New Media Pharmacology: Hansen, Whitehead, and Worldly Sensibility

Abstract

New media theorist Mark Hansen, in Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-first Century Media and a series of articles, argues that the most sophisticated forms of media technology today have the capacity to broaden and enrich human experience and consciousness. Refusing the popular discourses of nonhuman and posthuman, while acknowledging yet turning away from the dystopian, he insists, using the figure of the Pharmakon and the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, that while the balance of benefits and costs to human being is tipped toward toxicity, the human, through its imbrication with these media, can be ‘reformed’. In this essay I review Hansen’s argument, his use and critique of Whitehead, the central place of what he calls worldly sensibility in this vision, and consider his attempt to illustrate what this ‘new human’ of new media might be.