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everything from epidemiology, forensic science, clinical drug trials, business
analytics and quantitative finance, to name a few. In the paper I will illustrate via
case studies such as Microsoft's TrueSkill Xbox player matching engine. The
implications of these shifts for empirical sensibilities more generally are not well
understood. I would suggest that they highlight the need for a re-engagement
with notions of population, event, belief and number. We may be witnessing a
shift in the faultlines that separate belief and things/events. Through this reengagment,
we might also reconsider the contemporary making of experience,
subjectivity and knowing in an altered light.
BIOGRAPHY
Dr. Adrian Mackenzie is a reader and co-director of the Centre for Science
Studies, University of Lancaster, UK. He is the author of three books: Wirelessness:
Radical Network Empiricism. MIT Press, 2010; Cutting Code: Software and
Sociality, Peter Lang, 2006; Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed,
Continuum, 2002. His current research interests include: the lives of data,
especially databases but also data analysis, modelling and ‘analytics.’ He is
currently focusing on data as a way of thinking about ‘BioIT convergences’
across biological engineering, DNA synthesis and sequencing, clinical and
research databases and visualization technologies. Currently funded
research projects include ‘Technolife: A transdisciplinary approach to
the emerging challenges of novel technologies. Lifeworld and Imaginaries
in Foresight and Ethics’ (EU Framework Programme 7 – Science in Society). He
has published articles in The Fibreculture Journal, Theory and Event, Space and
Society among others. He is a guest editor for a forthcoming issue of Theory,
Culture and Society on ‘Code and Conduct’.
ANNA MUNSTER
“Hahaha” – 186,775,728 views. Emerging collectivities of publics, emerging
experiences of affect across viral media
Latour has suggested that ‘we’ have all become part of broader collective
experiments. But Latour’s work on the relations between humans and
nonhumans suggests, more profoundly, that collectivity, relationality and
aggregation have themselves become experiments. One such emerging
collectivity can be found in ‘viral media’, which amorphously sweeps,
audiences, performances and data up in its march. This paper looks at the
phenomenon emerging through networks, social and mobile media of 'going
viral'. In particular, I focus upon YouTube videos that, in the past 5 years, have
been downloaded, remixed and transmitted at monumental rates, producing
statistics such as ‘186,775,728 views’. Many of these clips tend to be of laughing
babies, cats and everyday moments. These clips are infectious affectively rather
than via analogy with disease. I argue that 'the viral' in networked media,
although connected with biopower, should not be reduced to an analogy with
'the biological' spread of viruses. In both biological and media viruses, new
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