CHAPTER 1.0: MINING FOR BYTES
A loose definition of technological disruption will make it confusing to apply in digital humanities discourse, making it easy to confuse with existing frameworks that are in similar areas of critique. This is why I find it important to understand what aspects of digital culture technological disruptions mean to address directly, and what other frameworks they might be in dialog with. In practice, I see the study of technological disruptions finding itself most comfortable within existing conversations surrounding glitch art, struggles surrounding the digital divide, and new media art in general. Since this concept spreads itself across a varied range of digital interactions, the question arises as to how the framework can be utilized without needlessly redefining existing theory.
Take Rosa Menkman’s work as an example of where the risk of redundancy becomes apparent. Her scholarship explores many facets of digital breakdown, especially across her works “The Glitch Studies Manifesto” and The Glitch Moment(um). More than anything, the thrust of her initial glitch studies work centers on how there needs to be an interrogation of glitch aesthetics, and how these aesthetics are being subsumed within media. Menkman spends ample time exploring what it means for technological processes to fall apart, referring to glitches “as a wonderful interruption that shifts an object away from its ordinary form and discourse, towards the ruins of destroyed meaning” (340). This definition of a glitch emphasizes the subversive capabilities that they have.
Menkman describes types of virtual failure that I am addressing throughout the thesis, where the "form and discourse" (340) of the virtual item that the glitch is affecting becomes warped, leading to a conflict between its original purpose and its current, modified purpose. It would be easy to apply the same definitions to technological disruptions, mainly due to a shared usage of terminology. An “interruption” of expected digital processes and the impact of “destroyed meaning” (Menkman 340) are similar to the types of language I use when describing technological disruptions. Subversion and corruption of virtual space are the central pillars of both glitch studies and the framework I define over the course of this thesis. Yet technological disruptions and existing glitch studies scholarship do not implement these concepts within the same physical/virtual dynamics. While there is a stronger focus on objective decay in those fields, similar to how Menkman defines the role of glitches, technological disruptions define virtual failure in cases where the decay itself is contested over whether it is detrimental or not. The framework shines light on the other side of the failure--on the marginalized groups who do not see a subversion of the virtual space as a flaw, despite what the status quo's view of the virtual space might be.