What we talk about when we talk about new media: digital subjectivity and Tao Lin’s Taipei

Abstract

ABSTRACT New media studies has often focused on the difference between traditional and new media objects while neglecting the perspectival difference in worldview and subjectivity concomitant with the becoming-ubiquitous of the digital. In this paper, I first illustrate with some examples from science fiction the complex relation between difference in kind and difference in degree. This allows me to examine why some well-known demarcations between traditional and new media seem blurry and untenable. There is, however, one line of cleavage that does hold water: the binary of analogue and digital proposed by N. Katherine Hayles. To see why, I compare works of fiction that present media technologies via analogue subjectivity with Tao Lin’s Taipei, a novel that presents lived experience through digital subjectivity, thereby revealing the continuing potential of new media studies for literature.