus’s frightening spread.9 When investigation of the virus begins, one anxious local health official remarks, “We can’t even tell people right now what they should be afraid of. We tried that with swine flu and all we did was get healthy people scared.” Her warning provides early confirmation that the film’s title will refer to social and communicational as much as biological forces. Moreover, in its deployment of generic conventions of the thriller and of dramatic realism, the film surely contributes to an affective contagion among viewers. My own mild hygiene paranoia travelling on public transport immediately after leaving the cinema attests to this claim. It could be argued that the virus merely acts as a vector for the film’s real interest in the social and political circuitry of contemporary global realities. Soderbergh wants to show us how humans react and communicate in times of major crisis, and the reactions range from selfless heroism to desperate barbarism. Neither end of this spectrum is depicted as more or less characteristic of humanity; if anything links all characters, it is moral and ethical complexity, even ambiguity. As Harsin continues, “what is just and right in the film seems to be situational, not clearly in favor of following or rebelling”. One character, though, stands apart from all others for her structural role at the center of the film’s primary narrative, in which the deadly virus is investigated and its origins identified. Beth Emhoff (played by Gwyneth Paltrow) is the first character we see, although the virus itself could be described as the first character we hear in the form of her cough. Opening the film with symptoms of her illness, Soderbergh positions her as the audience’s “index patient”. This is a category she will fully occupy by the end of the film when medical investigators also identify her as the first in the epidemic to fall ill and transmit the virus to others before dying. Beth Emhoff is also the character who transports the virus from China— eventually identified as its place of origin—to the United States where the film locates the majority of its personal, political, and medical drama. Beth is a corporate executive who travels frequently for work, and we first encounter her in an airport lounge in Chicago where she is waiting for a connecting flight home. The fact of her mobility makes her a useful figure for what the film is saying about viral circulation in global networks, and she is a convenient device for the virus’s first major geographical movement. But more telling of the film’s implicit framing of virality is the connection it makes between Beth’s ease of mobility as a transnational business subject and the multiple intimacies that constitute this subject position. Notably, we learn that Beth spent her layover in Chicago having sex with a man who is not her

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husband. While the film stops short of attributing explicit blame for the epidemic to an extramarital affair, it does return to discussion of this behavior several times and leaves the audience to ask questions about Beth’s responsibility in a number of ways. In one excruciating and subtly played scene shortly after Beth’s death, her widower Mitch (Matt Damon) is interviewed by medical investigator Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet). When Dr. Mears asks whether Beth might have seen anyone in particular during the several hours of her Chicago layover, Mitch must face the truth of the affair he already suspects between his wife and her former boyfriend in that city (“Did we get this from him?”), an affair that Dr. Mears has already discretely detected. The “we” of Mitch’s accusatory question remains unattributed and slips between him and his family and the wider (white middle-class heterosexual) American society that the film comes to require him and his surviving daughter to represent and defend. Beth Emhoff’s character is a standard emblem of how US corporate culture is naturalized at the center of global financial and communicational networks. Her mastery of “mobile intimacy” gives evidence of this world view: she makes an effortless display of the kind of cosmopolitan, neoliberal, affective labor of networking which smooths the way for the global expansion of the company she works for and the success of her own career.10 Even though Beth occupies very little screen-time in Contagion, much of it attests to her ease of movement through overlapping networks and to the privileges associated with this mobility. The film emphasizes the after-hours components of her business trip to Hong Kong and Macau, showing her friendly intimacy with local colleagues over cocktails and gambling in a high-end casino and over dinner, where a sequence of happy photographs is taken. In one photograph she poses with the restaurant’s head chef who, in a clear indication of Beth’s clout, does not hesitate to accept her request to step out of the kitchen for the snap-shot encounter. Back at head office in Minnesota, immediately after Beth’s death, her colleagues testify to Dr. Mears about moments of ordinary workplace intimacy shared with Beth. Listing examples of daily contact, such as taking a Pilates class together, the colleagues are now concerned for their own health. Social activities within the professional context occupy the ambiguous space of “presence bleed”, as Melissa Gregg names the collapse of clear personal and professional identity boundaries within contemporary white-collar work cultures.11 The ability to perform various kinds of emotional labor summarized by the term “networking”—in and out of the workplace—should not be seen as separate from more traditional work practices, Gregg writes, or as activity that leads to greater job security. In the current climate, networking activity “is itself the job”.12 In Beth’s case, the ambiguity around the scheduling of work commitments seems to allow the opportunity to organize a longer layover in Chicago at the last minute. Making the surreptitious phone call to her lover between cocktails at the Macau casino, Beth displays an assured and only partly self-conscious calculation of opportunity in the face

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of risk and the possible surveillance of her colleagues. Part of what the film is asking us to consider, then, is whether the valorized modes of intimacy Beth displays as part of her corporate networking subjectivity are separable from the dangers of contagious contact which will come to amplify the epidemic. The narrative choice of Beth’s infidelity adds the discourse of adultery as a familiar moral layer to the film’s treatment of viral outbreak and containment, and the transgression is both brutally punished and held as exemplary. In simple terms, adultery as well as contagion must be contained. Contagion is a clear example of Wald’s “outbreak narrative”. She identifies a “formulaic plot” structuring a range of journalistic and fictional accounts of contagion that “begins with the identification of an emerging infection, includes discussion of the global networks throughout which it travels, and chronicles the epidemiological work that ends with its containment”.13 Furthermore, Wald continues, outbreak narratives “promote or mitigate the stigmatizing of individuals, groups, populations, locales (regional and global), behaviors, and lifestyles”.14 Contagion reiterates this formula in a number of ways. These include a chronological narrative structure that depicts the day-by-day spread and investigation of the virus; the display of scientific technology and statistical information to add documentary authority to the narrative’s relentless teleology; and an ambiguous representation of China as a hyper-modern hub of global economics partly dependent on questionable pre-modern cultures and practices. Having begun immediately after Beth Emhoff’s lethal adultery, the film ends with a flashback montage sequence which summarizes the path of the virus from animal to animal, animal to human, then human to human. At this point Beth is confirmed as “index patient”, providing clarity and closure to the outbreak narrative.

Figure 4.1

Contagion (2011). “Index patient”.

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Writing about the earliest media accounts of the SARS epidemic in 2003, Wald writes that those individuals first identified as “carriers” of the virus were subject to the “epidemiological precedent of an ‘index case’ responsible for subsequent outbreaks”, and that this transformed them “from victims to agents—and embodiments—of the spreading infection”. The narrative requirement of the “index case” means that the “unwitting role in the spread of the new virus turned these unfortunate sufferers into stock characters of a familiar tale”.15 Wald’s thorough historical research traces this tale back to the case of Mary Mallon, a cook identified in early twentiethcentury New York as a healthy human carrier of typhoid and thereafter dubbed Typhoid Mary in popular culture and some medical literature of the time. This characterization, Wald demonstrates, was essential to the development not just of the outbreak narrative but of epidemiology as a discourse with social and medical authority: The healthy human being turned pathogen called attention to the bodily interconnectedness of people living in and moving through the shared spaces of cities and of the nation. The story of Typhoid Mary helped to fashion the experience of those spaces, showing how the realization of those connections required new models of being in the world. It offered a medical basis for emergent ideas of social and political belonging, including a renovated sense of social responsibility in a time of growing individualism.16 Wald’s work enumerates the multiple functions of the index case of an epidemic. As the example of Mary Mallon was used to show, an index case indicates an outbreak in the simplest sense. But the development of an outbreak narrative around this individual, such as the transformation of Mary Mallon into Typhoid Mary, indexes a complex formation of adjacent discourses. Wald analyzes how investigation of Mallon’s personal life snowballed into a fictional account permeated with “hints of venereal disease”, for instance, registering anxieties about contemporary social transformations related to family, gender, industrialization, and urbanization.17 The typhoid epidemic put new pressures on how these structures were being understood and experienced, and the narrative of Typhoid Mary helped to alleviate concern by placing responsibility on an individual of questionable moral stature. Wald cites at length the narrative pieced together by one US Army engineer, George Soper, whom she characterizes as Mallon’s dogged nemesis, and who “implicitly coded her disease as a result of her illicit behavior”.18 Soper’s account combines an imagined sexual promiscuity (a version of “the fallenwoman narrative”) with the epidemiological category of the healthy human carrier. The asymptomatic mobility of this figure adds to the mix the dangers of spatial promiscuity: “Because typhoid was the result of unknowing bodily contact, all spaces become ambiguous: almost sexual, but not quite, something new and unfamiliar”.19

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In these ways, the index case is as much ideological as epidemiological construction. It is an index of how dominant cultural values are used to explain, measure, and contain the crisis of contagion. In the film Contagion, Beth Emhoff is declared “index patient” despite how many other early fatalities of the epidemic are shown in the film’s opening sequences in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and London. More than these victims, Beth functions as a hub of global financial and professional networks and as narrative device to justify the film’s American-centered perspective on the global. While the virus metonymizes the film’s broader interest in the complex dynamics of global circuits of communication, the film nonetheless simplifies these dynamics as circulating around the United States, which is positioned here as narrative as well as epidemiological center. In short, Beth Emhoff is the film’s best choice of index patient because she brings the virus to the United States where its impact is narratively more significant than in any other location. Her non-monogamy, though, singles her out from other unknowing carriers to confirm the contagious proximity of discourses of sexual and spatial promiscuity. This designation is strikingly similar to how Wald critically reviews the epidemiological investigation and identification of HIV’s “Patient Zero”, the twentieth-century’s other most famous “index case”. An article in the American Journal of Medicine in 1984 reported on a study which attempted to draw links of sexual contact between the forty cases of AIDS in an identified cluster. By illustrating this network in a diagram published alongside the findings, the authors claimed the ability to single out one case connected to more than any of the others, that is a “hub” of connectivity, and that this measurement corresponded to other results of the study which constructed a chronology of infection.20 The authors named this hub case “Patient 0”, believing him most responsible for initiating the sequence of sexually transmitted infection that moved through the cluster. In questioning the logics of this study, Wald casts significant doubt upon its results—and ultimately on the firm designation of Patient 0, who would later become Patient Zero and be named as Canadian flight attendant Gaetan Dugas. Wald argues that uncertainties around the number of sexual partners of each “case” in the study’s cluster, combined with the difficulty of determining causality between sexual contact and the onset of AIDS symptoms, makes it “impossible to pinpoint an exact source even for most of the cases recorded on the chart”.21 Patient 0, she concludes, is only distinguished by geographical location: While every other AIDS case in the diagram is marked by city or state, he is just “0”, the absence of place: the non-Californian. The designation prepares him to become the viral incarnation coming in from somewhere else and initiating an outbreak in the United States.22 The patient’s profession and reported sexual promiscuity are then drawn on as convenient narrative devices to bolster claims for the accuracy of this

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epidemiological detective work. Both attributes emphasize kinds of network mobility—one geographical, the other sexual; mapped on to each other, they appear to confirm a unique convergence of dangerous intimacies. The dangerous intimacies display a racialized edge when combined with the fertile imaginary possibilities of “somewhere else” from where the virus is believed to come. Notably, as several authors point out, a number of journalistic and medical accounts in the early years of HIV/AIDS turned to Africa as the epidemic’s place of likely origin, freely deploying familiar tropes of under-development and primitivism.23 In fact, Wald suggests that the “Third World” image works so efficiently in this context that narrative accounts of Patient Zero, especially Shilts’s infamous version, need not prove any direct sexual or other physical connection to Africa or Africans on the part of Gaetan Dugas for him to “become [agent] of Africanization” in his dangerous mobility in and out of the United States.24 Rather, “[the] continent enters his body through the virus, which in turn crosses boundaries through his body”.25 Possibly taking its cue from the believed “origins” of the SARS epidemic in 2003, Contagion updates the “somewhere else” of external viral threat to China. Some evidence certainly points towards the film’s antagonistic characterization of China as the United States’ pre-modern Other. In the end, for instance, the chain of early transmissions that amplify the epidemic more or less comes down to poor Chinese hygiene practices. After moving from bird to pig to human in a number of unregulated rural spaces, the first human-to-human transmission occurs in the Macau restaurant where Beth Emhoff dines. When the head chef poses for a photograph with Beth and shakes both of her hands, he has failed to properly wash his hands after preparing the contaminated pig in the kitchen. The camera work and editing of this sequence construct a retrospective verification of these investigative clues, illustrating for the viewer an earlier scientific discussion of transmission via fomites. Chinese carelessness is established as a documented truth behind the global epidemic. It is also true, however, that the film internally addresses the inequities of global geopolitics which its own framing of China risks perpetuating. Local medical investigators in Hong Kong, working under the supervision of the World Health Organization’s envoy (a European woman, Dr. Leonora Orantes, played by Marion Cotillard), voice their suspicions about anti-Chinese prejudices on the part of the Euro-American alliance heading up the investigation. Once a vaccine has been developed, they take matters into their own hands. They hold Dr. Orantes ransom, until the vaccine is delivered to them, in order to circumvent what they imagine will be a deprioritizing of the vaccine’s distribution to China. The choice to script Contagion’s “index patient” as a non-monogamous spouse therefore serves two major purposes: one moral and ideological, the other structural. First, in line with the formulaic conventions of the outbreak narrative, Beth Emhoff’s adultery allows easy associations between kinds of responsibility. Epidemiologically, she is held responsible for the

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outbreak, even if she is unaware of her own contagiousness and could not have acted consciously to prevent the spread of the virus. She does spread the virus, however, through a range of forms of intimate contact including adultery. Here the film permits itself a gently moralizing set of responses, ranging from a more brutal visual treatment of Beth’s demise than most victims, to emphasis on the impact of her actions on other characters. Dr. Mears, for instance, singles out her disclosure of Beth’s adultery to Mitch Emhoff as the immediate reason for the emotional toll of her job. “Did you ever have to tell a man who just lost his wife and stepson,” she asks her boss, “that his wife was cheating on him before she died?” When she too succumbs to the deadly virus, Dr. Mears is confirmed as the stoic martyr drawn against Beth Emhoff’s irresponsible jet-setter. Furthermore, for the surviving members of her family, Beth’s adultery continues to shadow their attempts to move on. Husband Mitch quarantines his daughter Jory in the family house, where the contagion and desperate violence outside won’t reach them, but this is played out as the conventional drama of a father’s control of his teenage daughter’s sexuality and is focused on the banishment of Jory’s boyfriend. A funeral home refuses to handle Beth’s and her son’s bodies, preventing them from being laid to rest in the family plot. The funeral workers are understandably concerned about the still-unidentified contagion, but the scene plays subtly on discrimination narratives in order to hint at the possibility of moral objections to the dead woman. Indeed after Mitch explains the refusal to Beth’s mother in the funeral home’s lounge, the open secret of Beth’s adultery resurfaces. “She made mistakes, Mitch,” concedes Beth’s mother, “but I know she loved you very much.” Even the grieving mother’s consolation fails to separate kinds of responsibility. Finally, though, by the film’s penultimate sequence

Figure 4.2

Contagion (2011). Beth’s punishing postmortem.

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post-vaccine, our everyman-hero Mitch restores heteronormative propriety by arranging a safe version of prom night in the family home for Jory, who may now be reunited with her boyfriend, Andrew. In a pink evening gown Mitch has bought for her as a surprise, Jory welcomes Andrew once again into the home where Mitch proudly watches them slow-dance to U2’s anthem of monogamous devotion, “All I Want Is You”. Andrew’s return to the fold from the symbolic space of multiple potential threats is signaled as he arrives at the front door displaying his vaccination wrist-band. He is now allowed to cross this threshold unpolluted, and the audience interpellates Andrew on behalf of Mitch’s heteropatriarchal authority as no longer associated with the contagion for which Jory’s adulterous step-mother has been deemed responsible. The film restores the possibility of hope and social order via the reproduction of white heterosexual monogamy. The ideological function of Contagion’s adultery narrative sits a little uneasily with the second purpose of Beth’s identification as index patient: to draw attention to continuities across multiple relations of intimacy inherent in contemporary network culture. As Wald describes it, the identification of an index patient is above all a surveillance measure, the result of forms of tracking and mapping of network relations. The index case is diagrammatically indexical of the networks through which it moves and which move through it. If we strip away the moralizing layer of meaning added by the discourse of adultery, we could further argue that the film presents the multiple intimacies of various non-monogamous relations as indexical of global network culture. Larissa Hjorth and Sun Sun Lim’s term “mobile intimacy” is helpful here, “a probe for understanding the tensions around salient and transitory modes of intimacy”.26 Recognizing that mobility and

Figure 4.3

Contagion (2011). Heteronormativity restored.

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intimacy distinguish current networked media practices, Hjorth and Lim are interested in how the two modalities converge to produce “multiple cartographies of space in which the geographic and physical space is overlaid with an electronic position and relational presence, which is emotional and social”.27 Use of intimate mobile media devices most clearly illustrates this dynamic, but so do the transformed emotional and social relations that are facilitated by network mobility of various kinds. These include flexible work spaces and schedules and other practices supportive of the late capitalist discourse of efficiency. While Contagion deploys images of mobile intimacy as a kind of fear strategy, another major Hollywood studio film from recent years offers a lighter but more explicit connection between the mobile intimacies of frequent business travel, workplace efficiency, and casual sex. Turning to this film, we find a similar imperative to contain non-monogamy in safe spaces of gender normativity while the film flirts with non-monogamy at the level of sexual and economic fantasy. “JUST THINK OF ME AS YOURSELF, ONLY WITH A VAGINA” Comically depicting the non-stop air-travel business lifestyle of Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a professional job terminator, Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air (2009) stages a debate between two camps of characters around the relative values of commitment and loyalty versus flight and non-monogamy. As the main protagonist of the film’s non-monogamy camp, Ryan is unwilling to settle for a real home let alone a stable relationship or marriage. He introduces himself at the start of the film by emphasizing the efficiency and empty arm’s-length intimacies which characterize his “pleasantly rootless existence as a citizen of the air”.28 As we watch Ryan flying continuously around the United States to exploit the precarities of economic recession for his own professional benefit, his voice-overs and job termination spiels extol the virtues of letting go. Embodied by the slick-suited and honey-voiced presence of George Clooney, circulation, frictionlessness, and casual sex become desirable functions of each other—at least until the film makes a sentimental turn to loyalty in its final act. Heading up the film’s commitment camp is Ryan’s idealistic new colleague, recent business graduate Natalie (Anna Kendrick), who is astonished and offended that Ryan adamantly rejects marriage on principle. Natalie’s resolve starts to shift when the boyfriend she has favored over higher career prospects breaks up with her via text message: “I THINK IT’S TIME WE C OTHER PEOPLE”. Ironically, Natalie is joined in the commitment camp by the scores of office workers whom she and Ryan are employed to fire throughout the film. As Gregg discusses, Up in the Air offers a light critique of the contemporary white-collar workplace’s exploitation of loyalty, the now-in-question “pact between emotional and temporal investment”

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that demands “workers be rewarded for their devotion and monogamy”.29 Burned by the emotional impact of being rejected and by the effects of rejection that she has inflicted upon strangers across the country, Natalie has drunken casual sex and ends up quitting her job. Natalie’s female foil in Ryan’s camp is sexy stranger Alex (Vera Farmiga), with whom Ryan schedules hotel hook-ups between their respective crosscountry business flights. Alex is Ryan’s female match, and their embodiment of the frequent-flyer/non-monogamy complex is best illustrated by the competitive foreplay of their first conversation in a hotel bar. First tossing around multiple loyalty program cards like mementos of former lovers, they move on to sparring with stories of in-flight bathroom sex with unnamed partners. Alex wins. Throughout these scenes—and they are beautifully handled and seductively performed—the film’s humor and erotic charge lie in the self-conscious mockery of monogamy in professional and sexual contexts. Loyalty is passé; commitment is inefficient. But when the film’s moral tone veers towards the values of stability, when Ryan not only falls for Alex but also inadvertently finds himself as an informal pre-marriage counselor to his new brother-in-law, it is Alex whom the narrative treats somewhat problematically. In order for Ryan to learn the film’s loyalty lesson, he too must be burned. Alex turns out to be married with children, and what was her thrilling complicity in a lifestyle of breezy non-monogamy switches over into chilly and calculated adultery. With this move, Alex must now occupy for the audience a version of the more familiar and thankless role of temptress who breaks our hero’s heart. Ryan and Alex function as “index cases” of Up in the Air’s mapping of mobile intimacy. In this regard, they circulate analogously to Beth in Contagion. They are the film’s measure of the overlapping cartographies of contemporary network relations. Ryan’s singularity is measured in frequent flyer points, and by the end of the film he achieves his personal goal of accumulating ten million miles of points travel. Despite Ryan and Alex’s initial equivalence, however, the discourses they index gradually diverge. Indeed the film’s erotic tension first depends on the narrative suspension or disavowal of the necessity of sexual difference, reframed as narcissism. “I am the woman that you don’t have to worry about,” Alex reassures Ryan, erasing anxieties of heterosexist romantic protocols from the picture. “Just think of me as yourself, only with a vagina.” This is gender-frictionless mobile intimacy, the twenty-first-century “zipperless fuck”.30 Alex’s throwaway statements merit unpacking with a view to the gender politics of network circulation. The narcissism of Alex and Ryan’s competitiveness as rivals in corporate and sexual non-monogamy is, partly, the staging of a mutually rewarding post-feminist fantasy, one in which an obsolete feminism need not get in the way of the pleasure of both parties. If Alex is the woman Ryan doesn’t have to worry about, it is only because there are or used to be women that he does have to worry about. Alex’s recognition of her own difference from those women is also to distance herself from a

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need to question the centrality of a gender-normative structure of male desire within the heterosexual encounter. Her desire is his desire (“Just think of me as yourself”), or at least it will freely adapt to his. As an assertion of the importance of her own sexuality, however, her statement performs a onestep-forward, two-steps-back dance of post-feminist assimilation. While Alex asserts a claim for the centrality of female desire, she then frames this desire only in relation to the priority of its male counterpart, while also aggressively pitching herself against other women whom this arrangement might offend. And ultimately, of course, the film punishes her for all three manoeuvers by guiding viewer sympathy firmly towards the newly vulnerable Ryan. As Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker put it, somewhat wryly, Ryan’s “impulsive desire for a romantic connection with [Alex] results in a shock discovery that she has a life and a family of her own, and that she exists beyond their hotel liaisons”.31 In this light, for Ryan to think of Alex as himself “only with a vagina” is partly an invitation to imagine their coupling as polymorphously queer, and partly a foreshadowing of his castration by a conventional femme fatale in post-feminist disguise. His over-identification with her vagina—or with the female masculinity that her statement inadvertently projects on to him—ends up also punishing him for her failure to conform to monogamous, domestic femininity. Unexpectedly succumbing to the pull of heteronormative romance, it is not ultimately a vulnerable woman Ryan has to “worry about”; it is himself and his own latent inklings towards dyadic commitment. If Alex and Beth represent one vision of the gendering of mobile intimacies that measure global network culture, in which they are both successful and punishable, it is also worth exploring what or whom their representation occludes. Elaine Swan coins the term “transnational corporate femininity” to name a new version of middle-class white femininity. Its features include “globetrotting”, a self-conscious disciplining of the body interlocking with glamorous lifestyle and high occupational status, and a distance from domestic commitments.32 Of primary interest to Swan is the structural dependence of this subject position on the “dirty work” of non-corporate labor, performed by others positioned within “the domestic service class” whose dual gendering and racializing functions bolster transnational corporate femininity’s association to whiteness and cleanliness.33 Swan’s theory rings true in Contagion and Up in the Air in that Beth and Alex are depicted without any reference to the domestic labor of others which surely shadows their geographical, professional, and sexual mobility. Seemingly untroubled by the restrictive responsibilities of “dirty work”, both women embody a liberal feminist version of transnational business subjectivity, whereas their individualism and sexual autonomy render them accountable to post-feminist “scrutiny and hostile surveillance”—notably on the part of the logic of the films themselves.34 Swan’s work borrows explicitly from R. W. Connell’s definition of “transnational business masculinity”. The hegemonic construction of this subject position, Connell argues, “embodies, organizes, and legitimates men’s domination in the world gender order as a whole”.35 A number of important critiques have

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been made of Connell’s influential concept of “hegemonic masculinity” and its extension into “transnational business masculinity”. One worth mentioning here is Christine Beasley’s. For Connell, Beasley reminds us, hegemonic masculinity functions symbolically as a cultural ideal and a legitimating strategy rather than to empirically describe the gender identity of actual males. Beasley notes how “the political legitimating meaning of hegemonic masculinity in the global arena quickly slides in Connell’s analysis toward its meaning as the ‘dominant’ masculinity and how an actual group of businessmen ‘embodies’ this dominant positioning”.36 Taking up Beasley’s critique, we might ask what else occupies this space between actual dominant males and the ideals and strategies that circulate to reinforce a hegemonic gender structure. Might some women legitimize or performatively embody dominant masculinity and contribute to what Connell sees as its global ascendancy? Swan’s transnational corporate femininity is not reducible to a simple female counterpart to Connell’s earlier concept, but it does invite us to question these feminine subjects’ complicity in “holding up transnational corporate masculinity”.37 The ambiguity of Alex’s gender self-positioning in Up in the Air (“Just think of me as yourself, only with a vagina”) illustrates one point of intersection between Swan’s and Connell’s concepts and the ease with which a corporate version of liberal feminism might be folded into hegemonic structures of masculine dominance and neoliberalism transnationally.38 The race- and class-inflected strategies of feminine success deployed by Alex, Beth, and the women they represent necessarily construct failing subjects, as Swan concludes. By drawing attention to “feminism’s unfinished business” in this way, Swan gestures towards the presence of gendered hierarchies of mobile subjects within the global organization of labor and the intimacies it depends upon.39 In this sense, the “presence bleed” of mobile intimacies that both exploits and measures the professional success of transnational corporate subjects could in turn produce minoritizing versions of itself among less autonomously mobile workers of different kinds. The “dirty work” of human trafficking and trafficked humans, and their relation to the corporatized network structures of “big data”, provide the focus for the final section of this chapter. In this context, ideas of network mobility, so far seen to be evaluated in a competitive language of professional and gender success, also access a discourse of human rights which aims to measure and combat the denial of voluntary mobility. “A DATA-DRIVEN APPROACH TO COMBATTING HUMAN TRAFFICKING” In April 2013 the Google corporation offered a $3 million Global Impact Award to three non-profit organizations that work against human trafficking. The announcement came some months after a Google Ideas summit in 2012 at which various interest groups, experts, and industry professionals met to discuss ways of “mapping, disrupting and exposing illicit networks”. The corporation further announced that with this award its “total commitment

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to anti-trafficking efforts” had reached $14.5 million. Joining forces with Polaris Project, Liberty Asia, and La Strada International, Google’s aim was to connect “local, national, and regional anti-trafficking helplines across the globe” in a “data-driven network” in order to “disrupt the web of human trafficking”. The resulting Global Human Trafficking Hotline Network (GHTHN) would “enhance the participating organizations’ ability to better share, analyze and act upon their data in real time”.40 The GHTHN was the latest in Google Ideas’ stable of technology-based global initiatives which are designed to “confront threats in the face of conflict, instability or repression”.41 Other current initiatives include the Small Arms and Ammunition Data Visualization; the Network Against Violent Extremism; and Constitute, exploring how technology can support constitutional design. The GHTHN’s stated imperatives of sharing, analyzing, and acting upon data in real time speak to Google’s understanding of its own central role in global network formation. In his introduction to the initiative launch, Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas, further emphasized the potential role of mobile technologies in building density and efficiency in anti-trafficking networks: In the nine months since the [summer 2012 Google] summit took place, half a billion mobile phones have been activated around the world, many of which are in parts of the world where trafficking is most prevalent. We have to ensure that this new connectivity makes a huge difference. More connectivity, more people online, more people with mobile devices gives people who are victimized by these networks more options and more avenues through which they can reach out for help.42 Combined here are forces of proliferation and consolidation. By facilitating a more comprehensive connection of existing anti-trafficking networks with each other and with an expanding infrastructure of everyday mobile technology, Google aims to compete with the functioning of illicit networks. A language of combat and adversary is adopted. Google and partners are “fighting” the problem with technology, and individuals at risk are “victimized” by illicit networks. At the same time, Google’s assemblage of networks will provide “more options and more avenues” for individuals to “reach out for help”, that is to enable them to help themselves through such infrastructure. Technology figures as a tool for self-empowerment and agency within a framework of liberalization. Similar polarizing language is used by Jacquelline Fuller, Director of Google Giving, in her presentation at the GHTHN launch, again focusing on technology as agent: Here’s the thing about bringing technology to this problem. The opposition already is using technology. The traffickers are very savvy about how they’re using communications, how they’re moving porously across borders, and our response needs to ramp up to that.43

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In simple terms, Google and partners aim to fight networks with networks, recognizing an equivalency of communicational and organizational methods on both sides of the present conflict. In this way, both Cohen’s and Fuller’s formulation of oppositional network structures recalls Arquilla and Ronfeldt’s concept of “netwar” which aims to describe how global conflicts in the information age involve “numerous dispersed small groups using the latest communications technologies” and act “conjointly across great distances” to organize and strategize coordinated efforts. These strategies are shared by groups, whether networks of terrorists, criminals, or “radical activists”.44 Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker call this “the new network-network symmetry” of contemporary political dynamics, and I will come back to the question of network politics later in this chapter.45 Curiously, Fuller adds another layer of meaning to the kind of conflict being staged. She first attributes to “the opposition” an elusive mobility and intelligence which demand smarter responses, because traffickers move “porously” and are “very savvy”. She then draws on a discourse of epidemiology, and explains that inspiration for the anti-trafficking project emerged while she was working in India to prevent HIV infection: In the same way in fighting the [HIV] epidemic, we had to figure out: How do we identify who’s vulnerable? How do we analyze the pathways of transmission? And then how do we figure out how the bad guys are mutating and get one step ahead of them? The same way with the HIV epidemic, the same thing in this world of trafficking.46 Initially characterized as elusive and intelligent, traffickers are now simplified as “the bad guys”. By natural implication, Google, its partners, and her audience in general are invited to recognize themselves as “the good guys” joining forces to fight for the “vulnerable”. Moreover, the agency of traffickers is put in question by Fuller’s dramatization of how they circulate in networks virologically. Human traffic moves like an epidemic of transmission, and traffickers themselves mutate along these pathways. HIV, the referent of this comparison, now also accrues agency as an equivalent “bad guy” of whom to “get one step ahead”. The gender implications of identifying and fighting “the bad guys” become clearer in Fuller’s very personal and sincere description of the “vulnerable”, around whom her health advocacy work in India was most focused. She refers to two levels of sex workers whom she encountered in places of high HIV transmission, and she attributes to one group of more “empowered” female sex workers the ability to “control the terms of the transaction” and thus protect themselves. To another group, “a vast network of trafficked women, girls, sometimes boys” who were beaten and coerced into sex work, she attributes “a complete lack of power” and much greater risk of HIV transmission. Crucially, though, a comparison between her own

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ten-year-old daughter and girls of the same age in this second group “who looked a lot like her” allows vulnerability and risk to be most precisely identified. The “bad guys”, represented by traffickers and HIV, are necessarily opposed to the vulnerable and put them at risk, and the vulnerable are best represented by ten-year-old girls. Left aside is any real need to interrogate the conditions and circumstances of either position in these asymmetrical and binary relations. In Fuller’s account, pathways of HIV transmission provide a model for the network mobility of other kinds of agents, namely human traffickers. The comparison freely invites an easy understanding of harmful impact upon vulnerable bodies. Moreover, by association to various forms of violence and coercion which are said to characterize sex trafficking, HIV transmission itself is figured as violent. As previously discussed in this book, popular discourses around HIV/AIDS have long accessed simplified accounts of harm and vulnerability. One clear example that framed my own early response to HIV/AIDS is the infamous “Grim Reaper” AIDS awareness campaign on Australian television in the 1980s, in which the sickle-wielding horrormovie specter of death arbitrarily bowls over “ordinary” citizens lined up like pins in a bowling alley. The camera pays special attention to a young mother holding her infant and to a crying girl of about ten years old, while a dramatic voice-over identifies these victims as representatives of the “us” who are to be distinguished from “gays and IV drug-users” and who have been implicitly placed at risk by this group: At first, only gays and IV drug-users were being killed by AIDS. But now we know every one of us could be devastated by it. The fact is over fifty-thousand men, women and children now carry the AIDS virus, that in three years nearly two thousand of us will be dead, that if not stopped it could kill more Australians than World War II. But AIDS can be stopped and you can help stop it.47 In defense of the vulnerable, a form of collective combat is evoked and mapped on to the wider project of how the nation is defined by policing sociocultural borders and moral hygiene.48 Motivated by these ideological characterizations, the campaign is a key example from a history of mass media images in which HIV-related subject positions are categorized as harmful or vulnerable with attached moral positions of guilt or innocence.49 Roger N. Lancaster’s discussion of sex panics, including AIDS panic, helps to give context to how fear circulates and amplifies around various forms of sexual predation. Because the sexual predator is “a cultural figure whose meaning is readily transferred” to other figures and situations related and unrelated to sex, Lancaster identifies how the logic of sex panics is “essentially promiscuous” in its ability to disseminate throughout the body

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politic.50 The widespread cultural phenomenon of stories propagating sex panic provides an infinitely malleable template for the production of recurring narratives about victimization and innocence, the invention of new identities around these terms, and the manufacture of an inexhaustible need for ever more discerning modes of surveillance, supervision, and protection.51 One central narrative component that links AIDS panic with Jacquelline Fuller’s virological account of sex trafficking is the figure of the child as embodiment of innocence and vulnerability. The potency of this figure is such that it signifies and provokes panic even in situations where no actual children are present or no actual harm to children is inflicted.52 Lauren Berlant notes in particular the function of the little girl as “condensation of many (infantile) citizenship fantasies”.53 Because accounts of sexual predation explicitly and implicitly invoke child victims and also operate as “a metaphor for other conditions of injury” beyond the sexual, the template of sex panic may activate fear-based responses to any number of social and political situations in which real or imagined victims can be identified and attributed child-like vulnerability.54 Forms of surveillance can then be called for or retrospectively justified in the name of protection from real or imagined agents of harm. For the Australian government agency responsible for the Grim Reaper campaign in 1987, “gays and IV drug users” deserve special attention for inflicting AIDS on the nation, and internalized fear and compulsory monogamy are proposed as kinds of self-surveillance. As the authoritarian voice-over gravely intones at the end, “If you have sex, have just one safe partner. Or always use condoms. Always!”55 It is worth remembering that some of the victims of violence and coercion at the center of Fuller’s account of sex trafficking are children. But by singling out children from among “the vulnerable”—specifically girls of around her own daughter’s age—Fuller risks infusing with additional phobic force a range of activities that are not necessarily related to children, including consensual sex work, various kinds of informal migration undertaken by adults trafficked or otherwise, and the transmission of HIV in any circumstances. And even though children may often be indirectly affected by such circumstances because they are marginally related to the activity in question, as can be the case for children of sex workers or trafficked adults, to shape discussion primarily around the figure of the child victim may shift necessary attention away from those directly affected and to limit their possibilities of agency. Imagining adults to be child-like traps them in a discursive framework of vulnerability. A number of authors have outlined exactly this movement in how some organizations represent the dynamics of human trafficking and other kinds of informal migration, particularly those involving forced or commercial

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sex. Laura María Agustín argues that the full range of people working as “social agents” against such human trade constitute a “rescue industry” because they “consistently deny the agency of large numbers of workingclass migrants” who may find themselves involved in the sex industry for various reasons. “The journeys of women who work [in this sector],” for instance, “are treated as involuntary in a victimizing discourse known as ‘trafficking’, while the experiences of men and transgenders who sell sex are ignored”.56 As Agustín’s term “social agent” implies, the agency of industry workers—agency to choose, to work, to be mobile, to rescue—is shored up by denying recognition of the same to “victims”. Similarly, in her analysis of a sample of European anti-trafficking campaigns produced by the International Organization for Migration, Rutvica Andrijasevic argues that the campaigns “resort to victimizing images of female bodies as a way of warning potential women migrants about the dangers of migration and prostitution” and, through such stereotypical and objectifying representations, campaigns “demarcate the limits within which women can be imagined as active agents”.57 These methods of warning women against the risks of mobility, these authors claim, can amount to an endorsement of women’s continued domestication. Claudia Aradau’s approach to the subject of trafficking is helpful in taking discussion beyond representational techniques of victimization and gender stereotyping that international organizations employ and into an understanding of the discourses through which trafficking is “problematized” as part of wider strategies of governmentality. Taking a Foucauldian perspective, Aradau notes how trafficking itself—and not just trafficked individuals— becomes visible as an object of knowledge to be governed. Specifically, “the trafficking literature vectors its object in the directions already traced by knowledge accumulated in the fields of migration, organized crime or prostitution”.58 By constructing “truths” about trafficking and trafficked humans, the regulatory function of these discourses obscures contradictions. For example, “trafficked” women might be “migrants to be deported” at the same time as “bearers of human rights to be protected”.59 In this case, the limited understanding of subject positions available within each discourse shuts down possibilities of action for and on behalf of the women in question. To the discussion of governmentality and strategies of anti-trafficking work, Elizabeth Bernstein offers insights on particular political agendas. Notably, in the context of US activism, Bernstein identifies unexpected affinities between conservative Christian and mainstream feminist groups who have come to share a commitment to “carceral paradigms of social, and in particular gender, justice (. . .) and to militarized humanitarianism as the pre-eminent mode of engagement by the state”.60 Underpinning this coalition, Bernstein develops, is a joint movement towards “neoliberal (i.e., market-based and punitive as opposed to redistributive) solutions to contemporary social problems”.61 The problem of human trafficking is approached as a problem of social control, through “claims of a particular

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white, middle-class model of Western gender and sexual superiority” in conjunction with consumerist initiatives (such as the evangelical “business as mission”) and support for criminal sanctions at home and abroad.62 Bernstein’s analysis combines insights drawn from two main theoretical positions. First, taking up challenges posed by postcolonial feminists, she names the risks of exporting a simplified “Western” feminism to “non-Western” populations of women who are consequently immobilized in categories of subordination. Second, Bernstein demonstrates how the figure of the “third world woman”, to use Mohanty’s term, is instrumental to the ideological imperatives of globalized neoliberal governmentality.63 At their bottom line, all of these authors recognize forms of discursive and representational capture of “trafficked” individuals and that capture inadvertently results from aid interventions. The perceived immobility of such individuals which motivates interventions (“a complete lack of power”, for Fuller) is doubled in effect by the means of intervention. The full range of personal and structural circumstances around individual instances of “trafficking”, these authors argue, is reduced to the regulation of a problem. Similarly, industry workers speaking at the GHTHN launch focus their efforts on “cases” of trafficking. Dynamics of flexible network circulation, revered within neoliberalism and postfordist governmentality, are here simultaneously arrested by attempts to prevent harm and protect the vulnerable. As established in previous chapters, the contradictory double logic of promiscuity requires and instrumentalizes mobile subjects while containing some of the meanings and possibilities of mobility. Human trafficking is clearly the wrong kind of flexible network circulation, taken in its narrowest definitions; however, some attempts to disrupt it may ultimately impose on informal migrants a network logic whereby the distribution of points of self-service and agency (“more options and more avenues through which they can reach out for help”) conceals punitive modes of capture. I have argued that the account of human trafficking networks given at the GHTHN launch is modeled on a particular understanding of HIV transmission and illustrates the discursive ambivalence of promiscuity. The comparison to HIV is both explicit in providing a corresponding diagram of network mobility and implicit in its association to common cultural stereotypes of harm and vulnerability. If the GHTHN is an attempt to disrupt the functioning of illicit networks by staging a form of “netwar”, that is by using equivalent network strategies to “get one step ahead” of “the bad guys”, then it too is conceived from within the signifying frame of virological systems like HIV. In turn, we might consider that Google’s intervention into illicit networks itself bears unavoidable traces of a normative blueprint of HIV transmission. Drawn into this blueprint are the contradictory positions of viral object and viral subject, victim, and agent, and opposing movements of containment and liberalization. I will turn briefly to a discussion of the political economy of big data in order to address more fully this chapter’s questions of network strategy and control.

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Little information is currently available on how the GHTHN has been functioning since its launch and how directly Google is involved in operations. Nonetheless, the initiative’s dependence on the extraordinary global success of the Google brand and business model suggests a much more forceful strategy of network politics than “getting one step ahead of the bad guys”. Indeed, the degree to which Google will capitalize upon its relationship to this cause is also open to serious question, a relationship in which its ability to “better share, analyze and act upon” data could be seen to position the objects of that data (“cases” of human trafficking) as a new branch of Google’s ever-expanding free labor force.64 How then does the digital measurement of human traffic relate to Google’s domination of web traffic and the advertising revenue it so cleverly generates? Siva Vaidhyanathan has made clear in his book The Googlization of Everything that Google has achieved its position of market dominance not through a simple development of superior web services but through a brilliant combination of software engineering, horizontal integration across a wide range of digital platforms, and a version of soft power that fosters users’ eager complicity with their own data being used to improve product efficiency. Capitalizing on the “network effect”, as Vaidhyanathan discusses, Google makes itself indispensable to web searches by depending on its users’ search behavior to refine the search algorithm. The better the search product, the more users it attracts; the more users it attracts, the better the search product. Within this formula, the foibles and faults of user activity are endlessly transformable into biopolitical control, combining the intimately human level of user input and experience and the starkly mechanical level of digital coding and analytics. In simple terms, as Vaidhyanathan maintains, Google users are not its customers but its product.65 Because it reconstructs and instrumentalizes its users as data, Google illustrates Galloway and Thacker’s view that networks build modular spaces of control, a claim which draws on the work of Deleuze on societies of control. In networks, they argue: bodies are consonant with more distributed modes of individuation that enable their infinite variation (informatic records, databases, consumer profiles, genetic codes, identity shopping, workplace biometrics). Their effects are network effects, and their agency is an anonymous agency (in this sense, “anonymity” exists quite happily alongside “identification”).66 Following Deleuze, network control operates differently from Foucault’s received notion of disciplined subjects by enabling mobility and adaptability rather than reproducing forms of enclosure that are internalized by the subject. In this sense, network control “is unbothered by individuated subjects (subjected subjects)”.67 The network control exercised by Google works by providing distributed network functionality to its users. They are mobile, adaptable contributors

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to the network. User contributions are also leveraged, however, and network control is extended over users through various intricate means of data capture but crucially through the architectural design of code in which default settings for use privilege Google’s agenda.68 As Vaidhyanathan points out, the design is an example of what has been called “choice architecture”.69 The strategy succeeds because value is simultaneously added to users’ experience; in fact, the polyvalence of user experience is central to the process. In this way, Google epitomizes the paradoxical coexistence in contemporary geopolitics of horizontal network formations and new forms of sovereignty. Galloway and Thacker argue that “networks create the conditions of existence for a new mode of sovereignty” rather than being incompatible with sovereignty.70 They spell out the paradox of network sovereignty as follows: while the networked sovereign is globally networked, extending into all countries and all social contexts as a localized native (not as an interloper or occupying force), it is at the same time able to emit a single command decision, from a single location. . . . In this way, a networked sovereign is able to “flip the switch” and watch as command decisions propagate rapidly around the globe.71 Galloway and Thacker have in mind here the particular geopolitical role of the United States, but few descriptions suggest as smartly the modular potential of the Google corporation’s combined unilateral and multilateral power. Using slightly different language, Vaidhyanathan calls this power Google’s “infrastructural imperialism”.72 It is not my intention to undercut the efforts of the organizations involved in this anti-trafficking initiative; rather, I have tried to offer a critique of some of the discursive associations through which trafficking and the trafficked are spoken about. Speakers at the GHTHN launch placed respectful emphasis on the narratives and lived experiences of individuals, including survivors of trafficking. But an uncomfortable tension exists nonetheless between that kind of visibility and the “data-driven approach” to visualizing and interrupting illicit networks that Google proposed. In fact, for Google’s Jared Cohen to describe its intention “to troubleshoot one of the world’s greatest problems” suggests something between naïveté and outright arrogance.73 Perhaps it was just a poor choice of word. And maybe Google’s money and network infrastructure and data analytics can help. But I don’t think Google’s money and network infrastructure can be separated from its practice of outsourcing labor to users in ways that do not simply amount to a reciprocal exchange of value. Rather, the practice subordinates value of all kinds to the new sovereignty of data analytics, a field that is characterized by an ethos of competitive entrepreneurialism and a reductive instrumentalization of affect. In short, my concern is that a “data-driven approach” to interrupting human trafficking will deepen the capture in which so many informal migrants already find themselves discursively constructed as

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necessary victims but now doubly bound as potential agents of a global neoliberal agenda: flexible, mobile, and data-rich. This is the double bind of networked promiscuity in which varying forms of intimate labor are differentially measured in relation to moral agendas; all, however, are constitutively necessary to network culture’s data accumulation project. The index case is the retrospective proof of this project’s functionality. Virus-carrier, frequent flyer, mobile sex worker: all serve to visualize the geometry of network circulation, but equally to showcase and to justify the sovereign cause that governs the management of each network. Systems of surveillance and security need visible anomalies to demonstrate that they are functioning correctly. Anti-virus and anti-plagiarism software, for instance, cannot fully detect without an offending object. So too, data systems for visualizing human trafficking depend upon a certain measurable proliferation of “cases” in order to be successful. At one level, the technology is developed and deployed as part of a simple problem-solving logic (“troubleshooting”). This chapter has aimed to show, however, that the very ability to name problems to be solved is contingent upon prior normative judgments. Certain kinds of intimacy are singled out as aberrant despite remaining exploitable to measurement. As the dynamics of viral contagion continue to inform how we think about networks, the narrative role of the index case—at once exemplar and anomaly—continues to find new scripts in which to test out the ambiguous potential of promiscuity. NOTES 1. Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008). 2. Ibid., 10. 3. Douglas Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” October 43, Winter (1987): 242. 4. Steven Soderbergh, Contagion (Warner Bros., 2011); Jason Reitman, Up in the Air (Paramount Pictures, 2009). 5. Lev Manovich, “Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 460–75; danah boyd and Kate Crawford, “Critical Questions for Big Data,” Information, Communication and Society 15, no. 5 (2012): 662–79. 6. Nancy Fraser, “From Discipline to Flexibilization? Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization,” Constellations 10, no. 2 (2003): 168. 7. Ibid. 8. Elizabeth Bernstein, “Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns,” Signs 36, no. 1 (2010): 45–71. 9. Jayson Harsin, “The Plague 2.0: On Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion,” Bright Lights 75 (2012), accessed September 7, 2014, http://brightlightsfilm. com/75/75contagion_harsin.php#.U2OA2l4xFlI. 10. Larissa Hjorth and Sun Sun Lim, “Mobile Intimacy in an Age of Affective Mobile Media,” Feminist Media Studies 12, no. 4 (2012): 477–84.

Index Case 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

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Melissa Gregg, Work’s Intimacy (Cambridge: Polity, 2011). Ibid., 13. Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, 2. Ibid., 3. Ibid. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 93. Ibid., 236. Ibid., 229. Ibid. Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative; Simon Watney, “Missionary Positions: AIDS, ‘Africa’, and Race,” Critical Quarterly 31, no. 3 (1989): 45–62. Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, 238. Ibid., 237. Hjorth and Lim, “Mobile Intimacy in an Age of Affective Mobile Media,” 477. Ibid., 478. Gregg, Work’s Intimacy, 173. Ibid. Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (New York: Signet, 1974). Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, “Neoliberal Frames and Genres of Inequality: Recession-Era Chick Flicks and Male-Centred Corporate Melodrama,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 16, no. 3 (2013): 357. Elaine Swan, “Cleaning Up? Transnational Corporate Femininity and Dirty Work in Magazine Culture,” in Dirty Work, ed. Ruth Simpson, Natasha Slutskaya, Patricia Lewis and Heather Hopfl (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 201. Ibid. Rosalind Gill, “Postfeminist Media Culture,” in The Gender and Media Reader, ed. Mary Celeste Kearney (London: Routledge, 2011), 146. R. W. Connell, The Men and the Boys (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 46. Christine Beasley, “Rethinking Hegemonic Masculinity in a Globalizing World,” Men and Masculinities 11, no. 1 (2008): 91. Swan, “Cleaning Up? Transnational Corporate Femininity and Dirty Work in Magazine Culture,” 201. Nancy Fraser, “How Feminism Became Capitalism’s Handmaiden—and How to Reclaim It,” The Guardian, October 14, 2013, accessed October 20, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/14/feminismcapitalist-handmaiden-neoliberal. Swan, “Cleaning Up? Transnational Corporate Femininity and Dirty Work in Magazine Culture,” 201. “Fighting Human Trafficking,” Official Google Blog, accessed May 2, 2014, http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/fighting-human-trafficking.html. “Google Ideas,” accessed May 2, 2014, google.com/ideas. Fighting Human Trafficking with Technology: Announcing a New Initiative, 2013, accessed May 2, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILQAYtpF 5PM&feature=youtube_gdata_player. Ibid. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars (RAND Corporation, 2001), accessed May 2, 2014, http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_ reports/MR1382.html.

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45. Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 18. 46. Fighting Human Trafficking with Technology. 47. Grim Reaper [1987], 2006, accessed May 2, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=U219eUIZ7Qo&feature=youtube_gdata_player. 48. Deborah Lupton, Moral Threats and Dangerous Desires: AIDS in the News Media (London: Routledge, 2013); Melissa Autumn White, “Viral/Species/ Crossing: Border Panics and Zoonotic Vulnerabilities,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 40, no. 1&2 (2012): 117–37. 49. Simon Watney, “The Spectacle of AIDS,” October 43, Winter (1987): 71–86; Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004). 50. Roger N. Lancaster, Sex Panic and the Punitive State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 2–3. 51. Ibid., 4. 52. Robert Payne, “Virtual Panic: Children Online and the Transmission of Harm,” in Moral Panics Over Contemporary Children and Youth, ed. Charles Krinsky (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 31–46. 53. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 58. 54. Lancaster, Sex Panic and the Punitive State, 2. 55. Grim Reaper [1987]. 56. Laura María Agustín, Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry (London: Zed Books, 2007), 8. 57. Rutvica Andrijasevic, “Beautiful Dead Bodies: Gender, Migration and Representation in Anti-Trafficking Campaigns,” Feminist Review 86 (2007): 26. 58. Claudia Aradau, Rethinking Trafficking in Women: Politics out of Security (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 15. 59. Ibid., 4. 60. Bernstein, “Militarized Humanitarianism Meets Carceral Feminism: The Politics of Sex, Rights, and Freedom in Contemporary Antitrafficking Campaigns,” 47. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 66. 63. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Feminist Review 30 (1988): 61–88; Fraser, “From Discipline to Flexibilization? Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization”; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 64. Tiziana Terranova, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (London: Pluto Press, 2004). 65. Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 66. Galloway and Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, 41. 67. Ibid. 68. Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 69. Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything, 88. 70. Galloway and Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, 20. Italics in original. 71. Ibid. 72. Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything, 111. 73. Fighting Human Trafficking with Technology.

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In 2010, a blogger for the Washington Post reported on a fanciful scheme devised by the CIA as the US was planning to invade Iraq in 2003. The idea was to create and distribute a Saddam Hussein sex tape in which the enemy dictator would supposedly be seen having sex with a teenaged boy. In an effort to discredit the Iraqi leader in the eyes of his people, the US would “flood Iraq with the videos”, according to an inside source. A similar reported project, on which production supposedly began, was to make another video “purporting to show Osama bin Laden and his cronies sitting around a campfire swigging bottles of liquor and savoring their conquests with boys”. To facilitate production, the CIA would recruit actors from among its “darker-skinned employees”. According to former agency officials quoted in the report, the projects were ultimately canned because they fundamentally misjudged the cultural landscape they intended to infiltrate. “ ‘Saddam playing with boys would have no resonance in the Middle East’ ”, an official was quoted as saying; “ ‘nobody cares’ ”. Furthermore, “ ‘[w]e always mistake our own taboos as universal when, in fact, they are just our taboos’ ”.1 While this hilarious anecdote might tell us mostly about the creativity and desperation of certain members of the CIA, it illustrates nevertheless the deployment of media and of homosexuality as weapons of war. The two are intertwined: implications of homosexuality are supposed to destabilize a leader’s reputation and offend a population; and the ordinary media format of a videotape is the channel through which offense is supposed to spread. The claim to the offensiveness of homosexual acts relies wholly upon Orientalist assumptions about “the Middle East”, while the choice of media format as vector for the dissemination of certain affective responses relies wholly upon US-centered frames of what is scandalous. Curiously, media reports including the blog quoted above tended to overlook that these plans implied pedophilia as much as homosexuality, depending on one’s definition of “teenager” and “boy”. Nevertheless, the fated “gay” sex tape and confession tape act as snapshots of some of the ways in which ordinary mediality combines with embodied affect in service of the circulation of normative cultural and political frameworks.

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As I write, it is ten years since the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. In January 2004, one of the army reservists working as a guard in the US military prison in Iraq released a disk of the now infamous photographs of abuse and torture of detainees to the military’s criminal investigation unit. Investigation began almost immediately, and within a few months several major US media outlets had started to report the story and publish some of the photographs. The scandal was to become one of the defining moments of the US-led War on Terror, not just because the leaked photographs gave shocking evidence of morally corrupt and illegal practices taking place deep within the US’s military intervention in Iraq, and not just because the Bush administration’s response to the scandal suggested indifference to international conventions of war crimes and human rights. Abu Ghraib, like all scandals, was also a media event, and so it demonstrated the importance of visuality and image circulation to the project of declaring war on something as abstract as terror. Individual photographs from the prison seemed to stand in for the visual staging of scenes of otherness of various kinds upon which the War on Terror depended and through which it sought justification. In other words, Abu Ghraib revealed the full functioning of the visual technologies of war, partly operating, as Nicholas Mirzoeff has argued, to police a “boundary between seeing and not being allowed to see” which “delineated the sphere of the militarized visual image and those authorized to see it”.2 Also as I write, Facebook has just celebrated its tenth birthday. This is no doubt a coincidence, but it does give one cause for reflection. The last ten years have seen major changes in media culture, notably the massive success and impact of online social networks in all manner of social and political spheres. Even after a relatively short period of time, many of us now take these applications for granted; they have become absolutely structural to how media content circulates and to how communication happens in the early twenty-first century. If Abu Ghraib was a media event as much as a war event, I’m tempted to consider a few questions about this historical coincidence. How might the Abu Ghraib scandal have played out in the context of online social networks? How might circulation of the infamous photos have been different, in speed and in scale? How might their impact have been different as a result? And what if the prison guards who took the photographs had had Facebook or Instagram or YouTube? Might one of the guards have been tempted to post them online? All of this, of course, is hypothetical. We have no way to answer these questions, and perhaps no good reason to try. But the small leap of imagination I’ve just taken helps me to think more about the mediality of scandalous events like Abu Ghraib, and about the role of digital networks in various circuits of communication. Let me ask these hypothetical questions in a different way, then. Photographs of torture were among the thousands of photographs of other things also found on the soldiers’ cameras, and it seems to be the case that the soldiers circulated the photographs amongst themselves inside the prison. Some photographs of abuse were apparently

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even used as screensavers. Furthermore, some argue that the torture and abuse took place specifically for photographic circulation. So if technologies of visual circulation played a significant role in what took place in the prison, then what kind of sharing was this? This book has attempted to rethink how the current language of sharing makes an ambiguous call to promiscuity. When we share anything from baby photos to branding messages to shirtless selfies, we are consciously or otherwise contributing to networks built on multiple forms of intimacy, many of which are aligned with an ethos of entrepreneurialism. What circulates and how it happens, I have argued, is tied up with norms of gender and sexuality which frame intimacy and sociality, and I have shown how these frames can overlap with those of capitalist capture. What we now call viral circulation emblematizes the normative constraints of digital promiscuity, despite taking its name from unhealthy and uncontained network mobility. What does not circulate in these ways? What resists instrumentalization? And when sharing happens, what else circulates with the shared object? This chapter takes the medial formation of scandal as a point of departure in considering these questions. If scandal occurs as a kind of outbreak, that is, an uncontrolled release from a space of containment, then the ensuing viral circulation of scandalous material helps to trace the contours of contemporary network culture. I first began to think about Abu Ghraib while writing an article about military masculinity and homosociality. In that article, I was interested in how heteronormative frames of masculinity mediated the reporting of the mysterious death of an Australian soldier in Iraq and the circumstances of the incident itself. Euphemistic language came to stand in for the unnamable erotic ambiguities of the deadly event, and obscured knowledge of certain kinds of homosocial conduct among male soldiers.3 The collusive function of euphemism is important to an understanding of Abu Ghraib, too, and I have come to approach the scandal less via analysis of the photographs of torture at the center of the event and more via the secondary mediations that have proliferated around it. Errol Morris’s 2008 documentary Standard Operating Procedure is one of these texts.4 Taking its title from military euphemism, the film provides an implicit condemnation of an institutional culture that allowed the notorious Abu Ghraib abuses to take place and to be concealed initially from public view. Morris investigates the investigation into the photographs, and asks us to consider what they frame and how.5 The main challenge of the film, though, is in the direct-to-camera testimonies given by several of the abuses’ perpetrators. Viewers are faced not just with the perpetrators’ banal humanity but with the ordinary mediality of their acts, summarily described by one interviewee as “just taking pictures”. The film helps to identify the ambiguities in what is “standard” in gender terms, as well. In trying to make sense of how Abu Ghraib relates to the promiscuity of network culture—that is, in thinking about what kind of sharing it might be—other media texts have complicated my thinking. Their connection

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to Abu Ghraib may initially appear superficial, but I want to dig a little beneath the surface to show how they communicate with each other on the level of mediality and affectivity. Circulating widely online during the last several years since Abu Ghraib, a spate of amateur videos of US military personnel, taken mostly in facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which uniformed soldiers dance and lip-synch to pop music, has drawn my attention. This “meme” of dancing videos offers a purposeful glimpse into the gender and erotic configuration of off-duty military personnel who are deployed to fight the War on Terror. Beyond content, I am also curious about the videos’ relationship to everyday digital technology, and specifically to mediated acts of sharing. Apparently staged for the presence of cameras and the likelihood of network circulation, habits of ordinary mediality nonetheless intersect in interesting ways with the gender and erotic performances captured. What can these curious videos tell us about Abu Ghraib, then? I will examine one interpretation of all of these media examples as recreational activity. After the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, US radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh famously defended the perpetrators of the torture, telling his audience: You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?6 As is clear in these comments, the conventional trope of “blowing off steam” offers a general euphemistic reframing of the particularities of a wide range of behavior, apparently including torture. It also serves to justify that behavior as a natural function of a high-pressure situation, like “being fired at every day”. Descriptions uploaded with some of the dancing videos mentioned above make explicit reference to the difficult or boring conditions in which they were shot. If these performances can also be considered examples of blowing off steam because they display moments of release in dangerous or trying circumstances, then we might ask what the function of the steam, in this metaphor, says about the nature of the pressure. Certainly in all examples, we observe a range of performances of masculinity the ambiguous eroticism of which offers clear illustration of the contradictions of homosociality. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues in her classic interrogation of Western heterosexual masculine privilege, the continuum of male same-sex behaviors on the spectrum between heterosexually sanctioned “bonding” and forbidden acts of “homosexuality” is dangerously slippery. The maintenance of heterosexual masculine privilege, she continues, depends upon a continuous panic of disavowal of these behavioral overlaps, as well as a forcible self-ignorance of their erotic composition.7 With this in mind, I question the extent to which the precarious homosociality of “blowing off steam” metonymizes the hegemonically masculinist culture of the military and its foreign impositions in the War on Terror.

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In reading these secondary media examples alongside the far more distressing content of Abu Ghraib, I do not mean to erase important distinctions in what is seen taking place; some acts are brutally abusive and illegal, and some are mindless fun. Rather, because all of these documents display ritualized stagings of military homosociality, captured on habitually used digital media technologies, I wish to ask what circuits of transmission are at work here. The difference between kinds of content might offer a critical opportunity in itself. Specifically, the apparently distinct affective registers of the dancing videos and the Abu Ghraib photos could begin to indicate how “frames of war”, as Judith Butler writes, circulate affects across domains which we might prefer to believe are framed distinctly: for instance, foreign policy and domestic issues; oppressive political measures and progressive causes.8 The brutality of some images from the War on Terror may not be wholly separable from the freedoms performed in others. THE OUTBREAK OF SCANDAL When a scandal breaks, what does it break from and what does it break through? We talk of scandal “breaking” because it represents a rupture—the violent breaking of a seal of silence or enclosure in which information was once contained. It bursts out into the open. On one hand, it makes sense to say that the information that bursts out needed to be contained because it was scandalous and would have caused harm to those implicated if disclosed. In this view, information itself carries the burden of guilt or blame or potential harm and must not be circulated. On the other hand, what is deemed scandalous may follow from the fact of containment in that the repressive mechanism that contains it, as Foucault maintained, incites further discourse around what is repressed.9 Certain hidden truths become more scandal-worthy in proportion to how thoroughly they are hidden. Following Foucault and Sedgwick, this view brings scandal into line with an epistemology of closet, by which the ability to know something openly (a person’s sexual identity, for instance) depends on the continual reconstruction of what is not known. In slightly different terms, scandal and its impact register a culture’s uneasy, on-going negotiation of spaces of privacy and publicity.10 Therefore scandal reveals the political framing of what kinds of bodies, acts, and intimacies are deemed appropriate within the public sphere.11 Scandal is a function of mediation not just because questions of morality and transgression are publicly worked through in how a scandal is “narrativized by the media”.12 For Joshua Gamson, media narrativization pertains to the perceived transgression of specific institutional norms rather than of a widely shared social order.13 Before scandals break, the prior containment of information anticipates the eventuality of some intermediary form that would disclose it, whether word of mouth or letter, photograph or tape recording, television broadcast or gossip blog. If this is the case, then

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the magnitude of scandal surely relates to the potential for amplification of the disclosing media. Variation in scale, density, and speed of mediation, to name a few factors, plus the texture of “narrativization”, alter the perceived scandalousness of what is communicated. In Chapter 3, I took up the question of how closet structures of inside/outside and knowing/unknowing are remediated by current forms of network circulation which might appear to privilege immediacy and transparency of information. As Melissa Hardie asks, if celebrities are taking up social media tools to dislodge gossip’s mediation of “insider knowledge”, then will the figure of the closet become redundant?14 Because celebrity and scandal intersect as media discourses relying on closet epistemologies, it is equally worth asking whether a proliferation of communicational networks displaces and disperses the outbreak of scandals, or whether new infrastructures merely multiply sites of outbreak. It follows naturally that Abu Ghraib qualifies as a scandal not just because of the appalling and exceptional nature of abuses perpetrated against the prison’s detainees. It is also scandalous that the acts of torture were initially covered up, although exactly how and by whom remains debatable. In this sense, qualifying the scandal of concealment relates to factors such as who among knowing parties was more or less morally or legally or professionally obliged to maintain transparency (Donald Rumsfeld compared to Lynndie England, for instance). Who among knowing parties could be permitted to be seen knowing? Further, it could be argued that the scandal of Abu Ghraib was magnified by the fact that the torture was covered up and photographed: photographing the torture anticipated the likelihood that the photographs would be copied and circulated. Mediation provided and courted the risk of potential evidence, and then once disclosed media offered a set of texts for public negotiation of the intimacies revealed. Mediation probably also intensified the erotics of closet containment. But the point here is not to prove that Abu Ghraib was scandalous; that goes without saying. Rather than analyzing the details of individual scandals in isolation, what Richard Grusin calls a “medialogical” perspective aims to demonstrate how cases such as Abu Ghraib give insight into the media environment that produces them and into which they break as events of disclosure. Indeed as Grusin asks, given the prominence of other images of harm circulating in our media environment, why do more scandals not break?15 Given the same evidence, though, we could just as well ask why scandals still happen at all. Also using a language of rupture, Judith Butler’s Frames of War examines how the circulation of affect in media coverage of war, such as the shock of images of torture, can lead to critique of the authority that legitimated the war. Building on her earlier discussions of the recognizability and grievability of life, Butler asks if the framing function of norms that determine the intelligibility of a life or an event—and therefore those that can justify torture—might contain its own undoing. More specifically, if photographs like those from Abu Ghraib are framed by the norms of their context which limit what can be seen and known of the event, then the circulation of those

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photographs in different contexts breaks the frame and calls the frame into question. This in turn, she writes, may amount to a “loosening of the mechanism of control” that activated the normative function of the frame.16 Here again, scandal is kind of a breaking out: What “gets out of hand” is precisely what breaks from the context that frames the event, the image, the text of war. But if contexts are framed (. . .) and if a frame invariably breaks from itself as it moves through space and time (if it must break from itself in order to move across space and time), then the circulating frame has to break with the context in which it is formed if it is to land or arrive somewhere else. What would it mean to understand this “breaking out” and “breaking from” as part of the media phenomena at issue, as the very function of the frame?17 If we can understand scandal as an example of an event “getting out of hand”, that is, breaking from its own frame as it changes context, then the possibility of scandal is in a sense immanent to the framing of the event: “the very function of the frame”. And when the “breaking out” of scandal leads to normative frames coming apart, two possibilities emerge. One is critique: “a taken-for-granted reality is called into question, exposing the orchestrating designs of the authority who sought to control the frame”.18 Further, a different kind of “apprehension” becomes possible “about what or who is living but has not generally been ‘recognized’ as a life”.19 Applying Butler’s logic, it is not enough just to say that the Abu Ghraib torture illustrated the US military’s brutal indifference to the right to a recognizable life of certain bodies, and that the photographic capture of these scenes compounded the framing of sexualized and racialized subordination in accordance with a cultural norm dictating that certain bodies do not matter. And while it is obvious to say that the enactment of this brutal framing is only fully known about because the photographs circulated beyond the prison, it is also because of their circulation and circulability that the framing norm of the photographs is rendered unstable. That is, “the norm functions precisely by way of managing the prospect of its undoing, an undoing that inheres in its doings”.20 It might be, then, that brutality is a strategy for managing this instability—the norm working harder to install itself—and paradoxically that the photographs are evidence of a kind of precarity, as well as of clear brutality. The semantic gymnastics of the term “standard operating procedure” may offer an example of this manoeuver. As the title of Morris’s film suggests, the term closes down meanings of certain acts in order that they not destabilize the authority in whose name the acts were performed and legitimized. From his position outside this contextual frame, Morris undertakes a critical investigation of how the term’s legitimizing frame came to be imposed on some abusive acts in Abu Ghraib and not on others. He interviews army investigator Brent Pack, who was charged with the task of determining which

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of the photographs were evidence of criminal acts and which were merely “standard operating procedure”. Pack’s judgment led directly to certain soldiers being convicted and imprisoned. But as he talks Morris and the film’s viewer through his logic in making this distinction, as the photographs in question appear on screen for the viewer to examine with him, no clear distinction emerges. In fact, as Linda Williams points out, some of Pack’s own testimony within the film contradicts itself and the testimony of some of the soldiers interviewed. We have, Williams writes, “learned to distrust his judicial assessment”; he is “too sure of ‘facts’ that the film has taught us to question”. As a mere “rubber stamp of the military’s bizarre methods”, Pack’s investigation continues through euphemistic reframing to perform the brutality of authorized acts of torture.21 Without explicitly adopting Butler’s thinking, Richard Grusin’s discussion of Abu Ghraib is in some ways complementary. For Grusin, Abu Ghraib was “an instance in which shock broke through the protective barrier of premediation”. That is to say, shock broke through US media’s post-9/11 “desire to premediate the geopolitical future so thoroughly that the American public would be protected from experiencing a catastrophic shock or surprise like that produced by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon”.22 Grusin’s theory of premediation builds on an argument about the role of affect in the securitization of possible media futures. I introduced the concept of premediation in Chapter 1 of this book to help contextualize the political economy of what I call “post-viral virality” as a space of containment. In that discussion, I was more explicitly focused on the containments of “communicative capitalism”.23 I would now add, following Grusin, that the widespread visibility of the Abu Ghraib photographs produced an affective outbreak. The scandal was not just due to the content of the photographs, which after all can be seen in different versions and different formats in any number of other media sites, but due to their ability to produce shock and outrage that could burst out from a securitized media space, and then circulate via clusters of medial intensity. Clearly the shock of scandal reverberates in proportion to the contours of its media environment, but in Grusin’s formulation this does not simply mean as a by-product of that environment’s containment mechanisms. In a space of control or repression, scandal is not merely “blowing off steam”, as if by mechanical necessity. Grusin deploys the idea of embodied affect to recognize how media work beyond the power plays of representation and beyond a hegemony/subversion binary. He writes: thinking of mediality in terms of affect is to think of our media practices not only in terms of their structures of signification or symbolic representation but more crucially in terms of the ways in which media function on the one hand to discipline, control, contain, manage, or govern human affectivity and its affiliated things “from above,” at the same time that they work to enable particular forms of human

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action, particular collective expressions or formations of human affect “from below”.24 In these terms, affect operates as a medium of governmentality. By this Grusin means that the everyday media practices of individuals are a means of distributing affective labor among a population, and therefore these practices may constitute “techniques of power in a control society”.25 Rather than saying that images simply represent and thus mediate power relations within a social context, Grusin takes up the concept of biopower from Foucault and Deleuze to argue that affect can be put to work to mediate institutional control. Affect mediates the relationships between individual users and their media at the level of practice, creating “a heterogeneous network composed of political and medial agencies, mutually imbricated in [what Foucault calls] the ‘proper disposition of things’ ”.26 We have already seen how Google operates in this way, too. Two important points emerge here on how the mediality of the Abu Ghraib scandal illustrates this model of biopolitical control. The first concerns the role of US soldiers in producing the photographs at the center of the scandal: to try to understand the Abu Ghraib photos as media practices is not just (or perhaps not at all) to look at the ways in which power is allegorized or represented or emblematized in these photos, but rather to look at the way in which governmental power is mediated, the way in which biopower is actualized, through the everyday practices of taking, uploading, and distributing these photographs.27 It would be offensive to overlook the ways in which power is allegorized, represented, and emblematized in the photos, and naïve not to examine how these symbolic display of power extend from the visual project of the War on Terror. In other words, as exceptional or not as they may have been, these are not isolated acts of subjugation. As persuasive as Grusin’s argument is, I am not convinced that the content of the photos does not also perform a biopolitical function as much as the form and practice do. It may be, however, that the unexceptional nature of the media practice in question—“just taking pictures”, as I will examine below—is the very instrument with which governmentality trains its complicit labor force. And this is the basis for a second conclusion to be drawn from Grusin’s discussion, which returns us to the question of why the photos are scandalous. The photos are scandalous because they are, in a sense, ordinary: our response to the photographs is so powerful and immediate not simply because they reveal to us abuses of power and horrible acts of torture, completely out of the ordinary and beyond the pale of acceptable, civilized, humane behavior, but also because they reveal to us the

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This “continuity” does not necessarily allow us to conclude, as did Susan Sontag, that “the photographs are us”, although I tend to agree with her broader claim that “they are representative of the fundamental corruptions of any foreign occupation”, even if it would be necessary to qualify the representative function claimed.29 Putting representation to one side, the continuity of which Grusin writes may encourage us to see ourselves embodying a shared media habitus “with which we have become increasingly familiar and comfortable” in the last ten years.30 Turning to the “insider knowledge” disclosed in Standard Operating Procedure allows us to examine in more detail this scandalous interplay of the ordinary and the extraordinary. “JUST TAKING PICTURES” In Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris invites the perpetrators of the Abu Ghraib abuses to face their accusing public.31 Interviews with nine former prison guards and their former commanding officer are conducted via a special camera which allows the illusion of direct eye contact between the interview subjects and the film’s audience. As Linda Williams argues, this is one of the techniques used in the film to interrogate the role of framing in the Abu Ghraib photographs and scandal. In a film that purposely departs from the documentary genre’s conventional claims to objectivity, Morris “exaggeratedly frame[s] (and reframe[s]) ‘talking-head’ testimony of the soldiers”, stages “highly artificial” and “eerily theatrical” reconstructions of certain interview details, and “frame[s] and reframe[s] pictures of the photos themselves”.32 These devices contribute to the film’s metacritique of the naturalized relationship between visual representation and evidence which contributed to some soldiers being singled out as criminally responsible because of their appearance in certain photographs. In simulated face-to-face encounters, the audience must recognize the former soldiers as humans accounting for themselves. While it seems unlikely, certainly undesirable, that many viewers would identify with the abuses depicted in the photos (not least because none of the interviewed former soldiers fully redeems themselves in their testimony), viewers might more readily identify with their frailty and weakness and stupidity, among other ordinary human qualities that find a fuller embodiment in the interviews than in the photos. Unfathomable as the acts of abuse might be, Grusin reminds us that we can identify with the use of everyday technology that captured and distributed these moments as if they had been snapshots of “our pets, our vacations, or our loved ones”.33 This implied commonality of media experience disallows a complete and comfortable separation between the inside

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and outside of Abu Ghraib. (The safe closet structure of “inside knowledge”, in this sense, is less available here.) This, too, seems to be one of Morris’s points. Presenting the banal and sometimes pathetic self-justifications of “the only ones who have already done time and the ones who bore the brunt of blame for policies they often only implemented” might just provoke the audience to look at the case through the soldiers’ eyes.34 I will focus here on three moments from Standard Operating Procedure, including two extracts of soldier testimony, which speak to the idea of the Abu Ghraib photographs as ordinary media practice, despite their often extraordinary content. Given the opportunity to defend themselves, all of the soldiers interviewed seem to convey a desire to downplay the extraordinary by reaching clumsily for a language of the ordinary. One of these interview subjects, Lynndie England, maintains a bitter, near-dismissive tone throughout the film, and struggles to balance claims to victim status with moments of contemptuous bravado. This tension is most evident when she talks about former colleague Charles Graner, with whom she was romantically involved in Abu Ghraib. England devotes much of her on-camera testimony to explaining away her role in the abuses as a result of being swayed by Graner’s charm, and her narrative swings between a performance of masculine capability and a reluctant display of feminized helplessness: When I was in the brig, every single woman there was in that brig because of a man. Different reasons, yes, but it was because of a man. And when you join the military, no matter what anybody says, it’s a man’s world. You got to either equal a man or be controlled by a man. If you want to be their equal, you’ve got to be strong. They’re going to try to control you. You need to step up and tell them, you know, show them who’s boss. “I’m not going to take that. I’m not going to let you power me, you know, control me because I’m a woman and you’re a man. It’s not going to happen.” Even though it’s the military. I mean, hell, you’re in the military, you got a gun. Use it! If I would have thought about that then, by god I would have. But I was blinded by being in love—with a man. Despite the availability of at least one “prop” of masculinity, England reports having been disarmed by Graner’s attention.35 She is now clearly frustrated by her immature and uncritical acquiescence to codes of heterosexual romance: “He had fourteen more years’ experience. He knew what to say, what to do. And I was dumb enough to fall for it.” Curiously, the unconscious conventions of heteronormative gender relations seem also to manifest in England’s description of photo-taking. During many interviews in Standard Operating Procedure, Morris has his subjects comment on photographs they took in the prison or in which they appear. Williams writes that “Morris is fascinated not so much by the revelation of truths that can be revealed by testimony as by the performative nature of testimony itself”, that is by how the subjects “perform their relation to the

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‘truth’ as they see it”.36 Asked to comment on the photographs she took of prisoners being assaulted after they were accused of rape, England discloses: Graner wanted me to take some pictures. He didn’t tell me which ones to take or not to take, so I was just walking around and [pause] just take one, you know. Armed with what is likely Graner’s camera (another prop of masculine performativity?) and without explicit instructions, England resorts to a kind of auto-pilot mode. Content seems unimportant. She goes on to tell us that members of Military Intelligence then joined the scene: They wanted to mess with [the prisoners] too. They didn’t like it that they were raping a fifteen year old boy. They were roughing them up, have them run up and down the tier, crawl, run into walls, stuff like that. And then they handcuffed them together. As she describes one of her photographs of the scene, England notes: The two guys in the background are the MI guys. They didn’t want to be in the pictures. They were mad. But I was like, “Well, hey”, you know. “Don’t tell me. Whatever. Just taking pictures.” The generic plural “pictures” used here works to erase any meaningful distinction between kinds of photograph, perhaps between scenes photographed, and certainly between motives for taking photographs. In fact, the statement aims to excuse the act of taking photographs as essentially unmotivated, even unconscious. “Don’t tell me”, England tells the “MI guys”, as if to deflect responsibility not only from her complicity with the abuse

Figure 5.1 Standard Operating Procedure (2008). Lynndie England: “Whatever. Just taking pictures”.

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taking place but from her own agency over the camera. The absence of the first-person pronoun mirrors the lack of reflexive subjectivity in her throwaway excuse: “Whatever. Just taking pictures”. England became an unlikely mascot for the Abu Ghraib abuses because of one of the most infamous photographs that shows her holding a male prisoner on a leash. On one level, her sex, small stature, and young age appear to mismatch the scene of domination; a counter-reading of the photograph sees England as a new face and body for the continuing masculinist imperialist enterprise of the war.37 England’s peculiar combination of indignation and indifference in the film contrasts with the defensive tone taken by her former colleague, Sabrina Harman. Harman also got “into trouble”, as Morris puts it in the film, for a widely circulated photograph of her posing over the corpse of a prisoner who had been tortured to death. As in other photos, she is sporting a big smile and a thumbs-up gesture. (England and others also appear in several photos performing the same gesture. These include an almost identical photo of Graner posing next to the same corpse that Harman poses with, and the notorious photo of England and Graner posing behind a pyramid of naked prisoners.) Asked to comment on the “trouble” provoked by “the thumb”, Harman replies: I can understand. It does look pretty bad. But whenever I would get into a photo, I would never know what to do with my hands. Any kind of photo, I probably have a thumbs-up because it’s just [shrugs, pauses] just something that automatically happens. It’s like when you get into a photo, you want to smile. It’s just, I guess, something I did. Harman is visibly uncomfortable answering this question, and her response comes closer to remorse than anything said by any of her former colleagues throughout the film. Indeed she stands out as the character

Figure 5.2 Standard Operating Procedure (2008). Sabrina Harman: “just something I did”.

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painted in the most sympathetic and human tones, partly achieved by the exceptional access the film gives the audience to extracts from letters that Harman had sent home from Abu Ghraib to her wife. The extracts are included to exculpate her; in one, she claims to be taking photographs to provide evidence of abuses that she knew were wrong in order to show that “the US is not what they think”. Williams notes that Morris “has gone to great lengths” outside of the film, also, to restore something of Harman’s moral reputation by claiming that her infamous smile in photographs is “a forced, social smile” rather than the authentic expression of someone joyfully gloating over torture.38 The unconscious repetition of the word “just” in both women’s comments diminishes the gravity and the intentionality of the actions described: “just walking around”, “just taking pictures”, “just something that automatically happens”, “just something I did”. Both testimonies position these photographic moments within a regular and familiar photographic habit, and the photos lose their singularity and distinctiveness as a result. They could “just” be “pictures” of pets, vacations, or loved ones, to repeat Grusin’s examples of everyday photographic subjects. Both women’s use of “just” also signals the familiar social codes for how they habitually behave when a camera is present. If we are to believe these explanations, the photographic scenes described must be interpreted as familiar and social, or somehow arranged to feel familiar and social. The presence of the camera activates a certain kind of familiar moment that has corresponding poses, as if the subject’s gestures are saying, “This is how I react when a camera is pointed at me”, or in Harman’s own words, “it’s just something that automatically happens”. For this reason, the “social smile” worn by Harman could be interpreted differently from Morris who would read it as inauthentic, perhaps even coerced. Could it not show Harman’s bodily response not to an uncomfortable situation that she is patiently enduring, but to a familiar social situation not affectively different from other scenes that elicit a standard smile and thumbs-up? Throughout Standard Operating Procedure, affective indifference is very strongly suggested to characterize photographic moments across the range of content. In one telling sequence, Morris presents viewers with a montage of photographs offered without the narration of those involved. Eighteen photographs appear in a seemingly random sequence, in the style of a slideshow, evenly paced and without any of the graphic manipulation that the film sometimes uses to accompany discussion of photographs of key events, such as the moments narrated by England and Harman quoted above. This is Morris’s attempt to have the photos speak for themselves, but his selection and unenhanced presentation of them makes his position nonetheless clear. The first fourteen of the eighteen do not show torture or abuse. They are a sample of what is implied to be a wide range of photographs of ordinary moments of soldier life inside the prison. In one, a soldier sleeps in a bunk bed. In another, England appears to be waking up or falling asleep. In others, people pose and grin for the camera. Harman tries on underwear over her

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uniform. Graner and Ambuhl simulate oral sex with a banana. Graner and a male colleague simulate anal sex with the banana. The scenes are banal, perhaps embarrassing. The photos are aesthetically uninteresting. But in the final four photographs, presented without change to the slideshow rhythm, a hooded prisoner is shown handcuffed to a railing. Morris is introducing the viewer to a prisoner known as “Gilligan”, whose torture Harman and others will go on to narrate. But the message is clear: snapping Gilligan tied up and beaten is, at least photographically, much the same as the silly down-time antics shown just previously. Altogether, the sequence is a stark confirmation of England and Harman’s automatism, which we might now imagine was shared among their colleagues. It is “just something they did”. Williams notes that the man over whose dead body Harman and others pose is “not grievable” to the soldiers. Here she makes direct reference to the terms of Butler’s discussion of the “forcible frame” at work in the Abu Ghraib photographs. The photograph shows how the deceased man cannot be recognized as having had a grievable life, according to the frame that allowed his incarceration and torture. So too, “[it] is unlikely that Harman would have smiled over the corpse of one of her compatriots”.39 Presumably this is what would constitute an unfamiliar, uncomfortable photographic moment, a scene for which no appropriate code of behavior is available, and of which Harman and England and colleagues would not likely have been “just taking pictures”. But to risk stating the obvious, Harman is smiling over the corpse of this man because, she tells us, there is a camera pointing at her. It seems unlikely that she would have done something equally joyful if no camera had been present, but therefore we would have little way of knowing. The point though is that the camera’s presence activated an embodied affective response in her that may not have otherwise occurred in the same circumstances. The question that emerges here is less about whether the abuses, generally speaking, were performed for and because of the presence of cameras, and more about how particular affective dispositions were vectored by this ordinary media practice and by the ongoing framing of the war. Could it be that these examples of ordinary media practice worked to reinscribe and reinforce the frames of war, and therefore that they constitute a distribution of affective labor in service of the war cause? Posing the question in this way helps to side-step the knotty problem of individual responsibility by placing more emphasis on circuits of affective exchange that operate in and through media practice and less on the agency of individual subjects. This is not to deny the responsibility of the soldiers who we know perpetrated abuses; we also know, however, that they were not the only representatives of the US-led forces to commit various acts of atrocity. Singling these individuals out as solely responsible (the famous “bad apples” excuse) scapegoats them in favor of the whole chain of command. Equally, clinging to an account of their agency as wholly autonomous subjects—acting independently upon other bodies and technologies—does not fully allow for a view

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of the overlapping networks from which their actions and reactions cannot be separated. The critical language of habitus offers a way to think this through a little more deeply. It may be convenient for Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman to downplay their agency as participants in the photographing of scenes of abuse. Both former soldiers resort to language that elides their own subjectivity. England all but characterizes herself as a tool of someone else’s agency. She is “just taking pictures” for her boyfriend Charles Graner, the personal pronoun absent from this continuous action. “Don’t tell me,” she tells colleagues who complain about being caught on camera. Harman is happy to admit to taking photographs as evidence of abuse she claims not to endorse, but not to being able to control her own bodily reactions when the camera is pointed at her. Posing thumbs up, even when next to a corpse, is “just something that automatically happens”. Agency in both cases is certainly relative to forces of influence directly present around their actions, which here might include factors such as sexual attraction, gender relations, and coercion, among others. But Standard Operating Procedure builds a case for the role of broader structural factors to contextualize the lack of discipline of these inexperienced and suggestible soldiers. Grusin’s “medialogical” analysis takes up the ordinary mediality of these actions as both shocking and recognizable. Something in these photographs distresses us, he claims, because we too “just take pictures” as a social reflex. They betray a common and familiar media habitus. Jonathan Sterne makes an argument for a closer application of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to studies of media and technology. Neither separate from nor exceptional within social practice, technologies are rather a way of organizing social practice and movement. Sterne writes: “Habitus is a concept that mediates between relatively structured social relations and relatively ‘objectified’ forms of economic or social agency or interest”.40 Not fixed in relation to power or agency in any given context, habitus describes “a set of social dispositions, a kind of ‘generative principle’ of spontaneous and creative social action based on one’s position in a field and one’s access to and possession of certain kinds of capital resources”.41 This mapping of force relations within the variables of particular social contexts is helpful for an understanding of how technologies are “little crystallized parts of habitus” practiced at the intersection of social structure and agency.42 Reading Sterne’s words, the more recent media phenomenon of selfies comes to mind. I discussed selfies in Chapter 3 with reference to the interface between ordinary media use and performance of extraordinary self that social network participation can involve. Adopted by celebrities and non-celebrities alike, selfies nonetheless demonstrate one habitus among the many that are deployed in digital media spaces in service of a continuum of tactics of “microcelebrity”.43 Accordingly, in drawing attention to the massive multiplication of identically formatted selfies on the website Guys With iPhones, the concept of habitus helps to explain something of the tension

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inherent in each photo on that site between individual agency and capital resources, and socially structuring codes of gendered and sexual display. In this case, bodily pose and technological disposition mediate between agency and structure. These are not clones mindlessly copying each other’s postures and aesthetic and affective dispositions. Nevertheless, within a context of media virality, the logic of imitation is hard to overlook. The task at hand is therefore to consider how the circulation of embodied medial dispositions, at some level imitative of each other, may constitute a new form of sharing habitus. An example of the viral phenomenon of “memes” helps to illustrate. “IF THE ARMY GOES GAY” In April 2010, a video entitled “Telephone Remake” was uploaded to YouTube and quickly began circulating online. The video was accompanied by the following description: This is a couple guys located in afghanistan [sic], that re-made the music video by Lady Gaga. . . . Telephone. Prepare yourself for a fantastical journey. Right now this is the temporary version, we have more scenes to cut, and edit, however with guys always on mission it is harder to film than you think.44 Shot on a hand-held camera or cellphone, the video features male soldiers in uniform and in cheaply produced costumes, dancing in couples and in group configurations while sometimes lip-synching to the Lady Gaga song “Telephone”. The costumes and simple choreography show that the video is the result of some amount of preparation and rehearsal. It offers a light-hearted view of down-time activities in an US military installation. At the time of writing, the video had been watched close to seven million times (although other versions also exist on YouTube, suggesting a larger audience) and it had received more than 1,400 viewer comments. Apart from its use of the song, only small elements of “Telephone Remake” connect it explicitly to Lady Gaga’s original video. The soldiers borrow and repeat some of the same choreography, and one soldier appears for part of the video in a copy of one of Lady Gaga’s revealing costumes, made only from yellow crime-scene tape. The degree to which the soldiers have produced a “remake” is therefore debatable. What does transfer across to the remake, however, are gestures to gender and erotic provocation. The original video for “Telephone” was released a month earlier, and YouTube statistics show that it was viewed more than a million times immediately after its release online.45 Directed by Jonas Åkerlund as a short film, the video begins as Lady Gaga’s character is put in prison, creating a stir among the other female inmates. Shortly after, she is bailed out by a character whom

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we take to be her lover, played by Beyoncé who duets on the song, and the couple proceeds to commit a mass murder in a diner before fleeing from the police. Over-the-top costumes, kitschy scenography, and sexualized dancing appear throughout, plus at least one lingering moment of lesbian eroticism. The video wears its pop aesthetic inspirations on its sleeve, in a blatant pastiche of films such as Kill Bill and Thelma and Louise. Particularly in the prison sequence, the video takes a self-consciously exploitative slant on female same-sex desire and the racialized erotics of criminality. By relocating some of these themes to a US military location in Afghanistan, the soldiers of “Telephone Remake” allow the viewer to interpret their experience as affectively similar to incarceration. Overtly borrowed elements come mainly from the original video’s prison sequence, which is also the most titillating. Inasmuch as Lady Gaga’s embodied media presence riffs on ideas of post-feminist social and sexual liberalization and queer acceptance,46 the video for her song “Telephone” deploys the trope of imprisonment in a parodic, imaginary time and space beyond feminist and LGBT consciousness. Prison is hyperbolically represented as, in simple terms, a space of sexy queer freedom. And so, oddly enough, is military life in “Telephone Remake”. The eroticism of men dancing together seems fairly simply to be embraced, particularly in the face of conditions of enclosure: the song offers “a fantastical journey”, despite circumstances in which it is “harder to film than you think”. Around the same time “Telephone Remake” was circulating online, more videos came to light on YouTube in which male US military personnel dance or lip-synch during down-time to pop songs by female artists. In one humorously named “Your Tax Dollars at Work”, a group of male marines appear to interrupt their manual workshop activities with a simply choreographed dance (the “cha cha slide”) focusing on hip and groin movements. The accompanying text includes the disclaimer, “Relax, were [sic] just having some fun”.47 A similar description appears beneath another video, uploaded four years after the cha cha slide, also wishing to justify the activities taking place. This video is titled “It’s Not Gay to Sing Taylor Swift”, and it features three fresh-faced young marines in a tightly confined space, happily lipsynching “You Belong With Me” to each other and directly to camera. Lest the viewer mistakenly believe that it is gay to lip-synch a Taylor Swift love song to other men, the following explanation is given: things start to get monotinous [sic] so we have to keep ourselves entertained some how and when your around the same people every hour of the day you really stop caring what they think of you so you just act strange or “gay” because they know your just trying to keep from going crazy being in a combat area [sic].48 This elaborate disclaimer fills in for what is merely implied in the description of “Your Tax Dollars at Work”. There, the viewer is asked to “relax”,

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not because their tax dollars are being wasted, we might assume; indeed, the marines continue to work while dancing. Rather, what they call “fun” is described by the producer of “It’s Not Gay to Sing Taylor Swift” as acting or singing “gay”. In that description, a fascinating explanatory logic sees circumstances slip easily into attitude into behavior and then into justification: monotony equals not caring about what others think, equals acting strangely, equals acting “gay”, and acting “gay” is acceptable within combat conditions. Note also a familiar repetition of the word “just” in both videos’ descriptions, claiming distance from acts performed and suggesting unconscious reflexes to particular circumstances: “just having some fun”, “just act strange or ‘gay’ ”, “just trying to keep from going crazy”. All of the videos mentioned here reflect some anxiety about what Sedgwick richly described many years ago as the “arbitrarily mapped, selfcontradictory, and anathema-riddled quicksands” of homosociality. Having to disavow the overlaps and ambiguities present in this unstable space of male same-sex interactions generates a constant state of panic, she continued: a “permanent threat” of definitional ungroundedness and potential loss of heterosexual masculine privilege.49 The masculinist and blatantly homophobic culture of many nations’ military institutions, including the United States’, offers a paradigm case. Sedgwick writes: In these institutions [the armed forces], where both men’s manipulability and their potential for violence are at the highest possible premium, the prescription of the most intimate male bonding and the proscription of (the remarkably cognate) “homosexuality” are both stronger than in civilian society—are, in fact, close to absolute.50 A final example from the dancing soldier meme is the plainest (and most puerile) yet in naming homosexuality as an agreed upon threat to military culture, all the while featuring male soldiers reveling in the definitional ambiguity of activities supposed to scan as “gay”. “If the Army Goes Gay” takes as its premise news of the acceptance of gays in the military, and proceeds to offer a view of the likely results. These include lots of male soldiers dancing on military equipment, sometimes shirtless, sometimes aping erotic positions with each other and sometimes twerking; suggestive glances and hand signals in the showers; massage; disco-like flashing lights; and fluorescent panels on clothing. “Blah Blah Blah”, a song by Ke$ha about a young woman refusing the unwanted advances of men, plays over the top of these images. The producer of this video, too, offers a familiar justification in anticipation of critique: This feature was 100% my idea (. . .) Should you be offended no one else is to blame. Besides you don’t really want to cause a few of young

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It is unclear whether this message is addressed to viewers who would be offended by the video’s “gay” content—that is, those who would wish to protect the military from this sort of thing—or to those who would be offended by its homophobia. It is, after all, deeply if stupidly homophobic, and perhaps intentionally so. Both “gay” activities and homophobia defer here to the self-evidence of “a good time”, and both reading positions, curiously, require the viewer to force themselves to be more honest about how good that time is. In other words, the potentially critical viewer—whether homophobic or homofriendly—is being positioned in parallel with those queer members of the US military whose newly won right to honesty this video satirizes. Viewers too, it seems, can now “come out”—to admit how much they “loved” this demonstration of the contradictions of homosocial desires, even though the men embodying these desires cannot themselves come out as anything but “trying to have a good time”, “just having some fun”, “keep[ing] ourselves entertained”, or “keep[ing] from going crazy”. To link discussion back to Abu Ghraib, it is clear that the ambiguously erotic scenes staged there are also available to a queer analysis of this kind, and many authors have taken this approach very well. What went on in Abu Ghraib can certainly be approached in the terms offered by Sedgwick’s indispensable analysis of the queer underpinnings of all masculinity. Like in the dancing videos, we would see evidence—different evidence, mostly— of panicked attempts to restabilize heterosexual masculine privilege and authority through the forceful exclusion of gender and sexual (and racial) aberrance. We see exclusion, however, operating only through a staging of scenes of the very same aberrance. For Mirzoeff, the Abu Ghraib photos document “the performance of the new imperial masculinity”, especially through staged scenes of sodomy, a malleable term covering a range of activities all of which affirm dominant masculinity by “negative differentiation”. Reading this sodomy in historical context, Mirzoeff sees in the photos that “sodomy was visualized as embodied spectacle, a mass of alterity that confirmed the long-standing sense of the ‘Oriental’ as deviant”.52 Similarly for Judith Butler, “the ostensible shame of sodomy” was specifically deployed in the torture as a racializing and dehumanizing tactic, equating homosexuality “with the decimation of personhood”. Defining personhood is the presumptive and violent right of a homophobic US military whose members must “externalize this truth” of homosexuality from themselves.53 Moreover, in her discussion of rhetoric around the staged homoerotic abuses in Abu Ghraib, Jasbir Puar points out how limited readings of sodomy were deployed to support both homophobic and purportedly liberal perspectives on the sexually humiliating nature of the photos. Both positions worked to “naturaliz[e] ‘Arab’ or ‘Muslim cultural difference’ ” by arguing, in effect, that forced sodomy is most humiliating for Muslim men.

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Such a claim can be used both to justify the torture and to condemn it. Puar writes: A deeply heterosexist (and racist and imperialist) reading of sodomy is mobilized in order to emphasize the extremity of violence, to provide what is understood, in essence, as a progressive, attentive, multicultural, postcolonial interpretation of cultural difference.54 Puar’s take on this material is compelling because it illuminates continuities and complicities between the Orientalist and homophobic imperatives of the War on Terror, which are most evident in the Abu Ghraib photos from any perspective, and some adjacent domains in which progressive politics and liberalization are claimed. At these spaces of overlap is what she calls “homonationalism”, where “an exceptional form of national heteronormativity is now joined by an exceptional form of national homonormativity”.55 The rise of certain expressions of privileged and state-sanctioned homosexuality may constitute, Puar argues, “stagings of U.S. nationalism via a praxis of sexual othering, one that exceptionalizes the identities of U.S. homosexualities vis-à-vis Orientalist constructions of ‘Muslim sexuality’ ”.56 Errol Morris’s differential framing of Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman in Standard Operating Procedure may be relevant here. The active role of women in many of the scenes of torture in Abu Ghraib should not alter our perspective of the brutal and panicked imposition of homophobic masculinity via scenes of externalized “homosexuality”. By all accounts, including their own, female soldiers played instrumental roles in these scenes and their mediation. The testimonial evidence in Standard Operating Procedure tells us that England and Harman, for instance, were not most active in orchestrating the abuses, but I have not intended in my analysis to single out women as more or less deserving of critical attention with regard to the abuses committed. England for one is explicit in describing the performance of masculinity she felt compelled to undertake in the military context. Indeed as I argued earlier, her masculinity finds itself in something of a struggle with a more socially recognizable narrative of heterosexual romantic subordination (which she expediently maps on to her attempts to deny responsibility for abuse). Overt displays of heterosexuality, however, are instrumental to the much greater homoeroticized subordination of racialized bodies in the prison. One inflammatory example is the photograph of England and Graner “posing as a dating couple behind a sodomitical pile of prisoners”, representing “the assertion of the imperial body, necessarily straight and white, over the confused sodomitical mass of the embodied spectacle that is the object of empire”.57 This is clearly the exceptionalism of US heteronormativity of which Puar writes. Harman, on the other hand, reveals her queer identity without further comment, in Standard Operating Procedure, through the narrative device of her private letters to her wife. This privileged access to her moral reflections,

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not afforded to her colleagues in the film in the same way, has the possible effect of folding her homosexuality into her moral distinctness. As Williams writes, it is “tempting to wonder if it is accidental that the one woman in the film who openly dissents from the inhumanity of standard operating procedure is a lesbian, a women who had already dissented from the heterosexual and patriarchal status quo that could induce England to hold the leash to please her higher-ranked boyfriend”.58 Following Puar, however, it is equally tempting to wonder whether Harman occupies a position of homonationalism in the film and in the prison. Despite dissenting from the inhumanity of the abuses, Harman remains nonetheless complicit with the frames of war reproduced in the photographs. It may well be that her participation in “stagings of U.S. nationalism via a praxis of sexual othering”, as Puar writes, bolsters the normalization of her own sexual identity via the newly expanded institution of marriage (“my wife”), and via a military institution which was to overturn its ban on openly homosexual personnel not long after the film was produced. These queer theoretical framings are crucial to how we can make sense of Abu Ghraib, and I believe they allow us to position the Abu Ghraib abuses and the dancing soldier videos at different places on the same spectrum of military homosociality. There still remains, though, a need to account more fully for the mediality of the examples. We need to return to the questions of how these media objects circulated, what circulated in them, and what their circulation tells us about the network culture that produced them. From my analysis so far, it could be argued that in all of the examples, despite their important differences, we can discern the contradictory presence of forms of repression and forms of liberation. Rush Limbaugh’s callously applied metaphor of “blowing off steam” would see the soldiers in all cases naturally releasing pressure because of highly trying conditions, that is, experiencing small moments of liberation in repressive circumstances. “Just taking pictures” and “just having fun” are necessary and justifiable, in this view. It may be more accurate, though, to read the forms of repression that are visible in these documents as working in a more complex and uneasy relation to forms of liberalization elsewhere. In this alternative view, torture, homophobia, racism, and gender subordination, for instance, would not be separable from, say, certain human rights campaigns, the same-sex marriage cause, immigration policies, and post-feminism. Clearly, one does not cause the other. But they may animate each other in subtle ways that show up a shared relation to normative frames. As Butler argues: even as the war is framed in certain ways to control and heighten affect in relation to the differential grievability of lives, so war has come to frame ways of thinking multiculturalism and debates on sexual freedom, issues largely considered separate from “foreign affairs”.59 Put in these terms, to argue that the Abu Ghraib photos and the dancing soldier videos are all subject to the same frames of war is not to argue that they

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all establish and police that framing with equal force, or that the framing determines equally what takes place in each example. But they might be read as differently registered variations, captured in moments of shared media habitus, of how affective relations to gender, sexuality, and race are framed by the War on Terror. In all variations, a presumptive affective relation to the aberrance of “homosexuality” and its adjuncts is vectored through the ordinary habits of digital media use, constituting those moments as enactments of the wider norms that framed “homosexuality” as aberrant. Recognizing the activity and interactivity of the soldiers with their media takes us away from a simple reading of how they are merely subjugated by the norms framing their context. They are, in other words, a version of what this book calls “sharing subjects”. To better approach these questions in one final section, I will turn to some recent thinking on the affective dynamics of imitation and relationality which will helps us to see links across all of the content discussed in this chapter, beyond how they illustrate shared subject positions within a structure of identification and power relations. “AN ONTOLOGY OF RELATIONAL ENCOUNTER” The purpose of this chapter has not been to “explain” the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib. That task is certainly beyond any one chapter or person. Rather, it has been an attempt to think about what the photos tell us about the medial circuitry of network culture in which they were both aberrant and somehow exemplary. By reading the scandal alongside other media objects that circulated online not long after Abu Ghraib, I have not wished to claim that the torture photos somehow caused the dancing videos or that the videos somehow imitated the photos. I have wished to suggest that what we now call “sharing”—a process which does seem to account for both the rapid circulation of the dancing videos and some of the imitation occurring between them—might give us a different angle from which to examine the mediality of Abu Ghraib. Of course, the Abu Ghraib scandal broke partly because the photos were shared, rather than because they were “shared”. The distinction is to indicate that my reading has involved a small time-warp in the sense that “sharing” related to online social networks was not quite yet happening when the soldiers in Abu Ghraib shared the photos amongst themselves, leading to one eventually leaking them to investigators. The shared digital media habitus behind the production of the Abu Ghraib photos and the dancing soldier videos, which I have summarized as “just taking pictures” and “just having some fun”, indicates nevertheless that both media sets were produced in relation to an immediate social structure of network formation. Both examples are kinds of networked media event in which social forces and medial forces come to bear on the production, proliferation, and circulation of their objects. As the theory of habitus suggests, habitual acts of (in this case) taking digital photos or videos mediate

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between social structure and individual agency. The fully agentic subject, much loved in certain models of digital media distribution, as this book has critiqued, may not be a stable position from which to best understand acts of production and circulation, let alone the political economy structures around these acts.60 In a challenging recent book, Tony D. Sampson also attempts to decenter the agentic subject from processes of circulation, recognizing in addition the limitations of the biological metaphor of virality. Instead, Sampson takes up social theories of contagion to account for the apparently imitative spread of media content (or other objects) within densely connected networks. His is a theory “couched in an ontology of relational encounter”.61 From this critical position, he regards the social environment of the network not simply in terms of too much connectivity but as an affective atmosphere composed of subrepresentative currents flowing between a porous self and other relations. This opens up the potential for corporate and political powers to tap into a tendency toward imitation-suggestibility by measuring, priming, and manipulating the collective mood. Virality is therefore evident in corporate and political efforts to organize populations by way of the contagions of fear as represented through, for example, the War on Terror.62 Similarly to Grusin, Sampson sees the network circulation of affect as a medium of biopolitical control. The contagious socially spread forces of networks create moments of direct or mediated affective encounter which produce a kind of “imitative subjectivation”.63 This model is helpful for thinking about digital media phenomena such as “memes”, Sampson argues, beyond the biological evolutionary implications that are built into the term (which combines mimetics with genes). In the case of the examples discussed in this chapter, we could argue that complex and even contagious social forces combined with the easy availability of digital media devices to generate moments of imitative encounter. Particular affective relations to other bodies, circulating with selective intensity and authority through overlapping social and media networks, were vectored through these ordinary medial moments. In Sampson’s language, these are not to be understood as moments of fully formed subjects willfully imitating each other, or indeed of subjects being taken over by the force of a contagion replicating itself in passive bodies, but of new subjective relations coming about at the intersection of networked sociality and affective embodiment. If this chapter’s examples illustrate an “ontology of relational encounter” inherent to network culture, then the question of particular subjects’ susceptibility to contagious forces denies easy answers. As we have seen, Grusin’s take on the scandal of Abu Ghraib is that it required viewers of the photos of torture and abuse to consider the continuities between the ordinary media use that produced the archive and their own snapshot practices. So too, in

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Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris has the perpetrators look the film’s viewers in the eye, as it were, through a constructed relational encounter in which recognition of shared humanity might transfer. In neither encounter is there an affective exchange that contagiously propels the viewer to commit torture, or even to justify torture, or for that matter (without wishing to be glib) to choreograph a Lady Gaga imitation. Digital cameras didn’t make the soldiers commit acts of torture, and Morris’s camera doesn’t make his viewers excuse them. We might, though, experience a moment of recognition of shared receptiveness to the dynamics of those networks and devices with which a great number of us have come to define new parameters for intimate relations. Shared receptiveness does not equal an erasure of social differences. If anything, this book has argued that the recent discursive history of particular social differences configures how we map and measure intimate network relations. This is not simply to claim that digital media take up and intensify older forms of homophobia or gender bias, for instance, but rather that some of these very formations are embedded in our capacity to name and enact new networked intimacies. In this way, promiscuous subjects of different kinds are network culture’s index cases. Like the figure of the “homosexual” deployed in the homophobic choreographies analyzed in this chapter, the index case of network promiscuity is at once desired and threatening, exemplary and anomalous.

NOTES 1. Jeff Stein, “CIA Unit’s Wacky Idea: Depict Saddam as Gay,” SpyTalk, May 25, 2010, accessed July 27, 2014, http://voices.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/ 2010/05/cia_group_had_wacky_ideas_to_d.html. 2. Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Invisible Empire: Visual Culture, Embodied Spectacle, and Abu Ghraib,” Radical History Review, no. 95 (2006): 24. 3. Robert Payne, “ ‘Skylarking’: Homosexual Panic and the Death of Private Kovco,” Cultural Studies Review 14, no. 2 (2008): 34–48. 4. Errol Morris, Standard Operating Procedure (Sony Picture Classics, 2008). 5. Linda Williams, “Cluster Fuck: The Forcible Frame in Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure,” Camera Obscura 73 25, no. 1 (2010): 29–67. 6. “Limbaugh on Torture of Iraqis: U.S. Guards Were ‘Having a Good Time,’ ‘Blow[ing] Some Steam Off,’ ” Media Matters for America, accessed July 7, 2014, http://mediamatters.org/research/2004/05/05/limbaugh-on-torture-ofiraqis-us-guards-were-ha/131111. 7. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 8. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London; New York: Verso, 2009), 28. 9. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978). 10. John B. Thompson, “Shifting Boundaries of Public and Private Life,” Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 4 (2011): 49–70.

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11. Lauren Berlant and Lisa A. Duggan, Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest (New York: New York University Press, 2001). 12. James Lull and Stephen Hinerman, eds., Media Scandals (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 3. 13. Joshua Gamson, “Normal Sins: Sex Scandal Narratives as Institutional Morality Tales,” Social Problems 48, no. 2 (2001): 185–205. 14. Melissa Jane Hardie, “The Closet Remediated: Inside Lindsay Lohan,” Australian Humanities Review 48 (2010). 15. Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 63. 16. Butler, Frames of War, 11. 17. Ibid., 10. 18. Ibid., 12. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Williams, “Cluster Fuck,” 52. 22. Grusin, Premediation, 62. 23. Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). 24. Grusin, Premediation, 79. 25. Ibid., 76. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 65. 29. Susan Sontag, “Regarding the Torture of Others,” The New York Times, May 23, 2004, sec. Magazine, accessed July 11, 2014, http://www.nytimes. com/2004/05/23/magazine/regarding-the-torture-of-others.html. 30. Grusin, Premediation, 65. 31. It is worth noting that participants were reportedly paid rather than strictly speaking invited. Michael Cieply and Ben Sisario, “Film on Abu Ghraib Puts Focus on Paid Interviews,” The New York Times, April 26, 2008, sec. Movies, accessed August 1, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/ movies/26morris.html. 32. Williams, “Cluster Fuck,” 33. 33. Grusin, Premediation, 65. 34. Williams, “Cluster Fuck,” 33. 35. Here I refer to Halberstam’s discussion of how masculinity’s relation to male bodies is denaturalized by the presence of particular performative elements. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 1998). 36. Williams, “Cluster Fuck,” 34. 37. Mirzoeff, “Invisible Empire: Visual Culture, Embodied Spectacle, and Abu Ghraib.” 38. Williams, “Cluster Fuck,” 54. 39. Ibid., 58. 40. Jonathan Sterne, “Bourdieu, Technique and Technology,” Cultural Studies 17, no. 3–4 (2003): 375. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 376. 43. Theresa M. Senft, “Microcelebrity and the Branded Self,” in A Companion to New Media Dynamics, ed. John Hartley, Jean Burgess, and Axel Bruns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), 346–54. 44. malibumelcher, “Telephone Remake,” YouTube, April 23, 2010, accessed July 22, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haHXgFU7qNI.

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45. LadyGagaVEVO, “Lady Gaga—Telephone Ft. Beyoncé,” YouTube, March 15, 2010, accessed July 22, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL14 B2220EEEEBFCBF&v=EVBsypHzF3U. 46. See J. Jack Halberstam, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013). 47. “Your Tax Dollars at Work (I’m in the Blue Gloves),” YouTube, November 23, 2007, accessed July 23, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= NX5ZVC1YY1k&feature=youtube_gdata_player. 48. “It’s Not Gay to Sing Taylor Swift,” YouTube, November 3, 2011, accessed July 23, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d_76le4dEo&feature= youtube_gdata_player. 49. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 186. 50. Ibid. 51. “ ‘Military’ Blah Blah Blah Remake—Ke$ha Ft 3OH!3,” YouTube, May 12, 2010, accessed July 23, 2014, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x6mJZTrjs&feature=youtube_gdata_player. The original version of “If the Army Goes Gay” is no longer available. 52. Mirzoeff, “Invisible Empire: Visual Culture, Embodied Spectacle, and Abu Ghraib,” 21. 53. Butler, Frames of War, 90. 54. Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2007), 139–40. 55. Ibid., 2. 56. Ibid., 4. 57. Mirzoeff, “Invisible Empire: Visual Culture, Embodied Spectacle, and Abu Ghraib,” 28. 58. Williams, “Cluster Fuck,” 57. 59. Butler, Frames of War, 26. 60. David W. Park, “Critical Concepts: Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘Habitus’ and the Political Economy of the Media,” Democratic Communiqué 23, no. 1 (2011): 1. 61. Tony D. Sampson, Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 14. 62. Ibid., 13–14. 63. Ibid., 14.

Conclusion

This book has chiefly been concerned with how models of circulation within a network-organized culture are built from and around norms. I have asked, what circulates, how widely, and how densely? What should circulate, what should not, and what circulates too much? What propels circulation, what contains it, and what benefits from it? As these questions indicate, it has been important to show that some of the norms in question are descriptive (what circulates), while others are prescriptive (what should circulate), and others again are proscriptive (what should not circulate). These differences are crucial if the account of network culture wants, as mine has wanted, to move beyond a discussion of innovation or infrastructure or functionality or effects. And rather than approaching these norms only as having emerged from within networks, or only as having been transferred from outside (both may partly be accurate), my interest has been in how the very models by which we understand circulation depend upon the prior functioning of norms. A culture of networks which values and even requires circulation is also partly a space contained by those norms, even if circulation may lead us to question their legitimacy. The norms of which I have written in particular are primarily prescriptive and proscriptive. Beyond description, they provide the normative framing for gender, sexuality, embodiment, intimacy, and even sociality, in contextually specific ways. I have attempted to analyze examples of how these normative frames position subjects unevenly, differentially, and in some cases problematically, in relation to the politics, ethics, and economics of network structures. Queer theory has provided some of the fundamental critical resources for this analysis, both conceptually and methodologically. Uncovering the concealed underpinnings of institutionalized knowledges and normative social structures, and reimagining them otherwise, an established tradition of queer critique has inspired this book’s attempt to complicate how to think about the intimacies we call promiscuous. It has also encouraged me to stage a promiscuous encounter of my own, between objects of discussion and intellectual disciplines that do not always come into contact but have interesting things to exchange with one another.

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The trope of failure, recently instrumental to a particular branch of queer theorists, weaves its way into the conceptual and methodological accounts of the preceding chapters. My elaboration of the promiscuity of network culture is in many ways the elaboration of an ambiguous relation to failure. Models of promiscuous circulation, such as virality and “whoredom”, are named as such within dominant discourses to claim a distance from the purported success of social and sexual norms. Both models are represented as an excess of intimacy and circulation, and so they necessarily also signal the failure of containment measures. As Judith Halberstam tells us, a queer critique of failure is therefore one which sees a critical opportunity to destabilize how success and failure are established as normative logics.1 Failure of this kind may not only be a constitutive anomaly within a system, as seen across the range of examples in this book, but an opportunity to imagine that system less rigidly and more ethically. Of this opportunity, Halberstam asks: What kind of rewards can failure offer us? Perhaps most obviously, failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods.2 In these terms, failure could be a way out of regimes of “securitization” identified by Richard Grusin, such as restrictive media frames that premediate possible affective futures.3 Grusin is not talking about human life cycles per se but there may be an interesting overlap between mediated affects and how temporalities themselves, for Halberstam and others, are always already normalized around the presumption of and aspiration towards success within a limited conception of the life schedules of family, reproduction, work, productivity, and so on.4 If the recent language of virality that names successful network circulation is an unlikely rebranding of queer failure, as this book argues, then the norms framing successful “sharing” must be made to work harder to reinforce their secure position. With failure lurking queerly at their core, success and recognition are precarious. QUEER ANALYTICS SNAPSHOT As I was completing the manuscript for this book, I came to consider more clearly my own relation to the precarious success of network circulation and how its measures are being taken up within the context of academia. One day during this period, I went to the website of my publisher in order to show someone what this press’s covers look like. To my surprise, my own book was already listed among the forthcoming releases, even though I had not finished writing it. I felt excited and proud; if the publisher was already advertising it, then my book was real and not just a folder of documents on

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my computer. Needless to say, perhaps, my immediate reaction was to share this moment of pride. After a few minutes grappling with the question of whether it was hypocritical to share official news of my book’s upcoming publication through one of the very means that my book critiques, I settled on my decision. I posted the link to Facebook. And then I posted the link to Academia.edu, a social network for academics wishing to share research interests and publications. A generous response from Facebook friends helped to alleviate the anxiety of releasing my first book into the world, but the feeling of hypocrisy did not go away. Furthermore, the desire to track who had Liked and shared and commented on my post was very difficult to ignore. I realized that an initial motivating sense of pride had been overtaken by a projection of possible dismissal and failure. Throughout the period of writing this book, I have also received weekly emails from Academia.edu offering me my “analytics snapshot”. This includes the number of profile views, the number of document views, a breakdown of sources of traffic to my profile and documents, top keywords used to find my profile and documents, and the exact date, time, and location of viewing.5 While this information is visible by default only to the user, the choice is available to make it public. This suite of information is by no means exceptional, and serves to bring the website in line with most other digital applications for which complex data analytics are now a central component. For those who choose to use the site, profile analytics also serve to bring one aspect of academic production further in line with consumer-driven models of market capitalism. As on other social networks, the effort undertaken to build and maintain a profile—perhaps with the goal of increasing traffic, perhaps with the goal of increasing distribution of content—represents another level of immaterial labor within the information and creative economies. A spate of scholarship has emerged in recent years to critically examine the implications on academic labor and those who perform it of an increasingly marketized higher education sector in many countries.6 In a recent article focused on universities in the UK but also pertinent elsewhere, Rosalind Gill argues: exploitation within the contemporary Academy operates in and through technologies of selfhood that are producing new kinds of labouring subject: individualised, responsibilised, self-managing and monitoring, and increasingly carrying their office or workplace “on board” at all times in a mobile device.7 Putting aside questions of the site’s usefulness or desirability to its users, there is no doubt that Academia.edu opens a separate space in which the technologies of academic selfhood that Gill describes can be finely exercised, similarly to what has been happening for some time on other digital platforms that extend individual academic labor, whether voluntarily (such as blogs) or less voluntarily (such as official university websites). As Gill elaborates, however,

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the precarity of workplace conditions and career prospects for a high proportion of academic workers casts doubt on the ability to clearly distinguish which forms of labor are truly voluntary and which conceal themselves under the cloak of required professional development. Nominally separate from institutions, Academia.edu offers a complementary set of performance metrics to add to those that more directly affect academic workers’ livelihoods, in countries including the UK and Australia. The user-generated distribution model on which the site operates, though, may also compete with institutional performance metrics because it diverts some traffic away from the websites of academic publishers on whose data analytics official ranking systems are based. The otherwise desirable ability of users to control their own content may in fact jeopardize full and accurate recognition of some academic workers’ publication activity and its all-important “impact”.8 Even very briefly touching on the literature of neoliberal academic labor gives meaningful context to my autobiographical diversion. In a professional sector increasingly set up to minutely monitor and measure the success of subjects and to facilitate outsourcing of these functions to the subjects themselves in the manner of governmentality, feelings of failure are surely never far away. And as much of the literature points out, questions of gender, in particular, intersect with neoliberal labor structures to produce an uneven distribution of these affective relations and how and where they are embodied. My own desire to participate in this implicitly competitive structure of sharing is therefore troubling. My intention here is not to slip back into the register of “gay white male shame” as some universalized position of queer failure and precarity. Rather, in the process of concluding a book that claims some version of queer critique is necessary to rethink the tacit normativities of everyday media use, I simply wish to suggest that moments of contradiction are critically productive. My moment of risky flirtation with “queer liberalism”, perhaps not the only one, challenges me to be attentive to what propels mechanisms for success in network circulation.9 It was my own queer analytics snapshot. FAILURE OF SECURITY More than many of us, Chelsea Manning knows all about queer precarity. Her case offers both a coda to my discussions of homosocial outbreak in Chapter 5, and a way to wrap up this conclusion by thinking a little differently about the stakes of network circulation. Manning, a soldier in the US Army, was convicted in July 2013 for leaking a large number of classified documents, and was sentenced a month later to thirty-five years in prison. The day after receiving this sentence, Manning publicly announced her transgender identity, having been officially known until then as Bradley. She released a statement to the media indicating her plan to live as a woman and

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her wish to be addressed by her new name and feminine pronouns. Some media sources did not comply with this request, and much debate ensued as to how to think about with questions of Manning’s identity in relation to the charges for which she was imprisoned. Manning’s case was already compelling, partly because of the various facets of the media spectacle of WikiLeaks, the rogue website to which Manning delivered thousands of documents.10 As Bradley Manning, she had put a face to the long-speculated source of the WikiLeak’s flow of classified material. As a US soldier serving in a context of heightened measures of securitization, Manning’s actions were to be a litmus test of public opinions, media biases, and politicians’ stances towards militarization, nationalism, and the role of information in a democratic society. It may not be surprising, then, that Manning’s defense team advised her to hold off on disclosing her transgender status until her trial was over, hoping, it seems, to prevent confusing the two issues. Nevertheless, the disclosure made the case more compelling, even if one undesirable but wholly predictable outcome was an increased circulation of transphobia in and around reports of Manning, her past, her actions, and the rights of transgender people in relation to medical treatments and the prison system. By curious coincidence, one report opens with the claim that Manning “lip-synced to Lady Gaga while he [sic] downloaded thousands of classified documents from military servers”.11 For this journalist, the Manning story begins with a parallelism between crossgender performance and multiple willful acts of breaking classification. As I argued of military homosociality in the last chapter, the trope of disclosure appears to be richly available in the Manning case, too. It is difficult not to read her disclosure of transgender identity alongside the disclosures of information for which she was convicted. Those wishing to see the latter actions as criminal would have no trouble making the leap to claim the former as untruthful, and that some continuum of causality exists between the two. One writer uses the opportunity of the “PC agenda” served by the pronoun change to attack Manning, “his absurd request”, and all other transgender people whose transition can be reduced to “a psychiatric problem”. Signaling her belligerent disrespect for the Associated Press directive on the matter, this journalist adds the term “illegal immigrants” to those she refuses to change in future stories. By association, Manning too, jailed for “betraying his country”, is nothing more than an outlaw; “his” gender “problem” figures linguistically as a problem of national security.12 Dismissing all of these positions, as we must if we are to take Manning’s own word seriously, there remains the question of how “truths” of gender are mediated in the manner of information to be disclosed. In other words, what do we learn about contemporary media culture if the disclosed “truth” of Chelsea Manning’s gender became, in some media reports, not just another leak to add to the list, but the leak which retrospectively modeled the clandestine delivery and subsequent circulation of state secrets? And what do we learn about network culture, beyond this epistemology of the closet, if

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Manning’s gender became the viral object with which to measure the failure of security in systems not previously understood to be porous? In their discussion of network politics, to which I made reference in Chapter 4, Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker argue that modern geopolitical relations are characterized by “symmetrical political conflicts waged by centralized power blocs” as well as by “asymmetrical political conflicts in which networked actors struggle against centralized powers.” Asymmetrical interventions against centralized power have inspired, they continue, the concept of “the exploit” which names their book. Borrowed from the world of software systems and hacking, the term names “a resonant flaw designed to resist, threaten, and ultimately desert the dominant political diagram”.13 Like a computer virus, an “exploit” is a network anomaly that troubles and destabilizes the functioning of power from within, attacking the centralized location of power. In the slippage between “classified” systems of national security and of stable gender, and between the leaking of information and the disclosure of identity, the mediatized figure of Chelsea Manning circulates as a polyvalent anomaly—a kind of exploit. Incarceration of the queer body of Chelsea Manning—as a man, without access to hormone or sexreassignment options—aims materially to contain the overlapping security risks which the mediatized figure has been constructed to symbolize. The power of the exploit “to resist, threaten, and ultimately desert” analogizes the symbolic opportunity of queer failure to allow us to “escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior”.14 It remains to be seen whether this chance for escape will be more than symbolic for Chelsea Manning, and for others whose lived experience of precarity and non-recognition may in fact be exacerbated by some forms of network circulation. I have hoped to demonstrate that paying queer critical attention to how we conceive of models of circulation, and not just to what circulates, may help us to question the legitimacy of network culture’s prescriptions and proscriptions.

NOTES 1. Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). 2. Ibid., 3. 3. Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 4. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 5. Academia.edu, accessed July 29, 2014, https://www.academia.edu. 6. See for instance Ruth Barcan, Academic Life and Labour in the New University (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Melissa Gregg, Work’s Intimacy (Cambridge: Polity, 2011).

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7. Rosalind Gill, “Academics, Cultural Workers and Critical Labour Studies,” Journal of Cultural Economy 7, no. 1 (2014): 13. 8. For this insight, I am grateful to Cristyn Davies. 9. David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam, and José Esteban Muñoz, “Introduction: What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?,” Social Text 23, no. 3–4 (2005): 1–17. 10. For a thorough discussion, see Jayson Harsin, “Wikileaks’ Lessons for Media Theory and Politics,” FlowTV, January 15, 2011, accessed July 30, 2014, http://flowtv.org/2011/01/wikileaks-lessons-for-media-theory/. 11. “Profile: Private First Class Manning,” BBC News, April 23, 2014, accessed July 30, 2014, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-11874276. 12. Emily Miller, “MILLER: AP Calls Bradley Manning a ‘She’ and Liberal Media Fall in Line with PC Agenda,” The Washington Times, August 29, 2013, accessed July 30, 2014, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/29/ap-callsbradley-manning-she-and-liberal-media-fal/. 13. Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 21. Italics in original. 14. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 3.

Index

Abu Ghraib 15, 120–3; photographs 120–31 Academia.edu 148 adultery 98, 102 affect: and governmentality 127; indifference 132–3; and media 75–6, 126–8; and media coverage of war 124–5, 140; and network circulation 142; see also labor, affective Andrejevic, Mark 17n21, 34–5, 61n13 Aniston, Jennifer 19–20 attention: as commodity 65–6, 74; divided 4–5; economy 5, 68; excessive 63–5; gendering of 72; self-conscious accumulation 65, 79–80, 83, 89; and sexualized body 80–1; see also celebrity, viral; media whore authenticity: online presence 70–1 barebacking 15, 43, 48–52, 55–6 Berlant, Lauren 2–3 Bersani, Leo 38, 51, 55–6 biopolitics 35, 114, 127, 142 blood donation, and gay men 7 Boorstin, Daniel 68 Burgess, Jean 31 Butler, Judith 11, 123–5, 133, 138, 140 boyd, danah 23; see also Marwick, Alice and danah boyd Cahill, Keenan 35 call waiting 5 capitalism: communicative 9, 12, 21, 32, 126; and feminism 106–7; friction-free 45; and queer

subcultures 26; viral 10, 23, 26; see also labor celebrity 15, 19, 63–4, 67, 69, 74, 76, 82; as contagion 67–8, 75; microcelebrity 66, 69; and selfies 79; social media use 70, 76; and Twitter 70; viral 65–6, 78, 93–4; “well-knownness” 68; see also Franco, James; gossip blogs; Hilton, Perez; Kardashian, Kim; labor childhood, as figure of innocence and vulnerability 111 China 98, 101 closet, epistemology of the 76, 78, 86, 123, 124, 150 Cohen, Jared 108, 115 contagion: affective 75, 96; and containment 98, 100; homosexuality as 87–8; outbreak narratives 93–4, 98–9; social 142; see also celebrity; viruses Contagion 15, 95–104 Coté, Mark and Jennifer Pybus 11, 34, 36 Couldry, Nick 70 Crimp, Douglas 24–5, 49, 94 cruising 50–1; and James Franco 83; see also hook-up apps and websites; sex clubs Cruising 83–4, 87–9 data analytics 10, 114, 115, 148 Dean, Jodi 9, 12, 21, 32, 34 Dean, Tim 16 n.1, 48–52, 56, 57 Delany, Samuel R. 50 Deleuze, Gilles 114, 127 democracy 9, 11–12, 33 Dugas, Gaetan; see Patient Zero

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Index

England, Lynndie 129–34, 139–40 entrepreneurialism: and call waiting 5; and Facebook 50, 54, 59; and Google 115; and James Franco 77; and Kim Kardashian 65, 69, 71; and online sharing 6, 121; and post-feminism 74; and post-viral virality 15, and social networking 35, 46 Facebook 15, 53–5, 58; censorship 55; corporate partners 45; criticism of 46–7; and frictionless sharing 15, 44–7, 57; Like feature 29–30; number of users 45; Open Graph 41, 46–7, 50, 57; and premediation 54; Promoted Posts 54–5; and remediation 53; and securitization 58; ten years old 120; Timelines 41–2; and user labor 11; see also Zuckerberg, Mark feminism: carceral 95, 112; liberal 72, 106–7; postcolonial 113; second wave 37, 72; see also post-feminism Foucault, Michel 25, 76, 114, 123, 127 framing: normative function 124–5, 133, 140; and photography 128 Franco, James 15, 65; and gay sex 84–6; heterosexuality 89; and Instagram 77, 80; promiscuous public presence 77–8; and queer theory 76; and selfies 78–83; speculation about sexuality 76, 87; see also Interior. Leather Bar. Fraser, Nancy 95, 117n38 Fuller, Jacquelline 108–11 Galloway, Alexander and Eugene Thacker 109, 114–15, 151 Gates, Bill 45 gay men 7, 24; association to HIV 24, 110; and the military 136–8; and sex 50–1, 84–7, 119; see also barebacking; cruising; hook-up apps and websites Gibbs, Anna 75 Gill, Rosalind 74, 148 Google 15; Global Human Trafficking Hotline Network 107–9; and network control 114–15; and

user labor 11, 45, 46, 114, 127; see also Cohen, Jared; Fuller, Jacquelline gossip blogs 74–6 governmentality 26, 113; academic labor and 149; affect and 127; human trafficking and 112; postfordist 95 Gregg, Melissa 34–5, 97, 104 Grusin, Richard 14, 19, 36, 53, 58, 126–8 Guys With iPhones 82 habitus 134–5, 141–2 Hahn, Jessica 72, 73 Halberstam, Judith 14, 25, 144n35, 147 Hall, Stuart 32 Hardie, Melissa 76, 124 Harman, Sabrina 131–4, 139–40 heteronormativity 3, 103, 129; and Abu Ghraib 139; of active/passive binary 38; challenged by hook-up apps 59–60; and gay sex 85–6; and HIV/AIDS panic 10, 23; and promiscuity 13, 26 heterosexuality 139; heterosexual male privilege 122, 138; heterosexual men and gay sex 84, 86; open secret of 89; romance 2, 106; see also homosociality Hilton, Perez 63, 74–6 HIV/AIDS 7, 48–50, 88, 100–1, 109–11; Africanization 101; analogy to human trafficking 109–10, 113; association to sexual promiscuity 24, 49; Grim Reaper awareness campaign 110; panic 10, 13, 23–4; as queer social bond 50; Robert Mapplethorpe and 83; and sex work 109; see also Patient Zero; safe sex Hollande, François 7 homonationalism 4, 139, 140 homophobia 86; and HIV/AIDS 23–5, 49; and the military 137–8; and the War on Terror 139 homosexuality: as aberrant 141; as contagion 87–8; as homicidal 83; as weapon 119; see also gay men homosociality 86; and military masculinity 121–3, 137 hook-up apps and websites 59–60, 81–2

Index human trafficking 15, 95; analogy to HIV transmission 109–10; critical perspectives 112–13; Global Human Trafficking Hotline Network 107–9, see also sex trafficking humanism 44, 47 Hussein, Saddam 119 imitation 135, 141 index case 93, 99, 103, 116, 143; see also Patient Zero; Typhoid Mary index patient; see index case Instagram 80–1; see also Franco, James interactivity 27–34 Interior. Leather Bar. 83–9 interpassivity 33, 34 intimacy 2; and barebacking 50; and cruising 50; and digital media 42; and frictionless sharing 44; infrastructures of 59; and gossip blogs 74; as labor 97–8; and risk 56; mobile intimacy 97, 103; and sexual promiscuity 25; Jay-Z 63–4 Jenkins, Henry 9, 28–9, 46 journalism, digital 3 Kardashian, Kim 15; as brand 71; and Kanye West 63–4, 89n14; promiscuous public presence 65; marriage to Kris Humphries 68; and post-feminism 73–4; and Twitter 68–71 Keeping Up With the Kardashians 66–8 Klout 10–13 knowledge: and discourse of trafficking 112; inside 76, 124; sex as embodied 25; subjugated 25; see also closet, epistemology of the Knowles, Beyoncé 63–4 labor 11, 45; academic 148–9; affective 127, 133; celebrity 71, 73, 78, 89; domestic vs. corporate 106; friending as 35; immaterial 11, 36, 66; intimacy as 97–8; free 11, 46; leisure/labor divide 54; mobile 95; networking as 97; sharing as 36 Lady Gaga 135–6, 150 Limbaugh, Rush 122 liveness 42, 70

155

Mallon, Mary; see Typhoid Mary McRobbie, Angela 4, 73 Manning, Chelsea 149–51 Mapplethorpe, Robert 80, 83 marriage: analogy to media consumption 3; same-sex 4, 140 Marwick, Alice and danah boyd 66, 69, 70, 76, 79, masculinity, and barebacking 52; denaturalized 144n35; hegemonic 107; and Lynndie England 129, 139; military 121, 136–8; transnational business 107 Mathews, Travis; see Interior. Leather Bar. mediality 19 media whore 63–5, 71–4 memes 122, 142; dancing soldier videos 135–8 microcelebrity; see celebrity Mirzoeff, Nicholas 138 monetization 11, 45–6 monogamy 105; and digital devices 4 Morozov, Evgeny 61n38 Mother 5 Muslim men: humiliation of sodomy 138 neoliberalism: and academic labor 149; and affective labor 97; and carceral feminism 112; and communicative capitalism 9, 21, 34; and friending 35; and governmentality 95, 113; and post-feminism 74; and viral capitalism 23, 95 netwar 109 networks: and control 114–15; exploits 151; illicit 108–10; network culture 5–6; network effect 46, 53, 114; networked publics 23; norms of circulation 146; and sovereignty 115 O’Reilly, Tim 46 Orientalism 138–9 Parikka, Jussi 10, 23–4, 26, 58 Patient Zero 26, 93–4, 100–1 photography, digital: and biopower 127; and habit 132–3; ordinariness 127–8, 129–33; see also Abu Ghraib; Instagram; selfies

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Index

post-feminism 4, 19, 73, 75, 81, 105–6, 136, 140. premediation 36, 53–4, 58, 126 Project Cascade 22–3, 26–7 promiscuity: and attention 4–5; consumers 3; and contagion narratives 93; and contemporary media culture 1–4; disciplinary 14, 25; and digital journalism 3; double bind 116; as ethics of care 49, 56; and failure 147; and gay men 7, 24–5, 49; and HIV 7, 24–5, 49; media presence 67, 74, 77; and Patient Zero 100; and popularity 34; and safe sex 25, 49; and sex panics 110; and sharing 7–8, 13; and Typhoid Mary 99; see also barebacking; cruising; media whore; sex clubs Puar, Jasbir K. 138–9 queer: bonds 16; failure 147, 151; liberalism 149; sex; see gay sex; sociality 43–4, 50, 55–60; theory 2, 57, 146 Race, Kane 59 remediation, double logic of 53 risk 55–8; rebranded 21–2; and securitization 36; sexual practices 7, 24; and viral capitalism 26; and virality 27, 38; see also barebacking safe sex 25, 27 scandal: Abu Ghraib as 120, 124; Jim Bakker sex scandal 72; media narrativization 123–4; as outbreak 123–4 securitization 36, 58, 126, 147, 150 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 76, 86, 122, 137 selfies 78–83, 134–5 Senft, Theresa M. 66, 69 Sex and the City 1, 8 sex clubs 51 sex panic 110–11 sex trafficking; see human trafficking sexting 81 sex work 109–10

sharing 6–8, 22, 121, 141; economy 45; frictionless 15, 41–8, 50, 53, 57–8; sharing subject 34–6, 141 Simpson, O.J. 67 Smartwater 19–20 sodomy 138–9 spreadable media 28–9 Standard Operating Procedure 16, 121, 128–34, 139–40 Sterne, Jonathan 33, 134 subjectivity: constructed in relation to digital technology 57–8, 60; and imitation 142; loss of 51, 56; sharing subject 34–6; subject/ object binary 58–9 Swan, Elaine 106–7 television: and interactivity 34; liveness 70; public/private space 72–3; reality TV 66 Terranova, Tiziana 5–6 transgender 149–50; transphobia 150; see also Manning, Chelsea transnational corporate identity 106–7 Twitter 30, 69–71; retweet function 30 Typhoid Mary 93–4, 99 Up in the Air 15, 104–7 Vaidhyanathan, Siva 46, 114–15 virality: marketing 25; media 8, 19–22, 28–32, 46; as metaphor 9, 23, 28, 142; and promiscuity 7; post-viral 9–10, 20–7, 49; see also capitalism, viral; celebrity, viral; memes viruses 8–9: biological 95–6; computer 7, 8–9, 23, 26, 35; see also HIV/ AIDS; contagion Wald, Priscilla 93, 98–101 Warner, Michael 86, 88 Watney, Simon 24, 25, 49, 117n23 West, Kanye 63, 73, 89n14 WikiLeaks 150 Williams, Linda 126, 128, 129, 132, 133, 140 YouTube 21, 31 Žižek, Slavoj 32–3 Zuckerberg, Mark 15, 41–2, 44–7