Abstract:
Society now finds itself at the beginning of something, continually up dating digital technologies that enable an accelerated circulation of information are part of a globally networked society that has no outer boundary or distinguishable limit. An era of anxiety and paranoia defines particularly critical limits of complexity that has now become impossible to understand and comprehend. The term societies of control popularised by the late work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari address openly the emergence and development of new media. More specifically the impact new media has had on society and culture. Computers have become powerful instruments of oppression in the hands of military and paramilitary agencies, the total virtualisation of reality has resulted in unprecedented limits imposed on subjective perception, instrumentally splitting modes of perception and representation. Infrastructure that provides an individual’s position within an open environment at any given instant is no longer relegated to science fiction. The practise of mass surveillance by world governments and their respective war machine has often been cited as a necessary precaution in the war on terror and the prevention of social revolt. However, it has been equally criticised for violating many individuals’ privacy and therefore constraining civil and political rights to freedom. Society is now much more pervasively regulated, numerical languages of control comprise codes that determine access to information and negate it. Humanity now exists as samples, data, markets or banks. Moreover, this thesis examines technology in relation to latent accidents an unconscious oeuvre of scientific genius in the production of control and domination. More specifically the impact new media has had on society and culture. The walls that previously defined institutions are diminishing in such a way that disciplinary logics are not becoming ineffective but rather are now generalised as if in a fluid form moving across all social fields. The previously striated space of disciplinary institutions are giving way to the smooth cyberspace of the societies of control. How then can we find new weapons or forms of resistance against these socio-technological mechanisms of control?