Queering Media Suggestion from Mass Hysteria to AI Deception: inventing imaginaries for more just and equitable media futures.

Tools

Blackman, Lisa. 2025. Queering Media Suggestion from Mass Hysteria to AI Deception: inventing imaginaries for more just and equitable media futures. In: Annette Hill; Simon Dawes and Joke Hermes, eds. A Critical Media Imaginaries Playbook. Bristol: Intellect. [Book Section] (Forthcoming)

Text
Lisa Blackman media imaginaries final Feb 2025.docx
Download (57kB)

Abstract or Description

This chapter will reflect on some of the competing and colliding media imaginaries that structured my own entry into the disciplines of media, communications, and cultural studies in the 1990’s. As this edited book explores, media imaginaries are never just about different media forms and practices, but they are also about the myths, assumptions, stories, structures of feeling, histories, and socialized ways of imagining that frame how we understand the power of media and communication technologies in different conjunctures. In this chapter I explore the overlaps between my personal imaginaries and those normalized media imaginaries which have been the subject of my research over many decades, including the challenges of contagious communication. The reflections specifically explore how we might make better use of the concept of 'imaginary' in the struggle for more just and equitable media futures, which foreground and decentre the whiteness, ableism, and heteronormativity of imaginaries that have shaped the problem of media suggestion. I offer the concept of grey media as a social imaginary that can do some of this work with its commitment to staging the social pathologies of reason and its close relationship to disorder and deception. The chapter is organised through three examples which approach imaginaries in and through media, or even as media to stage some of the paradoxes, challenges, and problems of deceptive communication. In a contemporary conjuncture, some of these challenges have been increasingly placed at the centre of contemporary debates about power, networks, information, truth, reason, and what is constituted as social pathology. This includes in the context of so-called AI Deception and with how apparatuses of deceit and deception (disinformation) induce and produce processes of attachment and refusal, as they move and circulate within convoluted media environments.

Item Type:

Book Section