Habitual New Media: Exposing Empowerment
New media technologies provoke both anxiety and hope: anxiety over surveillance and hope for empowerment. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals that these two reactions complement rather than oppose each other by emphasizing how exposure is necessary in order for networks to work. Addressing the key ways that gender plays—and has historically played—into negotiating media exposure, she examines how “habits of privacy” persist and are fostered, often to our detriment.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is professor and chair of modern culture and media at Brown University. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics and Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. She has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, as well as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.