Forskning
Digital doom: Transmedial representation and narration in political fiction and news media
In this project, I explore how digital media, with its specific complex and somewhat obscure technical aspects, represents itself, and how it is represented by other media types. I hypothesize that digital media is incorporated into a transmedial narrative in which technological advancements are inherently perceived as a threat to a ‘real,’ interpersonal society, and that this narrative has serious effects on media legitimacy and literacy. I will investigate this narrative through a comparative study, by analysing the media characteristics, similarities and differences, that can be distinguished between different qualified media types that are realised or distributed through the internet as a technical media, within the specific context of political fiction and news media. The material, mainly political novels and tv-series alongside news podcasts and YouTube-videos, will be collected and analysed through both traditional hermeneutic methods of literary analysis and new digital humanities methods with the aim to illuminate how theinternet as technical media is represented in these qualified media types. I expect to find that the internetis transmedially narrated as a form of digital dystopia, and that specific characteristics of the internet contra other technical media are used to signify this dystopia. Ultimately, I propose that this digital dystopia narrative has negative effects on intra and intermedial relations in qualified media, effecting both media legitimacy and literacy.