Distracted Present, Golden Past?

Abstract

According to diverse recurrent cultural diagnoses, networked media is atrophying our affective, cognitive and somatic capacities through its distracting, rapid speeds. Echoing critiques of modernity and media technology voiced since the mid-nineteenth century, these accounts are broadly premised on loss in arguing that a general disenchantment is hollowing out our sociability and personal experiences alike. Building on Jane Bennett’s critique of the modern narrative of disenchantment, this article explores ambiguity as a means of resisting totalising accounts of the present, as well as for accounting for the affective complexities involved in our engagements with devices, apps and platforms as these yield different rhythms and experiential horizons of possibility. In doing so, it asks what kinds of figures of the past narratives of loss evoke and what social hierarchies and contextual nuances are effaced when sketching out the mediated present.