Assemblage theory : becoming-mixed-reality

Abstract

The emergence and proliferation of online communities such as MySpace, Facebook, Y outube and Ebay in the short space of a decade accounts for what Clay Shirky (2008) calls "the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race" (p. 1 06). This increase in expressive capacity involves a widespread socialization of the Internet, producing globalized virtual lifeworlds with a host of possibilities for networked persons and populations. The aim of this thesis is to portray the social expressive affordances of Internet based virtual life worlds, the opportunities and risks they provide to individuals to express themselves and to take part in social rituals and relations regardless of physical distances. Becoming-mixed-reality in the title refers to the mixing of virtual and actual life worlds catalyzed by contemporary activities in online communities. Whilst virtual, the lives and social relations synthesized online must be considered entirely real, with far-reaching consequences for offline lives in actual spaces. The theoretical framework used in the following chapters builds on and extends Manuel DeLanda's (2006) A New Philosophy of Society, a social ontology that takes Deleuze' s concept of the ' assemblage' as its basic unit of analysis. Within this framework, assemblages constitute virtual-actual circuits, open wholes vitalized and transformed by two temporal movements, actualization and virtualization. Whilst Section I accounts for individual persons becoming-mixed-reality, Section II portrays large-scale social individuals such as markets, governments and transnational activist movements becoming-mixed-reality, producing at the end a mixed-reality assemblage theory accounting for the Internet's affordances in local and global transformations of reality.