| Throughout the history of electric communication technologies, popular, journalistic, and scholarly discourses have suggested that such devices cause or worsen various forms of mental and physical distress. This dissertation gathers evidence of such associations, or "technopathologies," since the telegraph, organizing them into a typology of five common disease patterns. Using historiography, discourse analysis, focus groups, and textual analysis, these patterns are examined for what they suggest about expectations of normal and abnormal technology use and technology users. Additionally, technopathological discourses are examined for the cultural work they perform, found to be normalizing, gendering, individualizing, blaming the user, distracting from systemic concerns, reinforcing other vectors of social pathologization, promoting ongoing self-assessment, demonizing collectivity, and naturalizing sickness as part of usership. Representations of technopathologies are analyzed drawing on approaches from visual studies, sound studies, and feminism and gender studies. The latter two also inform this project on a larger theoretical and methodological level. I am attempting to develop a form of "differential analysis," which appropriates approaches and insights from feminism and gender studies to examine difference in culture more broadly, not exclusively in terms of women or gender. This is a first step toward developing a broader generalized theory of difference with accompanying methodological palette. |
