Digital Reset: Critical and Creative Interventions to Rewire Sense-Making, with G Langlois, R Sharp, C Fahner, I Jucan, R Vasudevan
This paper explores how critical theory, art and performance develop alternatives to the dominant social media paradigm of psycho-social exploitation. Social media short-circuit experience and sense-making through a logic where modes of data exploitation take over the processes of affect and cognition. Tentacular and everywhere, corporate social media giants seem to present two options – either embrace them and their (false) promises or cancel them altogether. Digital reset explores another option: that of providing moments where the circuits of experience and sense-making can be reorganized and reinvented. The paper specifically focuses on three adversarial collaborations with digital infrastructures that rewire sense-making: questioning equivalences; parasitizing existing systems and animating malicious deceivers.
Published in Media Theory, 2026
Vol. 10 No. 1 (2026): Stimulating Media: Cognitive and Sensory Approaches
Topics: Critical Internet Studies | Fake News | Media Studies | Method |