Mark Coté

Bio

For the past two years Mark has worked as an Assistant Professor in Cultural Studies at Trent University with a focus on media and communication. He has published extensively on networked new media in Theory & Event (under review), Ephemera, Canadian Journal of Communications, Derive Approdi La Revista, and borderlands, among others. His work deploys contemporary media theory, autonomist theory and continental thought to understand the relations between the human and technology and affect and political economy.

Abstract

immaterial labour 2.0

In previous research, I proposed the concept of 'immaterial labour 2.0' as one way in which we might unpack the relationship between play and labour in distributed digital networks.

For this conference, I would like to explore more basic questions raised about the relation between the human and technology as suggested by contemporary media theory, particularly via Bernard Stiegler and Mark Hansen.

Following the proposition that technics marks an originary condition of the human, I want to consider the latest prosthetic condition of social networks as mapped by a ‘medium cartography’ inspired by Deleuzian ethology. As such, play would transpire on an immanent plane marking the power of socially-networked selves in terms of both temporal-spatial extensions and affective capacity. Conversely, labour would be captured on a plane of transcendence in all its technico-jurudical forms. What social bodies can do in these contested spaces remains in tension.