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Killer apps and sick users: technology, disease, and differential analysis

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Killer apps and sick users: technology, disease, and differential analysis

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KILLER APPS AND SICK USERS: TECHNOLOGY, DISEASE, AND
DIFFERENTIAL ANALYSIS

by

David Travers Scott

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

May 2010

Copyright 2010 David Travers Scott

ii
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to numerous individuals who contributed to and supported this pro-
ject. Apologies to anyone unnamed in this surely incomplete list: Anne Balsamo, Sarah
Banet-Weiser, my advisor and committee chair; Manuel Castells, Madeline Crowley, Jo-
anna Demers, Nina Eliasoph, Rosa Linda Fregoso, Jennifer Natalya Fink, Alice Gam-
brell, G. Thomas Goodnight, Herman Gray, Larry Gross, Raquel Gutierrez, Velina Hasu
Houston, Aniko Imre, Ralina Joseph, Josh Kun, Erin Maher, Tara McPherson, Roopali
Muhkerjee, Sheila Murphy, Lisa Parks, Michael Schudson, Vanessa Schwartz, David
Silver, Matthew Swank, my husband; Doug Thomas, Crispin Thurlow, Allison Trope, my
cohort and other colleagues at the University for Southern California Annenberg School
for Communication and Journalism, my focus group participants and interview subjects,
the staff at House of Marketing Research, Pasadena, CA; the staff and librarians of the
Huntington Library and Archives, the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Mo-
tion Picture Arts and Sciences, the ONE Institute and Archives, the UCLA Film and
Television Archive, the U.S. Library of Congress, and the USC Libraries and Special
Collections; and the reviewers, panelists, respondents, and audience members of confer-
ence presentations at the Cultural Studies Association Portland OR 2007, International
Communication Association Chicago 2009, Media Ecology Association, St. Louis, MO
2009, National Communication Association San Diego 2008 and Chicago 2007, and So-
ciety for the History of Technology, Pittsburgh, PA 2009. Research for this project was
partially funded by a 2008-09 New Directions in Feminist Research Fellowship from the

iii
USC Center for Feminist Research, a 2009-10 Dibner History of Science Fellowship
from the Huntington Library and Archives, and 2007 and 2009 Stark Family Fellowships
for Summer Research from USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

iv
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii
List of Figures vi
Abstract vii
Chapter 1: Technopathologies, Feminism, the Body, and Differential
Analysis 1
Chapter 1 Endnotes 43
Chapter 2: Pathological Technoculture 47
Chapter 2 Endnotes 70
Chapter 3: A Historic Compendium of Technopathologies 71
Chapter 3 Endnotes 104
Chapter 4: Overload: Electrosensitives as Neurasthenic Echoes of
Feminine Pathologization 105
Chapter 4 Endnotes 150

Chapter 5: Resistance: Audio Zombies and Pathologized Collectivism 151
Chapter 5 Endnotes 174

Chapter 6: Mismanaged Bandwidth: Media as Sensory Inhibition and
the Personalization of Pathologization 175
Chapter 6 Endnotes 215
Chapter 7: Promiscuity: Transdimensional Infections, Reproduction,
and Sounding The Ring 216
Chapter 7 Endnotes 248
Chapter 8: Feedback: Repetitive Stress Injury, Internalized
Assessment, and Adjustment 249
Chapter 8 Endnotes 290
Conclusion: Sick and Healthy Users 291

Bibliography 302

Appendix: A Chronology of Technopathologies 345

v

List of Figures

Fig. 1: “The shut-in’s Sunday Service,” March 28, 1923. Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.
20540 USA. Control #: 2004672638. Digital ID: cph 3c34575
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c34575. Original copyright
Clark Music Co., J260769 U.S. Copyright Office. No known
restrictions on reproduction. 154

Fig. 2: “Computer Workstations.” (2003, April 23). OSHA
Ergonomic Diagrams. Retrieved Nov. 2, 2009, from
http://www.osha.gov/SLTC/etools/computerworkstations/
index.html 269

vi
Abstract
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 com-
mon 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 dis-
courses are examined for the cultural work they perform, found to be normalizing, gen-
dering, 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 technopa-
thologies 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 theoreti-
cal and methodological level. I am attempting to develop a form of “differential analy-
sis,” which appropriates approaches and insights from feminism and gender studies to
examine difference in culture more broadly, not exclusively in terms of women or gen-
der. This is a first step toward developing a broader generalized theory of difference with
accompanying methodological palette.

1
Chapter 1: Technopathologies, Feminism, the Body, and Differential Analysis
Whereas technology has been famously examined as expressive of a uniquely American
pastoral ideal (L. Marx, 1976) or technological sublime (Nye, 1994), this project investi-
gates a darker association, that between technology and ill health. Electric communica-
tion technologies are embedded in their cultures of origin, use, and representation. Their
practices, relations, and discourses engage and reflect not only human ideas and informa-
tion, but also our bodies. Technologies are therefore involved in even the messiest, most
organic of bodily conditions: disease. Throughout the history of electric communication,
media technologies have been associated with various forms of mental and physical dis-
tress, from “telegrapher’s ear” and telephonic schizophrenia to TV eye-rot and video
game addiction.
i
This recurrent theme of discourse has traversed popular entertainment,
medical science, and in between.
I examine the idea of electric communication technologies causing or exacerbat-
ing mental and physical illness, bearing in mind historic moments and contemporary per-
spectives in which a separation between the two is far from distinct. This paper surveys
discourse on what I refer to as technopathologies throughout just over the last hundred
years, beginning with the first global communication network, the telegraph. Using a his-
torically informed conception of disease that acknowledges a degree of cultural persis-
tence of archaic diagnoses, such as hysteria, neurasthenia, or evil spirits, I will present
various forms of technopathologies, organized into a typology of disease frames, refined
during data collection, using textual, historic, and focus group methods.

2
In the tradition of Michel Foucault’s (1988, 1990, 1994) discursively constituted
identities, “the user” of technologies is approached here as a subject position, and the nar-
ratives, knowledge, and understandings of sick users are examined for how they suggest
cultural expectations for healthy users. I explore how the technological ideal is consti-
tuted in part through the process of pathologizing the abnormal. I also examine the cul-
tural work of technopathologies, arguing that they perform work of normalizing, gender-
ing, 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
Finally, this project initiates a theoretical and methodological effort at developing
a generalized approach to studying difference in culture. While I limit myself here to
generalized application of theories and methods from feminism and gender studies, this is
seen as the first stage of a research trajectory engaging next with studies of difference
such as disability studies, critical race theory, queer theory, and citizenship studies.
Feminism, Technology, and the Body
This project’s object of study, pathological technoculture, is approached through a bodily
analytic. That is, my interrogation of pathologized users is organized around their bodies:
failures of and attacks upon them, their (mis)shapings and corrections, and their
representations and disciplinary practices.
ii
I choose to study technological culture and
society through the body because, as numerous scholars, following the work of Foucault,
have asserted from varying perspectives, the body is a crucial, if not the central, subject
for sociological analysis (e.g., Bordo, 2003b; M. Douglas, 2002; Turner, 1984). Bodies

3
sociological analysis (e.g., Bordo, 2003b; M. Douglas, 2002; Turner, 1984). Bodies are
the prime site for exertions of social control and transgression, but they are also material
and discursive media that shape and are shaped by culture—yet analysis of the body has
been at times neglected. A leading area in body scholarship, at times unacknowledged,
has been feminism. In the this section, I wish to briefly suggest a rich and complex intel-
lectual lineage of feminist and related thinking and research on the body, within which I
will situate myself and this project. Although admittedly incomplete and reductive, I hope
it will not only acknowledge but also clarify the tradition within which I am working.
Analysis of the body and culture is an intellectual project deeply indebted to and
driven by feminism, as sexism’s justification and demarcation were based on biological
sex, an ostensibly corporeal fact, and all of its perceived associations.
iii
Practical and phi-
losophical origins of this necessitate, first and foremost, a conception of “the body” as
something in and of itself, a discrete, bounded, separate thing. Feminist philosopher
Deborah Orr (2006) attributes to Greek philosopher Parmenides (c. 515-399 B.C.E.) the
articulation of an early metaphysic of dualisms: that all the world is divided into two
logical possibilities of “is” and “is not,” which are exclusive, oppositional, and valued.
As she and others relate, this worldview of hierarchical binaries forms what Karen War-
ren calls Western culture’s underlying “logic of domination” (quoted in Orr, 1). This con-
tinues in philosophies such as Plato’s split between appearance and reality, in which the
body is understood as that which perceptually distorts reality into inaccurate appearances,
as in his allegory of the cave. Early Christian philosophers, such as St. Augustine, align

4
the body with animality in opposition to humanity. Enlightenment philosopher René Des-
cartes is perhaps most widely recognized for cleaving the body from the soul or spirit,
which, operating through the tool of the mind’s intellect, could then potentially transcend
the body’s limitations. However, as foundational French feminist Simone de Beauvoir
(1974) famously articulated, and others expanded upon, this lineage of dualisms has been
applied to the dualisms of sex and gender, with the body, deception, inhumanity, sensual-
ity, and irrationality associated with the sex of “woman,” and the behaviors and attributes
associated with it as the gender
iv
of “femininity” (e.g., see discussions in Bordo, 2003a;
Cohn, 1993; Fox Keller, 1985; Grosz, 1987, 1994). Moreover, woman has been general-
ized as always Other in relation to man, as mutually constitutive concepts locked in rela-
tion to one another, raising the question: How do devalued Others resist and organize
against this and find ways to better understand and express themselves, if the very defini-
tion and conception of their self is part of their oppression? This is one of the key dilem-
mas of feminism, one that has been very productive, driving research up to and including
this project.
Bodily difference justified social practices of sexism: Women were inherently in-
ferior to man due to her weaker, unstable body (which, dualisms notwithstanding, is often
largely inclusive of mind, brainpower, and moral character). For example, up through the
nineteenth century, it was conventional wisdom that female brains were too undeveloped
for higher education, and that their nervous systems were so easily excited that their edu-
cation helped spawn a wide category of disease, neurasthenia
v
, and some authorities sug-

5
gested that even a traditionally feminine realm, music training, should be denied to “deli-
cate girls during the development period” (“Music and neurotic conditions in young
girls,” 1899, 793). Early liberal feminists challenged this biological essentialism, assert-
ing that the body was not destiny, that women were potentially more capable than pre-
sumed, not as inherently limited, frail, or weak, and that other factors contributed to what
might manifest as symptoms of body and/or character. Mary Wollstonecraft argued in
favor of women’s education in the late 18
th
century by stating that what might be per-
ceived as feminine irrationality or inability was not inherent but one of “the pernicious
effects which arise from the unnatural distinctions established in society,” such as social
standing (1994, 66). John Stuart Mill (1994) subsequently articulated male complicity in
and benefit from raising and socializing women to fulfill or affect an inferior position,
reinforced through social institutions such as the educational system, property law, and
marriage. Rather than a natural state, Mill compared sexism to another widely recognized
injustice, slavery. Indeed, abolitionist and slave-born Sojourner Truth (1994) famously
argued, addressing the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1851, that liberation for
those categorized “woman” applied across another bodily-based boundary demarcation,
that of race. Later, drawing on the work of anthropologist Lewis Morgan and notes of his
late collaborator, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (1972) described ancient matriarchal fam-
ily structures and their demise in order to assert the historic contingency of patriarchy,
arguing that ownership and inheritance of property introduced and induced positions of
female inferiority. Practical applications and political activism drawing on such feminist

6
work aimed to understand women as being more than their bodies by changing the social
factors that actually oppressed them, such as gaining access to education, achieving suf-
frage, and curtailing domestic violence through temperance.
vi

If, then, one could generalize the bodily aspect of such first-wave feminism as as-
serting that women were more than their bodies, a major component of second-wave
feminism was women gaining control of their bodies, as in fights to gain and preserve
access to birth control and abortion or to demonstrate bodily abilities in fields such as la-
bor, recreation, and athletics. Protecting bodies from exploitation and abuse was a goal of
feminists ranging from Catharine MacKinnon (1987, 1997), who focused on sex and
sexuality as the prime, material domain of women’s oppression, to Gayle Rubin’s 1975
(1997) examination of the political economy of women’s bodies as commodified raw ma-
terial. Representations of bodies in mass media and pornography were examined for the
various ways in which they were imbricated in actual bodies falling impossibly short of
ideals of beauty and femininity, as well devalued objects of sexual exploitation (e.g., see
varying opinions and at times virulent debates discussed and summarized in Bordo
2003a, 2003b; Kipnis, 1996; MacKinnon & Dworkin, 1997; Sturken & Cartwright, 2001,
Ch. 3; L. Williams, 1989).
I wish to pause briefly here to position myself with regards to the intellectual line-
age I am describing and to which my research is in debt. In short, allow me at times in
this section to suggest my personal in this political. It is from this period that I had my
first conscious encounters with feminism, as a white, gay, boy of wildly mixed class ori-

7
entation growing up in Texas. Shortly before I’d been born, my maternal aunt had moved
to California and, as a graduate student at San Diego University, had co-founded the na-
tion’s first women’s studies program (Rowell Council, 2008). Growing up, I was too
young to understand what that had meant or involved, but I do remember receiving femi-
nist children’s books from my aunt in San Diego at Christmas; one in particular was
about a woman who raised sheep. It did not explicitly speak of her body, but told a story
of a woman clearly strong and hardy enough to be capable of animal husbandry and
ranch work. Her sister, my biological mother, was not a self-identified feminist, but defi-
nitely was in her politics and perspectives. I remember her telling me about my birth,
how the doctors had called her “uncooperative” and forcibly anesthetized her, removing
me with forceps, a classic example of women’s institutionalized lack of control over their
own bodies I experienced first as family narrative, then later as feminist scholarship
(Treichler, 1990). Finally, my stepmother, whose politics may have been on the opposite
end of the spectrum, nevertheless gave me one of my favorite children’s books and re-
cords, the feminist kids classic, Free to Be You and Me, which dealt with numerous as-
pects of men, women, bodies, and gender.
In short, in much of first- and second-wave feminisms, bodies were problematic,
if not the problem. Bodies marked as female and feminine were used both to justify op-
pression and as tools of it, from which women worked to free themselves. Much second-
wave feminist work, in particular, involved de-centering the body, liberating women from
body-based restrictions and abuse. Thus, the body in some ways fell out of favor as a site

8
of analysis, in order to not privilege further what had been used so centrally in oppres-
sion. If, then, biology was not destiny, what else was involved in creating sexual and
gendered difference? One alternate avenue focused on lived experience as a source of
data, most famously articulated by Betty Friedan’s analysis that there was something
wrong in domestic suburban lives, that women experienced a “problem that has no name”
(1994), and this was realized through the method of sharing experiences in conscious-
ness-raising group. Experiences of psychodynamic family relations and social roles, such
as responsibility for parenting, were the focus of scholars such as Chodorow (1997) and
Gilligan (1997), who examined psychological differences between men and women, such
as capacities for nurturing or individuation. The psyche was central to the influential
French school of psychoanalytic feminism, in which scholars such as Irigaray, Kristeva,
and Cixous took bodily sexual difference as a starting point for, but not central focus of,
exploration of feminine subjectivity and subject formation (Marks & Courtivron, 1980).
Finally, another area focused on language as a vector through which gender was not only
constituted, but enacted and reinforced in speech acts, silences, and conversational norms
(Cameron, 1998; Lazar, 2005). However, the body’s displacement in favor or psychology
or mind simply reinscribed a mind-body split.
This attempt to “displace” the body as a central analytic was challenged by sev-
eral areas of feminist activism and intellectual work maintained and advanced corporeal
analyses. Feminists of color and from the third world reminded the Western feminist es-
tablishment that all women’s bodies were not the same, that bodies were differently

9
raced, classed, and situated globally (e.g., Combahee River Collective, 1997; Mohanty,
2003). Moreover, these and other attributes of bodies, such as sex, sexuality, and ethnic-
ity, neither existed nor operated in isolation, but had intertwined and combined effects
and experiences, and the theoretical models of which were seen as part of challenging
self/Other dualisms (Alarcón, 1997; Anzaldúa, 1994; Crenshaw, 1994). Lesbian, bisex-
ual, transgender, S/M, and queer feminists, at various times, raised bodily issues of dif-
ference in terms of sexuality, sexual object choice, sexual practices, and relations be-
tween sex, gender, and sexuality, working to experience, acknowledge, and claim deni-
grated bodily pleasures of various demonized sexual practices and relationships, such as
sadomasochism, lesbianism, and pornography (e.g., Brunch, 1987; Califia, 1994; Ellis,
Jaker, Hunter, O’Dair & Tallmer, 1992; Radicalesbians, 1997; Rich, 1980; Rubin, 1993;
Vance, 1984).
To return to situating myself—for, I feel strongly that acknowledgment of my
personal relationship to and investment in issues of gender, disease, and the body is nec-
essary to avoid other conceptual splits, such as public/private or scholarly/political— this
was my intellectual entrée into feminism. As a young gay man coming of age during the
onset of AIDS, I participated in direct action and activism responding to that crisis, in-
cluding co-founding the Chicago chapter of Queer Nation. While discovering gay and
lesbian studies, emergent queer theory, and working with queer activists of various sexes
and genders, I was also attending art school as an undergraduate, working at a nonprofit
art gallery, and later working as an independent writer, art critic, and performance artist.

10
During these years I encountered feminist debates around sex, sexuality, and pornogra-
phy, debates that intersected with queer debates around visibility, reclaiming pluralistic
forms of bodily pleasure, and resisting cultural assimilation. Many of my friends and col-
leagues were sexworkers and radical sex activists; my career as a novelist and fiction
writer began at this time through publishing explicitly sexual writing as a medium to in-
terrogate notions of gay male identity, sexuality, and masculinity. Attempting my own
intervention, I edited a collection of stories, texts, and essays analyzing and demonstrat-
ing different reasons and ways that sex, sexuality, and their representations were brought
from private into public realms (D. T. Scott, 1999). In sum, these intellectually formative
years were steeped in numerous and passionate intersecting debates involving biological
sex, gender, sexuality, representation, media, power, politics, culture—and disease.
During this time, a body of feminist work developed which is often referred to as
“corporeal feminism.” Coined in 1987 by Australian feminist Elizabeth Grosz in a 1987
article and formalized in a later book, corporeal feminism endeavored to situate bodies as
not merely epiphenomenon to other practices, such as looking and representation, but as
central to critical analyses of lived culture. Given the problematic relation of the body to
sexism, it was an uneasy and risky project for feminists to elevate and privilege the body,
yet, as Grosz wrote in her original article, her goal was to work toward establishing “an
understanding of corporeality that is compatible with feminist struggles to undermine pa-
triarchal structures and to form self-defined terms and representations” (1987, 3). Grosz
identified three major categories of feminist thought regarding the body: In egalitarian

11
feminism, diverse figures such as de Beauvoir, Wollstonecraft, and Shulamith Firestone,
and schools ranging from ecofeminism to humanist feminism, all viewed the female body
as biologically distinct, resulting in denial of access to certain rights and privileges within
patriarchal culture and/or gaining access to uniquely insightful knowledge and experi-
ences. In social constructionism, figures such as Chodorow and Kristeva, and Marxist
feminists and psychoanalytic feminists, saw the body as biological, fixed, and ahistorical
and in a dualistic relation to the mind, much like egalitarian feminists, but differed by
marking a distinction between a “real” biological body and the body as representation of
sexual ideologies, as expressed in the social assignation of gender traits and behaviors to
biologically sexed bodies. Finally, sexual difference feminists, such as Luce Irigaray,
Helene Cixous, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, and Monique Wittig, resisted the
mind/body dualism in various ways, but shared an understanding of the body as neither a
brute fact to be dealt with nor a neutral, passive recipient of psychological associations
with gendered traits and behaviors. Instead, for these thinkers, the body was both signi-
fied and signifier, an active terrain in which social forces waged contestation. As Bordo
described it, the body was “a medium of culture” (1993, p. 175).
Grosz’ “corporeal feminism” was closely aligned with this approach. She called
for theorizing beyond the mind/body dualism and its associated mappings onto types of
people as being more bodily (e.g., women, African-Americans). She challenged the bio-
logical essentialism of associating the body with the binary opposition of nature/culture
binary to argue instead for seeing the body as “not opposed to culture, a resistant throw-

12
back to a natural past … [but] a cultural, the cultural, product” (1994, 23, emphasis origi-
nal). She called for recognition of the complex plurality of bodies and body types, the
mutually constitutive relationship between biology and psychology, and finally, the body
as a boundary or borderline concept—something that does not reside within particular
dualisms (nature/culture, public/private, self/other, etc.) but rather is both and neither,
marking the space that defines those very domains. Grosz concluded by citing feminist
work amenable to, if not perfect realizations of, what she calls for, in examples including
the bodily sociology of Mary Douglas’ work on purity/impurity taboos and horrific bod-
ily fluids, Kristeva’s application of this work in a more psychological exploration of ab-
ject defilement, Linda Williams’ analysis of pornography, and Iris Young’s phenomenol-
ogy of having breasts (1994, 187-210). Anne Balsamo (1996) picks up Grosz’ call in her
work on the bodies of cyborg women, aligning herself with corporeal feminism of Grosz,
examining how bodies work as boundary objects between organic and mechanical, and
masculine and feminine. Balsamo’s work engages corporeal feminism overtly with femi-
nist studies of science and technology, an area I will soon discuss.
Corporeal feminism, of course, was not intended as a manifesto, after which pro-
ponents and acolytes would dutifully adopt its banner, agenda, and nomenclature. Schol-
ars such as Grosz and Balsamo were identifying trends in certain feminist work, calling
into legibility intellectual and political formations, orienting themselves in relation to
them, and suggesting directions for future research. Much of the work in the name of
corporeal feminism, in fact, drew inspiration from the work of Michel Foucault, and, in-

13
deed, a recent work on Foucault and feminism directly engages with Grosz (M. McLaren,
2002). Foucault’s work on the body is typically described as falling into three phases: the
“early” or “archeological” period, which examined how bodies were situated in discourse
through institutions of power and knowledge, such as science, medicine, and the law; the
“middle” or “genealogical” period, which examined how power was exerted directly
upon bodies and bodily practices, and finally an “ethical” or “late” period, which focused
on how subjects came to understand and care for their individual selves—bodily and oth-
erwise—in relation to others. Late in his career, Foucault asserted that these were far
from disparate or contradictory periods, but phases in an ongoing exploration on how
subjects come to understand themselves as such. Clearly, social location and categories,
bodies and bodily practices, and relations of self and others are all intersecting vectors in
the formation of subjectivity. Within this work, Foucault articulated key philosophical
advances, such as reconceptualizing modern power as fluid, dispersed, multidirectional,
and productive relations, rather than a thing possessed by a person or group and lorded
unidirectionally over the oppressed. In addition to complicating notions of power, his
work extended the “biopolitics” of bodily control down to the level of everyday practices
and also out to the level of institutional structures, situating bodies within discursive
flows of power and knowledge. His work suggested not only how bodies were regulated,
but also offered an alternate model for formation of subjectivity to psychoanalytic theo-
ries.
Feminist responses to Foucault varied.
vii
For one, his notion of the dispersal of

14
power made unified notions of power-holders (men, patriarchy, owners of means of pro-
duction, etc.) and organized resistance to them more challenging, albeit, many would ar-
gue, more realistic. Moreover, his analysis of micro-level politics allows for a critical in-
vestigation of the body (for example, amplifying as disciplinary practices such quotidian
corporeal activities as grooming, comportment, and preventative healthcare). His argu-
ments for the discursive constitution of subjects and subjectivity ran counter to fem-
inisms, such as discussed by Grosz, that were invested in essential biological and/or psy-
chological differences between the sexes. However, his enormous influence in the field
that came to be referred to as queer theory suggests the libratory nature of this perspec-
tive as well.
viii
The most famous objection, however, was that, despite his emphasis on
sexuality, the issue of biological sex and gender go largely unaddressed—a significant
oversight for a subject for feminist appropriation (Balsamo, 1996). Yet, many feminists
did appropriate Foucault, as I’ve suggested. For example, Balsamo (1996) examined
various technologies of gendered bodies—female bodybuilders, cosmetic surgery pa-
tients, fictional characters in virtual reality—for how they performed cultural work of
marking boundaries of male and female, (in addition to human and machine, living and
nonliving, virtual and real). These cyborg bodies were both cultural signs and sites of in-
scription, shaped by and shapes of culture. Lorber (1998) examined the transformation of
bodies into sexed categories through social processes such as sports and technological
competency. Sarah Banet-Weiser (1999) examined the disciplinary practices of bodies on
competitive display in beauty pageants, not only in terms of gender but also as this re-

15
lated to constitution of national and raced subject positions.
The primary impetus for my project comes from Foucauldean feminism that fo-
cused on the body as a site for the construction of pathologized dualisms. Foucault’s ex-
ploration of the creation of social categories—the processes of ab/normalization by which
categories such as sick/healthy, sane/insane, legal/criminal, heterosexual/homosexual,
etc. are demarcated, communicated, understood, enforced, and lived; how subjects both
are positioned by normalizing discourse and take up positions within it—was addressed
by feminists examining feminine body ideals and related eating disorders. Most typically
associated with Susan Bordo (2003) and Sandra Lee Bartky (1988), this work examined
female bodies as sites of cultural struggle, enacted on daily practices such as weight man-
agement, decoration, and movement. Most importantly, they articulated how diseases
gendered as feminine, such as eating disorders, hysteria, and agoraphobia, were not an
oppositional abnormality but the logical extension of the norm: gendered diseases could
be “read” as exaggerations of gendered ideals. Quite literally, if feminine bodies are
meant to be slender, anorexic bodies take this ideal to its extreme.
This analytic of gendered diseases and cultural norms is the inspiration and initial
model for this project’s investigation of technological diseases and cultural norms. While
initially focused on mapping the contours of pathological technoculture and extrapolating
from it a portrait of cultural ideals of the “user” of technologies as a subject position, it
grew to also examine the cultural work performed by technopathologies. However, where
I diverge from Bordo and Bartky is in suggesting actual or potential resistance within

16
these diseases. For me, this verges too far into psychological territory by speculating on
the intent of the disease sufferers. This project is committed to an empirical approach that
includes the materiality of discourse—its manifestations, artifacts, readings, and expres-
sions.
ix
I am interested in articulating the legibility of the cultural formation of technopa-
thologies to explore what cultural work its discourse performs, rather than in theorizing
why sufferers of these conditions suffer.
x
I do not want to explain away sickness: doing
so only reifies stereotypes of the hysterical and hypochondriac feminine, but also reas-
serts dualistic thinking in terms of physical/psychological, real/imagined, and mate-
rial/discursive. This project is committed to working through these dualisms; my founda-
tional orientation, or what Karen Barad (2007) would call my “onto-epistemology” is that
these and other dualisms are anything but separate. Indeed, I reject in this project the cau-
sality inherent in the question, “Why?” Cause/effect, much like thing/representation, are
another dualistic split.
Indeed, a particular problem Foucauldean feminists wrestled with was how to
make sense of the relation between bodies and discourse, between the (seeming) dualistic
opposition of material and immaterial. Did rendering the body into discourse liberate
women from a marker and instrument of oppression, or did it dissolve the central cate-
gory of analysis and activism? This tension between materiality and discourse runs deep
in feminism but, rather than a fundamental contradiction, I see it as arguably a core en-
gine of intellectual and political productivity. How do we liberate, supersede, or trans-
gress the sexed body if we must operate within a system that organizes oppression around

17
the sexed body? While Marxist or matriarchal feminisms might maintain a notion of at
least the possibility of some true, unaltered, pure state to be achieved or returned to, for
Foucauldeans, there is no “outside” of discourse.
One proposition has been a kind of strategic-tactical orientation, recognizing the
construction of sex and/or gender (socially, discursively, psychologically) but recogniz-
ing the practical need to organize and operate within a system that treats these as biologi-
cal facts, one potentially disruptable by imperfect replications. Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak famously suggested the notion of “strategic essentialism” within postcolonial the-
ory; Luce Irigaray’s “mimesis” offered a more explicitly feminist theorization of the con-
cept. In another move, Alice Jardine (1985) attempted to bridge American and French
feminisms by replacing conflicting notions of “woman as sexual identity” and “woman as
process” (141) with “gynesis—the putting into discourse of ‘woman’” (25). Joan Scott
challenged the feminist privileging of experience as epistemology by arguing that the ma-
terial of lived experience—bodily or otherwise—is discursive: “Experience is at once al-
ways already an interpretation and in need of interpretation” (J. Scott, 1992, 37, emphasis
original). Therefore, the use of experience as a source of information or data for femi-
nists, historians, and others, is not a simple matter of transparent representation—a point
to which I will return. Judith Butler’s (1990, 1994) influential work offered a model that
redressed the perceived lack of agency in Foucault—his passive bodies categorized, sur-
veyed, and disciplined—with her notion of performativity, which clarified gender as less
the assignation of attributes and behaviors to passive, sexed bodies, but the active per-

18
formance of gendered behaviors and attributes by active bodies and subjectivities; Judith
Halberstam (1998) took this work in a queerer direction in her theorization of female
masculinity.
This ongoing wrangling with dualisms—bodies/discourse, material/immaterial,
experience/representation—was paralleled in studies of science and technology (STS)
and related fields. In a foundational STS text, Bruno Latour (1991) famously argued that
dualisms of primitive/modern, objective science/ideology, and human/nonhuman were
actually far from separate. Explicitly feminist areas of STS and related fields tackled the
epistemological dualism of objectivity/ideology, looking at gendered assumptions in ide-
ologies, such as that of neutral scientific objectivity and the scientific method of empiri-
cal observation and experimentation. Feminist scholars directly critiqued the notion of
pure objectivity (Harding, 1992; Fox Keller, 1985; Silverberg, 1998; Wajcman, 1991). In
an intellectual tradition typically linked to Hegel’s master/slave relationship, feminists
proposed methods for productively incorporating subjectivity, such as Harding’s notion
of strong objectivity as critical inclusion of both subjects and objects of knowledge,
standpoint theory’s uniquely female perspective on sexual division of labor (Harding,
1992; Harstock, 1983, 1998), and a rejection of omniscient, infinite vision through situ-
ated knowledges and partial perspectives (Haraway, 1999). Indeed, as Cynthia Cockburn
described the perspective of feminist STS, “This is feminists’ claim that the social rela-
tions of technology are gendered relations, that technology enters into gender identity,
and (more difficult for many to accept) that technology itself cannot be fully understood

19
without reference to gender” (1992, 32).
xi

A foundational text in this area was Donna Haraway’s 1985 “A Cyborg Mani-
festo: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”
(1991), which proposed the human-machine hybrid of the cyborg as a conceptual model
for working through dualisms such as science/ideology, organic/machine, hu-
man/nonhuman, physical/non-physical, and masculine/feminine. The work’s relevance
and impact, however, extended far beyond science and technology studies, connecting
studies of bodies and their disciplining and pathologization through dualisms of
good/bad, sick/healthy, with studies of the sciences and technologies that shaped, investi-
gated, defined, and organized those bodies. It was a major work of feminist theorizing in
general, with its cyborg model applied to the ongoing struggles within feminism to re-
solve biological essentialism or psychological naturalism with seemingly exclusive and
incompatible models of gender as discursive or socially constructed. Instead, Haraway
asserted that women were both and all of these things. Exhibiting a Foucauldean concep-
tion of dispersed, fluid modern power, she did not offer a matriarchal or goddess-centric
reversal of patriarchy’s power relations—i.e., feminine dominance—but a richer, more
complex model that moved beyond dualistic hierarchy and inspired a body of “cyborg
feminism.” Similar impasses her manifesto challenged were those between feminism and
socialism, which debated whether subjugation was primarily an effect of gender or eco-
nomic class. She also even challenged radical jurisprudence models, such as those of
Catharine’s MacKinnon’s anti-pornography legislation, critiquing such solutions as

20
predicated on a stable, unified, essential female subject around whom legislative, rights-
based solutions must orient and, thereby, perpetuate the very conceptions of femaleness
and femininity that feminism sough to challenge.
The recent work of Karen Barad (2006, 2007) draws together corporeal feminism,
quantum physics, queer theory, and science and technology studies as a way of rethinking
through the very model of binaries. In her model of “agential realism,” she draws on Ian
Hacking’s critique of representationalism, the dualistic logic that there are things and
their symbols, signs, images, etc. Drawing on Neils Bohr’s philosophy-physics, she
breaks from a model of the world that views things as the fundamental unit—atomism.
Barad takes the idea of opposed things, such as material objects and discursive words, or
real objects and their representations, and reconceives of them as actions. Her onto-
epistemology approaches the world as phenomena in relations with material-discursive
practices. Therefore, a category, such as gender, is not about two categorical circles con-
taining masculine and feminine things, respectively; it is about enactments of exclusion,
about dynamic processes that draw the very shapes of those circles. A ruler is not a thing
measuring an object and thereby creating its quantitative, discursive representation. Rul-
ing (and the multiple meanings here are significant) is an action of inserting a grid into
space, creating units of measurement, defining boundaries. Similarly, it is not gender but
gendering, not machines but mechanizing. Although the cyborg, for example, has been
fruitful, a notion based on a hybrid of two opposites is still conceptually dependent upon
those two original referents and thereby, while blurring them, also serves to reinforce

21
them. Barad offers a way past this dilemma, which my gerunding examples oversimplify
by perhaps maintaining original concepts too much, but I deploy them as explanatory
tools. However, to use the model of a coordinate grid, if the X and Y axes are a dualism,
Barad moves beyond merely thinking about the constructedness or relativeness of X and
Y, or how points on the grid have both X and Y characteristics, conceiving of their hybrid
intersections—all of which perpetuate X and Y as things. Barad’s approach argues in-
stead for actions: not X and Y but the process of gridding.
A perspective such as Barad’s girds this project, even if it was not written using
her explicit terminology and framework throughout, nor even originally conceived within
it. I cite her work here for two reasons. First, to bring up to date this genealogy of femi-
nism and the body, in which this project’s driving connections between feminism and
science and technology studies become explicit. Second is to justify or perhaps warn the
reader that what lies ahead freely moves between what many consider dualistic catego-
ries, such as sex and gender, mental and physical, material and discursive, sick and
healthy, fact and fiction, thing and representation. This is not caprice but a deeply per-
sonal worldview: I do not separate such categories in definition or experience. Not to say
that differences do not exist, that I am a perfect model of absolute fluidity, or that we ex-
ist in a social world that does not operate along lines of dualistic thinking. However, as I
have explored in my writing and performance work outside of the academy for two dec-
ades, there are simply too many exceptions, transgressions, hybrids, and shades of grey to
make definitive categories tenable. I was raised in triangulation between a radical neo-

22
pagan, a conservative Southern Baptist, and a practical agnostic; given such a worldview,
I am committed to a perspective that does not bracket, asterisk, or factor away the outlier
or exception. A relational, action-oriented, process-based worldview is core.
xii

A final note to further situate myself: An inevitable question this project raises is,
Why do I see it as feminist rather than queer? First, my choice of feminism is not simply
a rejection of queer. Clearly, these fields are related, and I have no problem if others per-
ceive mine as a queer project. However, despite the overwhelming formative experience
of coming of age as a gay man during the onset of the AIDS epidemic, it is feminist work
that I have found more inspiring and useful throughout this project. Which is not to say
that there are not queer ideas, scholars, and scholarship used here. However, the move to
expand that umbrella, to queer my sources and claim them all as such, has a colonizing
flavor with which I am uncomfortable. Moreover, situating myself and this project as
feminist also serves to refuse the tradition of erasing histories of feminist intellectual and
political labor. My experiences today as a twenty-first century, married, gay man are di-
rectly due to feminism. The modern LGBTQI rights movement could possibly exist
without feminism, but it would be drastically different, and certainly not all queers are
feminists. Moreover, feminists have been my family, friends, and teachers. Finally, as I
have suggested elsewhere (D. T. Scott, 2008), branding myself queer from a desktop bur-
ied in laptop and books does not progress unproblematicly from having brandished that
same appellation when marching down city streets in lingerie and combat boots, throwing
paintballs at the American Medical Association, or demonstrating for more hospital beds

23
and public AIDS education and less homophobic comedians and media. This is not to
separate such activities into distinct realms, to create a hierarchical dualism of nostalgic
queer activism and arid queer theory, but to simply acknowledge that the process, the re-
lational action between those mutually informative and constitutive realms is something
with which I have yet to come to satisfactory personal terms and, ultimately, is not the
focus of this project.
Pathological Technoculture Yesterday and Today
In the section I wish to historically contextualize this project. To be clear, I am not argu-
ing for a temporal causal logic: e.g., “Technopathologies happen around this most recent
turn of the century due to these social or historical reasons…,” or, “Technopathologies
happen when new technologies are in moments of emergence or mass adoption.” This
project does not make an argument for technopathologies as a historic event or disrup-
tion, nor for historical changes as instigating technopathological discourse. However, as
this project is about drawing pathological technoculture into legibility, making coherent
the cultural formation of technopathologies, I wish here to suggest something of the his-
torical group upon which this legibility rests. As such, I wish to suggest in this suggestion
less why technopathologies happen when they do, than perhaps why, looking back, their
discourse makes sense now—the why of this project more than the why of its topic.
Indeed, my historical argument is one of continuity, that these associations have
existed and continue to exist across the history of electric communications, and, there-
fore, are not phenomena associated with newness or emergence. Indeed, this study of

24
technopathologies could clearly fall within a larger history of pathological associations
with technologies of transportation, architecture, urbanity, industrialization, or moder-
nity.
xiii
Technopathologies clearly predate the telegraph and continue in transportation
and other fields: Cars have been associated with the anxiety and irritability of “com-
muteritis” (D. Schwartz, 1983), and air travel has been described as so “mentally and
physically upsetting” as to make globetrotting world leaders dangerously irrational (Cas-
sidy, 1969) or persistently associated with deep vein thrombosis, despite decades of re-
search to the contrary on flights up to eight hours long (Adi, 2004).
Within this continuity, whether technopathologies have changed in significant
qualitative aspects is a question for future research. For now, my main concern is docu-
menting and organizing technopathologies of electric communication technologies, and
suggesting the cultural work they perform, found to be normalizing, gendering, individu-
alizing, 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. This is less history of technology than histori-
cally informed cultural studies of technology in which I examine these associations
through cultural approaches to both technology and disease.
My focus on electric communication technologies is not meant to imply only they
have been associated with pathologies, but is an intentional focusing of area of inquiry to
that which seemed most potentially fruitful. While not unique to electric communication
technologies, technopathologies have perhaps unique relevance to them, as I will next

25
suggest.
As discussed previously, the Cartesian mind/body dualism is central to not only
Barad’s explication of and challenge to representationalism and its dualistic progeny, but
also to much feminist critique and scholarship. It is also central to my topic of technopa-
thologies, by way of a problem at the heart of the mind/body split: motion. Specifically,
animal motion.
xiv

If, as Parmenides and others proposed, the universe is made of two fundamentally
opposing and exclusive things, how can one affect the other? This is the conundrum at
the heart of the Western dualistic worldview and, like most problems, it has been in many
ways greatly productive. Historically, an important specific example of this conundrum
has been animal motion. How does a thought, such as “bend my knee,” become the mo-
tion of muscles contracting and a knee bending? Barad’s agential realism, for example,
would reconceptualize animal motion perhaps in this way: the knee bending is not an in-
explicable interaction between supposedly opposite and discrete things, but an action, a
relation between phenomena and material-discursive practices. However, many earlier
attempts to understand the process of animal motion begat the heart or lifeblood of mod-
ern technology: electricity.
The question of animal motion was an important, if not the central, driving force
in the development of physics, mechanics, and ultimately, modern electric communica-
tions technologies. Ancient and modern thinkers ruminated, meditated, and experimented
to divine the workings of this process, variously theorizing intermediary substances that

26
connected mind and matter, or fundamental substances that united them: ether, pneuma,
animal spirits, mesmeric force, electricity, willpower, charisma, and vital forces all enter
into these discussions in similar and disparate ways far too complex, and employing
vastly different terminologies and conceptual frameworks, to review here.
xv
However, I
would like to briefly suggest a thread of continuity.
What courses through the veins of users? Today, the varied forces that travel
through our nervous systems, shoot down from clouds, or surge out of wall outlets are
generally understood as related, but also discrete forces, each having unique properties
and, more importantly, successfully channeled into separate functions. This has not al-
ways been the case, and understanding the past confluences of such forces makes their
current pathological manifestations more understandable. Ancient philosopher-priest-
scientists (roles which, again, are distinct only to a modern perspective
xvi
) divided the
world into five elements: earth, water, fire, air, and ether. The latter we have dropped in
science, but not, I argue, in many cultural sensibilities.
What was ether? Milutis (2006) refers to it as “the nothing that makes up every-
thing,” the idea being that the ancients could not abide by the concept of nothing in the
way we can think of emptiness of outer space. Instead, the planets floated through ether.
To the ancients, our atmosphere was filled with air, which was what we mortals breathed.
However, the gods lived above this, in an ethereal realm, where they breathed ether, the
element that made up their space. And yet, since ether was what the gods inhaled, it was
also what they exhaled. And it is the exhalations of the gods that created the normal

27
world: pneuma or the breath of life is divine exhalation of ether. Divine respiration in-
spires life in inanimate matter, and when this force leaves us, we expire. Therefore, celes-
tial ether fills up the space we today think of as “nothingness,” and yet, as the divine
pneuma that creates our world, it is “the nothing that makes up everything.”
One ethereal manifestation has been lighting, which connects electricity to divine
powers of life and death. Zeus throws down thunderbolts from his ethereal realm. Scien-
tists (arguably the replacements for the priests of earlier generations), such as Thomas
Edison and Benjamin Franklin, harnessed lightning or recreated it to bring life to an in-
dustrializing nation. Moreover, Edison championed electricity as a mode for ending life
in his support of the electric chair as corporal punishment (using, naturally, not Edison’s
own DC current, but the AC current of his competitor George Westinghouse). Dr. Frank-
enstein, succumbing to masculine hubris and desire of reproduction without women, har-
nesses lighting to electrically impart life to dead flesh in most filmic representations of
“the modern Prometheus,” perhaps the quintessential modern Western myth of technol-
ogy and gender. As a component of CPR, a procedure that Tercier (2002) argues has be-
come in some cases more cultural ritual than medical necessity, given its actual uneven
success rate, doctors—another priestly replacement—use defibrillator paddles to electri-
cally bring the dead back to life.
Such cases are not merely related incidents on the electrical family tree; they are,
until very recently one and the same thing. As recently as the nineteenth century, univer-
sal theories of equivalence to large degrees conflated mechanical and biological energies:

28
The forces that caused muscle movements and metrological lighting were one and the
same. Moreover, the forces that moved the heavens also moved our muscles, and ani-
mated our minds and hearts. Movement, thought, and emotion were all electrical, so were
souls, spirits, personality, and character. Your willpower that coursed down the spinal
cord to make a muscle contract was the same force charging brain cells in not only con-
ceiving a thought but in inspiring mental creativity. This same force that you willed to
think a thought, was also what was used to exude sexual attraction toward someone, to
generate and radiate the charisma of personality. Furthermore, as science was demon-
strating and learning to control over the centuries, this force, here electricity in its broad-
est sense, travelled. It moved from heavens to earth, from static-charged fingertip to an-
other person, from wire to wire, from transmitter to receiver. It could be stored in batter-
ies and displayed in light bulbs. Electrical shocks could be harnessed to kill a criminal
and cure baldness. Therefore, it was perfectly logical that spirits could communicate with
the living, as electrical energy traversed both realms. Such confluence explains the many
anxious, spectacular, and supernatural associations with electrical technologies (Carey,
1989; Lanza, 2004, p. 33; Marvin, 1988; L. Marx, 1976; Metzger, 1996; Milutis, 2006;
Mosco, 2004; Nye, 1994; Sconce, 2000; L. Simon, 2004; Winner, 1986). Telepathy was
as simple as radio. Telegraphs and radios could pick up the voices of ghosts; photography
could capture images of ectoplasm and aura, tape recorders could capture spirit voices,
televisions could entice little girls into the spirit-world, and videotapes could carry a
ghost’s viral curse.
xvii
Vitalism, physics, electrotherapy, psychoanalysis, spiritualism,

29
hypnosis/mesmerism, vital photography, mind control, and the supernatural are the com-
plex and multifaceted roots of what we take for granted today as mere current. Scientist-
philosophers, such as Volta, demonstrated the mutual influence and combinations of me-
chanical, spiritual, biological, and scientific discourses that today’s disciplines and epis-
temologies tend to separate.
If electricity was once the ethereal, divine force of life and death that creates our
world, then it is common to physical, spiritual, and psychic realms. Moreover, if divinity
is expressed through unity, constancy, and commonality, then the forces animating our
thoughts, our sexual magnetism, our brains, our bodies, our ectoplasmic spirits, our light
bulbs, our death penalties, our medical treatments and our wireless communications are
literally one and the same. Given this commonality, it is common sense that invisible ac-
tions and agents—thoughts, willpower, souls, spirits, demons, emotions—travel through
invisible media—pneuma, ether, lightning, electricity, brain waves, nervous systems, dy-
namos, radio waves, TV signals, power lines, wi-fi networks, cell phone signals. As ether
enlivens the mortal world, electricity is the lifeblood of modern communication tech-
nologies, and electromagnetic waves their ethereal element filling the atmospheric void.
Cultural historian of technology Rosalind Williams (2009) argues that the invisi-
bility of electricity and related forces represented a change from the visibility of steam
power, further disconnecting cause and effect, labor and production, and dematerializing
the formerly concrete things of industrial technology and technological relations. This
spurred various literary attempts to resolve the anxiety of reaching a limit of visibility’s

30
powers of representation.
xviii
Asendorf (1993) similarly finds interrelated invisible forces
of electricity, thought, and libido as key cultural sites for transformations in sensory per-
ception that came with industrialization. Burgess takes this in an explicitly technopa-
thological direction in tracing how “cell phone health concerns form part of a general
twentieth-century fear generated by the technological harnessing of different parts of the
electromagnetic spectrum, even simply electricity itself” (Burgess, 2004, p. 98). Cell-
phone fears, he argues, connect to health panics around X-rays leaking from early color
televisions, microwave oven leaks, 1970s fears over power lines and childhood leukemia,
conspiracy theories over microwave weapons developed in Cold War secrecy, 1980s la-
bor activism around radiation from video display terminals, and even late-nineteenth-
century fears over health risks from electrical lighting. In her history of electricity and
anxiety, Simon also notes early concerns over blindness and “photo-electric ophthalmia”
due to electric lighting. Health is threatened because solid boundaries are transgressed by
electricity. Electricity, and its cousins ether and radiation, are mostly invisible forces, just
as germs were for centuries. They are infectious agents of unboundedness. Simon notes
that the advents of electrification and (feverishly debated) theories of infectious disease
were coterminous and mutually informed:
The theory that illness could be caused by invasive microscopic agents
supported the idea that electricity could also be an invasive power. “The
‘seeds of disease,’ to adopt a popular term (whether we accept the germ
theory or not),” commented Scientific American [in 1884], “are floating
about us in myriads without number, and are inhaled by us with every
breath, and yet the diseases are manifested only here and there, wherever
the ‘seed’ finds a susceptible point for its growth. In the same manner,
though the electrical influence may come alike upon all, yet is its effect
made manifest to us in certain cases with great power, while in others we

31
fain to detect it.” Physicians noticed that some people were more sensitive
to electrical charges than others, reporting tingling of the skin, for exam-
ple, hours before a thundershower. In these people, electricity could incite
nervous symptoms and result in neurasthenia. (L. Simon, 2004, p. 150,
emphasis orig.)
In his examination of the US conflation of technology and ether-eal spirituality, Sconce
(Sconce, 2000) points out the “electropsychopathology” of cyberspace addiction, mental
illness, and central nervous system dysfunctions attributed to the bio-electrical-spiritual
circuits of 19th century “spiritual telegraphy.” In his history of ether and its electrical de-
scendents, Milutis (2006) notes that 19th-century neurologists linked susceptibility to
hypnotism (the sanitized descendant of electro-spiritual mesmerism) to the feminine dis-
ease of hysteria. Both Sconce and Milutis document the electro-psychic connection
among 19th-century spiritualism, which expressed a gendered pathology: mediums were
typically female and the most famous of which, the Fox sisters, were forced into asylums
for treatment in the emerging field of psychiatry—a medical literal taming of the (often
pubescent, sexually awakening) feminine electro-spiritual.
Marina Warner, in her work on Victorian spirit photography and other phantas-
magoric engagements with representation and the invisible, argues that “the brain balks at
non-meaning; meaninglessness, like formlessness, becomes the dominant scandal against
reason, and reason, seeking to abolish it, generates fantasies” (Warner, 2006, p. 17). As I
will discuss in my next chapter, pathology is often defined by formlessness and, as in
Dumit’s (2005, 2006) work on liminal diseases, such as electrosensitivity, the disease’s
pain and suffering, bereft of sanctioned cause, are therefore to varying degrees meaning-
less as well. Whereas Burgess might focus on the fantasy-making response

32
to such technopathological formlessness and meaningless, my emphasis is on Warner’s
other reaction: “to abolish it.” Technopathological discourse performs precisely the work
of abolishing, through normalizing, gendering, and otherwise banishing “bad users” to
culturally devalued realms.
Ether is a technology of life- and world-making. It “makes up everything,” and
technology—particularly divine technologies—threaten mortals. Invisible waves of
power doom the transportation technologies of Daedalus and Icarus; Prometheus’ theft of
divine fire brings retribution down on humanity (notably, in some versions, in the gen-
dered form of Pandora); Frankenstein learns his lesson, as do numerous victims of irradi-
ated dinosaurs, insects, and other animals of 1950s atomic horror films.
xix
Therefore it is
entirely logical for electric communication technologies to be a site of health concerns.
Yesteryear’s ether—with both awesome and terrifying incarnations—courses through
yesterday’s panics over color-TV X-ray-emissions and today’s cell phone health anxie-
ties. The previously mentioned New England Journal of Medicine’s report on “disrupted
flashover effect” — iPod wearers’ increased vulnerability to lightning strikes (Fitz,
2007b; Heffernan, 2007)—and neurasthenics’ exhausted collapses from technology-
fueled modern society, echo mythological histories of ether and pneuma, the life-infusing
breath of the gods.
This lineage supports an implicit argument of this project, that of historical conti-
nuity. As my examples will demonstrate, technopathologies are not solely associated with
new or emerging technologies as some kind of irrational, technophobic reaction. They

33
persist, and the cultural history of electricity suggests some possible reasons why. How-
ever, the stories of ether and lightning do foreground one important change. While not
suggesting that ether, vital forces, electricity, radiation, hypnosis, and mesmerism are
equivalent, there is continuity in the concepts, an associative lineage. But at one end of
the lineage it is a spiritual force, a vital essence of life itself, much like a soul. At the
other end, it is a utility, a commodity bought and sold.
Of course, electricity is not ether. The currents coursing through my synapses and
from a wall socket are not equivalent. However, they are in relation. They are connected
in a genealogical lineage. To use Barad’s language, they are phenomena related to mate-
rial-discursive practices. There is a thread of connection from the divine breath of the
gods, that which transforms inanimate matter into organic life, to that which moves our
muscles and extends our minds, to that which persists after death, to that which comes
shooting down from the sky, to that which we store in batteries and deliver to our ma-
chines and devices. Our bodies and souls are related to a commoditized utility. We pay
monthly for a thing related to our souls.
This may be relatively recent, but is not new. Nor is the surrounding accumulation
of electric devices and technologies that enable our lives, although it can be argued that
the rate of increase in both their accumulation and our dependence on them has rapidly
increased. However, what may be new is the degree to which we are ourselves becoming
electrical, electrified, or etherized (upon a table?). The space of many modern lives is
filled with electrical devices, and the living of many aspects of modern life takes places

34
in electric spaces. Our mediation and digitization suggest increasing electrical suffusion
along new vectors. Surely it is not unrelated that, as the twentieth century progressed, the
objects of paranoid delusion for schizophrenics switched from largely spiritual (e.g.,
“God is talking to me”) to technological (e.g., “The TV is talking to me”).
xx

Moreover, if anything suggests technopathologies as continuous, it would be per-
haps the paradigmatic case of the various health concerns related to cell phones and their
related technologies. Fears about their health risks refuse to die, despite mobile telephony
having been first demonstrated to the public almost four decades ago (the Motorola
Dyna-Tac in 1973) and, by 2007, used by 84% of the US population, with 100% use es-
timated by 2013 (Sachoff, 2007). In early 2010, yet another an article in a popular men’s
magazine went viral, mimetically spreading and replicating research on the subject that
was decades years old and largely discredited (Ketcham, 2010). The cell-phone issue
warrants book-length treatment, and I have therefore not made it my focus.
xxi
I note the
issue as a form of my disease pattern of Overload, and, in my chapter on Overload, cell
phones are a major but not the only concern of the health activists and sufferers of elec-
trosensitivity that I examine. More fantastic variations of these concerns, often surpris-
ingly parallel in their narratives of inexplicable bio-spiritual-electric plagues or infections
spreading through cell phones, figure prominently in my chapter on a form of the Prom-
iscuity disease pattern, Possessed and Cursed Technologies.
Ultimately, however, this project was not designed to answer historical questions
about technopathologies, although the Appendix arranges cases chronologically in order

35
to give a feel of their flow through the decades, and suggest perhaps qualitative differ-
ences over time. However, my primary goal has been to articulate (in both senses of the
word) the emergent cultural formation of technopathologies, while asserting that they are
not new phenomena. What is recent, as demonstrated by this project, is their increasing
intelligibility. Technopathologies make sense now more than ever; they can be heard,
seen, and recognized. While I had to resort to a neologism to name them, when describ-
ing the concept to friends, family, and colleagues, I have received almost universal rec-
ognition and understanding. Similarly, in my focus groups, all understood the concept,
even if they did not believe in it.
Method: Differential Analysis
This is a feminist project. I identify it as such because its fundamental method and con-
ceptual framework—the analysis of cultural norms via the abnormal, specifically the dis-
eased—is inspired by and adapted from the work of feminist scholars of gender. In terms
of this project, I am employing “feminist” as an adjective of origin. However, it does not
mean that it is limited to feminist content, arguments, or representations. (Although I feel
it is aligned with such work as a progressive, critical project.) “Feminist” indicates line-
age, not exclusive content. While this project often specifically addresses women and
gender, it is not exclusively about them, which I acknowledge puts its feminist creden-
tials at risk. This project sits somewhere between feminism as a political project—one
that works towards equality between biological sexes and/or, through genderings, their
associated behaviors and attributes—and an intellectual project of theorizing and analyz-

36
ing how differences of sex, gender, and sexuality are devalued in society. I am interested
in how the intellectual project of feminism might be applied to additional vectors of dif-
ference. This is not intended to erase women or femininity, but from a strictly political
perspective could be seen as doing so. Nor is it intended to co-opt the intellectual work of
feminist scholars, such as those discussed previously, and thus I reiterate the acknow-
ledgement here.
The method I am developing here of differential analysis is about logics of differ-
ence— analyzing how a phenomena plays out across vectors of difference inclusive of
but not limited to analyses specifically about sex or gender. It posits difference as a pri-
mary frame of analysis, rather than attempting a universal perspective. It conceives of
difference as not a mediating influence to be factored out or a surplus of variables to be
reduced and isolated. Gender, biological sex, and sexuality are applicable vectors of dif-
ference, but so are class, era, race, ethnicity, geography, nation, and many others. There
are robust traditions examining each of these. However, the move I am trying to make—
the room I am trying to carve out—is to encourage communication and collaboration be-
tween these fields by suggesting that the logics of difference within each may have rele-
vance beyond each specific area. For example, relations and logics of racial difference
may play out in social realms and fields not explicitly about race, as in McPherson’s
work on 1960s computer programming (2009). While differential analyses may explore
structures and relations that primarily occur between women and men, or masculine and
feminine persons, and have specific ramifications for them, it also looks for and examines

37
situations in which people, things, or processes are treated like a woman. My goal is gen-
eralization without homogenization. For example, broad conceptual frameworks for so-
cial analysis, such as Marxism or the Neoliberal subject, risk losing sight of other forms
of difference in their privileging of economic vectors of analysis. Similarly, Foucault’s
broad categories of normal and abnormal in terms of mental health, sexuality, or crimi-
nality lose sight of how they vary by different types of sick, sexual, or criminal bodies.
This is far from a new idea, as much work in feminism and gender studies ex-
plores how different things, places, and activities within social worlds are “gendered” as
masculine or feminine, or have masculinizing or feminizing effects. However, the prob-
lem I have discovered in trying to discuss applications of such scholarship is a misunder-
standing of gender studies as some taxonomic project of classifying, absolutely and ex-
clusively, every thing, action, experience, and concept as discretely and exclusively mas-
culine or feminine. This completely misunderstands the project. For example, Ruth Old-
enziel’s (1999) work on the historic masculinizing of technology is not meant to suggest
that all technologies or users are boys. However, the not-uncommon objections to such
work (e.g., naming counterexamples of feminine technologies), clearly demonstrates that
this is an interpretation of it (or a specious misperception objectors are rhetorically at-
tempting to reframe it as). But such work is not literally about the gender of technology;
it is about how values, hierarchies, social structures, logics, and relations based on those
of gender are applied to it. Therefore, although there may be specific repercussions for
persons of different genders, the work is primarily about gendering, not gender.

38
Apparently a gerund is insufficient; therefore I am succumbing to the role of
phrasemaker and attempting to make things clearer. “Differential analysis” focuses on the
role of difference—the ≠, <, or > in the algebra of social life. I do so in a manner derived
from feminism and gender studies but, while it may have specific relevance for them, it is
not limited to them. Sexed or gendered dynamics may play out between raced subjects.
Very similar projects could be conceived and executed using differential analysis and
class studies; yet wholly distinct and irreconcilable projects could also be conceived and
executed within each. To resort to the hoary heuristic of a Venn-ish diagram: imagine a
large circle of differential analysis, within which are many overlapping but not duplicate
circles of specific analyses derived from different traditions. Their differences are not
dissolved into some universal theory, but their commonalities and broader mutual appli-
cations are acknowledged.
For example, how does a critical race theorist see a tape recorder differently than
a media historian? How does a feminist hear the complaints of a carpal tunnel patient dif-
ferently than a cultural historian of disease? What articulations does one think to look for
that might not occur to other investigators? What relationships is one already primed for
or attuned to? I consider this not wearing different hats but raising and lowering analytic
priorities, integrating into a coherent whole, like adjusting the equalizer controls on an
audio mixing board or RGB settings on a color television. The spectrums of sound and
light frequencies are separated by electronic controls, but only as a tool. Even when digit-
ized into the ultimate divisions of binary code, in the perceptual reality of experience,

39
sounds and colors fuse, are never mutually exclusive nor wholly distinct.
For example, elsewhere (D. T. Scott, 2010) I have examined illusory rhetoric of
empowerment appearing in what feminist scholars have called a “postfeminist cultural
sensibility” (Gill, 2007) and also in the marketing and associated claims of interactive
media technologies. Feminist scholars have analyzed a pervasive cultural sensibility, of-
ten expressed in media products, of feminism having accomplished its goals, thereby
making its concerns with gender disparity archaic and irrelevant. Therefore women are
now liberated, and can dance on a stripper pole or wear a thong as a free choice of their
girly natures, not from any kind of social pressure to perform gender or bodily ideals. The
claims of already-achieved liberation obscure the persistence of gender expectations and
inequities and, moreover, castigate any need for politics to address them. Appropriating
these insights to examine media technologies, I argue that the claims of liberation for the
user of interactive, participatory media ring similarly hollow. This application of insights
from feminism and gender studies to aspects of culture not exclusively about women or
gender is part of my project of developing differential analysis.
I will explore and demonstrate differential analysis variously throughout this pro-
ject. In this chapter I look at technology in terms of difference by examining it in terms of
gender and sickness, as well as the relation between those two. The subsequent chapter
presents an overview of technopathologies, organized into a typology, with gendered and
differential insights noted throughout. However, I explore differential analysis most
overtly in chapters that present case studies of each type of technopathology. My chapter

40
on electrosensitivity includes feminist writers Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Angela
McRobbie as part of my gendered analyses of an O. Henry novella, a Joan Crawford film,
and activist discourse in online electrosensitivity networks, all of which demonstrate dis-
ease as what Tom Lutz calls a “cultural complex”: a site where cultural work is per-
formed, such as the work of gendering. Disease, I argue, not only marks degrees of nor-
mal and abnormal, it marks degrees of masculine and feminine, and performs other cul-
tural work as well, such as stigmatizing the user and naturalizing sickness itself. My
chapter on Audio Zombies—a continuum ranging from antisocial behavior to sociopathic
monstrosity associated with users of personal, private listening technologies—applies de-
bates and insights from the history of lesbian separatism to argue how this technopathol-
ogy performs cultural work of pathologizing collective organizing. My chapter on tech-
nopathologies of Mismanaged Bandwidth examines the cases of Central Park Jogger
Trisha Meili and the engineer in the Chatsworth train crash, Robert Sanchez; I demon-
strate here how feminist attention to difference helps in analysis of the cultural work of
technopathological discourse. Narratives of pathologized users, I argue, reinforce other
vectors of social pathologization, such as sex, gender, race, and sexuality, while also di-
verting attention from social and systemic concerns to individual ones. In my chapter on
the Promiscuity pattern of cursed technologies, I present gender analyses of the film
Pulse 2: Afterlife and a group of films and books based on the Koji Suzuki novel Ringu.
Drawing on a variety of feminist scholarship around cultural concepts of sluts and moth-
ers, I argue that these cultural texts reflect technopathologies’ concern with reproduction

41
of technological subjects, of users, and provide insight into the limits of appropriate net-
working or “hooking up.” My chapter on repetitive stress injury applies feminist theories
of looking and Michel Foucault’s work on medical perception, examining what sort of
user an OSHA ergonomics diagram positions. Applying a feminist-inspired differential
analysis, I ask how this ideal user varies across vectors of difference, specifically discuss-
ing class.
In these diverse examples, I am attempting two moves. The first is to show the
applicability of feminist insights into sex/gender-based differences to other forms of dif-
ference, first steps toward developing a generalized theory of difference. Second, I am
exploring how this could operate methodologically, attempting to build a palette of tech-
niques for performing differential analysis. The first and perhaps most obvious approach
is to consult area studies: If I’m looking at disease as a cultural complex, what have
feminists said about a prime example, such as neurasthenia? Another is to substitute sites:
If feminists developed an analysis of gendered diseases, what happens when their ana-
lytical model is applied to technological diseases? Alternately, one can trace tropes: how,
for example, perceptions of identity as individual, personal, and mutable, rather than
structural, institutional, or historic, appear in both postfeminism and postracial cultural
analyses (Joseph, 2009). Another is to create juxtapositions: What can the reconfigured
collectives of lesbian feminists tell us about the reconfigured collectives of Audio Zom-
bie hordes? Finally, and perhaps even more obvious, is to differentiate the phenomenon,
to ask the fundamental question behind not only feminism but also all area studies: How

42
does this phenomenon vary, intersect, or play out differently across social hierarchies of
difference? If headphoned joggers or texting train engineers are bad, sick users, what of
female headphoned joggers or gay, Latino texting train engineers?

43
Chapter 1 Endnotes

i
As the last two examples suggest, not all forms of illness are unpleasant. The pleasures of technology use
are not separate and exclusive from their pathologies and discomforts.

ii
As I will elaborate further, my conception of the body does not exclude the mind or conceive of it as
separate. I use “body” to refer not only to physical matter, but also a holistic organism, inclusive of psyche.
Indeed, as in ancient and non-Western medical theories, mind and body are not separate, something even
Western medicine’s recent models of genetic and biological factors for “mental” illnesses suggest.

iii
For a survey of the broad array of feminist research on the body, see Balsamo, (1996).

iv
Although, as Laqueur (1990) has shown, the social roles, behaviors, and attributes of gender actually
predated biological sex: ancient medical science traditionally considered there to be one sex, of which man
was the evolved form and woman an unevolved, inverted, degenerate, or otherwise lesser variant.
Enlightenment materialism, particularly in Rousseau, support the shift to a perspective more familiar today:
bodily biological sex being somehow a priori, natural, essential, and demarcated, with the roles, attributes
or behaviors of gender assigned to it socially.

v
See Chapter Three for an extended discussion of neurasthenia and gendering.

vi
For an excellent survey of how these efforts related to the development of the social sciences, particularly
disciplines of social work and psychiatry, see Helene Silverberg (1998), Gender and American social
science: The formative years. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

vii
For a succinct overview, see Margaret A. McLaren (2002), Feminism, Foucault, and embodied
subjectivity, esp. 1–18, 175–181. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. The entire book offers
a persuasive argument for Foucault’s relevance and utility to feminists, as well as counterarguments to his
objectors. Jana Sawicki also makes a persuasive book-length argument for Foucauldean feminism in
(1991). Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, power and the body. New York: Routledge. An extended
argument for the feminist application of Foucault’s neglected later work comprises Lois McNay (1992),
Foucault and feminism: Power, gender and the self. Boston, Northeastern University Press. Key
anthologies collecting perspectives in the feminist-Foucault debate include: Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby
(Eds.). (1988). Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on resistance. Boston: Northeastern University Press;
Caroline Ramazanoglu, (Ed.). (1993). Up against Foucault: Explorations of some tensions between
Foucault and feminism. New York: Routledge; and Susan Hekman (Ed.). (1996). Feminist interpretations
of Michel Foucault. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

viii
A paragon of this work would be David Halperin. (1995). Saint Foucault: Towards a gay hagiography.
New York: Oxford University Press. Other key Foucauldean queer theorists would include Lauren Berlant,
Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, Adrienne Rich, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michael Warner.

ix
This expanded notion of discourse draws on that of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985).
Hegemony and socialist strategy: Toward a radical democratic politics, 107. London: Verso. See
application of this to corporeal feminism and technology studies in Balsamo (1996).

x
Indeed, sufferers suffer because they suffer. Suffering is. Here Elaine Scarry’s work on pain as the limit of
language, intelligibility, and discourse may be useful: (1985). The body in pain: The making and unmaking
of the world. New York: Oxford University Press. While Scarry focuses on signification and representation
as forms of world-making, I suggest she also offers an important intervention in the impulse to always

44

resolve away pain, whether through medicine or other explanations. This is not to say that a physiological
fact, such as injury, does not cause painful sensations, which can be alleviated through medicinal treatment.
My suggestion is that the deep impulse to stop pain drives the need to explain away pain and sickness:
Where do you hurt? leads to What’s wrong with you? My project attempts to resist that impulse and
examine hurting without necessarily solving the problem of pain. As Scarry rejects the signification and
intersubjective experience of others’ pain; I largely reject its cause in my research design. I am not saying
pain is beyond cure or explanation, but that sometimes it is productive to bracket those issues. For an
alternate example, consider the practices of Western sports endurance or Eastern yoga, particularly
kundalini, in which pain must not only be experienced rather than avoided or stopped, but also that painful
experience is in fact a valuable path toward enlightenment and new mental-physical skills.

xi
Other aspects of science and technology studies, not explicitly feminist, challenged the in/organic,
person/machine binaries through reconceptualizing the opposing categories into a new, unified concept of
actors. In actor network theory, humans and technological devices are reconceived not as opposites, but
similar actors possessing agency within networks of technological relations (See discussions in Bauchspies,
Croissant & Restivo, 2006; Biagioli, 1999; Feenberg, 1999; Latour, 1991; Rabinow & Dan-Cohen, 2005).

xii
For parallels in the arts, one could also look to process art, earth art, and performance art, particularly its
less-theatrical incarnations in the 1960s and 1970s—all of which were notably suffused with feminist art
and artists.

xiii
For example, early twentieth century encounters with technologies at times resulted in injury and death.
Automobile collisions and factory dismemberments, for example, helped drive the idea that some people
were inherently more susceptible to technological injury: the accident prone. A concept developed
independently in Germany and Britain, it sought to explain statistical findings that some people fell victim
to more than their share of inadvertent incidents, and attempted to find a way to plan for and prevent such
loss of life and productivity. Reaching its high point in midcentury, it ultimately was not adopted by
medical and psychiatric authorities, and the problems it sought to grapple with were addressed more by
developments in engineering (Burnham, 2009). Other concerns focused on specific technologies, such as
physical and mental complaints associated with the new experiences of speed and movement associated
with the railroads (Harvey, 1989; Kirby, 1997). Humphreys’ (2000) history of US disease panics relates
fears of non-contagious diseases spreading through transportation and non-electric communication
technologies such as ships, trains, and the mail post.

xiv
“Animal” in this usage is inclusive of, not opposite to, humanity, as in the categorical triad of animal,
vegetable, or mineral.

xv
Suggested histories and overviews include Cristoph Asendorf (1993). Batteries of life: On the history of
things and their perception in modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press; George Bloch (Ed.)
(1980). Mesmerism: A translation of the original scientific and medical writings of F. A. Mesmer. Los Al-
tos, CA: William Kaufmann, Inc.; Mary A. B. Brazier (1961). A history of the electrical activity of the rain:
The first half-century. London: Pitman Medical Publishing; G. N. Cantor & M. J. S. Hodge (Eds.) (1981).
Conceptions of ether: Studies in the history of ether theories 1740-1900. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press; Robert Darnton (1968). Mesmerism and the end of the Enlightenment in France. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press; Bern Dibner (1952); Galvani-Volta: A controversy that led to the discovery
of useful electricity. Norwalk, CT: Burndy Library; Patricia Fara (2002). An entertainment for angels: Elec-
tricity in the Enlightenment. New York: Columbia University Press; Robert C. Fuller (1982). Mesmerism
and the American Cure of Souls. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; Robert Montraville
Green, M.D. (Ed.) (1953). Galvani on electricity. Cambridge, MA: Elizabeth Licht; Elizabeth Haigh
(1984). Xavier Bichat and the medical theory of the eighteenth century (Medical History, Supplement No.
4). London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine; R. J. L. Heilbron (1979). Electricity in the

45

17th and 18th centuries: A study of early modern physics. Berkeley: University of California Press; W.
Home (1992). Electricity and experimental physics in eighteenth-century Europe. Brookfield, VT: Vari-
orum/Ashgate; C. Marvin, (1988). When old technologies were new: Thinking about electric communica-
tion in the late nineteenth century. New York: Oxford University Press; T. H. Metzger (1996). Blood and
volts: Edison, Tesla, & the electric chair. Brooklyn: Autonomedia; Milutis, J. (2006). Ether: The nothing
that connects everything. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Iwan Rhys Morus (1998). Franken-
stein's children: Electricity, exhibition, and experiment in Early-Eighteenth-Century London. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press; John Durham Peters (2010). Broadcasting and schizophrenia. Media, Cul-
ture and Society 32, 123-140; Sidney Ochs (2004). A history of nerve functions: From animal spirits to
molecular mechanisms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; Michael Brian Schiffer (2003).
Draw the lightning down: Benjamin Franklin and electrical technology in the age of enlightenment. Ber-
keley: University of California Press; L. Simon, (2004). Dark light: Electricity and anxiety from the tele-
graph to the X-ray. New York: Harcourt. A. J. Snow (1926). Matter & Gravity in Newton's Physical Phi-
losophy. London: Oxford University Press. Original texts of interest include: A. D. Rockwell & George
Miller Beard (1873). Clinical researches in electro-surgery. New York: William Wood & Co. George
Miller Beard (1882). The psychology of the Salem witchcraft excitement of 1692 and its practical applica-
tion to our own time. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons. Xavier Bichat (1827). Physiological Researches on
Life and Death. Boston; Richardson and Lord. William Craig (1859). On the influence of variations of elec-
tric tension as the remote cause of epidemic and other disease. London: John Churchill. Michael Faraday
(attributed through spirit medium) (1885). Progression, or How a spirit advances in spirit life, the evolu-
tion of man. Two papers, given in the interest of spiritual science, by Michael Faraday, late electrician and
chemist of the Royal Institution, London, England. Springfield, MA: Star Publishing. Benjamin Franklin
(1769). Experiments and observations on electricity, made at Philadelphia in America, to which are added,
letters and papers on philosophical subjects. London: David Henry. E. J. Fraser (1863). Medical electric-
ity: A treatise on the nature of vital electricity in heath and disease. Chicago: C. S. Halsey. J. Stanley
Grimes (1845). Etherology; or the philosophy of mesmerism and phrenology; including a new philosophy
of sleep and of consciousness, with a review of the pretensions of neurology and phreno-magnetism. New
York: Saxton and Miles. Dr. L. W. de Laurence (1910). "Magnetic hypnotism" "medical hypnosis" and
"suggestive therapeutics." Chicago: de Laurence, Scott & Co. Stephen Hales (1981). Statical essays: Con-
taining haemastaticks; or, an account of some hydraulick and hydrostatical experiments made on the blood
and blood-vessels of animals. New York: New York Academy of Medicine Library; Benjamin Waterhouse,
M.D. (1790). On the principle of vitality. Boston: Thomas & John Fleet. Allen Putnam (1858). Mesmerism,
spiritualism, witchcraft, and miracle. Boston: John Wilson & Son. Baron Charles Reichenbach aka Carl
Freiherr von Reichenbach (1860). Odic-Magnetic Letters. New York: Calvin Blanchard. S. Heydenfeldt, Jr.
(1890). The unison of the conscious forces (continued). San Francisco: W.M. Hinton & Co.. T. Gale, M.D.
(1802). Electricity, or ethereal fire, considered: 1st, Naturally, as the agent of animal and vegetable life;
2d, Astronomically, or as the agent of gravitation and motion; 3d, Medically, or its artificial use in dis-
eases. Comprehending both the theory and practice of medical electricity; and demonstrated to be an in-
fallble cure for fever, inflammation, and many other diseases: Constituting the best family physician ever
extant. Troy: Moffitt & Lyon. Thomas L. Wright, M.D. (1848). Notes on the theory of human existence,
comprising remarks on vitality, the mind, and incidentally, the soul, the whole being an exposition of the
nature, powers, and destiny of man. Cincinnati: Collins & Van Wagner. J. J. Thomson (1908). On the light
thrown by recent investigations on Electricity on the relation between Matter and Ether. Manchester Uni-
versity lectures: The Adamson Lecture delivered at the University on November 4, 1907. Manchester, UK:
Manchester University Press. W. R. Wells (1869). A new theory of disease; Based upon the principle that
man is a compound electrical magnet; Also a new method of cure, by means of the various qualities of elec-
tricity. Rochester, NY: Tracy & Rew, Evening Express Office.

xvi
Moreover, even these distinctions, Latour argues, are illusory and more rhetorical than actual, even in
“modernity.”

46

xvii
For cinematic representations, see, for example, White Noise, White Noise 2, Shutter (US and Japanese
versions), Frequency, Poltergeist, The Ring films, Photographing Faeries.

xviii
For a fascinating example of approaching this through not only literary but sonic means, see the John
Adams opera Doctor Atomic and particularly the comments of director/librettist Peter Sellars in its making-
of documentary.

xix
Them, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Beginning of the End, Godzilla, The Deadly Mantis, It Came
from Beneath the Sea, Tarantula, etc.

xx
This shift was related to me in discussion with a Los Angeles-area mental health professional who
manages mental health programs largely populated with schizophrenics; see also discussion of the changing
sources of schizophrenic auditory hallucinations in Daniel Smith (2008). Muses, madmen, and prophets:
Hearing voices and the borders of sanity. New York: Penguin.

xxi
For a thorough scholarly overview, see Adam Burgess (2004). Cellular phones, public fears, and a cul-
ture of precaution. New York: Cambridge University Press. Two book-length surveys generally supportive
of health risks are George Carlo and Martin Schram, (2001). Cell phones: Invisible hazards in the wireless
age. New York: Carroll & Graf and Robert Kane (2001). Cellular telephone Russian roulette: A historical
and scientific perspective. New York: Vantage. A federal review of research findings and update on a simi-
lar 1994 report found insufficient evidence for government action: United States General Accounting Of-
fice (2001). Report # GAO-01-545, Telecommunications: research and regulatory efforts on mobile phone
health issues.

47
Chapter 2: Pathological Technoculture

Foucault gave us the maxims that each age gets the form of madness it deserves and
that every form of madness is a parody of the reigning form of reason. Pathology reveals
normality. In the same way, each format or technology of communication implies its own
disorders. Madness shines a bright light on hidden assumptions about communication.
— John Durham Peters, “Broadcasting and Schizophrenia”

Having previously discussed the analytic approach of this project in terms of feminism
and differential analysis, and suggested the historical context of its legibility, I turn now
to my object of study, technopathologies. In this chapter, I wish to trace the background
for studying both technology and disease from a cultural perspective, rather than, say,
engineering or medical science approaches. I will then discuss ways in which my topics
relate to each other and to my feminist, differential analytic, examining pathological dis-
course as not only gendered but productive of gender, and the relation of disease and
gender to notions of boundlessness.
Approaches to Critical Study of Technology, Science, and Culture
My approach is similar to and draws on studies of science, knowledge, and technology
carried out under various banners, including social construction, history, feminism, phi-
losophy, and sociology. I will now briefly describe two strands particularly relevant to
this project, feminism and cultural studies, then my chosen approach of “technological

48
culture.”
Much critical scholarship on technology falls under a historical materialist um-
brella, providing political economic analysis of the “machine problem,” to borrow a Vic-
torian appellation. Marx (1978) argues that, originally, humans used tools, and these
technological devices had metaphoric relations to and extensions of innate human pro-
ductive capabilities. However, in the modern factory, the tool uses the man; she becomes
shaped to fit it rather than enhanced by it. Although still maintaining a vision of an essen-
tial, pure, unalienated self, Marx nevertheless argues that individuals are shaped by mate-
rial relations of production; therefore the technologies of production come to have greater
import and necessity of analysis. The propagandizing and direct action of the original
Luddites can be seen as amenable to this, less so the individualist consumer-citizens of
neoLuddism (Jones, 2006). An application to technological history can be seen in
Winston’s (1998) examination of U.S. technological diffusion, in which a myriad of so-
cial, political, and economic forces shape technologies’ use, demystifying concepts of
natural and independent discoveries and adoptions. Similar research has explored how
science and technologies support and perpetuate existing structures of power and knowl-
edge (Andrejevic, 2003, 2007; Czitrom, 1982; de Lauretis, 1987; Fox Keller, 1985;
Haraway, 1999; Harstock, 1983; Headrick, 1988; Lorber, 1998; Robins, 1999; D.
Schiller, 2007; H. I. Schiller, 1989; Silverberg, 1998; Wajcman, 1991).
In philosophy of technology and areas of science and technology studies, others
have adopted a more theoretical approach to understanding the nature of technology. For

49
example, Heidegger (1977) sees art as a Platonic method of calling forth the true nature
of technology, which he viewed as a reductive instrumentalization of nature, a breaking
down of all—including humanity ultimately—into causal relationships implying “stand-
ing reserves” of extractable values and resources. Feenberg (1999) argues that Heideg-
ger’s view did not take enough into account technologies’ social embeddedness, bestow-
ing too much autonomy upon technology. However, Feenberg also argues that too strong
a slide into social constructivism evanesces technology as a subject of inquiry. Feenberg
aims to strike a balance, avoiding Heidegger’s pessimism by retaining the hope of agency
in critical theory, such as that of Marcuse, and maintaining technology’s social, material
imbrication in issues of class. He attempts to resist utter relativism by insisting that, de-
spite social variations, technology has enough generalizable, dominant traits to preserve it
as a subject of democratic deliberation within a Habermasian public sphere. Latour
(1991) theorizes that the very constitution of “technology” in the West via modernity’s
ideal separation of knowledge, power, and practices (with religion bracketed) is illusory
and necessitates auto-anthropological redress.
Inspired by such thinking, a less abstract strain of science studies developed in-
volving the documentation of scientific and technological practices, typically through in-
terviews and observation. Rabinow and Dan-Cohen (2005) conducted a primary-site eth-
nography, primarily through extended interviews with established informants at a Cali-
fornia biotech. The authors attempted to avoid heroes and villains by refusing narrative
structure: providing no clear summaries, introductions, or, most significantly, conclu-

50
sions, and relying heavily on reproducing extended interview transcripts and a reflexive
co-author process. The highly descriptive result attempts to show the creation and com-
munication of scientific knowledge. Reardon’s (2005) multi-site ethnography on the Hu-
man Genome Diversity Project traced unexpected resistances and mostly unsuccessful
responses. Reardon shows not merely how social forces impact acquisition of knowledge,
but also how not taking this into account from the beginning impedes knowledge acquisi-
tion itself. In these and other science studies research, the goal is demystification through
explanation of how science works or how technologies come into being, illustrating cul-
tural embeddedness as opposed to discoveries waiting to be revealed (Bauchspies, Crois-
sant & Restivo, 2006; Biagioli, 1999).
In feminist studies of science and technology, numerous scholars have critiqued,
embraced, or reimagined relationships between gender, science, and technology,
Haraway’s (1991) vision of a feminist cyborg being one of the most well known
examples and a rallying cry for such research.
i
Fox Keller (1985) and Silverberg (1998)
trace the mutual constitution of gender and, respectively, science in general and
American social science in particular. Balsamo (1996) examines numerous ways in which
contemporary technologies, ranging from cosmetic surgery to bodybuilding, not only
have gendered components in their construction and deployment, but also literally
reshape the female body. McClintock (1996) explores the intertwined nature of gender,
race, and ethnicity in her articulation of imperialist technologies. Easlea (1984) examines
the development of the atomic bomb as an exercise in masculine competition and

51
expression, and Thomas describes hacker culture as the movement of what can be defined
as “‘boy culture’ into the age of technology” (2002, p. x). Several scholars have
examined the gendering of technology as feminine. Frank (1995) notes an increasing
association of women with machines beginning in the late nineteenth century, as well as
particularly feminine descriptions of emergent sound recording technologies, continuing
to modern science fiction.
ii
Huyssen (2003) argues that technological anxieties belie
castration anxiety and misogyny projected onto machines and a mechanical view of
nature, as in Fritz Lang’s
iii
Metropolis and the 18
th
-century European automata craze.
iv

Auner (2003) likewise notes anxieties around gender and sexual identities as frequently
wrapped up in representations of technology.
v

Cultural studies of science and technology are similarly critical, analyzing racial
and class inequities, in addition to sex and gender, and emphasizing media and pop cul-
tural representations (A. Ross, 1996). As Gray writes, “Technologies are not neutral but
rather are always raced, gendered, and deeply rooted in particular social conditions, histo-
ries, and interests” (2005, p. 154). Several identify exaggeratedly utopian and dystopian
patterns of in technological discourse (Carey, 1989; Jones, 2006; Mattelart, 1996; Miller,
2006; Nye, 1994; Robins & Webster, 1999; Spigel, 2001; Sturken, Thomas & Ball-
Rokeach, 2004; Rosalind Williams, 2005; Winston, 1998, 2006). Cultural scholars have
also examined technological discourse as the site of specific displaced or sublimated so-
cial anxieties and fantasies around topics such as nation (L. Marx, 1976; McClintock,
1995; Nye, 1994), parental obsolescence (Banet-Weiser, 2004b), difference (Nye, 2006),

52
or spirituality (Noble, 1997). Several scholars have explored anxious, spectacular, and
supernatural associations with the very lifeblood of modern communication technologies,
electricity (Carey, 1989; Lanza, 2004, p. 33; Marvin, 1988; Metzger, 1996; Milutis, 2006;
Sconce, 2000; L. Simon, 2004). Finally, throughout much cultural studies of technology
exists a dynamic tension or productive conversation on balancing a critique of techno-
utopianism, technological transcendence, and determinism (Balsamo, 1996; Chun, 2006;
Dean, 2002; Mosco, 2004), with an acknowledgement of the importance of including the
formal properties of communication technologies, or “mediality,” as an influential aspect
of analysis (T. J. Anderson, 2006; Innis, 1991; Kittler, 1990, 1999; Lowe, 1982; McLu-
han, 1994, 1995; W. J. Ong, 1996).
Attempting to synthesize several strands within these many approaches, Slack and
Wise (2005) offer a “technological culture” approach that draws on concepts of articula-
tion and assemblage. Articulation refers to mapping the network of associations, what
Hall refers to as “lines of tendential force” that connect to an area of inquiry. “Articula-
tion can be understood as the contingent connection of different elements that, when con-
nected in a particular way, form a specific unity” (2005, p. 127). An assemblage, in turn,
refers to “a particular constellation of articulations that selects, draws together, stakes out,
and envelops a territory that exhibits some tenacity and effectivity” (p. 129). Technologi-
cal culture uses an interdisciplinary approach in order to articulate technologies’ assem-
blages of people, institutions, representations, and practices, and analyze their distribu-
tions and contestations of power. Such a perspective helps make complex arrangements

53
and connections more apparent and intelligible: 1990s shaming discourse pathologizing
online newbies and their improper netiquette could be articulated as echoing earlier ridi-
cule of Jews, blacks, women, and non-experts encountering the telephone and telegraph
at their moments of emergence. For example, the middle-class, WASP cultural value of
emotional restraint is expressed in admonitions not to shout in a public place, into a tele-
phone receiver, an answering machine message, or write an email in all capital letters.
Distinctions of class are also heavily involved, as they were in the technology-fueled
nineteenth-century bouts of neurasthenia. Arguably such cultural values link sitting up
straight and walking erect with the comportment of fingers over keyboards (alphanumeric
and musical), distance of eyes from screens, noble exhaustion from technologically-
mediated “brain work” versus crass (and stoop-inducing) manual labor, and the infra-
structure focus on urban wi-fi blankets rather than rural broadband provisioning.
A technological cultural perspective is as part of an ongoing effort by many
scholars at demystification and, in turn, fuller understanding of technologies’ use and de-
ployment (L. Marx, 1976; Metzger, 1996; Mosco, 2004; Slack & Wise, 2005; Rosalind
Williams, 2002; Raymond Williams, 2003; Winner, 1986). By seeing technologies as not
discrete or autonomous, and thereby not neutral, the hope is to contribute toward under-
standings of technologies’ uses in and perpetuations of streams of power—an initial but
necessary component of theorizing, articulating, and struggling for alternative, more
egalitarian flows. In a globally networked era of ongoing technological change (and re-
sultant fetishization, demonization, and reification), this is an ongoing project, but one of

54
escalating urgency.
Pathological Culture
A similar approach is applied here to studying disease: what could be called pathological
culture. In examining not simply discrete injuries, failures of mind or body, or infectious
agents, but how their discourses articulate to people, institutions, practices, and represen-
tations, such an approach explores how the binary continuum of sick-healthy is culturally
and historically contingent. Not to say that disease is pure social construction, but socie-
ties and cultures do make decisions about defining degrees of “sick” and “healthy,” and
those markers are imbricated in cultural flows of knowledge and power. Disease can per-
form cultural work of normalization—pathologization in a broad sense—and thereby
reify other social continuums, such as masculine-feminine, self-Other, normal-abnormal,
and good-bad.
A cultural approach to disease is necessarily a historicized approach. I will em-
ploy not only contemporary diseases but also archaic, such as neurasthenia, degeneracy,
delinquency, chlorosis, and evil spirits (one of the earliest theories of disease cause or
etiology). Although officially debunked, they still operate culturally as pathological
frameworks, marginal forms, and traditional behaviors.
What, then, is disease? There are and have been many meanings to the word “dis-
ease.” I use it in its broadest sense, as an umbrella for any mental or physical discomfort
or abnormality (Kennedy, 2004). Literally, dis-ease. True, medical philosophy and soci-
ology have argued for differentiation between disease as biological aberration, illness as

55
the phenomenological experience of being unhealthy, and sickness as public performance
of the social role of an unhealthy person (Boorse, cited in Parsons, 1991; Turner, 2008, p.
176). However, I align with Turner’s ultimate rejection of these distinctions as all inher-
ently relative: “The concepts of ‘illness,’ ‘disease,’ and ‘health’ inevitably involve some
judgment which ultimately rests on a criterion of statistical frequency or an ideal state.
The ‘average individual’ does not exist. … Disease is not a fact, but a relationship and the
relationship is the product of classificatory processes” (2008, 176, emphasis mine). This
process of judgment is not merely social but hierarchical. Social decisions about sick and
healthy are inextricably intertwined with valuation and, as such, disease discourse per-
forms cultural work of normalization.
Therefore, like technology, disease can be understood as deeply embedded in cul-
ture. One current of inquiry has explored diseases as metaphors (Arnheim, 1993; Sontag,
1978; Worby, drawing on Steiner, 2000). Another has examined illness as itself meta-
phoric in its expression of inexpressible cultural anxieties (Glassner, 1999) or “mass so-
ciogenic illness [that] mirrors prominent social concerns” (Bartholome & Wessley, 2002,
p. 300). Metaphors and mirroring are indicative of a cultural embeddedness that is crucial
to this project and will be examined in detail in a later chapter on neurasthenia and elec-
trosensitivity. However, they are the starting point rather than conclusion of my analysis.
Primarily I am interested in how health discourse performs cultural work, not merely
what it represents or reflects. Although disease can perform a positive social function as a
marker of distinction (Bourdieu, 1984; Veblen, 2000), more typically medical-scientific

56
discourse has been used to stereotype, demonize, or pathologize groups lower in social
hierarchies, and how medical discourse, technologies, and techniques have been used as
justification for stigmatizing or a cultural arena in which social hierarchies of power, op-
pression, or separation are negotiated and contested (Browning, 1998; M. Douglas, 2002;
Ewen & Ewen, 2008; Foucault, 2000, p. 138; S. L. Gilman, 1985; Turner, 2008; Wailoo,
1997). Examples include racist medical technologies from eugenics to evolutionary
physiognomy, medical justifications for imperialist colonization of dirty savages, or fa-
mously, during the slavery era of US history, enslaved Africans were diagnosed with the
mental illness of drapetomania—the desire to run away from their masters and enslave-
ment (S. L. Gilman, 1985). A century later, during the civil rights movement, schizo-
phrenia was associated with blackness in many ways such that one state hospital for the
criminally insane experienced a sudden, atypical increase in black male patients, all diag-
nosed with schizophrenia (Metzl, 2010). A tabloid in the 1980s reported that “4 House-
wives in 5 Suffer Ailment Caused by Women’s Lib.”
Housewife syndrome—a tragic ailment that strikes women who have cho-
sen not to join the working world—is a major health problem today, ex-
perts say. Its symptoms include depression and feelings of inferiority, as
well as physical aches and pains—and experts say it is the fault of “fanatic”
feminists who make housewives feel worthless and unappreciated. (Kra-
jewski, 1983, p. 26)
In examples such as this, we see a point to which I later return; that part of the cultural
work of pathologization is shifting attention from the social to the individual. House-
wives do not feel badly because a variety of social, systemic forces that make entering
and succeeding in the working world difficult, or devalue and degrade the work they do,

57
or rob them of financial and personal independence—they are depressed because femi-
nists in the media tell them they’re inferior. Similarly, a 1969 tabloid report on “ghetto
headache” quoted a doctor that, “As little as 10 years ago, he noted, the ghetto resident
was better adjusted to his fate, but the recent awakening of social consciousness has made
him yearn for a better life” (“Ghetto Life Cause of New Illness, MD Says,” 1969). Again,
the person is pathologized rather than the systemic causes for their condition. They re-
spond in a normal, healthy way to unhealthy social condition—“their fate”—yet the prob-
lem is theirs, or social agitators who call attention to the problem. In either case, racial or
gender equity are missing from diagnoses and treatments.
Health discourse has been chosen as an entrée into technological culture as it
maintains a non-determinist, social focus on people rather than discrete machines. It fore-
grounds the human, corporeal, and personal. Disease is an inherent problem of the user:
something is wrong with her. It is a failing, weakness, or degeneration, and through this
abnormality we can extrapolate the “normal.” Thinking of technologies as sickening
helps maintain a conception of technologies as social assemblage and thereby not neutral.
In contrast, a conceptual framework of weaponry would conceive of technologies as neu-
tral vessels for human misuse or malfeasance (“Guns don’t kill people, people kill peo-
ple”). True, technologies can carry out the politics of their creators, as noted in concepts
such as Winner’s (1986) artifactual politics or the technological affordances of actor-
network theory (Bauchspies, Croissant & Restivo; 2006). Disease is different in that the
effects are not the intent of the designers or inventors. They are the device’s unintended

58
consequences or uses. Disease also is symbiotic; it requires the sickening agent and the
susceptible patient. Both are implicated. I attend to the user, and usage is by definition
relational. Disease also maintains a bodily focus, which is important for several reasons.
For one, this is intended as a corrective to utopian technological discourses of bodily
transcendence, which dangerously elide corporeal issues of labor, gender, and pain. In
addition, this maintains a bodily focus. In technopathological discourse, the user’s body
is a site of contestation; the diseased user is anything but disembodied.
Diseases of technology are noted in many cultural histories of media and commu-
nications, but typically within a paradigm of theorizing technological fears. The underly-
ing presumption being that the technologies are neutral, the anxieties irrational, and some
other, “real” anxiety lies behind its displaced projection onto technologies. For example,
technopathologies have been viewed as “metaphoric illnesses,” displaced venerations and
fears of science, medicine, or technology that cannot be directly articulated and instead
appear in mass cultural panics (Glassner, 1999). Alternately, technopathologies have
been interpreted as symptomatic of social conditions. Diseases are literalization of the
deadening impact of technologies of artistic production, as expressed by critical theories
such as Benjamin’s (2005) loss of aura, Horkheimer and Adorno’s (2002) dehumaniza-
tion, or Durkheim’s (1997) antisocial anomie. Injury up to and including death of the
human body can easily parallel injury up to and including death of the human spirit. Re-
cent theorists have connected technology and social conditions more explicitly: Crary
(1999) argues that a nineteenth-century crisis in focus and concentration, aided and abet-

59
ted by technologies of visual communication, forms the root of today’s attention deficit
disorder. Turkle’s (1995) influential analysis of early popular cyberspace asserted that it
was a direct incarnation of postmodernity. Ronell (1989) deconstructed telephonic de-
vices, history, and experiences to suggest a schizophrenic affect on modern thought with
direct implications for state terrorism.
This project aims not to debunk, psychoanalyze, or reveal as metaphoric techno-
logical illnesses. Indeterminate technopathological stories, such as those of cell-phone
cancer or Internet addiction, what Joseph Dumit (2005, 2006) refers to as “liminal ill-
nesses,” are something I aim to listen to, rather than explain away as conspiracy theories,
irrational projections, or pseudoscience. As O’Connor writes in her work on Victorian
pathology, “Methodologically, I insist that before breast cancer is turned into a political
allegory, it is crucial to let breast cancer speak for itself—to listen more carefully to its
language and to think more creatively about the work it does” (O'Connor, 2000, p. 83). I
do not treat the subjects of debated technopathologies as cultural hypochondriacs or hys-
terics but persons who warrant hearing. Who are these patients, and what can we learn
from listening to their pains? Similarly, when examining explicitly fictional texts, my
task is not interpretive in the classic sense. When, in Dial: Help (Deodato, 1988), a pos-
sessed payphone kills a man by shooting change from its coin return, I will not flay the
text to reveal its internal anticapitalist metaphor, but instead stitch that skin into the larger
fabric of technopathological discourse. Finally, by not engaging in metaphoric interpreta-
tion or psychosocial reduction, this project allows for inclusion of technopathologies un-

60
doubtedly real: from the repetitive stress injuries to the eyesight damage from laptop
computer users. As several scholars have noted, “myths” are not the opposites of truth,
but are stories with real effects, regardless of veracity (Certeau, 1988; Mosco, 2004;
White, 1978). While I am not arguing for elevation of technopathological narratives to
mythic status, I adopt the perspective that they have meaning and importance, regardless
of veracity. Indeed, my empirical commitment is to the fact of the existence of the dis-
course, and this is another methodological choice informed by feminism: a refusal to po-
sition myself beyond discourse, what Haraway refers to as a “god trick” (1999, p. 177).
Disease as a Technology of Gender
The cumulative strand of technopathological discourses—real, debated, and fictional,
contemporary and historic—does not perform their work in a cultural vacuum. Differen-
tial analysis asks, how does this work vary? To suggest one answer, I will briefly discuss
how normalization is related to social processes of gendering. Indeed, disease, from this
perspective, can be understood as part of the social production of gender, or what femi-
nist scholars would refer to as a “technology of gender.”
Gender, from a social constructionist point of view, is not a set of essential attrib-
utes associated with biological sex but a system of placing attributes and behaviors within
arbitrary categories of “masculine” and “feminine” (Cohn, 1994; Lorber, 1998). As de
Lauretis (1987) famously argues, social practices, such as the viewing conventions of
cinema, produce and mark these categories. I find it productive to think of gender as a
continuum within which social practices locate attributes, behaviors, and/or objects. Gen-

61
der is not formed of mutually exclusive categories, and by this I do not mean simply that
transgender, third gender, and intersex persons complicate a masculine/feminine binary.
My point is that technologies of gender neither categorize nor locate absolutely and ex-
clusively. Instead, they mark as more or less masculine or feminine. This reinforces the
concept of masculinity and femininity being not discrete categories but mutually constitu-
tive: something more feminine is less masculine. It also circumvents tiresome debates
over whether or not something “is” masculine or feminine. Instead, gendering is a proc-
ess by which something is marked with greater or less degrees of one gender, fully allow-
ing residual degrees of the other. Not only is this an antidote to exceptional and relativis-
tic counterarguments, it resists reifying the essentialism of something “being” a gender.
Finally, this approach is more amenable to recognizing gendering as a cumulative proc-
ess. One marker does not neatly plop something into a gendered box, manifold markers
of numerous aspects cumulatively renders something socially legible in the gender con-
tinuum—or not.
Foucault famously argues for sexuality as a major category of pathology, and (S.
L. Gilman, 1985) agrees as well that, in the nineteenth century, sexuality becomes “a cen-
tral structuring feature of systems that relate difference to pathology,” such as gender
(38). Drawing on Mary Douglas’ (2002) work on the social necessity of dividing between
purity and pollution, Gilman traces pathology’s support of discrimination along gender
and other social lines. For example, around the dawn of the twentieth century:
Jews, like women, [were seen as possessing] a basic biological predisposi-
tion to specific forms of mental illness. Like women, who were also mak-
ing specific political demands on the privileged group at the same moment

62
in history, Jews could be dismissed as unworthy of becoming part of the
privileged group because of their aberration. Like the American slaves who
were labeled as mad because they desired to escape from slavery, Jews, by
acting on the promise made to them through the granting of political eman-
cipation in the eighteenth century, proved their madness. (p. 162)

Pathology is a “technology” of gender in that it marks greater degrees of feminin-
ity. A sick person is not a girl, nor is the sufferer necessarily and absolutely feminine, but
they are less masculine than a healthy person. Laqueur (1990) argues for pathological
roots at the very understanding of sex and gender. He demonstrates the long history and
ongoing cultural salience of a one-sex model, in which women (and the feminine) are not
a separate, opposite sex and gender, but a lesser, abnormal version of men and masculin-
ity that has not been bounded and shaped into a higher form. O’Connor (2000), in her his-
toriography of Victorian production of pathology, explores both the demasculinizing of
immobilized, injured soldiers as well as how the era’s treatment of breast cancer involved
laborious discursive construction and elision of femininity. This tradition is sometimes
inverted for rhetorical effect, as in the infamous manifesto of the Society for Cutting Up
Men:
The male is a biological accident: the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X
(female) gene, that is, it has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other
words, the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the
gene stage. To be male is to be deficient, emotionally limited; maleness is a
deficiency disease and males are emotional cripples. (Solanas, 1968, ¶2).

Feminist scholars have illustrated disease’s operation as a technology of gender by
pathologizing perfectly normal functions of the female body or psyche because they dif-
fered from male bodies or threatened male privilege. For example, Bordo (2003b) traces

63
the Western intellectual lineage of a mind/body dualism, in which the body is associated
with the feminine, a lesser-developed state than the evolved, intellectual, rational, mascu-
line mind. Pathology further genders by drawing attention to either the (feminine) body in
physical illness, or a loss of (masculine) rationality in mental illness. Despite the
mind/body dualism, mental and physical illnesses both feminize. Recent evolutionary and
biological turns in mental health arguably only serve to underscore connection to the
(feminine) body in all illnesses. Maines, for example, traces the history of the vibrator,
not as an aid to female orgasmic pleasure but as a medical device to save physicians the
unpleasant labor of manually stimulating “sick” women into therapeutic “convulsions.”
Pathology also genders by virtue of its frequent associations with the interrelated
concepts loss of power, submission, and penetration, an association Bersani (1988) fa-
mously traced. One succumbs to a disease like one gives in to a seducer. Swooning onto a
fainting couch, one is overcome and overpowered by illness as by a rapist. Whether a
deleterious, malevolent spirit or a dumb virus, enters one’s body, one is still is invaded
and penetrated. Skin and cellular walls are broken and punctured like the hymen. Gilman
writes that “pathology is disorder and the loss of control, the giving over of the self to the
forces that lie beyond the self” (1985, p. 24). Even psychiatric symptoms can arise from
one’s mind being impregnated with worrisome thoughts, colonized by stress, polluted
with deviant ideas. The Freudian tradition links psychic disease to gendered sexual
trauma, such as castration (albeit imagined) or abuse (too often not), and repression (an
un-masculine, emotionally fueled, inability to face trauma rationally).

64
Disease, then, is a technology of gender in that it categorizes as abnormal, and the
abnormal is a feminine state. However, to be clear, I am not suggesting a simple loop of
equivalences, such that unhealthy = abnormal = feminine = unhealthy. Illness can be rela-
tively normal (stress, under- or over-weight) and also masculine (sports injuries, hyper-
tension); masculinity can likewise be abnormal (serial killers, bodybuilders). Feminine
disease can even be not only normal but also ideal, as with the case of Romantic con-
sumptives or contemporary anorexics. What I am suggesting is that—bearing in mind the
continuum perspective discussed earlier—sickness marks degrees of masculin-
ity/femininity and normality/abnormality, across multiple attributes and practices, cumu-
latively, to varying effects. At the risk using an academic cliché, pathology is better un-
derstood as part of the rhizomatic processes of gendering and normalization, rather than
simple categorization.
Pathology and Boundaries, or Lack Thereof
Finally, I wish to perform a differential move by arguing that discourses of disease not
only mark subjects in terms of normalization and gendering, they perform broader, more
general work of announcing the need for markings, the need for categorizations. Disease
not only marks and categorizes, it calls markings and categorizations into being. This is
because pathology inherently relates to boundary failure or absence. Mary Douglas’
(2002) anthropology of pollution taboos argues that extremely “direct is the symbolism
worked upon the human body. The body is a model which can stand for any bounded sys-
tem. Its boundaries can represent boundaries which are threatened or precarious” (2002,

65
p. 142, emphasis mine). Gilman (1985) argues that pathology is one of the primary
modes of maintaining stereotypes of sex and gender (as well as race), which are far from
random but socially constructed boundary formations crucial to social stability, identity,
and distinction between self and Others. Health is a categorical concept, with “disease”
being the state of having entered the no-man’s-land between the normal to abnormal ends
of the continuum, the boundary broken, permeable, and unstable. Sickness can be viewed
as literal trespass through the body’s bounding skin or cellular walls, the broaching of
personal boundaries by infectious or otherwise harmful agents, or the breakdown of func-
tional divisions of bodily organs and processes. Drawing on Heidegger and Nietzsche,
Colomina (1996) argues that subjectivity is dependent on boundaries, that enclosure and
horizons of space are necessary for a “healthy” sense of self or identity. In essence, per-
meable boundaries are pathological. When categorical enclosures dissolve, a pathological
state results. For example, O’Connor sees the “industrial disease” of Victorian factory
workers as “a kind of corporeal amalgamation, a merging of worker’s bodies with the
raw materials of their trades” (2000, p. 8). In addition to the literal merging, such as coal
and saliva in “black spit,” I suggest this persists in contemporary repetitive stress injuries
from cell phones or iPods, in which not only the body merges with machine forms and
motions, but also absorbs feedback of their own labor energy exerted into the machine.
The device’s design, its usage practices, its ergonomic demands, all extend the machine
into the user’s body. The machine’s demands, needs, and requirements bend muscles and
tendons to its design—and here I imply both senses of the word as structure and intent.

66
Returning to Marx’s tool, machines change from extending human productivity to de-
manding that humans bend to fit their needs of efficiency and output. Is this not a patho-
logical, unhealthy situation? Consider also the amoeba, a shape-shifting entity of unstable
boundaries whose very name is vernacular pathology: people say that someone “has
amoebas,” but not “has bacteria” or “got a case of viruses.” Theweleit (1987), in his
comprehensive study of the German proto-Nazi Freikorps volunteer army, analyzed fas-
cist policing of boundaries as a result of capitalism’s blurring of human/machine and
bourgeois/worker relations—with at times pathological results: “In the fascist texts, we
saw that any contact between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ realms—any boundary transgression—
immediately shuts off consciousness, producing a trancelike state” (1987, p. 263). Shor-
ing up boundaries was particularly expressed in regards to the feminine because women,
to the fascist male, were the ultimate in unboundedness, constituting through opposition
their own solidly bounded, rock-hard masculinity. Turner supports this association as
well:
‘Disease’ has an uncertain status because it lies on the boundaries of ‘na-
ture’ and ‘culture,’ both of which are social constructs. If ‘disease’ is an
index of the nature/culture relationship, it is also sensitive to gender rela-
tions. … It is … impossible to discuss the nature of ‘disease’ even in theo-
retical medicine without locating the concept within a hierarchy of moral
evaluations, which in turn have to be understood with reference to power
in social groups. (2008, pp. 190-191)

Such amorphous states are exacerbated on several levels when they involve elec-
tric communication technologies, which have been widely theorizing as contributing to
collapsing spatial, temporal, psychic, and corporeal boundaries (Harvey, 1989; Innis,

67
1991; Lowe, 1982; McLuhan, 1994, 1995; W. J. Ong, 1996). They transgress limitations
of time and space by recording, digitizing, preserving, and/or transmitting sensory expe-
rience across great distances. They expand the capacities of “natural” perception and
thereby function as prostheses, invoking further boundary destabilizations of body, self,
space, and other. As indicators of industrialization and modernity in general, technologies
call attention to other modern boundary destabilizations, such as that of pro-
ducer/consumer, nation, public/private, race, and gender. For example, drawing on Mum-
ford and Wachhorst, Frank (1995) notes the relatively coterminous appearance of the
audio technology of the phonograph with the switch from steam to electric power and the
blurring of boundaries between science and technology. These effects are heightened
when communication technologies are electric. Protean, volatile electricity, and its simi-
larly formless cousins ether and radiation, are mostly invisible forces, much as germs
were for centuries. They transgress solid matter; they are infectious agents of unbound-
edness. As the advents of electrification and (feverishly debated) theories of infectious
disease were coterminous and mutually informed, it is not surprising to find historically
intertwined discourses of electricity and destabilized boundaries in disease, spiritualism,
and psychology, with major examples frequently gendered feminine, from hysteria to
mediumship (Marvin, 1988; Milutis, 2006; Sconce, 2000; L. Simon, 2004).
Boundaries are further destabilized by sound, which I argue for elevating as a cen-
tral yet neglected aspect of the study of electric communications technologies. From the
beeps of the telegraph to the headset trash-talk of players in online games such as World

68
of Warcraft, sound is heavily present. True silence is rare: even silent film without live
music accompaniment, faxes, written telegraph, and early computers have the sound of
their mechanical apparatuses, “noise” that perspectives ranging from Attali’s (1989) po-
litical economy to Cage’s (2004) avant-garde aesthetics include as meaningful aural ex-
perience. Email and web pages similarly are rich with audio feedback: error eeps, key-
board clicks, the cheery hail of “You’ve got mail!” Electric communication technologies
are bathed in sound, and listening is an interior biological activity of sound waves enter-
ing the body and vibrating internal bones. It is an invasion of borders, a transgressive
penetration of an individual’s boundedness. A substantial body of scholarship has ana-
lyzed listening as gendered feminine (Adorno, 1990; Aparicio, 1998; Auner, 2003; S. J.
Douglas, 2001; Frank, 1995; Gottlieb, 1994; Hilmes, 1997; Leppert, 1993; McClary,
1991, 1993; Rustin, 2005). Adorno describes, in richly gendered language, the user inter-
acting with the phonograph as a boundary-blurring process: “the individual ... abandons
himself, in a kind of active receptivity, to that toward which the materials are striving on
their own. ... [in] nothing less than the mediation of subject and object” (2002, p. 125,
emphases mine). Sound’s capacity to transgress boundaries, as well as its frequent gen-
dering, are both reasons numerous theorists have addressed the capacity of sound and
music for aiding in the constitution of subjects (Attali, 1989; Barthes, 1986; Cruz, 1999;
Ellison, 1972; Fanon, 1967; Gray, 2005; Kun, 2005; Lipsitz, 1994; Mackey, 1993;
Moten, 2003; Weheliye, 2005). Finally, the idea of communication itself, with its roots in
communion, suggests a loss of boundaries between interpersonal subjectivities as well as

69
between the human and divine (Czitrom, 1982; Mattelart, 1996; Noble, 1997).
In order to examine the normalizing and gendering work of technopathological
discourses, and the subject position of “the user” they contribute toward constituting, I
have found hundreds of examples of associations between technology and disease
throughout medical literature, journalism, and popular entertainment. These I have orga-
nized into a typology of disease patterns: Overload, Promiscuity, Mismanaged Band-
width, Resistance, and Feedback, which I will survey in the next chapter.

70
Chapter 2 Endnotes

i
Many scholars trace feminist technological critiques back to Shelley’s Frankenstein (2003) as a portrait of
the pitfalls of masculine hubris and alienated independence.

ii
“A certain shift in the representation of women during the late nineteenth century, a moment when
women began to be associated more and more with machines, from the girls on bicycles in turn-of-the-
century advertisements, to the bachelor machines of the Surrealists, to the robot-woman in Fritz Lang's
Metropolis. The effects of this shift continue to be expressed in contemporary artificial women such as
those in Lem's Solaris and in Bladerunner, and in the feminine voices that urge consumers to buckle their
automobile seat belts or to remove their cards from the bank machine” (p. 163).

iii
Decades later, Lang would direct Blue Gardenia, considered the last of the film noir genre, a murder
mystery whose plot revolves around gender, sexuality, music, and recording technologies.

iv
He writes, “Historically ... as soon as the machine came to be perceived as a demonic, inexplicable threat
and as harbinger of chaos and destruction—a view which typically characterizes many 19th-century
reactions to the railroad to give but one major example—writers began to imagine the Machinenmensch as
woman. There are grounds to suspect that we are facing here a complex process of projection and
displacement. The fears and perceptual anxieties emanating from ever more powerful machines are recast
and reconstructed in terms of the male fear of female sexuality, reflecting, in the Freudian account, the
male castration anxiety. This projection was relatively easy to make: although woman had traditionally
been seen as standing in a closer relationship to nature than man, nature itself, since the 18th century, had
come to be interpreted as a gigantic machine. Woman, nature, machine had become a mesh of
significations which all had one thing in common: otherness; by their very existence they raised fears and
threatened male authority and control”

v
I add the female robots that are supermodel-sexy but homicidal in Terminator 3, and TV’s Terminator:
The Sarah Conner Chronicles, and the recent version of Battlestar Galactica.

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Chapter 3: A Historic Compendium of Technopathologies

“There are no substances in nature that can fully resist the decomposing power of a cur-
rent of electricity.”
W. R. Wells, 1969, A new theory of disease; Based upon the principle that man is a com-
pound electrical magnet

“Walkman” was a song that spread far enough in the French house music underground to
go gold in 1982. The instrumental tune was by Kasso, a pseudonym for Claudio Simon-
etti, an Italian musician also known for his film music. As a lead member of Goblin, he
composed the cult soundtrack to the classic 1978 American film of zombie contagion,
Dawn of the Dead. In its 1985 sequel, Day of the Dead, a zombie named Bub is given a
Walkman (as well as a telephone) to help him become more human. The director of both
films, George A. Romero, is a friend, colleague, and collaborator with horror novelist
Stephen King, the two having worked together on the film Creepshow. Romero is one of
two persons to whom King dedicates his 2006 bestseller and forthcoming film, Cell—
note the title’s biological, political, and technological confluence—, in which mobile
phones spread a plague that turns people into vicious, homicidal zombies. To recharge
their zombie state, infect others, and ultimately inoculate people, King’s characters use
cell phones, portable stereos, and Walkmans.
I begin this chapter with a play of linkages to gird the point made previously that,

72
in the history of disease, association has a much longer presence than cause. Often more
was understood about sickening people and places than essential causes. Medicine has
many more centuries of nosology—the identification and categorization of diseases—
than etiology—the understanding of what causes mental or physical distress. The concept
of disease as infection by a bacteria or virus is a recent perspective. Physicians and scien-
tists have understood diseases as discrete phenomenon that can be transmitted from one
person, place, or thing to another for much longer than they have known what causes
them. The mode of communicating syphilis, for example, was known before the disease
even had a name, and for four centuries before its etiology was understood (Kennedy,
2004). Therefore, in analyzing disease in culture, one must bear in mind that association,
contagion, and transmission are powerful concepts with deep roots. Our current under-
standing of disease as infection or organ failure blinds us. We must strain to perceive not
solely the cause, but the communication of disease. At times diseases have been under-
stood as connected and interrelated, not only with each other and other biological forces,
but also with the natural laws and phenomena fundamental to physics and technology.
Note the symphony of associations extolled by two prominent physicians in 1871:
There would appear to be cogent reasons for the theory that the law of cor-
relation and conservation of forces is as true of disease as of death. The
recognized relation that exists between certain cutaneous affections, as the
manifestations of cerebral or other diseases that appear in children, fre-
quently, on the disappearance of an eczematous eruption; the relief of dys-
pepsia, or neuralgia, hypochondriasis, on the appearance of affections of
the skin of various kinds in different parts of the body; the sudden metas-
tasis of pain from one region to another, as from the hands to the feet,
from the back to the limbs, from the stomach to the head, and alternations
of sick-headache and indigestion, of cerebro-spinal and gastric disturbance
with which nervous patients are so familiar; the mysterious phenomena of

73
inheritance, by which the nervous diathesis that appears in the parent in
the form, for example, of insanity, reappears in one child as chorea, in an-
other as epilepsy, in another as hysteria, in another as neuralgia or paraly-
sis, and successively reappears by almost innumerable phases in distant
generations; the antagonism which certainly exists between nervous and
febrile affections; the relief or cure of nervous symptoms, amounting to a
revolution in the system, that results from a course of fever, or acutely in-
flammatory disease; and, finally, the very remarkable results that flow
from counter-irritation, by whatever means produced,—all these facts of
general observation, taken together, would seem to give weight to the the-
ory that the secret forces of diseases are as truly correlated to each other
as heat or gravitation, as magnetism or electricity. (Rockwell & Beard,
1871, p. 290, emphasis mine)

This project organizes its topic informed by this history of pathological association, oper-
ating from a perspective that logics of correlation, contagion, transmission, and commu-
nication are far from extinct. In authoritative medicine and science, facts may displace
one another absolutely, but in culture and the popular imagination, memories of connec-
tions linger. History is not displaced absolutely by the present.
Although I employ a typology, it is not categorization in the sense of discreteness,
separateness, and mutually exclusivity. My groupings and patterns are sticky, with as-
sorted contact, influence, and commingling. This allows for incorporation of historic dis-
ease models; it also is not without precedent as an underlying research principle. I will
now briefly mention some such perspectives of connectivity, which I combine with
pathological association for this project’s organizing epistemology of contagion.
French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s (1987, 2000) project of breaking with an ob-
ject-oriented ontology sees instead a world of interconnected entities in influential flows
of interplay and constitutive relations—a relational ontology. For example, two persons

74
sitting at a table are not separate. Biologically, they inhale and absorb each other’s
pheromones. Communicatively, they send and receive messages verbally and nonverbally
(as the disciplinary adage goes, one is never not communicating). Socially, they consti-
tute a group or nascent community. Such an associative, relational perspective is not only
appropriate for a study of a contagious phenomenon, disease, but for the communicative
technologies of culture and media. As Crary’s writing on his research on attention and
perception is applicable here:
Following Gilles Deleuze and others, I have emphasized transversal con-
nections between objects of different kinds occupying very different loca-
tions. Deleuze’s proposition that “philosophy, art and science come into
relations of mutual resonance and exchange, but always for internal rea-
sons,” provides a way of thinking of the simultaneous but autonomous co-
existence of disparate cultural artifacts, outside of mechanical or bio-
graphical notions of influence. (2001, p. 9)

Such resonance and exchange is amenable with Foucault’s work on the mutual constitu-
tion (rather than distinction) of categories of normal and abnormal. Likewise, the Fou-
cauldean-influenced Actor Network Theory of science and technology studies sees users
and devices as less disparate but more united as similar actors possessing agency within
relational networks.
Resonance, exchange, relation, communication and contagion are all forms of
connection or linkage, a concept central to this project’s “technological culture” ap-
proach, introduced in the previous chapter. In this, Slack and Wise (2005) emphasize
linkage and association as developed in cultural studies’ methods of articulation and as-
semblage. Drawing on Stuart Hall and Lawrence Grossberg, they define an articulation is

75
that which unites two different elements into a new unit of meaning, identity, or practice,
under wholly relative and contingent circumstances. This is articulation in the skeletal,
jointed sense rather than that of eloquence: The hipbone is connected to the thighbone.
For example, one way in which the user is connected to the keyboard is through the
physical soreness one imparts on the other: the pain of repetitive stress injury articulates
user and keyboard. Assemblage multiplies articulations into larger structures of meaning,
identity, and practice—technological culture’s objects of study. The pain articulating user
and keyboard combines with other articulations of user, devices, actions, and intents,
forming assemblages of meaning, such as “office work(er)” and “sick(ness).” These re-
late to broader concepts, such as labor, economy, health, gender, class, and identity. Slack
and Wise describe technological culture as, not machines, but culturally embedded “ar-
ticulations among physical arrangements of matter; typically labeled technologies, and a
range of related practices, representations, experiences, and affects” (2005, p. 128). Eve-
rything is connected, and, although things do matter, the primary focus of research is how
things—objects, ideas, feelings, meanings, people—relate.
Recently, Slack has engaged an encounter—in Deleuze’s sense of an event that
startles one out of a habitual worldview—between cultural studies’ articulation-
assemblage and the Buddhist concept of dependent origination (J. D. Slack, 2008). De-
pendent origination (or dependent arising or interdependence) is a fundamental Buddhist
concept that everything is interdependent. Phenomena exist, but they are constituted by
the relations and linkages of smaller components and, in their association and interplay

76
with other phenomena, create larger structures. The variable, relative nature of these lev-
els of association does not destroy the unit: Things still are things, but their being is un-
derstood as a process rather than mute, immutable fact. Slack’s encounter leads to a call
for cultural scholars to embrace arenas they have shied from but should recognize as in-
terconnected, such as emotion and spirituality.
My intent here is more circumspect: to set out a perspective for the reader in
navigating this history. What here at times may seem like capricious panoply—hospital
patients, conspiracy theorists, and evil spirits—is a conscious choice to foreground inter-
play and association. My organizing relation is that of contagion, which embraces a
worldview of connection. Objects, actors, identities, and ideas are not discrete but mutu-
ally constitutive, interactive, and in relation. Such a perspective is methodologically
driven and also a political choice. Categories are foundational tactics of power hierar-
chies and thereby inequities, such as race, gender, sex, sexual orientation, nation, and
citizenship. Categories separate; they exclude. This project seeks not to bracket the out-
lier, but to look at threads relating outlier and paragon, freak and generalized case. I
choose to err on the side of including over-generous, weak connections rather than ex-
cluding potentially meaningful ones. At its most optimistic spirit, I am asserting that such
discourses, and we as users, are all connected. However, we are also all contagious.
Therefore, while I will include examples from popular news and medical litera-
ture, I do not differentiate between these and fictional sources. One cultural arena in
which technological relationships have been frequently predicted, negotiated, and imag-

77
ined is in fictional narratives, especially fantastic genres of science fiction, horror, and
fantasy. Such films, television, radio, and literature have foretold and influenced actual
technological innovation and developments. Others have served as warnings of dystopian
futures or outlets for dissatisfaction, discontent, fear of, or challenge to existing or emerg-
ing technological relations. Not surprisingly, many have used pathological tropes, and are
included here are part of the trail of technopathological discourse this project follows.
I will now provide an historic overview of the many different ways that electric
communication technologies have been and continue to be associated with mental and
physical dis-ease. These are organized into five patterns: Overload, Resistance, Misman-
aged Bandwidth, Promiscuity, and Feedback. I use a typology (but not a more hierarchi-
cal taxonomy) as a tool to organize recurrent patterns in technopathological discourse,
common ways in which technology and disease have been associated. Bearing in mind
the interdisciplinary and hybrid nature of Communication as a scholarly discipline, as
well as its varied meanings and etymologies as a word, polyvalence and complexity are
embraced here. These are diseases related to technologies of communication, which I
have emphasized by suggesting how they can be seen as communicative failures:
sick(ened) communication.
Overload
A 37-year-old man jogging through a park in the Pacific Northwest is struck by lightning,
and his injuries are far worse than typical due to an unapparent medical condition: “dis-
rupted flashover effect.” A healthy flashover effect refers to the skin’s natural ability to

78
repel electricity. However, as reported in the New England Journal of Medicine and re-
layed through North American print and broadcast media, the jogger’s bio-electrical state
was unbalanced. Instead of repelling electricity, it was channeled into his head, resulting
in burns to his head, neck, and face, ruptured eardrums, dislocated bones of the middle
ear, and a dislocated jaw broken in four places. The cause of “disrupted flashover effect”?
His iPod (Fitz, 2007b; Ryan, 2007).
This is a recent example of the disease frame of Overload, in which a person’s
bioelectrical systems are short-circuited, injured, or fried. Technologies interact deleteri-
ously with the vital energies of organic life. Overload is my update of neurasthenia, a dis-
ease of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, in which a wide variety of
physical and mental problems were attributed to an overstimulated central nervous sys-
tem. The source of overstimulation was “modern society,” defined largely by urbaniza-
tion, transportation, and communication technologies, and the education and liberation of
women. Lutz (1991) argues that neurasthenia and other diseases can be understood as a
cultural complex, a loose association of real illnesses and discomforts whose broad and
flexible perimeters make it a popular slate for expressing or negotiating other cultural is-
sues, such as labor unrest, overseas expansion, immigration, proto-feminism, technologi-
cal advances, changing gender and other roles, and changing attitudes about sexuality,
morality, and calling. The symptoms may be completely real, but the unifying signifier of
“neurasthenia” operates as a discursive touchstone, flashpoint, or nexus of cultural work.
One of the most familiar examples of disease as cultural complex would be female hys-

79
teria as a form of medicalized discourse, which responded to and attempted to constrain
the changing gender roles during the emergence of the “New Woman” in the nineteenth
century. Neurasthenia became a catchall for a wide variety of mental and physical disor-
ders spawned from excessive and exhausting bioelectrical-sexual-personal-mechanical
energies. Overload refers to a similarly wide array of symptoms attributed to technologi-
cally enhanced “modern life,” overstimulation, and various invisible energies such as ra-
diation, electromagnetism, and sound waves.
Mental and physical manifestations vary wildly: headaches, nausea, loss of will
power, seizures, addiction, insomnia and many others dues to various media, including
3D films, television, electricity, radio waves, computer monitors, video games and virtual
reality. Overload is often about excess sensitivity, for example, in his exploitation classic,
The Tingler, director William Castle warns the audience in a prologue that
Some of the sensations, some of the physical reactions which the actors on
the screen will feel, will also be experienced for the first time in motion
picture history by certain members of this audience. I say certain members
because some people are more sensitive to these mysterious electronic im-
pulses than others. These unfortunate, sensitive people will at times feel a
strange tingling sensation. Others will feel it less strongly. (Castle, 1959)
i

Additionally, Overload cases often relate to excess sensitivity to sound, noise, and related
technologies. Indeed, Overload illnesses have been highly visible in association with mo-
bile phones. Activists rallied against possible brain tumors in cell-phone users as well as
various ills from the “electrosmog” of electromagnetic fields and radiation, to which cel-
lular towers contribute (Burgess, 2004; Carlo, 2001; Hayden, 2000; Kane, 2001; Leon-
ardi, 2003). The diverse ailments of Overload, associated with modern technology, are

80
suggested in lyrics from “Anything Goes,” a song written after the peak of neurasthenia
but before it had fully vanished:
Just think of those shocks you’ve got
And those knocks you’ve got
And those blues you’ve got
From those news you’ve got
And those pains you’ve got
(If any brains you’ve got)
From those little radios. (Porter, 1934)

If Overload seems suspiciously accommodating—literally, “anything goes”—that is the
point of a cultural complex, such as neurasthenia or Overload. Its cultural efficacy comes
from its very plasticity: “Oh, it’s just my neurasthenia / nerves / stress” or “She’s just
overloaded / hysterical / too sensitive.”
Resistance
In 1969, the National Enquirer reported on the book Open Letter from a Television
Viewer by Robert Montgomery, a former movie and TV star, President of the Screen Ac-
tors Guild, friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and
advisor to President Eisenhower. Montgomery, whose daughter Elizabeth at the time
starred in the hit TV sitcom Bewitched, wrote that “Television is poisoning American
minds. ... Television must accept a large part of the responsibility for the violence in our
cities today. ... TV is a brainwashing machine for too many people” (Terrence, 1969).
In the frame of Resistance, the user is withdrawn, turning inward and away from society.
The user disconnects from information transmission, resisting communication, commu-
nity, and communion as a germ resists treatment or a resistor resists electricity. Ritualisti-

81
cally, she is separated from society in a state of willing anomie. Initially this is the incon-
siderate technology user, lost in their private world and disregarding others. For example,
absorption with the Internet is blamed for people neglecting relationships such that they
lose jobs and families (P. Smith, 1996); withdrawal into video games is the subject of
several urban legends regarding players neglecting themselves or their children to the
point of starvation. Such behavior escalates into a catatonic self-absorption and discon-
nection from the real world. For example, the boredom TV induces is thought to suppress
the immune system, causing “backache, headache, insomnia, chronic fatigue, and sexual
impotence” but only due to TV’s isolating, antisocial nature, unlike going to the movies
(Haley, 1987). More extreme antisocial behavior is seen in fantastic narratives when us-
ers disappear wholly within an artificial media environment, losing much connection to
the real world, suggesting the addictions of Overload taken to a new level of immersion:
the drug-like virtual reality system of Strange Days (Bigelow, 1995) or living within
television studios in Shock Treatment (O’Brian, 1981).
ii
In its penultimate stage, the anti-
social, withdrawn, or immersed sufferers of Resistance conditions progress to becoming
violent and sociopathic. In The Signal (Bruckner, Bush & Gentry, 2008), for example, an
unknown force takes over all communications systems, enslaving viewers and listeners,
and sending them into paranoid, homicidal rages.
Mismanaged Bandwidth
“We can’t let ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security just be-
cause we are running down a beautiful tree-lined street on a lovely day
and listening to a symphony in our headphones,” said Claire Walsh, the di-
rector of the Sexual Assault Recovery Service of the University of Flor-
ida.”…

82
Highest on the list [of precautions] is the personal stereo. The problem is
that it blocks too much of your awareness. “Don’t wear a Walkman,” said
Spencer Mann, a spokesman for the Alachua County Sheriff’s Depart-
ment. “You can’t hear traffic, particularly the way many young people
have the volume on these things cranked up. … And if there was someone
hiding in the bushes and making rustling sounds, you wouldn’t hear that
until it was too late.”…
“Three days after Tiffany disappeared, I was out driving about 8 P.M. in
the same area where we think she disappeared,” Mann said. “I saw three
different female joggers wearing a Walkman and running alone. And this
after tremendous publicity about this young woman who was missing in
that area. It just blew my mind that they could be so unaware [sic].”
(Stockton, 1989, p. C12)
This New York Times article was illustrated with a missing-persons poster for Tiffany
Sessions, a Florida woman who had disappeared during a “fitness walk.” The poster and
the article’s lede, quoted above, pointed out that she’d worn a black Walkman radio.
This exemplifies my technopathological frame of Mismanaged Bandwidth, in
which communication technologies suggest media theories of sensory extension (Innis,
1991; McLuhan, 1995; Polanyi, 1966), but to unhealthy ends. They enable more streams
of stimuli than a user can appropriately process.
Some scholars have suggested that headphoned listening is inherently unnatural
(Kittler, 1999, p. 37; Takasugi, 2002), an altered state that perhaps informs not only pa-
thologies, but also some of the erotic frisson behind the fetish website of headphone-
wearing women, HeadPhet.com.
Health concerns related to this can be seen in efforts to legislate oblivious head-
phone wearers from walking into traffic. Recently, an online technology column trum-
peted, “Warning: Be On The Look Out [sic] For Killer iPods!” (Ryan, 2007). The story,
also covered in mainstream print and broadcast media, referred to NY State Sen. Carl

83
Krueger’s assertion that the syndrome of “iPod oblivion” was causing fatal accidents in
cities when users walked into traffic. Krueger proposed a bill banning use of portable
electronic devices while crossing city streets (“N.Y. lawmaker hopes to ban iPod use in
Crosswalks,” 2007; Rapoport, 2007; Young, 2007). Such concerns regarding digital mu-
sic players echoed earlier fears over portable cassette players. In 1982, a New Jersey
township attempted to ban Walkman headphones on drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians at
intersections (“Consumer Saturday: Headsets And Ear Damage,” 1982; “Walkman v.
Talkman,” 1982). In between these two periods, legislation restricting mobile phone use
while driving were passed in Brazil, Switzerland, Israel, Australia, Japan, as well as US
cities and counties in Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York (Hafner, 1999;
Kelley, 2000; Kolata, 1997). Such concerns persist today: One man in my focus groups
related that he had been pulled over because his car radio had blocked out the sound of
police sirens. Another agreed, “You can’t hear sirens. I mean, I’m sure if we did a survey,
a lot of people are getting hit running around with headphones because they don’t hear
nothing, no sirens or anything.” Although some said they lowered volume or ran with
only one earbud in, others related they didn’t bother.
A variant of Mismanaged Bandwidth involves injury due to technologies exacer-
bating general clumsiness. A female focus group participant confessed, “I’m a clumsy
person. I used to drop my cell phone all the time. I would always just like get down and
grab it until I heard a story of a guy who did that and then got in a car accident and died.
So, now I don’t, but I always get distracted by my cell phone like I always text and drive,

84
and I drive a stick, so it’s not good.” A male participant related that his daughter fell and
hurt herself from “running around the house” with a handheld videogame. Another par-
ticipant, male, related: “I got into a car accident once with one of my exes. She was talk-
ing on the cell phone, and I couldn’t hear the person. She was like, What and what? And
for some reason people look down like as if the answer is on the ground. And I’m like,
Stop, stop! And she slammed into [an object]. We were both fine, but I still have neck
problems.”
Another version of Mismanaged Bandwidth involves a user unaware of impend-
ing danger because they are watching TV or listening to music. This trope of technolo-
gies interfering with a character’s senses and making them vulnerable to death or injury
appears in numerous films. For example, in Graduation Day (Freed, 1981), a jogger
sporting bright red headphones is unaware of the killer running behind her, suggesting
media accounts which will implicate female attack victims for wearing Walkmans while
jogging. The sequence ends with a pan from the headphones, lying on the jogging path
and blaring rock music, to her now-dead body. Variants include the headphoned listener
who does not hear someone else’s death, as in A Soldier’s Girl (Pierson, 2003); the lis-
tener unaware the approach of a general threat that does not immediately kill them, as in
Poltergeist (Hooper, 1982); the listener who does not hear a shouted warning, as in La
Balance (Swaim, 1982); and victims so enveloped in telephone conversations, that they
do not notice a killer’s approach, as in Don’t Answer the Phone! (Hammer, 1980). A fe-
male focus group participant noted the same thing in true crime and programs and foren-

85
sic documentaries. As another participant described the trope, “Usually a lot of them have
earphones on. They’re jogging or whatever and they can’t hear anything, and they get
killed.” However, they did not feel this was only in media representations. One woman
related, “I think it’s a dangerous situation when you do have earphones, especially if
you’re jogging late or depending where you’re jogging, in a wooded area. … It’s just too
dangerous to do that, especially for us women. Yeah, I think they do make themselves
vulnerable for attack, you know, potential rape.”
Promiscuity
The journal Medical News reported in 1899:
President Murphy of the New York City Board of Health, believing that
telephone transmitters are a means of spreading disease, has ordered in-
spectors to examine the public telephones. The inspectors will thor-
oughly cleanse the transmitters and receivers with cotton, which will
then be sent to the Bacteriological Department of the Board of Health.
Should it be found that telephones are likely to disseminate disease or-
ganisms; an order will be issued requiring daily disinfection of the in-
struments by the telephone company. (“Echoes and news: Diseases
from Telephones,” 1899)

Only five years prior, users worried about putting a telephone in the room with a sick
person, lest calls transmit illness to the party on the other end of the call (Marvin, 1988;
Tomes, 2002). Here, and in other cases of Promiscuity, the technology is not directly the
culprit, but a necessary conduit of transmission and the focus of pathological concern. A
video, text message, website, or phone call has gone bad because it connects the user to
something that hurts the user, paralleling how, when one is sick with food poisoning, one
blames bad sushi, not a specific microorganism. This also parallels sexually transmitted

86
diseases. Even once etiologies were understood, syphilitics and persons with AIDS have
been shamed and ostracized as morally corrupt, persons “gone bad” who acquire a dis-
ease and spread it to “innocent victims.” A microorganism may be the cause of an illness,
but the carrier medium—comestible, human, or technological—is pathologized as sick
and sickening.
For example, in the days of early silent cinema, when nickelodeons and arcades
were more the norm than stately movie palaces, there was a public health panic around
the mixing of classes in these environments. It was not merely that upper-class patrons
might be discomfited by mixing with the lower classes while enjoying cinema, the poor
ventilation and enclosed spaces were seen as increasing the likelihood of carrying one of
the many infectious diseases borne by the lower classes (Hansen, 1983; Kirby, 1997;
Sklar, 1994). Very similar public health concerns were raised around public phone of-
fices, early places for shared telephone use. More recently, an exchange in my focus
groups illustrated the tendency to disproportionately fear technologically aided connec-
tions:
FEMALE PARTICIPANT: I actually recently heard a story about some-
one’s car getting broken into, and they stole the GPS out of the car and
they knew how to look into the GPS to find out where their home address
was, and it even tells you how to get there.
…
ANOTHER FEMALE: It’s really funny that somebody would take the
time to look into your GPS to figure out where you live. All you have to
do is open up the little packet [in the glove compartment] see my registra-
tion, and there’s my address.

Pathologies of medium result from indiscriminate connection and/or transmission. “In-

87
discriminate” derives from the Latin “promiscuous,” and I call this frame Promiscuity to
suggest a lack of discrimination in choosing with whom to connect, and to capture the
social opprobrium such lack of judgment carries. The unrestricted, heterogeneous circuits
of a networked society can result in malevolent or deleterious connections that damage
the system. Communication technologies keep users connected, but they can connect us-
ers to bad, sickening things. Connections to polluted sources sicken the individual and
society. The user demonstrates a lack of judgment that calls their social incorporation into
question. It suggests immature selfishness in not taking into consideration how connec-
tions could negatively affect other individuals and society as a whole. Such promiscu-
ity—indiscriminate connection to too many channels, too many nodes, too much of the
network, gorging on mediated pleasures, freely associating with and succumbing to the
wrong sort, slumming, if you will, without judicious restraint— unites these disease asso-
ciations, which I will describe in a continuum beginning with Symptomatic Degeneracy,
progressing to Unhealthy Connections, and culminating in Trans-dimensional Infections.
Symptomatic Degeneracy
Historically, degeneracy is a disease, not mere moral corruption. It is the deterioration of
living things from a higher to lower form. It was originally applied to “lower” people,
races, or ethnicities as being less evolved, weaker, and therefore more susceptible to dis-
ease, decay, temptation, and dissolution, and then affecting or infecting the “normal”
population (S. L. Gilman, 1985). Technopathologies of Symptomatic Degeneracy are
about potential connection to harmful forces. Communication technologies are markers,

88
signatures, or symptoms of degenerate persons. The user has not yet connected with
them; these cases merely announce their presence within communication networks. I
suggest an understood cultural association of technologies with degenerates underlies
this.
iii
As one reformer worried about the telegraph, “‘It is a well-known fact that no other
section of the population avail themselves more readily and speedily of the latest tri-
umphs of science than the criminal class’” (quoted in Standage, 2007, p. 105). The tech-
nology marks the degenerate. It is a signpost of a stereotype: When someone describes a
car accident by an Asian motorist, the specification of race is a marker of racist stereo-
type. In sociologist Mary Douglas’ (2002) work on im/purity, she argues that social fears
arise around an object once that object is associated with feared groups. One does not
have to spell out “and you know Asians are bad drivers.” It is understood. Likewise, “and
you know degenerates wear Walkmans / use cell phones / use public phones” is not
spelled out, but these technologies are mentioned in stories as stereotypic markers of de-
generates. For example, a New York Times article on how the removal of attendants
turned subway bathrooms “creepy” described how
A man with a goatee and a Walkman who was in and around the bathroom
for four hours on Tuesday told a reporter gravely: “You better stop asking
so many questions, you’re going to get killed.” Since the attendants were
dismissed, the police have made four arrests for public lewdness. (M. F.
Cohen, 1995)

Note the swift association of degrees of degeneracy: public lewdness in the same breath
as homicide. More importantly, what makes the Walkman a newsworthy detail? Why is it
more relevant than others that could have been mentioned, such as clothes, hygiene, or

89
expression? Fictional narratives frequently also use technology as shorthand to mark de-
generates. In Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 (Burr, 1990), cannibal brothers
Tex and Tink discuss giving a yuppie victim’s Walkman to Junior, a.k.a. Leatherface,
who had previously appreciated another victim’s electronic spelling game:
Tink: Junior's been getting out of hand lately, but I got a present for him.
I got a fine present, going to keep him in line, yes sir.
Tex: He liked that last present you got him—that um electronic thinguma-
jig.
Tink: Of course he did. That's progress, boy. Technology is our friend. He
might even learn something.

In the subsequent scene, Leatherface sports the Walkman, as well as his trademark mask
of a victim’s facial skin. He puts the headphones on new victim Michelle, gagged and
nailed into a chair. She screams, and he yanks them back, angry at the rejection. He con-
tinues to wear it tossed over his shoulder until later, when apologizing for failing to cap-
ture another victim, he offers it to Tink. Tink rejects it, throwing the Walkman in the
oven. Leatherface attacks him, forcing him to pull the now-burning Walkman from the
oven. Whimpering, Leatherface carries the melted cassette to his mother for comfort,
who, in another bizarre technology-sociopath association, speaks to her boys through a
throat-microphone of the sort typically used for cancer patients. The film presents multi-
ple examples of techno-degenerates: Leatherface, his mother, and the obnoxious Yuppie
who originally sported the Walkman.
Often communication technologies mark a specific degenerate: the juvenile delin-
quent. A 1965 New York Times feature lamenting changes in the Bronx’ Grand Con-
course connects delinquent youth, audio technologies, and race:

90
At night, however, bands of boys in brightly colored jackets and stovepipe
trousers and girls with ornately teased hair and clad in stretch pants and
ski jackets lounge near Alexander’s or Poe Park. They pack the numerous
pizza stores lining the Concourse, all the time listening to rock ‘n’ roll and
shutting their eyes and swaying as though hypnotized whenever their fa-
vorite song blares … from transistor radios. (Weinraub, 1965, p. 40)

A social worker later makes explicit that one part of the neighborhood’s change is racial:
“Of course a lot of people moving away are simply afraid of integration. … Negroes are
moving onto the side streets and a lot of people who aren’t admitting it are just plain
frightened” (p. 40). Frequent associations of technologies with youthful criminality and
victimhood, such as “Police Say Teen-Ager Died For His Sneakers and Beeper” (Roane,
1997), beg the question, Why is techno-murder (or apparel-murder) more headline-
worthy than murder for money or jewelry? Hypersexuality is a frequent component of
delinquency. A 1988 New York Times exposé on AIDS among “reckless and irresponsi-
ble” adolescent homeless prostitutes concluded with the tragic image of a boy showing
off the new haircut, leather jacket, and Walkman a man had given him, while a social
worker shakes her head, sadly noting his AIDS-suggestive weight loss and doubting the
relationship would last a week (Daley, 1988, p. B4). In the notorious delinquency movie
made for the Lifetime cable network, Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life (T. McLoughlin,
2005), a promiscuous teen girl’s sexual exhibitionism on a webcam corrupts a whole-
some teen swimming champion, turning him into an online porn addict who chugs energy
drinks, neglects homework, lies to his parents, lets his swimming lap-times deteriorate,
becomes distracted by women and sexual imagery, exposes his little brother to internet
porn, develops sexual aggression toward his girlfriend, has sex with the promiscuous

91
webcam girl (who, in despair afterwards, slams her forehead against a bathroom sink),
and gets beaten up by her boyfriend.
Unhealthy Connections
Here users progress to actually connecting with health-threatening danger due to or
through communication technologies. Users promiscuously connect to degenerate, lower
forms of life, atavistic subhumans who hurt or corrupt the users. These sickened users
then have the potential to spread their decay and de-evolution to the rest of the “normal”
population. For example, in the mid-nineteenth century, a New England professor
weighed concerns about the risks of future telegraph cables linking Americans to possibly
diseased and dangerous Europeans (Marvin, 1988, p. 132). In the late 1960s, the National
Enquirer warned: “Rapists and sexual perverts are using computerized dating services to
line up unsuspecting girls as potential victims” was the lede to a story headlined “Male
Misfits Use Computer Dating Services to Meet Innocent Girls” (Mahoney, 1969a). Note
how the sociopath in the system is foregrounded as “male misfits,” “rapists,” and “sexual
perverts.” All of whom could commit crimes using other channels, but it is the degenerate
access through communication technology that gives the story its angle. Similar concur-
rent concerns focused on obscene phone callers: “Sick minds are using the nation’s tele-
phone network to torment innocent people,” begins one article. A psychiatrist describes
perpetrators as “telephone tormentors ... exhibitionists ... some are schizophrenics or split
personalities. … Phone calls from strange men can drive a woman to hysteria. Model
(above) shows how many helpless victims react to obscene calls” (Blaine, 1969, p. 25).

92
Note how the roles are not only clearly gendered, to the degree that female recipients are
apparently “helpless” to hang up or change their phone numbers. Disconnecting from the
network is not even considered as an option. Furthermore, note how the sexist situation
pathologizes the female victim. While, on one hand, it is a positive sign that a situational
context is acknowledged for upsetting women (rather than merely it being their own fault
for being oversensitive neurotics), this is contained by the sickness to which they are
driven: hysteria, a diagnosis which has historically performed cultural work of blaming
the victim. Note also that, although the male perpetrators are at times indicted (“tor-
ment(ors)…exhibitionists … abusive … strange”), there are also medical suggestions of
mental illness that could possibly excuse them (“schizophrenics or split personalities”).
Furthermore, this is an excellent example of the very semantic confusion around the most
common term for illness: the first word of the article, “sick.” Although medically and cul-
turally much work has been done to differentiate between cruel criminality and innocent
mental illness, both meanings persist in the single word: “That was a sick thing that he
did, but he can’t help it because he’s sick.”
iv
Such semantic confusion suggests the con-
ceptual confusion that thousands of courtroom dramas have yet to clarify.
Decades later, Vanity Fair claimed that the Internet “made possible” and “en-
abled” the crimes of the “Craigslist Murderer” (Orth, 2009, p. 156). A decade earlier, the
Internet was blamed in “Kids Who Kill,” a 4-page spread in the National Enquirer that
warned of murderous teens online, such as a sadistic “computer nerd,” “unsavory losers
who warp young minds,” and other “violence-prone kids” that are “hooked on the Inter-

93
net,” which is “an electronic sewer, home to slime who prey on the young and vulner-
able” (Blosser & Nelson, 1997, p. 24-27). The article promises, in an upcoming issue, a
special investigation into “Sick Monsters Stalking Your Child on Internet,” a topic that
would be the subject of the extremely popular MSNBC series of documentary entrapment
programs, To Catch a Predator.
Fictional narratives have paralleled this trope. A common form is the degenerate’s
use of technology to harass, intimidate, or otherwise upset people (often women). This
dates back to André de Lorde’s 1902 Grand Guignol play At the Telephone, in which a
psychopath forced a man to listen to the murder of his wife and child over the phone (de
Lorde, 1925). Horror films feature prominently psychopathic telephone harassment and
stalking. As Spiteri notes of the telephone in slasher films, “Even when the telephone is
still operative one remains vulnerable; in fact it is the telephone that makes us vulnerable.
… You have the killer using the telephone as a means to violate the victim” (Spiteri,
2004) The Telephone and the Slasher Film section, ¶ 3). In films about techno-snuff,
communication technologies not only help locate and stalk victims, but also record and/or
broadcast their murders. For, as Kerekes and Slater (1995) have described, the act of
filming a murder is presented as more horrible than the murder itself. The communication
technology increases the sickness, in the same way that crime, injury, or sickness become
more newsworthy when involving communication technology.
Fatally hooking with degenerates online is the central conceit of Rick Reed’s IM
(2007). Taglined “Instant Message or Instant Murder,” the erotic novel concerns more the

94
use of adult social networking sites for casual sex than instant messaging, but it is again
technology that facilitates connection with a homicidal sociopath. The pathologized user-
ship of promiscuous hooking up in IM is underscored by the pathologizing of the killer
and victims as bad gay role models. The killer is feminine and girlish, and the victims
exhibit drug and alcohol abuse, unsafe sex, superficiality, vanity, and promiscuous hook-
ing up online—in contrast to the masculine, monogamous, and sober protagonist who
doesn’t use online adult services. When I interviewed Reed, who frequently has technol-
ogy themes in his work, he denied consciously making any overt morality tale of what
happens to bad fags. However, he did describe the moral of the book as one of responsi-
ble technological usership:
The Internet can often be a lot of smoke and mirrors and even if you think
you know with whom you’re hooking up, use caution. Meet first in a pub-
lic place. Tell someone you trust where you’re going if you’re meeting up
with someone. There are no guarantees for either bad or good resulting
from Internet interaction, but there are precautions that might help tip the
scales in your favor. (personal communication)
Such discourses of technologies of Promiscuity support media scholar Wendy
Chun’s argument that, drawing on Foucault’s analysis of sexuality as locus of subjectiv-
ity and power relations, as new communication technologies threaten established orders,
“the relationship between control and freedom in terms of fiber-optic networks is often
experienced as sexuality or is mapped in terms of sexuality-paranoia” (Chun, 2006, p.
11). However, as the clichéd joke goes, “Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they’re
not out to get me.” I mention this to assert that a discourse being “paranoid” should not
imply a lack of impact and effects: a European Union study of youth and online risks

95
concluded that young users’ perceived the responsibility for safe identity management
online as resting with themselves, not government, family, or industry (Lusoli & Miltgen,
2009). Such expectations do not arise unaided, as this project attempts to articulate one
stream in forming such expectations of technology use.
Finally, degenerate threats can also come from elite echelons of society: conspir-
acy subcultures abound with stories of electric communication technologies and related
devices misused by visible and shadow governments, extraterrestrials, and others to make
people suffer or succumb to mind control. “Mind-bending sound waves, sophisticated
chemicals, and television techniques to make the masses obey,” described a British scien-
tist. “This is a case of machines taking over.” Alluding to delinquency, he added, “The
new generation is not worried, because the youngsters have grown up with electronics
and mini-gadgets” (Calder, 1969, 24). As one man in my focus groups noted, “If they go
on the Internet to the wrong place, they can get contacted by the evil FBI or CIA, if
they’re going through the wrong places.” Another example that surfaced in my focus
groups was Videodrome (Cronenberg, 1983), in which hallucinations and physical muta-
tions (evidencing comorbidity with Feedback technopathologies) are caused by a televi-
sion signal designed by techno-vigilantes to purge society of porn-watching deviates.
Trans-dimensional Infections
Promiscuity progresses to dangerous connections so powerful they cross boundaries of
natural and supernatural. Spirit communication through electric technologies is a familiar
trope several scholars have addressed (Milutis, 2006; Sconce, 2000; L. Simon, 2004;

96
Sterne, 2003). Seen in such as tabloids reports such as “Ida Lupino Tells of Phone Call
From a Dead Friend (Walker, 1969), “Randy Quaid: My Dead Dad Caused a Power Out-
age” (Herz, 1996), and “We Were Terrified by Ghost Who Spoke Through TV Set”
(Dikeman, 1982), this echoes the history of intertwined spiritual, biological, and me-
chanical energies, as in natural physics of ether, Vitalism, mesmerism, and electricity.
When such connections become injurious or fatal, I divide trans-dimensional infections
into possession and cursed technologies.
In cases of possession, supernatural forces, such as demons and ghosts, come
through communication technologies to control them and/or their users. Possession by
evil spirits is one of the oldest etiological theories of disease, and discourses persist today
in which supernatural forces travel through a medium, control a person, forcing them to
do evil, make them sick, deformed, or ugly; or cause mental and emotional distress. Some
supernatural connections can be unhealthy due to the fear or anxiety they provoke—even
if the supernatural agent itself is not clearly malevolent. As one woman in my focus
groups described:
In the town I’m from there’s actually a house that when I was a kid I used
to babysit. … There is a book on it like for being a haunted house, and like
a couple of homes that I’ve heard of and read documentation on, I know
people who lived in and have been written up as haunted houses, like offi-
cially, whoever officially takes that. And a lot of stories … involve like
hearing the TV go on or off in the other room when nobody’s in that room,
or a light is on in one room while everyone’s in the kitchen and like the
light just pop, go out. In terms of it being negative, it’s just that it put fear
in people. That’s like a negative thing. And I guess if it’s like supposedly
an angry poltergeist, they’ll like do more, they’ll like blow out fuses as
opposed to just having some static because some spirit is entering.

97
In my focus groups, the film Poltergeist (Hooper, 1982) was frequently remem-
bered as an example of transdimensional infections. One woman said, “The girl was see-
ing the ghost coming from the TV, and I guess it was the TV that was—I don’t know—
possessing her mind or something like that.” This is actually incorrect, a mis-
remembering that attests to the salience of the general possession idea. In Poltergeist, the
daughter only initially communicates with spirits through staring into television static;
she is abducted through a dimensional portal growing out of her bedroom closet and ter-
minating in the living room. Moreover, she is never actually possessed. Although kid-
napped, she does not take on the consciousness or appearance of another entity. Yet, the
film’s advertising and final image—the family rolling a hotel TV onto the balcony—
ascribe significance to the TV unsupported by the actual narrative. However, possession
does appear in many fantastic fictions when spirits gain access to controlling or manipu-
lating victims through a computers, telephones, television, radio, and portable stereos.
For example, the ghost of a young girl uses ham-radio broadcasts to lure victims to a
haunted house in Ghosthouse (Lenzi, 1987), the cryptic message turning out to be a re-
cording of their future deaths, prefiguring voicemails of the more recent One Missed Call
films.
v
A related form of degenerate supernatural forces is when technologies are cursed:
toxic videotapes, cell phones, text messages, or websites induce physical and mental dis-
tress or death without possessing the user. In these cases, the user is not taken over, but
they are injured or killed, usually immediately upon exposure to or use of the cursed
technology. The notion of a curse or spell put on a device so that it hurts the user is not so

98
far removed from quotidian chain email, texts, letters, and comment posts that threaten
recipients with ill health and misfortune. It is another associative form of disease, like the
curse on King Tut’s tomb or actors associated with the Poltergeist films. In fantastic fic-
tions, cursed technologies range form celluloid film and videotapes to voicemails and text
messages. In a subsequent chapter, I will discuss cursed phones, videos, computer disks,
and virtual worlds in several Ring films and novels.
Feedback
Recently, a series of news stories reported on studies linking childhood obesity with tele-
vision and video games. Dr. Philip Nader, a University of California-San Diego pediat-
rics professor emeritus who conducted “one of the largest studies of its kind” on obesity,
partially attributed decreasing physical activity to increasing popularity of computer and
video games and levels of physical activity (“Restricting Kids’ Video Time…,” 2008). A
Tabloids had reported similar studies, warning, “TV Makes Kids Fat!” (Fitz, 2007c).
Obesity and acne are also incurred through abuse of a Massively Multiplayer Online
Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) in an episode of South Park (Parker, 2006).
Some scholars suggest that this recent obesity epidemic is also a cultural complex,
dealing with such social issues as citizenship and national security (Shugart, 2008). Obe-
sity concerns do seem to exhibit the technological frisson noted previously: If the prob-
lem is children being sedentary, shouldn’t the problem also include reading, napping, and
meditation. The Feedback category encompasses obesity and other somatic disorders—
direct physical changes, mutations, or injuries to the body—due to communication tech-

99
nologies. A degree of human output into the technology returns as input into the human
body. A very familiar Feedback is repetitive stress injury, such as iPod thumb, telephone
neck, carpal tunnel from texting, and thumb joint inflammation from handheld devices
such as the Sidekick, Treo, Blackberry, or BlackJack (Menghrajani, 2007). Another fa-
miliar Feedback disorder would be hearing loss or tinnitus from audio technologies (Ep-
pingham, 1981; Fitz, 2007a; Policy, 1983; A. B. Smith, 1983). More baroque mutations
such as tabloid reports of insectoid “fly eyes” (Stewart, 2007) and female baldness from
cell phones, pagers, video games, and video iPods (Siegel, 2007). Variants from fantastic
fictions include technologies that injure the body, often fatally, when they for various
reasons become semi-autonomous or when the deaths of characters in video games cross
over to deaths of their players.
vi

In obesity and other cases of Feedback, we see a familiar blaming of the patient,
despite Feedback cases being some of the most easily recognized and medically verified
categories. Blaming the user can even spread to blaming anyone who takes the sick user
seriously, or looks out for her. “Laser Printers Can Kill You with Evil Dust,” blared a
2007 post heading in Gadget Lab, a member of the blog network of WIRED magazine,
the bible of new-media techno-enthusiasm. Australian researchers found that small parti-
cles emitted by some laser printers could lodge in pulmonary crevices, resulting in car-
diovascular difficulties, respiratory irritation, and cancer. The blogger indicts the scientist
leading the research project, quipping, “And ban the machines that make scalding hot
coffee while you're at it” (Sorrel, 2007). The actual study, which reads as anything but

100
sensationalistic, made no extreme claims or proscriptions. Indeed, it clearly announces
that it is the first study of its kind, and as such is only preliminary. Its sober conclusion
reads:
The particle emission process and the behavior of individual printers are
complex and that they are still far from being completely understood.
Many factors, such as printer model, printer age, cartridge model, and car-
tridge age may affect the particle emission process and all of these factors
require further study. (He, 2007)

Nowhere in the fusty report is anything to suggest the sensationalism, paternalism, panic,
or litigiousness the blogger suggests. Yet note how quickly the discussion potential health
risks slips into personal attack: “The professor in charge of the study is already calling for
nannyfication of the problem: ‘Governments regulate emission levels from outdoor de-
vices such as vehicles, power stations and factories,’ said Professor Lidia Morawska, ‘so
why not for printers?’” The blogger can perhaps be excused, for he relied on not the ac-
tual study but news reports (Judge, 2007; “Laser printers may pose health risks,” 2007).
Yet use of the hot coffee reference is telling: Sorrel alludes to this paragon anecdote of
American society as over-litigious. The case of a (significantly, elderly and female)
McDonald’s customer who sued the chain after being burned by spilling hot coffee on
herself is repeatedly used as evidence in support of tort reform, of consumer stupidity
abetted by legal greed and corruption. A bevy of unwholesome users, no? Yet, it is an
extreme series of leaps to go from a sober call for more investigation into a heretofore-
unstudied phenomena (laser printer particle emissions), to a decades-long struggle of re-
search, consumer education, litigation, and corporate malfeasance involving a leading

101
cause of death (smoking), to a frivolous lawsuit by an idiot.
vii

From Sick to Ideal Users
Here are the disease patterns I have presented and what attributes they suggest; followed
by what I suggest are the more healthy technological attributes and behaviors they imply:
Sick users
Overloaded: Too sensitive, overwhelmed. Aspires to go beyond the safe realms or
appropriate spaces for their nature. Doesn’t know their proper place.
Resistant: Too isolated, withdrawn, asocial. Independent to the point of social
withdrawal of sociopathic extremes.
Mismanages Bandwidth: Inept in media (over)use. Does not know how to priori-
tize or triage multiple streams of stimuli.
Promiscuous: Too freely, indiscriminately connected. Over-networked to the
point of improperly and excessively “hooking up”
Fedback Upon: Too receptive to the point that the body breaks down and loses its
structural integrity. Pliability taken to the extreme of fragility or flu-
idity.
Healthy users
Acquisitive: Stimulation-seeking, happily and obediently consuming distraction
but—through care or luck—not to their own or anyone else’s detriment.
Knows how to differentiate and hierarchize streams of stimuli. She has
appropriate preferences and distinction.

102
Team Player: Although independent, this is not taken to an extreme of withdraw-
ing from the social body. However, not needy or dependent on the group:
she remains self-reliant enough to resist the wrong sorts of groups and is,
in that sense, “not a joiner” or anti-collective. The healthy balance could
be seen as a productive and engaged company employee who remains not
susceptible to unionization, excessive socialization, or other special inter-
est groups at work.
Content: Moderate in ideals, desires, ambitions. Pragmatic. Knows her place.
Status quo.
Intranetworked: Networked and connected, but within appropriate bounds. Not
too much. Discriminate in hooking up appropriately. Social, trusting, and
loyal, but contained within the proper channels or circles.
Pliable: Incorporates feedback and adjusts to suggestions successfully, but with-
out body breaking down. Flexible, adaptive, agile, willing but not fluid.
In subsequent chapters we will see these portraits of sick and healthy users emerge more
fully, and examine the cultural work they perform via technopathological discourses.
Conclusion
We have come a long way from the curiosities of newbie telephone users to the scope of
technopathologies presented. However, I hope this journey has illustrated two points:
1. Technology, especially the electric communication technologies I am focusing
on, is far from a pure, antiseptic realm. Technological practices and discourse are just as

103
embodied as any other part of human culture, and subject to the messiest, most organic of
corporeal conditions: disease (and at this point I reiterate the contemporary confluence of
mental and physical illness as all having at least a major organic, biological genetic com-
ponent or predisposition). Disease and pathology are just as much a part of our techno-
logical expectations, uses and ideals—human technological culture—as any other part of
culture. As others have asserted, the body is in many ways the central site of sociological
analysis, and I have attempted to demonstrate here this applies equally to analysis of
technological society and culture, that they are no exception.
2. Discourses of technological disease then perform the cultural work similar to
other disease discourses, such as normalizing and gendering. The sick, unhealthy, abnor-
mal user is in many ways also feminized.
The following chapters will examine in-depth case studies of each of the five
technopathological disease patterns. These will not only support and flesh out my por-
traits of sick and healthy users, but also analyze how, like other stereotypical pathologiza-
tions, technopathologies blame the patient and perform cultural work of obscuring the
societal, systematic issues at play, reinforcing other vectors of pathologization and natu-
ralizing sickness itself. The user can be sick, yes, but differential analysis encourages us
to ask, What larger conditions may be sickening the user, and what power relations may
be involved in perpetuating those conditions?

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Chapter 3 Endnotes

i
While a bioelectrical creature living symbiotically in the human spine caused the filmic sensations, the
audience’s feelings were due to select theater seats specially rigged to deliver electric shocks to patrons.

ii
I am excluding Tron and other narratives in which electronic worlds are simply parallel or adjunct to
reality, and their crossovers not pathologized.

iii
This could be understood as the shadow side or dystopic view of the association of technologies with
modernity and progress, as in numerous midcentury news articles that note transistor radios appearing in
undeveloped nations.

iv
The recent slang adoption of the word by youth to mean intensely impressive adds another layer of
complexity.

v
Supernatural connections, it should be noted, can also be benign or beneficent, although that lies outside
the scope of this project. In The Manitou, technologies are not the conduit for supernatural possession but
the conduit for exorcism, demonstrating a beneficent version of techno-supernatural-biological
equivalence: In this 1978 film, Susan Strasberg is possessed by a 400-year-old evil Native American
medicine man, who afflicts her with tumor-like dermoid fetus growing on her back. Tony Curtis plays a
San Francisco tarot card reader who discovers that “machines have their own manitou” or universal spirit
energy. In the film’s conclusion, Strasberg’s character channels the spirit-energies of a room full of
computers and electric medical equipment to defeat the evil spirit, a white, diseased mother-medium
triumphant against her native attacker. In the novel, the evil spirit is stopped by venereal disease.

vi
Although not a disease, the use of communications technologies as weapons does suggest their life-
threatening potential. In many films and narratives, devices of communion becomes ones of intentional
death and injury: a death ray in Murder by Television (Sanforth, 1935), bludgeoning by TV set in (Zombie,
2007) or computer keyboard in Gattaca (Niccol, 1996), strangulation by phone cord in Halloween
(Carpenter, 1978) or Walkman headphone cords (twice!) in The Living Daylights (Glen, 1987), cerebral
impalement from a spike-emitting phone receiver in Dr. Phibes Rises Again (Fuest, 1972), Mikey’s
boombox-into-hot-tub (Dimster, 1992), the death contraptions triggered by number of visitors to a snuff
website in Untraceable (Hoblit, 2008), and impalement by an ocular telephoto video lens and razor-sharp
flying discs from a chest CD-player of the Cenobites—supernatural industrial cyborgs—in Hellraiser III:
Hell on Earth (Hickox, 1992). Comic variants include the diePod euthanasia machine of The Simpsons
"Million Dollar Abe" episode, the alien TriPod of Scary Movie 4, with its “Destroy Humanity” playlist
(Zucker, 2006), or the obesity and acne incurred through video game addiction in South Park's "Make Love
not Warcraft" episode.

vii
Such anecdotal reports typically fail to mention that the woman suffered third-degree burns over six
percent of her skin and lesser burns over sixteen percent, affecting her groin, thighs, and buttocks, and
requiring eight days of hospitalization for skin grafts and two years of follow-up treatments. She initially
sought $20,000 to cover medical costs of $11,000, to which McDonald’s offered $800, refusing to raise its
offer or settle. This led to the infamous lawsuit and a $2.86 million jury award (a figure based on a
percentage of McDonald’s profits from coffee sales), reduced by the judge to $640,000, then settled out of
court during appeals for less than $600,000. At the time, McDonald’s required drive-through coffee to be
served at 180-190 degrees F, had already received over 700 complaints regarding burns and scalding, and
had already awarded settlements of up to $500,000.

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Chapter 4: Overload: Electrosensitives as Neurasthenic Echoes of Feminine
Pathologization

“The man who does not know sick women does not know women.”
S. Weir Mitchell, inventor of the neurasthenia “rest cure,” 1887

This chapter presents the condition of Electrosensitivity as a case study in Overload tech-
nopathologies. This will first involve an example of a cultural approach to studying a re-
lated disease, examining neurasthenia as what Lutz (1991a) describes as a “cultural com-
plex.” I will examine some of the cultural work of this diseases in terms of normalizing
and gendering, drawing on historic and medical literature, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s
classic feminist story, “The Yellow Wall-paper” (C. P. Gilman, 2004b) and related texts,
O. Henry’s Let Me Feel Your Pulse: Adventures in Neurasthenia (Henry, 1910), and the
1947 Joan Crawford’s Oscar-nominated film Possessed (Bernhardt, 1947). Having dem-
onstrated this approach of looking at disease as a cultural complex, I turn to a more recent
but in many ways similar condition, electrosensitivity, a technopathology of the Overload
pattern. Shifting as well from fictional representations to nonfiction self-expressions, I
will examine electrosensitivity primarily through an analysis of gendered discourse in
online networks of health activism. I then examine what electrosensitivity in specific and
Overload conditions in general say about healthy and sick users of technologies, and the
cultural work this performs of normalizing, gendering, blaming the user, and distracting

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from systemic issues. Finally, continuing my differential analysis of appropriating and
applying feminist scholarship on neurasthenia and disease in general, I conclude suggest-
ing the normalization carried out here includes normalization of sickness itself.
Disease as Cultural Complex: Neurasthenia’s Gendering and Normalizing Work
As discussed earlier, a disease can be examined culturally, as what Lutz refers to as a
“cultural complex.” What sort of cultural complex was neurasthenia? Neurologist George
Beard conceptualized the disease in 1869 as a bioelectrical nervous system exhausted by
overstimulation; literally nerve (neuro) + weakness (asthenia) (Beard, 1882, 1972; Gos-
ling, 1987; Hoover, 1999; Lutz, 1991a; Ng, 1999; P. Y. Schwartz, 1999). Today, the most
familiar vestigial form of this diagnosis, no longer used in the West, would be nervous
breakdowns. What caused such crippling enervation? It was a particularly American
i

phenomenon, due both to perceived climatological uniqueness but also social competi-
tiveness and ambition. However, “the chief and primary cause of this development and
very rapid increase of nervousness,” wrote Beard, “is modern civilization, which is dis-
tinguished from the ancient by these five characteristics: steam-power, the periodical
press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women” (Beard, 1972, p. vi,
emphasis original). In other words, technologies of transportation and communication,
coupled with a challenge to gender roles. Modern civilization was “at the head” of “pre-
disposing causes” of neurasthenia:
None of the predisposing or exciting causes that follow it are competent to
produce functional nervous disease of the class described in this work un-
less civilization prepares the way. The nervous diseases from which sav-
ages suffer, and the lower orders of peasantry, are largely of a subjective,
psychical character, being caused by the emotions, and assume very dif-

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ferent phases, whatever their names be, from those herein described
(Beard, 1972, p. 171).

Well-known neurasthenics included Max Weber, Theodore Roosevelt, and Theodore
Dreiser. Neurasthenia was referred to as “the blues,” but the physical and mental mani-
festations of an overstimulated nervous system went far beyond our contemporary mean-
ing of “the blues” as depression. Neurasthenia was literally unbounded in its endless
symptomology, a catchall for a wide variety of mental and physical disorders, such as
dyspepsia, extreme nervousness, lethargy, hyperexcitability, insomnia, impotence, skin
rashes, depression, hay fever, liver trouble, headaches, premature baldness, inebriety,
spermatorreah, epilepsy, and mild insanity. Neurasthenia was pointedly not mental ill-
ness, but a physical illness of the nervous system, thereby exempt from the moral and
character failings suggested by mental illness. Moreover, neurasthenia afflicted “brain
workers,” not manual laborers, and therefore carried a certain cultural capital. As Beard
wrote, “Woman in the savage state is not delicate, sensitive or weak. Like man, she is
strong, well developed, and muscular, with capacity for enduring, as well as childbearing.
The weakness of woman is all modern, and it is preeminently American” (1972, p. 171).
Citing studies of emancipated Negroes on islands of the south between Charleston and
Savannah—“a bit of barbarism on our door-steps”—Beard argued that, “there is almost
no insanity among these Negroes; there is no functional nervous disease or symptoms
among them” (Beard, 1972, p. 189). Indeed, stereotypical attributes of laziness and sloth
were reinforced and medically explained as due to this lack of nervous energy.
Lutz’ research examines neurasthenic discourse in 1903 as site of complex and

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contradictory upper-class expressions regarding changing roles of gender, sexuality, la-
bor, and other social positions, technological innovations, overseas expansion, immigra-
tion, fluctuating notions of morality and professional calling, and protofeminism. Skul-
tans similarly examines the cultural work of neurasthenia as it persisted in 1990s Latvia,
where, under the lingering influence of Soviet ideological psychiatry, narratives of neu-
rasthenic suffering provided a way to speak of the unspeaking stresses of living and being
a caregiver under Soviet rule (Skultans, 2001). Gosling’s (1987) research in medical re-
cords from 1870-1910, however, has shown that, despite what might have been original
functions of neurasthenia in differentiation and distinction along class and race-based
lines, the condition democratized fairly rapidly. A variety of rural, urban and small-town
physicians (not just elite neurologists) came to diagnose and treat Americans of all social
classes and types of employment in homes, offices, public clinics, private sanitariums,
city hospitals, and state asylums across the country. For these people as well as elites, a
respectable, even admirable diagnosis of neurasthenia served to replace, cover, or aug-
ment previous socially undesirable diagnoses such as hysteria, hypochondria, melancho-
lia, and even syphilis. Indeed, Lutz (1991b) describes how W.E.B. Du Bois, not himself
neurasthenic but familiar with neurasthenia from his teacher William James, appropriated
neurasthenic discourse to lend civility, sensitivity, and refinement to the black subjects of
his writing. Moreover, neurasthenia was progressive and associative with other condi-
tions: Beard’s “Evolution of Nervousness” charts the following continuum: “General
Nerve Sensitiveness -> Nervous Diathesis (nervous dyspepsia -> sick-headache -> near-

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sightedness -> Chorea -> sleeplessness -> Asthenopia -> hay-fever -> hypochondria->
hysteria) -> Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) (cerebral -> spinal -> digestive -> sex-
ual),” which then branches in three equal directions: “inebriety, insanity, and epilepsy”
(in Lutz, 1991a, p. 5). Such diversity and scope allowed “many disparate discourses—on
socialism, on black Americans, on art and realism, on muckraking, and on the blues
[emotional and musical]—[to be] illuminated through the use of neurasthenic as a shared
horizon, as [were] the relations of neurasthenia to disparate forms of cultural change”
(Lutz, 1991b).
If this begins to sound a little far-reaching, that is exactly the point. As one
prominent psychologist noted in 1890, “Neurasthenia, as a term, means very little”
(quoted in Prince, 1975a, p. 79). Neurasthenia’s effectiveness as cultural complex lies in
its very flexibility, openness, and adaptability as a discursive site. As a later physician
noted, “In neurasthenia no symptoms have hard-and-fast lines” (Brock, 1923, p. 153).
My focus here is on the cultural work done by neurasthenia in terms of contribut-
ing to and supporting social constructions of gender. The “modern society” that caused
neurasthenia was viewed as a feminizing over-civilization, hence the hardy outdoor cures
for male neurasthenics. Neurasthenia was one of several pathologies highly gendered as
not only feminine but indicative of the inherent degeneracy and susceptibility to disease
of women, particularly women of color, most often due to their excess sexuality (S. L.
Gilman, 1985). An 1899 issue of Medical News cited “the sensitive dispositions of deli-
cate girls during the development period” as making them vulnerable to neurasthenia,

110
chlorosis, and neurotic condition, therefore warranting their exclusion from music con-
sumption and training (“Music and neurotic conditions in young girls,” 1899, ¶1). Thus,
even though Lutz asserts more men than women were diagnosed, it makes sense for Wil-
liam Dean Howells in 1871 to refer to the epidemic of neurasthenia among artists and
intellectuals by writing that “‘sometimes America seems little better than a hospital for
invalid women’” (quoted in Lutz, 1991b, p. 140). S. Weir Mitchell, inventor of the neu-
rasthenic rest cure, described in an 1877 book how the disease feminized men: “I have
many a time seen soldiers who had ridden boldly with Sheridan or fought gallantly with
Grant become, under the influence of painful nerve-wounds, as irritable and hysterically
emotional as the veriest girl” (quoted in Golden, 2004, p. 65). Neurasthenics had gen-
dered treatments: vigorous outdoor activity to revitalize men, and absolute incapacitation
and rest to recuperate women. The condition also featured progressively feminized repre-
sentations (as in the nervous breakdowns of hysterical women and sensitive men). Earlier
theories of a nutritional etiology for nervous exhaustion were replaced with more judg-
mental ones: “As to the assumed pathological principle, —faulty nutrition—I think there
has been a growing conviction that this is not the real underlying principle of neurasthe-
nia,” American psychologist Morton Prince told the Massachusetts Medical Society in
1898, “and that the cures effected by the rest treatment are due to other influences,
largely moral and educational” (Prince, 1975b, p. 100).
American humorist O. Henry published in a brief illustrated story, Let Me Feel
Your Pulse: Adventures in Neurasthenia (Henry, 1910), which demonstrates associations

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between the disease and gender and sexuality. It tells, in first person, of a man’s experi-
ence receiving treatment at a sanatorium. The varied treatments of the condition are paro-
died in a running joke about the oxymoronic prescription of “absolute rest and exercise”
(p. 30). Equally ripe for humor are the generally less-than-masculine fellow patients (a
female novelist, a Wall Street broker, an architect, a minister, society ladies, a neurotic
millionaire, and a famous artist), the liminal disease itself (suggested to be merely a cover
for alcoholism), and the sufferer himself: “There is nothing more alarming to a neuras-
thenic than to feel himself growing well and cheerful” (p. 30). Moreover, the story’s con-
clusion makes explicit the disease as one of failed heterosexual masculinity. His doctor
tells the protagonist to find a magic cure-all mountain plant, the only thing that can save
him. They hunt for it together for a month. Finally, when the doctor spies the protagonist
with a female friend, Amaryllis, he takes her aside. The doctor tells her to look up her
name in an encyclopedia when they get home and tell the protagonist what it means.
“It seems to be the name of a genus of flowering plants and also the name of a
country girl in Theocritus and Vergil,” she tells him. “What do you suppose the doctor
meant by that?”
“I know what he meant,” said I. “I know now.”
A word to a brother who may have come under the spell of the unquiet
Lady Neurasthenia.
The formula was true. Even though gropingly at times, the physicians of
the walled cities had put their fingers upon the specific medicament.
And so for the exercise one is referred to good Dr. Tatum on Black Oak
Mountain—take the road to your right at the Methodist meeting-house in
the pine-grove.
Absolute rest and exercise!
What rest more remedial than to sit with Amaryllis in the shade, and, with
a sixth sense, read the wordless Theocritan idyll of the gold bannered blue

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mountains marching orderly into the dormitories of the night?
The End. (pp. 37-38)

“Amaryllis,” being not only, as noted, a name for a shepherdess, country girl, or rural
sweetheart in classical and pastoral poetry, but also a flowering plant (the “magic cure-
all”) known for its red and pink trumpet or funnel-shaped blossoms. Admittedly, reading
blossoms as not merely feminine but gynecological symbols has been something of a cli-
ché at least since the revival of the paintings of Georgia O’Keefe, but nevertheless one
should note that the alternate name for amaryllis is “naked lady.” What’s more, the late-
eighteenth/early nineteenth century fad of a symbolic language of flowers, enabling se-
cret messages and difficult sentiments to be expressed through arrangements, had re-
cently been revived at the time of O. Henry’s writing, with red amaryllis meaning, “I re-
spect you from the depths of my soul.” Thus, O. Henry clearly seems to be asserting re-
paired masculinity, through heterosexual love and sexuality, as the “cure-all” for the du-
bious condition of male neurasthenia.
The most famous feminist critique of neurasthenia, perhaps, is Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” Originally published 1892, it was con-
sidered a horror tale in the vein of Edgar Allan Poe, and never truly “lost,” but antholo-
gized several times. However, its 1973 republication by Feminist Press, with an after-
word by Elaine R. Hedges, ushered in unprecedented international acclaim and led to it
becoming one of the most-studied English texts (C. P. Gilman, 2004a, 2004b, 2004c;
Golden, 2004; Heilman, 2000a, 2000b; Tuttle, 2000). Briefly, the story concerns a mostly
unnamed female protagonist who suffers from nervous illness but her physician-husband

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does not believe she is sick, in a classic early example of Dumit’s “liminal illness” or an
“illness you have to fight to get” (Dumit, 2005, 2006). She takes the Mitchell rest cure
and is isolated in a room with patterned wall-paper. The forced inactivity makes her
symptoms worse, and she becomes drawn to the pattern, studying it, feeling nauseated by
its colors, detecting a smell, and seeing a pattern in it. She grows paranoid toward other
characters and realizes the pattern within the wall-paper pattern is a woman, who begins
to seem mobile or sentient. In an ambiguous ending, her husband John arrives and asks
what’s the matter. She responds: “I’ve got out at last … in spite of you and Jane. And
I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” (C. P. Gilman, 2004b, p.
144). John faints, and she crawls over his supine body repeatedly. It is unclear what the
ending means: Has the wall-paper woman has taken over the protagonist, or was she suc-
cessfully refused? Was Jane (never before named) the protagonist? Is she now liberated
from “Jane’s” domestic life? Perhaps liberated, perhaps trapped, triumphant or insane?
As clarified in its prequel, it is not education, technology, nor access to her physi-
cian-husband’s books (as one contemporary doctor blamed post-partum distress) that
made her sick. And, contrary to medical opinion at the time, her volatile uterus and re-
productive organs are never mentioned as cause, either. As the story suggests, and its
prequel makes clear, it is exhaustion from domestic responsibilities. “Through This” is a
brief portrait of a harried wife and mother, featuring most all the characters in “Wall-
Paper,” too exhausted at the end of the day to respond to a letter from Jane, who is facing
challenges as a new mother. The story, using a different case, is a “Before” portrait to the

114
“After” of “Wall-paper.” Furthermore, the institutionalized sexism of the medical estab-
lishment is emphasized in Gilman’s autobiography, in which she describes the story’s
target, Mitchell, as scornfully telling her, “I’ve had two women of your blood here al-
ready”—referring to the Stowes (C. P. Gilman, 2004a, pp. 49-50). “Blood” serving not
only as vernacular for relations but also medicalizing feminist activism, conflating dis-
ease with politics and pathologizing not merely women but a specific type of women:
feminists. Secondly, “Wall-Paper” is a significant text as well in that it links neurasthenia
with gender roles and the supernatural, as suggested in the intertwined cultural histories
of electricity, femininity, and vital energies. Gilman begins the story discussing the estate
housing the room as “haunted” and her condition as her “ghostliness.” Her husband,
John, explicitly does not believe in the supernatural:
John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense
horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be
felt and seen and put down in figures.
John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of
course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—perhaps that
is one reason I do not get well faster.
You see he does not believe I am sick! (C. P. Gilman, 2004b, p. 131, em-
phasis original)

Note the quick succession of disbelief in the supernatural, her lack of recovery, and dis-
belief in her illness. Later in the story, the lady in the paper could be a ghost or hallucina-
tion, but the story significantly refuses to differentiate or specify the two. Furthermore, in
threatening to or possibly overtaking the protagonist, the pattern-lady exhibits behavior
similar to the malevolent supernatural entities we will see in my later chapter on tech-
nopathologies of spirit possession and cursed devices in the Ring-related horror films and

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novels. Finally, the act of communication and its media are central and, although they are
not electric machines, electricity still suffuses the story in its focus on depleted nervous
energies. The story itself is an act of communicating back to Mitchell—an early example
of interactive, participatory media perhaps—and to other women and doctors. This act is
amplified by the prequel, essay, and autobiography, making clear that, if the story was
meant to convey a subjective psychic experience, Gilman also wished to make the in-
tended message of the story clear as well. Communication is also shown to be inappro-
priately faulted, when in actuality, it is the cure: “John has cautioned me not to give way
to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making,
a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I
ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try” (p. 134). John’s sis-
ter also is accused of thinking that writing makes the protagonist sick. And yet:
I don’t know why I should write this.
I don't want to.
I don't feel able.
And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and
think in some way—it is such a relief! (p. 136)

This reversal of conventional wisdom parallels that of entire story: the “cure” makes you
sick; the “cause” can cure you. Most fascinating however, is the communicative medium
of the wall-paper. Yes, there has been much scholarly argument for preserving that hy-
phen, as it emphasizes that it is not merely a wall covering, but paper on the wall, the
prime communication medium for centuries mounted on the boundaries of domestic im-
prisonment, her bedroom’s “four walls.” Typically one differentiates, however, between

116
decorative patterns and linguistic symbols, yet Gilman challenges this distinction. As
Treichler (1984) has famously discussed, the protagonist’s confrontation is with language
and discourse itself as a technique of patriarchal control and power: Language forms both
sentences, the protagonist’s prescribed sentence to her room for a rest cure, and sentenc-
ing women to social subordination. The supposedly mere aesthetics of the wall-paper do
contain a message; they do contain encoded or mediated human consciousness and
agency: There is a woman in the pattern. “I never saw so much expression in an inani-
mate thing before.” The pattern is not mere decoration but is communication, challenging
the gender roles associated with decoration and pragmatism, respectively. “There are
things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.” The wall-paper is both emo-
tional decoration and pragmatic communication, animate and inanimate. Recalling the
previous discussion of blurred boundaries and pathology, it understandable then that it is
also sickening.

(Lutz also notes the use of toxic dyes in Victorian wallpaper, adding an-
other layer to this.) The “sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” are
described variously as confusing the eye, irritating, “outrageous,” suicidal (not provoking
suicide but suicidal themselves, again suggesting agency in decoration), “repellent, al-
most revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow,” “lurid,” “a sickly sulphur tint,” “horrid,”
impertinent, “absurd,” “irritating,” “strange, provoking,” “silly and conspicuous,” “point-
less,” “bloated,” “debased,” “interminable,” “hideous,” ”unreliable,” “infuriating,” “tor-
turing,” reminiscent of a fungus, strange, “foul,” ”tiresome and perplexing,” dizzying,
“awful,” and smelling “yellow.” It provokes sickness, is sick itself, and even suggests a

117
representation of ill health: “There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken
neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.” It changes with changing light,
suggesting semiotic instability. In short, the story brings together a sickening form of ear-
lier communications media (paper, writing, decoration) with a disease of bio-electricity
and modern technological society; it marries the elements of the technopathologies upon
which my study focuses.
The feminist analysis of neurasthenia had larger implications for gender and
sexuality. Neurasthenia was opportunistic, taking advantage of laxities in morality and
character, as women, people of color, and lower classes were seen as having. Modern so-
ciety’s demands could sicken the elite, but non-elites were susceptible to neurasthenia by
virtue of their inherent weaknesses and degenerate constitutions. McLaren’s (A.
McLaren, 2007) cultural history of male impotence argues that neurasthenia was a focal
point in gendered cultural anxieties: its nervous exhaustion was due to the emasculating
and feminizing stresses of modern civilization, which also led to medicalized failures of
masculinity such as perversion, over indulgence, masturbation, and homosexuality. How-
ever, the insatiable sexual demands of hysterical women also contributed to this state of
exhaustion; nerves already over-excited by modern life could be pushed over the edge
into full-blown neurasthenic exhaustion and collapse by a traumatic sexual humiliation or
fiasco, such as impotent inability to satisfy the demands of a wife or mistress. Moreover,
by the 1930s, a German-influenced concern with threats to masculinity, modern exhaus-
tion, and depleted willpower was associated with a more general European feminist back-

118
lash (Cowan, 2008). Gay rights pioneer Harry Hay recalled how, coming out in the
1920s, there was no word “gay” to describe homosexual men: “The word for us was
‘temperamental’” (in Schiller & Rosenberg, 1984). Temperamental clearly parallels the
emotional liability and moodiness of neurasthenia, an over-sensitivity bioelectrical and
emotional, clearly linked in inappropriate forms of (ef)femininity. Indeed, Freud’s analy-
sis of Daniel Paul Schreber, the author of Memoirs of my Nervous Illness, focused on his
homosexuality, yet, as Lutz argues, “homosexuality also would have created the kind of
role and status anxiety so often expressed in neurasthenia” (Lutz, 1991a, p. 310).
By the 1920s, the rest cure had its skeptics. One prominent Scottish physician
wrote that, after World War I, rest cures no longer worked for nerves: “Foolishness un-
treated (and not, as scientists used to believe, chemical, physical, or bacteriological ongo-
ings in the brain) is the main cause, not merely of our neurasthenia and nervous break-
downs, but of our rising insanity rate” (in Schiller & Rosenberg, 1984). Diagnoses of
neurasthenia were on the decline, displaced to some degree by the emergence of Freud
and also perhaps the disease’s association with cultivated refinement and sensitive tem-
peraments was less tenable after the shock of WWI.
However, as I have argued, diseases echo and linger, or perhaps haunt. I turn now
to one such example of a transitional text, the 1947 Joan Crawford film Possessed, which
links neurasthenia to subsequent diagnoses, such as schizophrenia, while maintaining
gendered associations, especially that of pathologized feminine desire and sexuality. It
illustrates how the issues in the cultural complex of neurasthenia move into schizophre-

119
nia, and I will argue they then move on into the technopathology of electrosensitivity.
Possessed: A Pathological Cultural Complex in Motion
We human beings, act according to certain patterns of behavior. Some-
times, why exactly we don’t know yet, the pattern is broken—the wires
are crossed. The mind cannot evaluate, judge, or even function properly.
Shock follows shock, until eventually the mind gives way. The brain loses
control and the body sinks into coma. Then, in a biblical sense, we might
say that such a person is possessed of devils. And, it is the psychiatrist who
must cast them out. (emphases mine)

When Doctor Willard soberly intones the above lines to concerned husband Dean, played
by Raymond Massey, at the conclusion of 1947’s Oscar-winning Joan Crawford vehicle,
Possessed, he suggests numerous intersections between gender, technology, medicine,
the supernatural, and disease. Moreover, the passage is significant not only for these in-
tersections, but as climax of the film—clearly significant as it was quoted verbatim in
promotional articles for the film and singled out by the Pennsylvania Board of censors to
be deleted.
Briefly, the film involves a catatonic woman found wandering the streets of Los
Angeles. Hospitalized and medicated, she relates to doctors and the film unfolds in flash-
back, telling her story of obsessive and eventually unrequited love for a former lover,
David. The woman, Louise, was a nurse, dumped by her caddish paramour, David. After
her patient, a neurasthenic, paranoid invalid woman, dies, she stays with the family, even-
tually marrying widower Dean, but is unable to let go of David who, coincidentally
works for Dean. David begins romancing Dean’s daughter, Louise’s stepdaughter, driv-
ing her further into madness, until she is hallucinating, paranoid, and convinced she mur-

120
dered Dean’s first wife, her patient. She does eventually murder David, descending into
complete jealousy and madness; her prognosis at the film’s end is bleak and dependent on
Dean’s steadfast love and support. Although the older patient is clearly labeled as neuras-
thenic (and in general a foreshadowing of the jealousy, irrational woman Louise will be-
come), Louise’s diagnosis is somewhat ambivalent. A psychiatrist she sees privately
states she exhibits “all the symptoms of neurasthenia,” but then quickly confirms when
Louise guesses that she has schizophrenia, which many of the film’s press materials also
mention. Although schizophrenia, as a mental condition, is incompatible with the physi-
cal illness of neurasthenia, it is also a diagnosis that eventually absorbed many cases that
physicians would have previously diagnosed as neurasthenia. Given this, the film offers
an important window in the transition of this cultural complex.
As the brief summary should indicate, Possessed is a clear example of the patholo-
gized feminine, especially feminine sexuality and romantic desire. The film is about un-
restrained, pathological, obsessive female love, cited repeatedly and unproblematicly in
promotional materials for and press coverage. This is emphasized by stories that blurred
the line between Crawford and her character: Louise is “lovelorn;” Crawford is “thrice-
divorced” and “swearing off matrimony.” Many articles speculated on Crawford’s diffi-
cult love life and concurrent divorce. Louise is ill; Crawford has a case of the sniffles
during filming. Immediately after filming the climactic scene in which Louise shoots the
object of her unrequited love, Crawford has to go to the doctor for a shot of penicillin.
Crawford loses herself in the emotional intensity of shooting a hysterical scene, as direc-

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tor Curtis Bernhardt told the press: “The cameras stopped, the scene was finished, and I
yelled: ‘Cut. Stop, Miss Crawford. It’s all over.’ But she could not stop. She kept on
screaming. Finally, we managed to get her back to her dressing room and she calmed
down.” The doctor in the film cites Louise’s similar inability to distinguish reality and
fantasy, a blurring emphasized by the film’s use of innovative subjective cinema tech-
niques, making the audience unclear what was and was not real.
Significantly, the film heightens the pathologization of the feminine due to institu-
tional structures in place at the time. In early versions of the script, it is made fairly clear
that David resumes his affair with Louise after she marries Dean. The MPAA, in several
memos to studio head Jack Warner, insisted that these references to adultery be removed.
The result is that Louise’s obsession with David seems strangely unmotivated: She’s
merely a crazy bitch who can’t get over the guy who dumped her (prefiguring characters
such as female lead Alex in Fatal Attraction), even when she remarries. The original fact
that the guy was leading her on and continuing the affair—a much more rational cause
for her emotional upset and confusion—is erased. Even if David remains a cad, the dis-
ease seems sorely the result of Louise’s unbalanced feminine desire. (Fatal Attraction
similarly reduced sympathetic elements for Alex during the production process.) The
pathologizing of Louise by erasing legitimate causes for her distress was further in-
creased by the MPAA in another way: their insistence on an unhappy ending. A happy
ending would have rewarded a criminal. Louise, even if mentally incompetent at the time,
as the doctor clearly states, was nevertheless a murderer, and after more than one memo,

122
the MPAA would allow an ending which suggested her resumed happiness with Dean
and recovery only if it was made clear that this would take years. This is the ending of the
film: a clear retribution for Louise’s moral failing. In the tradition of medical blame-the-
victim with women’s health, Louise is punished for her mental illness.
The film also connects to archaic disease models. As previously mentioned, evils
spirits are one of if not the oldest etiologies of disease. Possessed’s expositional doctor
notes that Louise would, in different time, have been clearly diagnosed as “possessed by
devils.” In pointing this out, the doctor notes the cultural and historical relativism of sup-
posed medical science. Spirit possession was once thought to be what we now consider
mental illness, yet, as the film clearly shows and press self-congratulations to the con-
trary, there was still much stigma attached to mental illness, even though we supposedly
were far beyond the days of associating it with demons. Or were we? Maybe only per-
sonal demons. The film makes further connection of archaic disease models in linking
Crawford’s schizophrenia to neurasthenia, a somewhat archaic diagnosis in the West by
1947. Early in the film we see Louise working as a nurse for Pauline Graham, Dean’s in-
valid wife who, although only heard never seen onscreen, is clearly “nut job.” Pauline
foreshadows Louise’s fate in several ways: being bedridden, married to Dean Graham,
paranoid and delusional with a “persecution complex,” and her delusions focused on a
romantic love object. (Pauline mistakenly thinks Louise is having an affair with Dean;
Louise is obsessed with David and, in the original script, has an affair with him while
married to Dean.) Moreover, Pauline commits suicide, as does Louise in the original

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short story—in the film she merely takes on responsibility for Pauline’s death. As noted,
in a rather confusing bit of dialogue, one doctor seems to diagnose Louise with neuras-
thenia, but then it becomes schizophrenia. And yet, such flexibility and confusion is a
hallmark of both neurasthenia and the cultural complex Lutz describes, and as a liminal
illness in Dumit’s sense. Therefore, although Louise is not a case study in neurasthenia,
the film clearly links it to her schizophrenia, catatonia, hallucinations, confusion, fatigue,
emotional volatility, and obsession.
The film also exhibits conflation of biological and electromagnetic energies,
echoing the nineteenth-century medical theories of interrelationships and equivalences
between such energies. Dr. Willard uses electrical metaphors when he speaks of crossed
wires and incapacitating shocks. Beard attributed neurasthenia to modern civilization, in
Possessed this link is reiterated in an opening scene. In the “Psychopathic Dept.” of an
L.A. public hospital, a young doctor bemoans the large number of mental cases they've
been receiving: “One manic, three seniles, six alcoholics, and 10 schizos” in one day. The
wise, older doctor notes that the rate is “going up all the time,” and blames it on “this
civilization of ours, [which] is a worse disease than heart trouble or tuberculosis. And we
can't escape it.” Yet, given bio-electrical conflation, what incapacitates also cures. Static
electricity and other electrical devices were a common treatment for neurasthenia; elec-
troshock or electro-convulsive therapy was and continues to be a treatment for schizo-
phrenia. In fact, Crawford was sued for invasion of privacy by a Pasadena mental patient
whose electro-shock therapy was witnessed, without her or her husband’s consent, as part

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of the research for Possessed. The incident received a fair amount of press coverage be-
fore and during the film’s release, although Crawford claimed to have done research at
LA General and not actually been present for the research trip to Pasadena sanitarium.
ii

The touchstone that ECT has been—it is not the only or most baroque treatment for men-
tal health over the past century, yet it certainly is the most famous—suggests the cultural
salience of electricity. There is even a technopathological whiff to Possessed, as its
much-remarked upon, new-at-the-time technique of recreating mentally ill subjectivity
gave the viewer the experience of schizophrenia, through several first-person, (in-
ter)subjective techniques meant to give the viewer insight into Louise’s experience. One
advertising campaign for the film suggested its ability to literally sicken the viewer (as
some editors had suggested Gilman’s story would).
Disease as Cultural Complex: Electrosensitivity’s Gendering and Normalizing Work
As mentioned previously, Overload can be considered an update on neurasthenia. It is an
umbrella for a wide variety of physical and mental ailments, often related to other dis-
eases that share somehow malfunctioning or overloaded bioelectrical systems. One such
condition, the liminal disease of electrosensitivity, can also be examined as a cultural
complex, much like neurasthenia, within which gendered discourse and cultural work
struggle to reinforce stereotypes of the pathological feminine.
Electrosensitivity refers to people who suffer mental and physical effects due to
close and persistent electromagnetic radiation, even at levels that do not harms others.
This hypersensitivity—to sources such as cell phones and computers—appears alone and

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in conjunction with other diseases of disputed authenticity, such as environmental illness,
multiple chemical sensitivity, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and various auto-
immune syndromes. Its widespread, varied, and flexible nature parallel Lutz’ cultural
complex of neurasthenia. Like neurasthenia, electrosensitivity involves bioelectrical and
central nervous system overstimulation, technological etiology, varied symptoms (e.g.,
headaches, muscle pains, fatigue, confusion), and frequent comorbidity with other condi-
tions (e.g., chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and other environmental / autoim-
mune syndromes).
However, rather than fictional narratives, I wish to examine electrosensitivity
through its self-representation in online networks of health activists. In the field of activ-
ism variously centered around EMR/EMF/ELF (electromagnetic radiation, electromag-
netic fields, extra-low frequencies), sufferers, researchers, alternative health practitioners,
religious gurus, and conspiracy theorists come together—as a type of the social move-
ment Dumit describes as often organized around a liminal disease—to deal with mental
and physical health problems attributed to electromagnetism. They provide emotional
support, practical health, document suffering, organize for recognition, and protest
sources of electromagnetic radiation. In contrasting discourse on public websites versus a
mailing list, I found that the pathologizing of the feminine persists in the silencing of suf-
ferers. That is, “feminine” attributes, such as sensitivity, emotion, or empathy were
largely absent from the public face of activist groups for they were deemed threatening to
the legitimacy of the movement. These voices were relegated to less-public spheres,

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demonstrating how the normalizing and gendering work of pathologization is not merely
a top-down flow from institutions, elites, and authorities, but persists even in activist
groups—a legitimizing hierarchy confines certain types of knowledge, rhetoric, action,
and experience to less-visible realms.
I examined two types of online communication networks of electrosensitivity activ-
ism: static websites and a discussion group. The four websites were the EMR Network,
the California Electric and Magnetic Fields Program, the San Francisco Neighborhood
Antenna-Free Union (SNAFU), and the Council on Wireless Technology Impacts
(CWTI). Every local page of these websites was examined, including PDFs and pop-up
windows, for a total of 107 pages. These sites provided activist resources, legislative
alerts, and education, and were easily found online. However, seeming somewhat con-
trary to the community-building nature of grassroots projects, they employed one-way
rather than interactive communication. None offered working message boards, chat
rooms, blogs, or other interactive space for activists or sufferers of EMR-related illnesses.
I also examined the archives of an open, unmoderated mailing list, unaffiliated with
any organization. The list dealt not only with health concerns related to cell phones and
towers, microwave secret weapons, power lines, but also due to the general “electros-
mog” of an environment suffused with electromagnetic radiation from electromagnetic
fields and radiofrequency radiation, implicating radio and TV signals, wi-fi networks, and
even the general contributions from household appliances. The group was organized
around multidirectional, asynchronous communication. Posts were unmoderated, but

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group policing of inappropriate posts did occur. Members often linked to external sites,
but did not post static pages, files, or photographs. It had a steady posting of messages
since formation in 2000, with a total of 1874 posts by 317 members when I studied the
list. I examined a systematic random sampling of 10% of all posts, excluding spam and
quoted or forwarded messages. In the following discussion of this list, all member names,
user IDs, locations and other identifying information have been changed.
Gendered Discourse
For both the websites and the discussion group, I identified gendered discourse, following
the tradition of work in gender studies, of marking characteristics and behaviors (e.g.,
passive/aggressive, emotional/rational, subjective/objective, scientific/intuitive) culturally
associated with biological sex—masculinity and femininity. Within EMR online commu-
nication networks, four markers identified masculine discourse:
1. Active steps involved directly making moves to deal with an issue or situation,
rather than merely complaining about it.
2. Objectivity referred to a sober, neutral stance expressed through journalistic
style, news reports, or an overall rational tone.
3. Expertise identified as the use of professional sources, rhetoric, or data, such as
scientific reports, studies, measurements, statistics, demographics, medical re-
search, or legal documents.
4. Reasoning included expressing ideas or developing defensive strategies in a

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manner that was tactical, mechanical, or procedural.
Four parallel markers were used to identify feminine discourse:
1. Passive suffering referred to expressions of enduring a situation rather than tak-
ing steps to alleviate suffering.
2. Subjectivity referred to writing in a personal, diary-like style, expressing per-
sonal opinions, in contrast to objective neutrality.
3. Conjecture included speculation, conspiracy theories, and intuition.
4. Emotion included expressions of care, support, anger, nurturing, hyperbole, and
nonstandard expressive punctuation.
The two types of online communication networks did differ in their gendered dis-
course. The activist websites were strongly masculine in their discourse, with markers on
three-quarters of all pages and, on average, almost three markers per page. For example,
activeness could be seen in CWTI’s advice for newcomers to the issue to “Ask lots of
questions of the industry representatives at the public meetings. Ask for visuals showing
EMF or RF wave propagation at a particular site to see what the radiation pattern is and
where it falls” (Council…, 2006, Science section). Tactical reasoning could be seen in
how SNAFU logically justified shifting efforts to a policy level: “It places a great burden
of time, energy and resources on neighborhoods to fight inappropriate antennas on a case-
by-case basis, and we are hopeful that substantial changes to the [city’s] WTS [Wireless
Tower Siting] Guidelines will help alleviate this problem” (Council…, 2006, Success
Stories section). CWTI was particularly objective in its rational reasoning and moderate

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approach. They described themselves as “concerned about the safe use of technologies
which use electromagnetic radiation” (Council…, 2006, Mission section)—merely “con-
cerned,” and not about all use or unsafe use but “safe” use. They also advised “common
sense” and a “better safe than sorry … precautionary approach” (Council…, 2006, Public
Policy section). Similarly, the EMR Network (2006, Home section) soberly described
themselves as an “educational organization” of “citizens and professionals for the respon-
sible use of electromagnetic radiation.” Their Executive Officer was quoted on the CWTI
site as saying, “‘We hope the reasoned debates taking place as wireless technologies un-
fold will lead to more protective public health, environmental and consumer safety pro-
tections for all’” (Newton, 2006). California EMF Program (2006, Risk Evaluation sec-
tion) was almost exclusively an organization centering around expertise, offering many
professional, legal, health, and scientific experts, conducting or supervising research, and
ultimately creating a risk assessment report that was over 700 pages. These guidelines
were in support of their goal “to foster a rational and fair approach to dealing with the
potential hazards, if any, of exposure to EMF” (California EMF, 2006, About section,
emphases mine). Other expertise included position papers at the EMR Network and court
documents and legal briefs at CWTI. Objective reporting and expertise suffused all four
sites; individual experiences of illness were practically invisible.
Feminine-marked discourse appeared in only 12% of website pages. When it did
appear, however, it was fairly solid, with an average of almost two markers per page.
However, the predominant masculine discourse tended to moderate it. For example, in a

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video clip of news coverage of a SNAFU demonstration, protestors can be heard emo-
tionally shouting some variant of a “Hell no...!” chant. Yet their spokespersons speak
calmly of scientific evidence and their desire for “a reasonable restriction on some loca-
tions” for tower siting (San Francisco…, 2006, Neighborhood Demonstrations, emphasis
mine). On their Links page, the EMR Network made conjectural reference to “powerful
(vested interest) political and economic forces ... impacting the science (indeed, all as-
pects of EMF)” and quoted the foreboding warning of an EMR researcher that, “Much of
the research conducted by the military [on EMR health effects] has not been made known
to the public” (San Francisco…, 2006, Research section). EMR Network also included
emotional rhetoric, such as, “It is absolute arrogance to assert that we know these non-
ionizing radiating technologies are safe.” However, the first words of the page bracketed
this with a disclaimer: “The opinions expressed on ‘linked’ sites do not necessarily repre-
sent the position of the EMR Network. They are provided to inform you about the
breadth and depth of the EMR/RFR debate.” SNAFU occasionally lapsed into more emo-
tional rhetoric than the other websites, with sections headings such as “It’s the Radiation,
Stupid” and “Damning Evidence from the Industry Itself.” Even when discussing spe-
cific, individual suffering and symptomology, CWTI noted with a skeptical tone that,
“more and more people claim to be electrically hypersensitive” (Council, 2006, Re-
sources section, emphasis mine).
The mailing list, however, was fairly rich in both types of gendered discourse.
Feminine discourse was slightly more predominant than masculine, with markers in 66%

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versus 63% of pages, respectively. Pages with feminine discourse were also more
strongly gendered than masculine, with about 30% more markers per page. Here, one
member expressed passive suffering in his situation, but made no mention of any amelio-
rating or preventative strategy, particularly the obvious solutions of holding his phone in
his other hand, wearing a headset, or not using a mobile phone:
My bumps are not painful to touch although they do get itchy from time to
time. They are predominately on the right side of my neck. … I find these
little blisters come up, I pop them then they go. They are usually at the tips
of my finger and it’s usually on my right hand (the one I hold my mobile
phone with). ... If you like I can include some pictures of my little bumps
if you email me direct.

One member complained of severe tinnitus she suspected was caused by device(s) next
door. When another suggested, among other steps, that she talk to her neighbors to ascer-
tain if they were the cause or, alternately, also suffering, she refused all options. “There’s
no point in talking to my neighbours [sic] when I believe by the nature of it and all that is
here it is deliberate harassment.” An extreme example can be seen in this connection of
EMR victimhood to larger conspiracies:
I was a child, mind controlled, abused, sexually too, tortured especially
and controlled between Cold War governments. ... I'm chronic ill and
handicapped increasingly, by the moth [sic]. it's much like autoimmune
disease. I wondered many times to contact any military facility. ... I feel
sick. I didn't look. more than surely, it will be more terrible.
iii

Subjective, personal experience, often expressed in personal, diary-like style, was
employed in over half the posts examined. These included personal assertions of belief.
“I think I'll trust my own reactions rather than some supposed ‘authority’, thank you
very much,” snapped one member. Another combined her affirmation of subjective ex-

132
perience with emotional language and a hint of passive suffering: “I pray for the day
when engineering and scientific folks such as yourselves will begin to listen to those of
us who have descended into this special kind of painful limbo.” One member opined,
I think a good research project for some in your field would be on links
between canine epilepsy and EMR - I have a dog with epilepsy and read
somewhere that there are now more dogs than people with epilepsy, which
used to be pretty rare in dogs. I have not had time to explore the link yet
and would not be doing it in any academic field ... but I assume the skulls
of dogs are thinner than ours.

While subjective knowledge often also involved personal experiences with EMR, as in
other examples noted, it also included personal experiences related to efforts to cover-up
EMR threats. This member also exhibited conjectural fears in describing her EMR-
related health problems as the result of intentional “assaults” and “attacks” since becom-
ing an activist:
Just ten days ago … I was about to cross the narrow main street in my
town … and had checked that there was a clear space to do so, in the two-
lane traffic. To my horror, out of nowhere came this large van, and the
next thing I knew I was wedged up against it and the front left wheel was
slowly rolling over my right toes! … That large yellow van had [an elec-
trical utility logo] boldly emblazoned on it.

The mailing list was rife with conjecture and conspiracy theories, a feminine marker that
only rarely appeared in websites, and there with subtlety. Not so here. EMR was con-
nected to mind control, the Mafia, smallpox inoculations, terrorism, and chemtrails (pur-
portedly unnatural aircraft contrails). One member managed to even apparently drawn in
the Terminator films:
By electrostatically charging (chemtrail spraying) the air to the capacity
required for SkyNet (the medium that the military's global battle command
utilizes - the OTH layer), weather modification happens but me thinks that

133
the overall communications security concerns for the defense establish-
ment are primary here, meaning that over-the-horizon (OTH) radar,
SkyNet (a prerequisite for pulling off the remotely-controlled Operation
Two Towers), enhancing signal strength in some areas (in conjunction
with ops) while stifling it in others, electrostatic pulse bombs (the air
BECOMES a medium that is volatile) designed to take out your local
server are the deciding factors as to what types of climate engineering will
happen on a given day. I am sure all of this is ALSO a convenient screen
for the testing of biologicals and pharmaceuticals.

Finally, compared to the websites, the group postings overall were much more emotional,
not merely in the sense of articulating feelings but in emotionally appealing language,
rhetoric, and punctuation. One post shouted that
24 HOURS OF DAILY TECNOLOGIA WITHOUT STUDYING NOR
VERIFYING a priori IT’S POSSIBLE NEGATIVE EFFECTS
DESTRUCT The HUMAN RACE (AT THE MOMENT WE HAVE
LIKE THE WORLD A GIGANTIC FURNACE OF MICROWAVES
BUT WITHOUT WALLS, TIME WILL GIVE The RESULTS: BUT BY
THEN IRREVERSIBLE And IRREPARABLE DAMAGES ALREADY
WILL BE).

Another wrote, “I still cry when I hear about a child in our neighborhood (near the high
voltage lines) who dies from leukemia and/or the child who suffers daily from asthma or
ADD or ADHD, etc., etc., but I have ‘NO POWER’ because the media and our court sys-
tem has been successfully controlled by government and industry.” Not all were alarmist,
however. A collective post from a neighborhood-activist group signed off with “a hug.”
The websites did not hug.
Masculine discourse also appeared in the mailing list. One member expressed fa-
miliar conjecture and emotive punctuation, both feminine indicators, but with masculine
logical, mechanical reasoning: “I’ve studied the aerosol operation for a year and can as-

134
sure you that I see fake clouds containing barium responding to EMR on a regular basis.
They are spraying the skies worldwide to make EMR easier to conduct!!” Similar me-
chanical reasoning appeared in EMR experiments and demonstrations. One post de-
scribed a self-test for electrosensitivity: timing how quickly one could count to 50 while
holding a cell phone to one’s ear, then comparing the timing for the count when standing
six feet away from the phone. Other posts presented logical, rational arguments for classi-
fication of electrosensitivity as a disease: “Support groups need to push the WHO for an
ICD code - ICD means International Classification of Diseases by the WHO. Then doc-
tors would have a diagnosis code for it. Very important for getting disability benefits,
etc.” Active steps varied from defense to escape. Some members moved into their cellars
to avoid EMR at night, many discussed protective devices such as Faraday shields, alu-
minum foil, specialty phones, and EMR-reducing accessories. Another member posted
that “Sometimes the wiring is ‘grounded’ to the plumbing (which can affect entire neigh-
borhoods). I suspect my neighborhood may be guilty of all of the above, so rather than
‘fight’ this particular dilemma, I’m opting for the ‘flight’ approach, and will be seeking a
lower-intensity situation.” Objective journalistic style appeared in reporting various news
stories, especially in another newsletter cross-posted to the group. These news stories,
such as the soberly headlined “Phone mast won’t signal problems, say church” or “Sleep
Laboratory: investigating how sleep affects performance” at times ran equally beside
non-news stories reported in the same journalistic format, such as “I do not want a mobile
mast to send me to hell” and “THE INVISIBLE THIRD WORLD WAR.” Finally, al-

135
though subjective experience was thoroughly honored in the mailing list, expertise was
frequently cited as well. Legal and engineering professionals were not as common as in
some websites, but scientists were frequent, especially from countries outside the U.S.
One post cited multiple studies on microwave alteration of the blood-brain barrier, dating
back to 1970s Soviet work. A self-described scientist described numerous studies and
reports, as well as his own radiation detectors, but interspersed with emotion and conjec-
ture. “The mass mind control of the metropolitan [national] population can be proved. …
People around these microwave transmitters are turned into submissive zombies who
cannot think clearly, become depressed, apathetic and want to lounge around all day do-
ing nothing.”
Overall, the online communication networks of EMR activism exhibited a distinct
pattern. The discourse in public websites was strongly gendered masculine, but the mail-
ing list was both masculine and feminine in its gendered discourse. Moreover, the public
sites did not allow interactive, pubic postings of the sorts seen in the mailing list. Their
very design, in fact, acted as a filtering mechanism, and feminine discourse was what was
filtered out. Thus, it found expression within the mailing list. Why limit access to such
discourse? Why filter its presence? Why not allow blogs, message boards, or even post-
ing of individual testimonials?
I argue the subjective, emotional, conjectural, and passive aspects of feminine
discourse were threatening to the legitimacy of the movement. For example, this mailing
list post challenged previous emotional, speculative posting as a threat to the cause:
I have concerns about the work that you and [another member] are con-

136
ducting regarding EHS, due to your focus on being covertly targeted by
microwave weapons. As this is clearly not the case, it is not surprising that
the EHS are being seen as mentally ill. It is difficult enough trying to get
the authorities to take this condition seriously without making it worse
with such paranoid and unproven claims. It’s unnecessary. It is too easy
for non-EHS people to regard us as mentally ill, and although I am able to
function normally I still have a problem with people thinking this, so why
give them extra ammunition?

Another post similarly urged a reduction in emotional rhetoric:
You can make a case for stating that the disregard shown by phone com-
panies for the health of individuals living next to cell-phone towers is bor-
derline criminal, and it can be addressed from that perspective, but to
equate their behavior to war crimes is so ludicrous that it instantly invali-
dates your initial complaint about EMF. If you want to be taken seriously,
you need to show that you know what you're talking about, and for that
reason I suggest you keep the notion of war crimes out of this context.

Although such emotional hyperbole or conspiracies did not explicitly appear on the pub-
lic websites, their presence in the field did seem to haunt them, as evidenced by subtle
disavowals. The EMR Network’s distancing from topics on their Links page has already
been noted. California EMF maintained a group of Scientific Advisory Consultants that
“provide[d] the program with relevance, balance, dissemination, credibility, and respect”
(California, 2006, Stakeholders Advisory Consultants). It is not articulated but apparently
understood why the field of EMR research and activism would need such protection.
As we have seen in these examples, feminine discourse seems to have been fil-
tered in order to preserve the movement’s legitimacy. This was reflected not only in this
analysis of the discourse in these networks, but also their very structure. The lack of in-
teractivity in the public sites functioned to block out individual contributions, such as
feminine discourse.

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Neurasthenia, Electrosensitivity, and Usership
In this chapter I have presented a detailed discussion of neurasthenia in order to demon-
strate not only the concept of disease as cultural complex, but also to provide background
to the issues that make up my technopathological disease frame inspired by neurasthenia,
Overload, which I then presented through a case study in the condition of electrosensitiv-
ity. I will conclude by describing how this particular condition illustrates the overall cul-
tural work of Overload conditions in terms of normalizing, gendering, blaming the user,
and distracting from systemic issues.
As described previously, the Overload frame represents users who are too stimu-
lated, receiving more stimuli than their systems can handle, or stimuli of a frequency in-
compatible with their own. This stimuli comes from the continuum of bio-electrical ener-
gies, the invisible frequencies that represent not only mythic powers of life and death, but
also, by their invisibility, suggest the alienation of industrialized life, the disappearance
of visible, logical, analog processes of production of both goods, devices, and knowledge.
These are, then, ultimately good or unavoidable forces, but sick users are not able to han-
dle them. In short, Overload diseases are too much of a good thing.
This is consistent with my conceptualization of pathology as an exaggeration or
extreme version–not opposite–of norms and ideals. Electricity is a good thing, a vital
force making life and modern society possible. Even the electrosensitivity activists and
focus group sufferers avail themselves of the latest electrical communications technolo-
gies and devices. The problem, however, is that certain people are too sensitive to it. In

138
short, we see again that the fault is with the user. At one extreme, it is an innate condition
they can do nothing about. However, more commonly, it is an issue not only of their sen-
sitive dispositions (and note how such terminology applies equally to neurasthenics and
electrosensitives) but more often their improper usage choices. In addition to their na-
tures, they use too much; they do not exhibit proper restraint, moderation, or degree of
use. This, then progresses the abnormality from a potentially biological condition, which
could be excused, to one of character and moral failing.
What does this suggest about the healthy, good user of technologies? One seeks
out stimuli, just not too much. Angela McRobbie’s writing on postfeminist culture here
girds my differential analysis and technique of substituting sites:
Better to be an ill girl than a girl who gets up out of her sickbed and chal-
lenges the power of the heterosexual matrix. Pathology as normality is
preferable to a new form of women's movement. ... Can we talk about
post-feminist disorders? ... They become the ways in which ‘we’ under-
stand ourselves as women, hence also a way of excluding those women
who dis-identify with these normalizing strategies. ... She who suffers
(along with her fellow sufferers) is no longer passive, indeed she is ex-
pected to be highly active in her struggle to overcome her afflictions. But
these pathologies remain part of her make-up, her personal reminders
about what it is to be a woman. ... This also deflects attention away from
any idea of patriarchal authority. (2009, pp. 96-98)

Although McRobbie is discussing feminine rage, melancholia, and body issues, consider
its insight and application to users instead of girls: Electrosensitivity is a personal prob-
lem; changing the larger system is impossible (McRobbie's patriarchal heterosexual ma-
trix, here the development and distribution of technologies.) Personalizing the problem as
sickness similarly deflects attention from systemic concerns. Furthermore, electrosensi-

139
tives are similarly active sufferers—especially when it comes to buying and selling pro-
ductive devices, or producing and consuming media about electrosensitivity.
Ultimately, like ill girls, electrosensitives are normal. Pathology is part of the
makeup of all users: While my focus group participants initially ridiculed the concept of
electrosensitivity, eventually they confessed to experiencing similar technology-related
health concerns. Electrosensitives are not sick because of their health problems, they are
sick because they complain about them, and complain too loudly, and complain about
systemic issues rather than personal problems of technology mis-use.
If the healthy users of technologies seek out stimuli, just not too much, then they
are good Calvinist subjects in this regard, and good capitalist subjects in that stimulation
is not merely a matter of exposure, but also consumption. One buys stimuli. There may
be passive exposure to wi-fi networks or other broadcast frequencies, but one also buys
the phones and laptops that are of much concern. Just as the neurasthenic was too much
of a good thing—a mental-laboring, ambitious, upper-class American—so is the elec-
trosensitive. Excessive stimulation and consumption—whether neurasthenic or elec-
trosensitive—is a hallmark of a form of pathologization I have discussed previously, de-
generacy. For example, in the cinematic classic of juvenile delinquency, The Wild One,
one local member of a town invaded by Marlon Brando’s criminal (and, significantly,
quite homoerotic) motorcycle gang describes them as “always going some place, crazy,
excited, taking a lot of vitamin pills, drinking, overstimulated! Oughtta arrest the whole
lot of ‘em” (Benedek, 1954).

140
Yet, how much is too much? Is excess equally distributed among stimuli, or are
certain types less valued, and therefore more excessive than others? Moreover, are certain
people more excessive, than others, and/or is “too much” a quantity that varies across dif-
ferent types of people? These are the sorts of questions that thinking in terms of differen-
tial analysis brings to the table. As with the feminist appropriation of Foucault, the circu-
lation and exercise of governmental power through the discipline and regulation of bodies
occurs, but all bodies are not the same. It is, as the saying goes, different for girls. Ro-
mantic love is the appropriate cure for the lassitude of O. Henry’s neurasthenic male pro-
tagonist; overly rampant romance drives Louise into homicidal madness and delusional
catatonia in Possessed. The online electrosensitivity activists suffer from various health
problems, but some suffer too much and speak of it too loudly, and thereby must be kept
in less-visible realms.
In neurasthenia, I have shown how the condition’s cultural work, among other
functions, was to legitimize restraint of excessive feminine desire and sexuality through
medical pathologization, as in Possessed and neurasthenic associations with male impo-
tence. In the O. Henry story, moreover, we see this process extended to the policing of
masculinity via heterosexuality, the problem here being not excessive feminine desire but
excessive femininity in men. That is, if feminine desire at the time is contradictorily seen
as a threat needing containment but also something that does not exist (Maines, 1999),
the neurasthenic male exhibits feminine sexuality in that he exhibits a lack, an absence of
libido. Feminine sexuality is restraint: female neurasthenics have too little restraint, male

141
neurasthenics have too much restraint, but both are issues of degree. Accordingly, then,
treatments vary and serve to reinforce norms. As Gilman famously critiques, the enforced
rest cure merely reinforces the domestic servitude, exhaustion, and exclusion from intel-
lectual society and activity that cause nervous illness in the first place.
In electrosensitivity, I have shown how a gendered hierarchy of value affects
health activism. The feminine voices are not silenced but are relegated to less-visible
realms. The “feminine” face of the disease is distanced as this is presumed to be harmful
to the social movement for it raises specters of the pathological feminine: hysterical, hy-
pochondriac, overly emotional, paranoid, deluded. These voices and experiences are con-
fined and relegated, much like Gilman and her heroine(s) for exhibiting characteristics of
excessive emotion and suffering, much like Louise in Possessed. This may be overt, as in
warnings from members of the discussion group, but also institutional, as the public web-
sites pointed lack of opportunities for individual posting or commenting preemptively
prevents such individual voices of suffering from contributing at all.
How then, does differential analysis inform this disease pattern of Overload?
Feminist understandings of its inspiration, neurasthenia, or the more heavily studied hys-
teria, see the restrictive and oppressive medical knowledge sugar-coated in Victorian
veneration of the feminine: Women shouldn’t go to college because it will make them
sick, because their brains are too small, because they are such beautiful delicate refined
creatures. Oppression is justified by weakness disguised as a compliment. I suggest that
Overload is not that different as it operates in postfeminist culture, most notably in the

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stereotype of the wacky single woman. From comic-strip Cathy’s hair-pulling screams to
Bridget Jones at The Edge of Reason, postfeminist heroines skew neurotic. A recent sym-
pathetic survey of “chick flicks” in Entertainment Weekly bemoaned the degeneration of
spunky heroines into ones more pathologically “mindless” “psychopaths,” “bordering on
mental deficiency,” “compulsive,” “pliable dolls,” “superficially cute—and deeply full of
crap,” “creepy,” and “mentally ill addict[s]” (Schwarzbaum, 2009). Even once approach-
ing the altar they become reality-TV Bridezillas or engage in Bride Wars. Typically these
are comedies, the humor residing in the perceived fallacy of previous feminist exhorta-
tions or ideals to have it all. The ambitious single career girl discovers how hard it really
is to work and have a relationship, insert ice-cream gorging scene here. In trying to have
it all, what is our plucky lass? Overloaded, with ambition, cultural demands, expecta-
tions, dreams, hopes, and illusions. She can’t have it all, and that’s the joke. But as film
theorist Richard Dyer reminds us in his discussion of masculinity and film humor, a joke
may seem to deflate its subject but it may also serve to naturalize or reify it through hu-
manization or lack of presenting an alternative model. We laugh at the sitcom schlub with
the hottie wife, but are any alternatives presented? Likewise, do postfeminist narratives
offer a different way to have it all, different ways of defining “it” or “all,” spouses who
take on some of the work involved in trying to have it all? Or, more typically, do they
offer resolution through not having it all, but by giving something up, as in The Devil
Wears Prada?
Differential analysis sees the Overloaded user much like the collapsed neuras-

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thenic: victim of her own over-ambition, someone who has tried to rise above her station,
uppity, even. She has tried to win too much of the kitty and, rather than change to rules of
the game, is chastised and contained to be content with less. Exhausted, collapsed, neu-
rotic, stressed, frazzled, or having a nervous breakdown, she is sickened into submission.
Moreover, differential analysis sees Overload not as a problem of the user, but a
problem of the game. It does not dismiss the sick user, the neurasthenic patient, the hys-
terical woman, the sensitive man, or the frazzled single girl as merely ditzy, crazy, malin-
gering, hypochondriac, or kooky—all character flaws of the person herself—it asks,
What conditions cause her to be this way? Technopathological blaming of the pa-
tient/user serves to distract from system social or institutionalized factors. Louise is just
too sensitive and needy, how she was being encouraged by a continuing affair is erased
by a national board of censors; how a patriarchal, youth-centric society devalues aging
single working women is never acknowledged as contributing to her anxiety. She merely
wants—not for particular and quite rational reasons (security, protection, finances, social
approval, etc.). The overwork and ambition of O. Henry’s and others’ exhausted neuras-
thenics is rarely critiqued in terms of labor standards and expectations, capitalist expan-
sion, or social upward mobility. The famous critique of American Protestant work ethic
as underlying the expansion of rational capitalism by Max Weber, a neurasthenic, does
not mention the disease he himself suffered from as a symptom of such factors, as a blis-
ter from rubbing against the bars of the “iron cage.” Moreover, even as a cultural com-
plex, Lutz argues neurasthenia as a discursive site allows opportunity for dealing with

144
these issues, it is a site made possible through the process of moving the issues to the per-
sonal/pathological and away from the social/systemic.
Indeed, American psychologist Morton Prince wrote in the 1890s that, although a
“real” organic disease may be a trigger, the patient’s obsessive, irrational fixation upon it
expands the condition to neurasthenic, hysterical problems. What we would think of to-
day as psychosomatic illness, or specific examples such as “hysterical pregnancy,” he
described as “neuro-mimesis,” the brain imitating the symptoms of a real affliction: “That
pain and various other nervous phenomena may be kept alive by the mind dwelling on it,
is a well-known fact” (Prince, 1975b, p. 75). Moreover, in a separate but contemporane-
ous essay, he writes that the treatment is largely educational: the physician, acting as a
guide to the patient in terms of morality and character, also teaches them to separate real
from obsessive suffering (Prince, 1975a). In 1923, a prominent UK physician looking
back at nervous afflictions before, during, and just after World War I, argues that neuras-
thenia is a moral failing, much like alcoholism and venereal disease. Rejecting bacteriol-
ogy as faddish, he asserted that nervous diseases seldom had an organic basis:
We need hardly take the biological factors into account; the causes were
rather of a social and moral order; it was here a case of interaction be-
tween psyche and society rather than between psyche and bodily proc-
esses. … It was not so much the circumstances as the reaction to circum-
stances that was at fault here. (Brock, 1923, pp. 22-23)

Moreover, although poor education was a factor, these reactions are at times framed in
terms that not merely as the fault of the victim’s inherent condition, but the victim’s ac-
tive choice: “Ennui or boredom passed easily into Nervous Debility—from discomfort

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into actual pain. Now, this ever-increasing pain of the pre-war period ... arose very
largely from the fact that people were allowing themselves to become weak (Brock, 1923,
p. 28).
Although electrosensitivity in its very name is more suggestive of accusing a so-
cial system—the “electro-” technological infrastructure of industrialized societies—this is
immediately shifted by “sensitivity.” The sufferer is too sensitive—the electromagnetic
radiation is not too strong or ubiquitous. In these cases technopathologies exhibit stronger
personal pathologization than many traditional diseases. When a person gets food poison-
ing or the flu, they get sick because of it. Although certain classes (the old, the already
sick) may be more vulnerable, we generally don’t have a separate class of food-
poisoning-sensitives, or people who are essentially and inherently more susceptible, par-
ticularly due to inherent degeneracy or moral shortcomings. (The obvious exception be-
ing AIDS and other diseases of compromised immune systems.) The sufferers of elec-
trosensitivity, similar to the broader pessimism encountered in my focus groups, saw sys-
temic issues as simply too broad to face, with manufacturers and utilities impervious to
change. The obvious parallel of a ubiquitous social system changing from pervasive,
popular enjoyment to a widely recognized and regulated health risk—tobacco—does not
seem to inspire much hope. Common solutions are individualistic and often involving
consumption (thereby clearly classed): move away to a rural cabin, measure and rehab
one’s home with shielding, or invest in protective cell-phone shield and EM-detecting
watches. Even among collectively organized activists, Burgess notes a shift from health

146
concerns to other, less personal frames as a tactic of efficacy: framing the debate in envi-
ronmental terms, risks to birds, and the eyesore of cell phone towers decreasing nearby
property values.
iv
As with the online activists, personal suffering is cordoned to the
fringe, and especially the fringe groups most willing to accuse and address systemic is-
sues, such as overall use of technology by society, corrupt scientists bought out by busi-
ness, and mind control by governments and secret elites.
While some members of my focus groups clearly pathologized sufferers of elec-
trosensitivity, others were more sympathetic. However, what was consistent was that the
parties least responsible were systems and institutions, such as device manufacturers and
government regulatory agencies. The least feasible solutions were activism, litigation,
legislation, and other forms of large social change. The most common and acceptable so-
lutions were individual changes in use—minimization and moderation of use, exercise,
and other self-disciplinary practices, or purchase of protective devices or moving to safer
environments.
Electrosensitivity and related syndromes, such as chronic fatigue, are blamed di-
rectly on our technological environment by many leading gurus in the alternative
health/spiritual practice of kundalini yoga (Shannahoff-Khalsa, 2006, pp. 183-190). Al-
though kundalini yoga does not pathologize the user as inherently weak or of poor
moral/physical fiber, the solution is however, wholly individualistic, consistent with the
self-improvement appeal of the practice and its logic within a larger neoliberal ethos of
entrepreneurial self-discipline. The environmental toxicity is more the problem than the

147
weak individual, but the solution is still an individual’s defensive strengthening and
rebalancing of vital energies. Consider, by contrast, if the solution to Love Canal had
been, not EPA cleanup, but somehow engineering the biology of residents there to have
greater tolerance to industrial toxic waste, or if the anti-nuclear movement had been fo-
cused on scientific research to make people more resistant to nuclear radiation. This dis-
placement from social to individual, I argue, is precisely the work of technopathologies.
One way by which it is more visible is through previously described work of feminist
scholars illustrating parallel cultural moves in the displacement of collective feminism by
individualist postfeminism (McRobbie, 2009).
Again, then, reframing the research area as differential analysis attunes one to cul-
tural moves, rhetoric, and motions, such as displacement and dissimulation. In this sense,
it becomes almost more of a formalist analysis of how cultural attention and hierarchies
of value flow differently across terrains of difference. This can be explicitly about sex or
gender—the neurasthenic pathologization of feminine desire; the electrosensitive shutter-
ing of feminine emotion and empathy—but also can be more broadly applied as well.
In sum, technopathological discourse disciplines the user more than it demonizes
the technology. I conclude with an example of this gendering and normalizing process
from a more overt example of disciplining technological usership: early telephone train-
ing films. While not specifically about technopathologies, they are not unrelated: 1927’s
Now You’re Talking, animated by the legendary Max Fleischer, features a technology-
related disease, but in an interestingly reversed etiological direction, showing a phone

148
sickened and sent to the hospital via ambulance—but the fault of the disease is still that
of an inappropriate user manhandling the device. An AT&T film from the 1940s, Dial
Comes to Town, pathologizes the elderly and non-urban users as irrationally resistant to
technological progress (a common theme in focus groups as well) and specifies an inap-
propriate user of a party line as an older, matronly woman receives dirty looks at a town
meeting introducing the new direct-dial telephones replacing their switchboards. A
younger, more attractive woman learns appropriate usage through trial and error in
1927’s How to Use the Dial Phone. During two examples of what not to do, a strange,
white, cardboard cutout of a male hand appears in the frame of an otherwise realistic,
live-action film. A title card reads, “You will get the wrong number IF —- Dialing is
started before taking the receiver off the hook.” A close-up of the phone directory and
phone itself follows, then a more extreme close-up of the female protagonist’s index fin-
ger correctly engaging the rotary dial for five digits (at the edge of the frame the receiver,
unmolested). In the next shot, however, we see the bad example: a medium, over-the-
shoulder shot of the woman dialing features the white hand in the left of the screen,
pointing to the phone receiver, which she incorrectly lifts up during the dialing process,
and the pointer hand disappears. This repeats in a subsequent demonstration, “IF—the
switch hook is moved accidentally during the dialing process.” We see the young woman
full-front this time, but she seems busy, preoccupied, and not paying attention as the
reaches for something on her writing-table and, in the process, bumps the switch hook
accidentally with her arm and loses her call, having to hang up, frowning. The male white

149
hand directs our attention to the switch hook the entire time. (This shot is either the con-
clusion of the film or where the currently archived copy has been severed.) The hand both
literally illustrates male authority in guiding us through the errors of feminine technologi-
cal use but also, as a communicative indicator, suggests male authority in the feminist-
Lacanian sense of the Symbolic-as-patriarchy (A. McRobbie, 2005, 2009). As we watch a
woman stumbling through inappropriate dialing, in an instructional narrative on being a
good user, we see a literal and symbolic representation of male authority enter the film,
penetrate its realism with symbolic, communicative artifice. Moreover, the viewer of the
film is positioned as a good user in being able to read this: literate in the English lan-
guage, the viewing conventions of early silent cinema, possessing symbolic competency
in knowing what to make of a strange white drawing of a hand poking into the frame, and
able to coherently integrate all three. Such positioning of the viewer as a good user
pathologizes the female object of the film all the more through contrast and differentia-
tion as a bad user. Such gendering and normalizing is cultural work performed both in
discourses of technology training here, and technology diseases, such as electrosensitiv-
ity, and broader diseases of modernity, such as neurasthenia and schizophrenia; with dif-
ferential media culture a useful way of examining these processes.
I will examine even more literal technological training in a later chapter on the
Feedback condition of repetitive stress injury, with an emphasis on the visual culture of
ergonomic technology-use diagrams. Next, however, I turn to the pattern of Resistance
and the case of Audio Zombies.

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Chapter 4 Endnotes

i
Although Cowan, for one, investigates nervousness in Germany after 1890 as part of a cultural crisis in
will power, expressive of the changes of modernity but also, he argues, laying cultural groundwork for
fascism.

ii
Coincidentally, or perhaps contagiously, Pasadena was also where Charlotte Perkins Gilman went to
recover from her injurious rest cure with Mitchell; it was also the site of this project’s focus groups.

iii
English-language skills varied. While some posts’ idiosyncratic syntax seemed possibly indicative of
mental illness or distressed emotional states, others were apparently due to non-native English speakers and
poor translations of non-English posts. For any given post, however, it was not always clear which of these,
alone or in combination, or other reasons, might have been the cause for nonstandard word choice or
syntax.

iv
The bizarre response to disguise (poorly) cell towers as trees suggests a response to this but also perhaps
an insistence on invisible forces remaining invisible. For more on tower-trees, see (L. Parks, 2008).

151
Chapter 5: Resistance: Audio Zombies and Pathologized Collectivism

The stigmatized person cannot use realism to imagine a world that will sustain her/him.
– Lauren Berlant, “States of Emergency”

The technopathologies of Resistance present sick users who withdraw, isolating them-
selves through various communication technologies, ranging from a Walkman personal
stereo to immersive virtual worlds. This withdrawal progresses in increasing degrees of
antisocial behavior, from the inconsiderate rudeness of a loud cell-phone user to more
direct hostility, culminating in the sociopathic violence of humans transformed into mur-
derous monsters through electronic signals. Across these, the user’s separation from the
social group is conflated with pathological enmity and/or harm toward society. This sug-
gests a sick user who is too independent, who severs social ties too much. In turn, the
healthy user is suggested as appropriately independent: not too social, not too easily
swayed to join groups, resolute in preserving their individualism. She is “not a joiner.”
This is a somewhat circular situation in that the antisocial withdrawal begins with self-
isolation and separation from the group, but, as it progresses, becomes social again as the
sick user joins a new group: the zombie hordes. Differential analysis suggests the cultural
work of this pathology is not demonizing solitude as merely asocial or antisocial, but as
an issue of difference. The true threat is from moving from one social group to a different
social group, such as from normal society to abnormal zombies, it is separation as collec-

152
tive organizing and (re)configuration of individual and collective consciousness.
Resistance is a mis-use of technology: instead of harnessing communication tech-
nologies to connect with others, in the grand tradition of American Progressive thought,
the user isolates herself. She blocks others out, to an extreme of hiding within techno-
logical worlds and completely losing herself in the familiar models of technological ad-
diction and immersion. Drawing on feminist insights, differential analysis sees Resistance
as not antisocialism but separatism, protection, or strength-building. “I vant to be alone,”
Garbo famously pleaded, and, from Miss Havisham to a local neighborhood’s Cat Lady,
recluses tend to be pathologically feminized (even if unwillingly hidden away, as in Jane
Eyre). Yet, consider individual independence from family demands and spousal financial
reliance, or communal independence at separatist communities and social spaces. Femi-
nism depathologizes antisocial behavior. After all, what is the benefit of a room of one’s
own? It is a place to be left alone—to be truly free from demands and expectations.
Withdrawal is seclusion pathologized, but differential analysis sees in this pathologizing
an attempt to discourage the healing, clarity, thinking, expression, and growth that can
come from solitude. It is a rest cure of its own design. A subsequent chapter will address
how connection may not always be good—contrary to many celebratory claims of tech-
nological networking. This chapter argues that disconnection may not always be bad.
Withdrawal, isolation, and resistance may be about creating space for healing and protec-
tion. Despite technological exhortations to log in, sign up, and link up, differential analy-
sis sees that refusals to such incitements to sociality are far from sick, they may instead

153
be curative.
In this chapter, I will present another way of examining technopathologies in
depth. Instead of focusing on a particular type of disease across several artifacts, I will
examine a spectrum of a disease across particular type of technology, that of portable
audio devices. I focus on audio technologies due to the clarity they lend themselves to a
gendered analysis, which again provides support for interpretation of the sick user as
feminized. However, here I will also employ differential analysis to more broadly exam-
ine the threat. I will look at this form of Resistance—the continuum of “Audio Zom-
bies”—as a case of pathologizing difference in terms of choosing a different social group.
Feminist histories of separatism offer insights into de-pathologizing acts of disconnection
from the social, seeing them instead as a necessary component or form of choosing a dif-
ferently defined social collective. Separatism suggests disconnection is, if not uncompli-
cated, not merely sick, either. It suggests the cultural work of this technopathology in
stigmatizing not only disconnection from society, but also the threat of collective organ-
izing and new configurations of reconnections.
The Trajectory of Audio Zombies
Initially, Audio Zombies are isolated users of sonic technologies, lost in their own per-
ceptions, “alienated from the world,” as a focus group participant put it. The listener to
audio technologies is often depicted as a sickly recluse, as in a 1923 image from the Li-
brary of Congress titled “The shut-in’s Sunday Service” (Fig. 1). This could be viewed as
a pathological extension of the “private listening” Sterne (2003) attributes to the rise of

154
sound reproduction technologies in general, or a predecessor of the “alienating” and
“anti-social, atomizing effects” the Walkman was criticized for from its introduction (du
Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay & Negus, 1997, p. 89).

Fig. 1 “The shut-in’s Sunday Service,” March 28, 1923. Library of Congress
Prints and Photographs Division.

In fictional narratives, this low-grade Audio Zombie is often depicted as a frail loner ab-
sorbed in phones, record players, or radios. An early example can be found in Gian-Carlo
Menotti’s 1947 short comic opera The Telephone, in which a woman is so enraptured by
her telephone that her boyfriend has to leave the house and call her in order to get her at-
tention and propose (Eaton, 1974). A woman in one of my focus groups described an

155
ironic moment of audio withdrawal in which she lost awareness of the device itself: “One
time I was talking on my cell phone, and I was going crazy. I was looking for my cell
phone and I was talking on it at the same time.” Such withdrawal is shown to have harm-
ful, antisocial effects, such as a betrayal of collective cultural politics, in a crucial, con-
cluding scene to the novel Bedouin Hornbook (Mackey, 1986), in which a woman, lost in
listening to a Walkman, does not hear the phone call from her male lover, who has just
been arrested by the police. A woman in my focus groups described similar disregard for
others as a result of listening on headphones: “You’re completely oblivious to the world
around you; when someone’s in trouble you can’t help them.”
The reclusive listener form of Audio Zombies escalates into an overtly inconsid-
erate one when their self-absorbed focus on technology use rudely disregards others in
public spaces. Responding to a comment about technologies making users dependent and
unthinking, a woman in my focus group said, “The isolation leads to self-absorption, and
that makes people inconsiderate of others.” In the 1980s and 1990s, personal stereos—
portable cassette players, then CD and minidisc players—were associated with “elec-
tronic narcissism” (Chen, 1998), “ecstatic alienation” (Moebius, 1994), or “Walkman ef-
fect” in which the device “intrudes inside the skin. ... The surface tension of the skin loses
its balancing function through which it activates interpenetration of self and world” (Ho-
sokawa, 1984, p. 176). A letter to the National Enquirer blamed the “entire problem” of
telephone courtesy and manners degenerating into rudeness on “high technology, like an-
swering machines” (J.B., 1996, p. 29). More recently, private listening combined with

156
public talking have been castigated in mobile phone use, when callers disregard others,
turning them into “cell phone victims” (Song, 2009). Responding to a comment about
video being “hypnotic,” a male member of my focus groups added, “Same thing about
the phones, cell phones. People just get so into them. They just forget where they’re at,
especially when they’re driving, [and] cause accidents.”
i

Zombie-like metaphors are used in descriptions of sufferers’ catatonic self-
absorption and disconnection from the real world as “Walkpeople,” “iPod people,”
“glassy-eyed” “plague-carriers” with “autism” (du Gay et al, 1997, pp. 115, 118, 140). In
its penultimate stage, these antisocial, withdrawn, or rude users literally progress to be-
coming violent and sociopathic monsters. An extended treatment of this condition ap-
pears in Stephen King’s novel Cell (2006), which begins with the protagonist, Clay,
standing in line for ice cream with two girls and a businesswoman, all three irritating him
with their self-absorbed cell-phone conversations. An unknown infection spreads through
all cellular networks, turning them and all other audio technology users immediately into
homicidal maniacs. “Women in power suits would no more leave home without their cell
phones than without their AmEx cards,” Clay thinks as the businesswoman rudely shouts:
“Maddy, you’re breaking up! I just wanted to tell you I got my hair done
at that new … my hair? … MY …”…
The woman said something unintelligible to Maddy and flipped
her cell phone closed with a practiced flip of the wrist. She dropped it
back into her purse, then just stood there, as if she had forgotten what she
was doing or maybe even where she was.
“That’s four-fifty,” said the Mister Softee guy. Clay had time to
think how fucking expensive everything was in the city. Perhaps the
woman in the power suit thought so, too—that, at least, was his first sur-
mise—because for a moment more she still did nothing, merely looked at
the cup with its mound of ice cream and sliding sauce as if she had never

157
seen such a thing before.
Then there came another cry from the Common, not a human one
this time but something between a surprised yelp and a hurt yowl. ... Yes,
that was [a] dog’s ear in the [business]man’s mouth, and as Clay contin-
ued to watch, the man tore it off the side of the dog’s head. …
He turned back toward the ice cream truck in time to see Power
Suit Woman lunge through the serving window in an effort to grab Mister
Softee Guy. She managed to snag the loose folds at the front of his white
tunic, but his single startle-step backward was enough to break her hold.
Her high heels briefly left the sidewalk, and he heard the rasp of cloth and
the clink of buttons as the front of her jacket ran first up the little jut of the
serving window’s counter and then back down. … She staggered, knees
bent. The closed-off, well-bred, out-in-public look on her face—what Clay
thought of as your basic on-the-street-no-face look—had been replaced by
a convulsive snarl that shrank her eyes to slits and exposed both sets of
teeth. Her upper lip had turned completely inside-out, revealing a pink
velvet lining as intimate as a vulva. Her poodle ran into the street….
The two girls had exactly the same [pixie] haircut above their iPod
headphones, but the one with the peppermint-colored cell phone was
blond and her friend was brunette. … Pixie Light dropped her phone on
the sidewalk, where it shattered, and seized Power Suit Woman around the
waist. … [She] darted her pretty little face forward with snakelike speed,
bared her undoubtedly strong young teeth, and battened on Power Suit
Woman’s neck. There was an enormous jet of blood. The pixie-girl stuck
her face in it, appeared to bathe in it, perhaps even drank from it … then
shook Power Suit Woman back and forth like a doll. The woman was
taller and had to outweigh the girl by at least forty pounds, but the girl
shook her hard enough to make the woman’s head flop back and forth and
send more blood flying. At the same time the girl cocked her own blood-
smeared face up to the bright blue October sky and howled in what
sounded like triumph.
She’s mad, Clay thought. Totally mad.
Pixie Dark cried out, “Who are you? What’s happening?”
At the sound of her friend’s voice, Pixie Light whipped her bloody
head around. Blood dripped from the short dagger-points of hair over-
hanging her forehead. Eyes like white lamps peered from blood-dappled
sockets. …
Pixie Light dropped Power Suit Woman, who collapsed to the
sidewalk with her chewed-upon carotid artery still spurting, then leaped at
the girl with whom she had been chummily sharing a phone only a few
minutes before. (pp. 5-9, underlined emphases mine, others original)

158
This scene describes the onset of a plague of Resistance technopathologies, from their
early stage of Power Suit Woman’s standoffish, antisocial attitude (clearly linked to class,
gender, and urbanity) to the transformation into killer zombies of her, the businessman,
the little girls, and anyone else using a cell phone at the moment a pulse of techno-
infection launches. As King’s characters soon realize, “It was the cell phones. … It was
the cell phones, all right” (p. 45), but even boom boxes and radios become enlisted by
zombies as part of great transformation centers where they infect the rest of the popula-
tion on a massive scale.
Listening, Gender, and Monsters
In this chapter I will attempt to “unpack” this progression of Audio Zombie cases. In this
application of differential analysis, I will attempt to gain insight through comparison with
another form of withdrawal: lesbian separatism. To justify this association, I will build
conceptual bridges between the two. First, I will draw on sound studies and gender stud-
ies to describe how the condition of Audio Zombies is gendered feminine. I will then fur-
ther support the zombie comparison with understandings of femininity as monstrous, and
of zombies as stigmatized and devalued social groups.
First, to address sound. The growing area of sound studies or audio culture is less
an emergent field or discipline and more conversation, a discursive site in which vectors
intersect around sonic questions, concerns, and phenomena.
ii
These include production,
performance, and consumption of sounds, and also their perceptions, technologies, and
effects. Sound studies examines how lived experience is suffused with sound, and how

159
methods such as deep listening can augment critical faculties. Part of this project involves
breaking the false binary of sight/sound and its mappings onto other dualisms, such as
logic/emotion, new/old, and mind/body—yet, while acknowledging the impact such bina-
ries have on understandings of sonic experience. Sound studies generally is not about re-
jecting the visual in favor of the aural, but about recovering, recuperating, and incorporat-
ing neglected aurality. With the prioritization of the visual in Western culture, emphasiz-
ing audio is a way to acquire fresh critical insights, hear different themes, receive new
frequencies of perception, and embrace multimodality (See discussion in Back & Bull,
2003). Ultimately, sound studies offers objects for and modes of study, with particular
utility for cultural scholars of media and communication technologies.
I have previously discussed the general relationship between femininity and dis-
ease; here I wish to show how this condition illustrates associations with listening, the
body, and femininity. First, listening is literally corporeal, as sound waves enter the bod-
ily orifice of the ears to tickle inner hairs and make bones quiver. Sterne asserts that “the
history of sound implies a history of the body,” (2003, p. 12) and, indeed, his history of
the idea of sound recording uses as its origin Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence
Blake’s use of a human ear, severed and mounted on a wooden frame, in an early sound
reproduction invention, the ear phonoautograph.
iii
Sterne also connects this history to me-
diate auscultation, the medical innovation of stethoscope use—a moment deeply gen-
dered, as it was driven in part by modes of propriety that a male doctor should not press
his ear directly to a female patient’s breast (2003, p. 114). Easily, music is the most

160
commonly listened-to sound in cases of Audio Zombies, and numerous music theorists
and explained the appeal of music and the singing voice as bodily. In describing a 16
th
-
century English pamphleteer’s attack on popular music, Leppert writes that “Music in-
fects us; it eats us out from within. … Music is inevitably of the body … whether as guest
or virus” (Leppert, 1993, pp. 87-88, 89). Through bodily desire and physical sensuality,
Frith argues that “central to the pleasure of pop is pleasure in a voice, sound as body,
sound as person” (Frith, 1996, p. 210). Barthes likewise asserts that “Musical signifying,
in a much clearer fashion than linguistic signification, is steeped in desire” (Barthes,
1986, p. 312, emphases original), and suggests that music’s stolid corporeality, may—
raising the pathological specter—be a path to madness:
In music, a field of signifying and not a system of signs, the referent is un-
forgettable, for here the referent is the body. The body passes into music
without any relay but the signifier. This passage—this transgression—
makes music a madness. ... The composer is always mad (and the writer
can never be so, for he is condemned to meaning) (1986, p. 308).

If the composer is mad—mad like Power Suit Woman—, what, then, of the listener who
enthusiastically takes into themselves such madness, such as iPod-wearing Pixies Light
and Dark? That which is bodily is necessarily mortal. Sterne concludes his history of the
conceptual roots of sound recording by exploring in depth its connections with the
shadow-side of sexual oblivion and the defining state of zombies—death: “For its early
users, death somehow explained and shaped the cultural power of sound recording”
(2003, p. 290).
Second, listening is femininizing. The physical side of the Western mind/body

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dualism is often associated with the feminine. Numerous scholars have also addressed
associations of aurality (especially when technologically enhanced) with femininity in
contradistinction to masculine associations with visuality, rationality, and literacy
(Adorno, 2002; Berendt, 1988; Jay, 1994; Levin, 1995; W. J. Ong, 1996; H. Schwartz,
2003; Weheliye, 2005). Historians of sound technologies have documented, in their peri-
ods of emergence, frequent associations with them as conduits to and symbols of femi-
nine objects of romantic and sexual desire (Marvin, 1990; Sterne, 2003). For example, in
an early twentieth-century short story from the Californian journal Overland Monthly,
“Lonesome Bill and the Phonograph Girl,” woman and phonograph are entirely collapsed
as a lonely prospector courts and proposes to a female singer in hopes she will replaces
the phonograph recording of her he had broken. “‘I’ve heard of a man marrying a wife to
get a housekeeper, or a cook, or a teacher,’ she said, ‘but I never heard of one marrying a
wife for a phonograph’” (Ramsay, n.d., p. 284).
Listening is also further feminized by its privacy, which associates it with the
feminine domestic (as opposed to masculine public) sphere. This can include the inti-
mate, physical interiority of the biomechanics of listening, private consumption of music
in the home, or the traditional delegation of women to roles as music consumers rather
than producers (Gottlieb & Wald, 1994; Wald, 2002). Part of recurrent cultural anxieties
around technologies of listening is that they threaten public/private divisions, whether
through broadcasting, mobility, or enabling women’s participation in public realms (Ber-
land, 2007; Chambers, 1994; S. J. Douglas, 1999; du Gay et al, 1997; Hilmes, 1997;

162
Kruse, 1993; Scott & Keates, 2003; Sterne, 2003). Listening’s most extreme private inte-
riority is its potential for intersubjectivity. Cruz’s (1999) work on slave songs argues for
consideration of them as an essential bridge in forming intersubjective bridge between
African slaves and American abolitionists. Barthes similarly describes listening as subject
positioning or constitution: “The injunction to listen is the total interpellation of one sub-
ject by another: it places above everything else the quasi-physical contact of these sub-
jects (by voice and ear): it creates transference: ‘listen to me’ means ‘touch me, know that
I exist’” (1986, p. 251, emphases original).
Not only does listening connote femininity, but even more so when acts of listen-
ing involve the consumption of popular music. Western musical composition itself has
been examined as a discursive site for reinscribing gender norms, including channeling
desire and expressing fears of femininity and the body (McClary, 1991, 1993). As Ber-
endt notes, the deadly music that threatens Odysseus and his sailors is not merely femi-
nine but fully female:
From the very beginning, the Church Fathers saw the Sirens as women
rather than as goddesses, female demons, or animal-like creatures. Am-
brose, for instance, wrote: “These Sirens are to be viewed as symbolizing
singing voluptuousness and cajolement through which the flesh experi-
ences temptation and turmoil.” They are “lovely ladies of lust,” standing
for what from then on would be “enchained” and blocked,” and symboliz-
ing the sex to which man, at that time establishing the patriarchy (and eve-
rything fits together), no longer wished to listen. (Berendt, 1988, p. 10)

Mass culture and consumer culture in general have a long history of feminine association
particularly in cases of the emotional, uncritical subject who listens to mass-produced
recordings, typically music (Adorno, 1990; 2002; Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002; Huyssen,

163
2003; Leppert, 1993). The sexual/political subtext is not subtle in Adorno’s critique of
the repetition by which popular music affects its listeners: “Plugging [referring to both
promotion of a song as well as generic compositional repetition in the field] aims to
break down the resistance to the musically ever-equal or identical by, as it were, closing
the avenues of escape from the ever-equal. It leads the listener to become enraptured
with the inescapable” (2002, 447, emphases mine). Musical listening’s feminine associa-
tions have been noted as well in attempts to compensate for them through masculinizing
practices such as radio construction, amateur hobbyists, hi-fi record collecting, and
audiophiles (T. J. Anderson, 2006; S. J. Douglas, 1999; Keightley, 1996; Rietveld, 2007).
The culmination of these many associations can be viewed as quite a gendered ex-
perience: Privately consuming mass-produced, musical entertainment via listening on in-
timate technologies combines layer upon layer of feminine associations. In this chapter’s
cases of sick listeners, recall the previous chapter’s discussion of disease itself as a fem-
inized state. Indeed, if disease is considered as bodily invasion, penetration by infectious
or otherwise harmful agents, then a sickened state is, quite simply, getting fucked. Listen-
ing is transgressing boundaries, individuals allowing themselves to be entered or pene-
trated. Diseases related to audio technologies designed for private consumption of popu-
lar music, then, represent a morass of feminine topping, a state of abandon to feminine
dominance. Adorno describes “the individual who abandons himself, in a kind of active
receptivity, to that toward which the materials are striving on their own” (2002, p. 125,
emphases mine). Even more feminizing, perhaps, than willingly getting fucked would be

164
willingly getting fucked by a woman.
In addition to the gendered aspects of listening, another justification for consider-
ing Audio Zombies in light of lesbian separatists is the tradition of the monstrous femi-
nine. Virginia Woolf describes the discursive portrait of Woman encountered in her re-
search as “a very queer, composite being … certainly an odd monster that one made up
by reading the historians first and the poets afterwards” (Woolf, 2004 [1928], Ch. 5,
screen 3). French feminist of the Lacanian psychoanalytic school, Julia Kristeva (2006),
draws on Mary Douglas’ work on im/purity to theorize feelings of horror as derived from
infantile ambivalence in separating from its mother, who is seen as horrifyingly impure in
her bodily fluids and an engulfing threat to the infant’s nascent sense of self. Kristeva
calls this psychic state of horror towards the boundary-transgressing mother as “abjec-
tion.” Feminist film scholars have applied these ideas in their study of the horror film
genre, arguing that, contrary to Freud, the feminine is not horrifying for being a castrated
subject, but for its threat as castrating monster (Creed, 1993). The notion of the abject has
been applied as a potentially powerful, disruptive position by scholars from perspectives
of queer theory, citizenship, disability studies, and critical race studies (Berlant, 1996;
McRuer, 2006; Reid-Pharr, 2007). Indeed, as Halberstam (1995) argues, “Monsters are
meaning machines. They can represent gender, race, nationality, class, and sexuality in
one body” (pp. 21-22). Although arguing for a messier, queerer reading of monstrous
horror than the psychoanalytic tradition, one that is less explicitly feminine as it is gen-
der-splattering, Halberstam nevertheless does suggest that horror frequently “locates

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monstrosity primarily within monstrous gender and monstrous sexuality” (p. 26)—a
place lesbian separatism, particularly in historical context, easily occupies.
The other support for examining Audio Zombies in terms of lesbian separatists is
the tradition of reading the zombie film canon as representations of social movements.
The most famous and influential film of the genre, George A. Romero’s Night of the Liv-
ing Dead (1968), with it atypical black protagonist, is commonly interpreted as a com-
mentary on the racial civil rights movements going on during its creation. The film’s
third official sequel, Land of the Dead (2005), showed the zombies gaining intellectual
strength and glimmers of collective organizing under a black male leader. That same
year, horror director Joe Dante produced for the cable TV series Masters of Horror an
episode titled “The Homecoming” (Dante, 2005). This mainstream, explicit critique of
the Iraq war—unusual and controversial for its time—populated its zombie hordes with
dead, largely of-color, soldiers, rising from their graves in order to vote against a proxy of
George W. Bush in his re-election campaign (echoing thematically the 1974 zombie-
Vietnam-soldier-comes-home film Dead of Night (B. Clark, 1974)). Recently, an online
scholarly media journal devoted an issue to exploring film zombies as expressions of ra-
cism, colonialism, and orientalism (“In Media Res: Zombies [Sept. 28-Oct. 2],” 2009).
Audio Zombies as Lesbian Separatists
Virginia Woolf famously argues for the importance of solitude in her extended essay, A
Room of One’s Own. Although Woolf is speaking of the importance of the need for pri-
vacy, workspace, and freedom from distraction in order to facilitate women’s creation of

166
great literature, she nevertheless articulates one example of a broader equation of solitude
and equality. Growth—be it of literary skills, personal subjectivity, or a collective
movement—needs a nurturing environment, which often necessitates distancing from
factors that hinder this growth. Moreover, such privacy, Woolf makes clear, is a luxury
not equally available:
One gathers from this enormous modern literature of confession and self–
analysis that to write a work of genius is almost always a feat of prodi-
gious difficulty. Everything is against the likelihood that it will come from
the writer’s mind whole and entire. Generally material circumstances are
against it. Dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made;
health will break down. … And so the writer, Keats, Flaubert, Carlyle,
suffers, especially in the creative years of youth, every form of distraction
and discouragement. A curse, a cry of agony, rises from those books of
analysis and confession. ‘Mighty poets in their misery dead’—that is the
burden of their song. If anything comes through in spite of all this, it is a
miracle, and probably no book is born entire and uncrippled as it was con-
ceived.
But for women, I thought, looking at the empty shelves, these difficulties
were infinitely more formidable. In the first place, to have a room of her
own, let alone a quiet room or a sound-proof room, was out of the ques-
tion, unless her parents were exceptionally rich or very noble, even up to
the beginning of the nineteenth century. (Ch 3, screen 11)

Although Woolf’s analysis of the difficulty of women writing literature also includes fi-
nancial dependence, social discouragements, and other factors, it is solitude that titles her
famous essay. It is, moreover, a singular solitude, a state pathologized in the early, re-
cluse stage of Audio Zombies. Listeners perhaps merely seeking sounds of their own,
moments of uninterrupted concentration, communication, or edification squeezed in dur-
ing a commute or workout, perhaps the only time the listener has alone all day, techno-
logically build the solitary acoustic spaces of Power Suit Woman or The Shut-In. Moreo-

167
ver, what is being withdrawn from is often related to heteronormativity: female personal-
audio listeners in both November (Harrison, 2004) and Bedouin Hornbook (Mackey,
1986) are pathologized specifically for neglecting their male lovers, who experience fatal
results in one case, emasculation by the penal system in the other.
However, as the antisocial, single listener progressively transform into monstrous
hordes, what of solitary women transformed into collectives? Here the historic debates
around lesbian separatism are informative, as they de-pathologize separation, withdrawal,
and isolation. Certainly, that is not to say that separatists were not demonized, but their
statements and histories suggest, like Woolf, the benefits of isolation and the reasons for
separation from the social collective, in turn suggesting the cultural work of technopa-
thologies in demonizing such acts.
Although it is important to note that lesbians did not invent separatism, but drew
on precedents on female separatism as feminist strategy dating back into the nineteenth
century (Freedman, 2006), perhaps the most famous statement of female separatism is by
the collective Radicalesbians. Their famous essay of 1970, “The Woman-Identified
Woman,” argued that the success of a revolutionary women’s movement would require
women to develop consciousness distinct from that which had developed within a miso-
gynistic, sexist, and patriarchal culture (Radicalesbians, 1997). “What is crucial is that
women begin disengaging from male-defined response patterns,” reads the statement. “In
the privacy of our own psyches, we must cut those cords to the core” (p. 156). Separation
was not merely physical and institutional but, even more importantly, psychic: separation

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in terms of the interior, private spaces so associated with listening. The statement con-
cludes with a justification for separatism that begins to speak in broader, more general
terms:
Together we must find, reinforce, and validate our authentic selves. … We
find receding the sense of alienation, of being cut off, of being behind a
locked window, of being unable to get out what we know is inside. We
feel a real-ness, feel at last we are coinciding with ourselves. With that
real self, with that consciousness, we begin a revolution to end the imposi-
tion of all coercive identifications, and to achieve maximum autonomy in
human expression. (p. 157)

In both urban and rural environments, lesbian-separatist feminists did exactly that,
with mixed results. In her 1976 essay, “Learning from Lesbian Separatism,” Charlotte
Brunch (1987) clarifies a misperception of lesbian separatism as escape from men to
some kind of Amazonian utopia. Instead, a major factor was escape from heterosexual
women in the feminist movement who, as many have described, were largely hostile and
unsupportive toward lesbian feminists (Radicalesbians, 1997). “We must not lose sight of
why separatism happened in the first place,” Brunch writes. “It happened because straight
feminists were unable to allow lesbians to grow—to develop our personal lives and out
political insights” (p. 190). But notice the difference between antisocial withdrawal: sepa-
ration is not an act of hostility toward the group one is removing itself from (although bad
feelings certainly may be involved), it is a necessary act to allow for nurturing self-
awareness and political consciousness denied by the group being left. Separatism is less a
rejection of the dominant than it is a creation of safe space away from it, a secure place in
which new insights, political understandings, social structures, and institutions can be de-

169
veloped that, as Brunch describes, ultimately serve to benefit the group from which one
originally separated. Moreover, in a move to generalized difference, Brunch explains this
as a widely applicable tactic: “Separatism is a dynamic strategy to be moved in and out of
whenever a minority feels that its interests are being overlooked by the majority, or that
its insights need more space to be developed” (p. 190). In this sense then, separatism be-
comes a productive component of larger movements for social justice. Writing a few
years before the rise of lesbian separatism, Valarie Solanas’ infamous yet continually
popular S.C.U.M. Manifesto links explicitly, for example, female separation with a tactic
of distancing in another progressive movement: the strike of organized labor: “If a large
majority of women were SCUM, they could acquire complete control of this country
within a few weeks simply by withdrawing from the labor force. … If all women simply
left men, refused to have anything to do with any of them—ever, all men, the govern-
ment, and the national economy would collapse completely” (1968, Disease and Death
section, ¶19).
In the 1980s and 1990s, lesbian separatism fell under heavy criticism, one critique
being that it posited an essential lesbian identity unacceptable to the rising popularity of
poststructural and postmodern theory. However, ethnographic research of separatist
communities suggests this was inaccurate and that, instead, a great diversity flourished,
with no universal or coherent lesbian identity articulated from community to community,
nor even an agreement on how to best implement separatism (Cheney, 1985; Valentine,
1997). However, a more trenchant critique was that any process of categorical

170
(re)definition necessarily involved new exclusions and thereby hierarchies. Drawing a
new circle still involved the drawing of lines, and critiques from lesbian feminists of
color pointed this out, most famously in “A Black Feminist Statement” by the Combahee
River Collective (1997). This argued that, although separatism is consolidation of differ-
ence, there are multiple differences, and therefore separatism necessarily chooses to pri-
oritize certain vectors of difference over others. When sex and sexuality are prioritized, it
leaves race, ethnicity, and to varying degrees, class, in familiar positions of neglect.
Moreover, disconnection from heterosexuality and men hindered the very solidarity ef-
forts with then needed in other social justice movements, such as anti-racism and labor
organizing. Feminist responses to such critiques theorized women’s consciousness and
subjectivity as multiply constituted through gender, sexuality, sex, race, class, geography,
and other factors (Anzaldúa, 1994; hooks, 2000; Crenshaw, 1994; Mohanty, 2003).
iv

Such productive intellectual work, and the fact that such criticisms are still heeded by
even contemporary advocates of separatism as a strategy for building coalitions of differ-
ence (Freedman, 2006), evidences not the failure of lesbian separatism but, on the con-
trary, its success. For, we see the goal of separatism—expanded consciousness in support
of more equitable world-changing along multiple vectors of difference—precisely in the
critiques and challenges it inspired. Its “failures” or limitations can be seen as, instead,
quite productive in their provocations and responses.
In conclusion, the progression of illnesses seen in Audio Zombie cases clearly il-
lustrate how, in technopathologies of Resistance, the threat is not simply a user who

171
withdraws. That is only the beginning. The true fear, underscored by the rhetoric of mon-
strous zombie violence, is that the user withdraws into something else. The threatening
aspect of separation is its potential for consolidation of difference. The sick user here is a
joiner, perhaps even an organizer. The healthy user, however, employs individual, not
collective solutions. For example, the key to surviving the technological curses of the
Ringu narratives, which I will detail in a subsequent chapter, as one of my focus group
members described, is coldly individualistic: “At the end of The Ring, too, they copied
the movie and she figured out that in order to get them to not bother me, I’ll copy [the
tape] and give [the curse] someone else [who would then die instead].” Violence in zom-
bie narratives is expression of abject horror but also a rhetorical exaggeration of separa-
tion as antisocial hostility and tensions: differences defined, reframed, and put into oppo-
sition. To analyze this difference in Audio Zombies, I have drawn on the example of les-
bian separatism, justifying this association through listening’s connotations as bodily and
feminine, theories of the feminine as monstrous and abject, and readings of zombie narra-
tives as allegories for conflicting social groups. The insight heard from this comparison is
a de-pathologization of the narratives. There could be good reasons for withdrawal, other
than mere individual failings, such as antisocial character traits. Such complexity is ob-
fuscated by Resistance technopathologies, for separatism is neither good nor bad but—as
feminist debates, critiques, and adaptations of separatism suggest—complicated.
Audio Zombies and other Resistance technopathologies perform the normalizing
cultural work of demonizing technological collectives, reconfigurations of social ar-

172
rangements. Throughout this project I discuss how pathologization individualizes; here
we see, in parallel with elevating the individual, a devaluing of particular forms of the
social, both in terms of cause and solution. These could be class-action suits of injured
users, consumer rights groups, or organized demands for user-centered design. Consider,
in contrast, the consumer product safety movements, particularly in regards to automo-
biles. Changes were made to the design of the technologies (safety belts, air bags) and
their use was regulated (speed limits, safety belt laws). Yet, as seen in my focus groups,
options such as product re-design and usage regulation, whether brought about by grass-
roots political organizing, class-action lawsuits, were rejected outright as impractical,
corrupt or amusingly oddball. At best they were considered only as minimal or limited
alternatives to consumer education and individual changes in technology use. When dis-
cussing preventative measuring for technology-related health risks, one participant sug-
gested educational messages: “Yeah, the [communication technology] manufacturer, just
like the cigarette company, is in charge in delivering their [health warning] message, not
that it always works. I mean, it’s up to the consumer at that point.” Merely posting warn-
ings so that it’s “up to the consumer” was a common perspective, one that not only made
health issues a personal responsibility, but completely erased government agencies and
social activists—the actual parties responsible for forcing cigarette manufacturers to post
health warnings. Moreover, posting warnings was seen as less protection for the con-
sumer than the manufacturer. As another participant said, “We’re warning you ahead of
time. This way, you can’t sue a telephone company or the product … and blame them for

173
it.” Such a focus on individual choice, commonly in acts of individual consumption
rather than political organizing, has been noted as a common feature of postfeminist cul-
ture in specific and the commodity activism of neoliberalism in general.
Having subjected a technopathology of the Resistance pattern, Audio Zombies, to
the differential analytic technique of creating juxtapositions, here with lesbian separatists,
I have suggested the cultural work performed being the demonization of new social col-
lectives and organizing. In the next chapter I will turn to cases of Mismanaged Band-
width, in which technopathologies perform work of distracting from systemic issues and
reinforcing other social vectors of pathologization.

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Chapter 5 Endnotes

i
Although this is suggestive of cases I will discuss in my chapter on Mismanaged Bandwidth, “they just
forget where they’re at” reflects more the immersive, withdrawn nature of Resistance.

ii
This is not to suggest that sound studies is not a field or discipline, or on its way to becoming one, but
merely a way to more productively bracket discussions beyond the focus of this project, such as those of
canon or institutionalization.

iii
This literal conflation of audio technology and the human body is reflected, inversely perhaps and
controversially for sure, in today’s cochlear implant.

iv
Arguably, queer theory’s attempts to distance or separate from all positions reliant on definitional
categories and practices of differentiation can be seen as a related extension or perhaps inverse of this
intellectual lineage.

175
Chapter 6: Mismanaged Bandwidth: Media as Sensory Inhibition and the Personal-
ization of Pathologization

Ginger, a 23-year-old single woman, lives with her roommate and has a boyfriend. She
has developed dissociation from social relations and the natural world, an oblivious state
in which people call her and she doesn’t respond. Violent, life-threatening events occur in
close proximity, but she is oblivious to them. It is as if she cannot perceive sensory stim-
uli of her world, especially warnings of danger in her environment. This muting of her
senses and perception is due to her unnaturally compulsive, near addictive, fixation on
her portable stereo. Wearing it almost constantly, she does not respond when hailed. She
even wears it when making love, the music blocking out the sound of an important warn-
ing phone call from the police. Her boyfriend encourages her oblivious condition, turning
up the volume while they have sex, increasing her oblivion. She responds rapturously,
and he makes sure the phone will not interrupt them. Unfortunately that call was warning
them of an approaching killer. Ginger continues to wear her stereo while in the kitchen
making a sandwich, not hearing the killer break into their home. She does not hear the
violent crashing of glass and furniture. She exhibits no response to the thud of her boy-
friend’s body slammed about the walls until dead. Ultimately, this sensory inhibition,
these impaired faculties, prove fatal for her as well. The invader, a homicidal cyborg
from the future, kills her next. (Cameron, 1984)
This pop-culture example of electronic communications media interfering with

176
normal sensory awareness, perception, and processing—with fatal results—is but one of
many ways media have been associated with health threats. Pathological associations
multiply when communication devices are networked in contemporary global media sys-
tems. Mobility also multiplies the pathology, particularly when mobile electronics are
combined with mobile transportation technologies: Many state and local laws have
banned the use of cell phones and portable devices while driving; cell phones and texting
are blamed for 28 per cent of car crashes, and research shows that even handsfree ver-
sions of the devices are just as dangerous (Halsey, 2010).
This chapter focuses on a category of cases and conditions I refer to as Misman-
aged Bandwidth, in which technologies interfere with the healthy perception and process-
ing of sensory stimuli due to fragmenting attention and awareness. The faculties of the
user are divided and, consequently, the receipt and transmission of multiple streams of
information is improperly processed. This can range from traffic accidents by drivers or
pedestrians distracted while texting or listening to music on headphones, to technology-
exacerbated clumsiness or not hearing an approaching attacker. Technology users’ band-
widths of attention are split across too many sources, or distributed unevenly or inappro-
priately across multiple sources, such that they do not perceive dangers in their environ-
ments, with deleterious or fatal results. I will present several fictional and factual exam-
ples of Interference. I will then discuss Interference in terms of critical media theories
and media ecology, before situating Interference within historic “crises of attention.” Fi-
nally, using the cases of the Central Park Jogger and a recent Los Angeles commuter rail

177
crash, I will discuss how technopathologies perform cultural work of normalizing techno-
logical subjects: how discourses of sick users can be examined for cultural ideals and ex-
pectations of healthy users. Such cultural work reinforces existing social pathologiza-
tions, disciplines subjects within an attention economy, and shifts concerns from the so-
cial and systemic to the personal and individual.
Media Theories: Numbing and Attention
Several traditions of media theory are informative when examining Mismanaged Band-
width technopathologies. I will now describe how classical critical theory and media
ecology have, respectively, limitations in terms of moralizing and relying on a broadcast
model, but historical panics around crises of attention may be better suited, particularly if
reconceptualized as problems of desire rather than focus.
In his critique of the deadening effects of mechanical, mass reproduction on art
and the aesthetic experience, Walter Benjamin famously describes a hierarchy of degrees
of attention to media. His ideal is the quality concentration of an active viewer who is
absorbed by a work of art, as when studying a painting. However, his lesser form of at-
tention would be the distraction of a viewer who merely absorbs his environment, as
when a passer-by perceives the architecture around him but without appreciation or en-
gagement, or the passive viewer of a Hollywood film who uncritically lets its sensory
barrage wash over him. Adorno had envisioned a distraction similar to Mismanaged
Bandwidth but not even needing technology, the vapid and clinging melodies of popular
music were enough (although, significantly, popular music as a form depended on mass

178
distribution through recording and playback technologies). “If you hum under your
breath, abstracted from external things,” Adorno wrote, “you may run into a car at any
moment” (2002, p. 506). With Horkheimer, in “The Culture Industry,” they famously ex-
coriate the efforts of the commoditized entertainment industry to collapse together high
art and trivial distractions, losing Benjamin’s distinction, and critiquing the empty prom-
ise of escapism as something quite different:
The enjoyment of the violence suffered by the movie character turns into
violence against the spectator, and distraction into exertion. Nothing that
the experts have devised as a stimulant must escape the weary eye; no stu-
pidity is allowed in the face of all the trickery; one has to follow every-
thing and even display the smart responses shown and recommended in
the film. This raises the question whether the culture industry fulfills the
function of diverting minds which it boasts about so loudly. ... The culture
industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises.
The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure
is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle
consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will
never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. (Hork-
heimer & Adorno, 2002)

Raymond Williams later would analyze the “flow” of television, looking at it both as a
technology and cultural form, and argue that the “time-unit of attention” established by
advertising commercials determined the similar length, tone, and structuring of the news
stories they surrounded, creating a barrage “of surprising and miscellaneous events com-
ing in, tumbling over each other, from all sides. The events are caught as they fly, with a
minimal and conventional interpretive tag” (Raymond Williams, 2003, p. 119). The flat-
tening and blurring of advertising and information parallel the flattening of art and escap-
ist entertainment in Horkheimer and Adorno, and both distinctions rely on the distinct

179
perceptual modes—levels of attention—that Benjamin described. Therefore, attention is
at the key of much critical-theory approach to media, and seemingly apt for application to
technopathologies of Mismanaged Bandwidth. However—in addition to decades of criti-
cism, revival, and reinterpretation of classical critical theory on grounds such as elitism,
ethnocentrism, and lack of viewer agency, I am reluctant to embrace it fully due to a
moralizing dimension that slides too easily into the pathologization of the individual,
which my work seeks to unpack. When Benjamin argued that distraction was on the rise,
he said, “The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one” (Benjamin, 2005, Part
XV, ¶ 4). Horkheimer and Adorno speak of the “slow-witted” and “stupid.” Such moral-
izing toward perceived character flaws perpetuates pathologization of the viewer-user.
In contrast, the technological focus of media ecology offers theorizations that do
not blame the user of media. In McLuhan’s (1994, 1995) theory of sensory extension, the
extension of parts of us via media results in a somewhat paradoxical or ironic “autoampu-
tation” of those parts. This is not due to character flaws of the audience but an effect of
daily media use. Overstimulation and overload ultimately create a “numbing” effect on
the senses, wearing down the very thing they initially heightened or extended. This can
be understood as the body’s defensive reaction, blocking out the relatively new (in terms
of human evolution) onslaught of mediated sensory stimuli, always in increasing accel-
eration. McLuhan sees “numbing” as both sociological metaphor—the numbed audience
developing an antisocial lack of empathy—and also a literal, biological deadening of the
senses—a very concrete technopathology. Similar concepts would be media audiences in

180
states of somnambulism or shock. Similarly, in Neil Postman’s (1982) work on technol-
ogy and society, he sees mass media having detrimental effects but in a more broadly so-
cial than individually biological sense. The forms and content of mass media, particularly
television, lead to a decline in literacy, replaced instead by anonymous, decontextualized,
dehistoricized, and uncontrollable information in a perpetual present. TV simplifies, ho-
mogenizes, and provides no instruction, leading to a degeneration of social fields requir-
ing engagement and deliberation, such as religion and politics, and a reorganized percep-
tual subject that mindlessly consumes a continual flow of information, without significant
engagement or comprehension—similar somewhat to Williams, if different in their han-
dlings of technology.
Both McLuhan’s and Postman’s views suggest a viewing subject beaten down,
worn out, overloaded with accelerated flows of information-saturated media, decontextu-
alized from meaning, and driven to an overloaded state of catatonic shock, dull numb-
ness, somnambulistic sleepwalking through life, or social disengagement and apathy.
i
Al-
though this work has been criticized for technological determinism and lack of viewer
agency, I suggest it is an ill fit for technopathologies due to its reliance on broadcasting
models. They flatten together media flows into one giant hammer and reinforce conceiv-
ing of the viewer as a passive subject in a mass audience. Their arguments rely on broad-
casting problems of homogenization and appealing to the lowest common denominator.
While I am far from a new-media cheerleader who blindly champions narrowcasting,
multiplatform consumption, or DIY prosumers as panacea, I do argue that the mediascape

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has changed significantly enough to render these theories unwieldy. Sufferers of Mis-
managed Bandwidth are active consumers, engaged with multiple discrete AND overlap-
ping flows—the problem is in selection and prioritization of information streams. The
problem is one of preferences. Furthermore, unlike McLuhan’s stress-induced, traumatic
numbing or autoamputation of sensory perceptions, Mismanaged Bandwidth incorporates
more quotidian states: The user is not absorbed or traumatized by a text reminding them
to pick up bread for dinner, merely distracted. Mental bandwidth is in competition, but
awareness is not necessarily decreased. A pedestrian is perfectly aware of the car that hits
her, the problem was in the triage or prioritization of awareness. These users incorrectly
set perceptual priorities. Mismanaged Bandwidth is not exactly numbing because that is
being inured or indifferent to signals; Mismanaged Bandwidth is too many signals im-
properly chosen from or hierarchized, signals getting crossed, overlapping, distorting
each other. Finally, I do not argue that this is necessarily a traumatic reaction to new me-
dia or overwhelming shock from electronic media saturation. One can succumb to Mis-
managed Bandwidth from reading a book, wearing old-fashioned bulky headphones, or
glancing at a low-resolution text message while strolling through a tranquil park.
However, what I do find useful from both critical theory and media ecology is a
focus on the issue of attention, to which I will now turn in the work of Jonathan Crary,
and expand upon problems of attention as better understood as problems of desire.
In his genealogy of attention, art historian Jonathan Crary (1990, 2001) traces the
perceiving subject who is not merely beaten down by media but, in a more Foucauldean

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vein, disciplined and trained. Attention—variously conceived as a biological capacity or
exercise in willpower—is a limited commodity to be managed. In Crary’s work, vision
specifically and perception more broadly are not simple biological truths of physiology,
but processes socially developed and organized. Moreover, he sees observation as a cru-
cial element in the formation of modern subjectivity and laboring subjects:
[In] the emergent physiological psychology of the nineteenth century[,] an
important part of this new discipline was the quantitative study of the eye
in terms of attentiveness, reaction times, thresholds of stimulation, and fa-
tigue. Such studies were clearly related to the demand for knowledge
about the adaptation of a human subject to productive tasks in which op-
timum attention was indispensable for the rationalization and making effi-
cient of human labor. The economic need for rapid coordination of eye
and hand in performing repetitive actions required precise knowledge of
human optical and sensory capacities. In the context of new industrial
models of perception, the problem of “inattention” by workers was a seri-
ous one. (1990, p. 85)

Observation, as mediated by communication technologies, brings about chal-
lenges to the notion of presence—feelings of authentically “being there,” being in the
presence of the object of observation—which new technologies increasingly can replicate
believably. Due to this new ontological cleavage—Is it live or is it Daguerrotype?—, at-
tention moves to the center in research and, as the center of an ongoing crisis, substituting
for the idea of presence, which modern modes of perception have made untenable. Inat-
tention becomes associated with various sociopathic behaviors and, overall, social man-
agement of attention becomes a key concern: the attention of workers to their labors, and
the attention of consumers to their media and other stimuli. Framed as “vigilance” in war-
time anxieties over the attention of, for example, radar operators, concern over attention

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continues in late-twentieth-century panics and debates around diseases of faulty attention
(ADD, ADHD) and attention as a key diagnostic component of schizophrenia, evidencing
the “durability of attention as a normative category of institutional power” (2001, p. 65).
Today, I argue this is even more apparent in the emphasis on attention (“eyeballs,”
“stickiness”) in new-media business discourse, which, even after the dot-com collapse,
remains deeply invested in economies of attention. The anxious commoditization of at-
tention—and its relation to emotion and relationships—was reflected in a recent Busi-
nessWeek cover story on social networking, “What’s a Friend Worth?”
For all its popularity, Facebook has yet to prove itself as an advertising
platform. Visitors, it seems, focus on their friends and pay scant attention
to ads. … The hope is that [if Facebook can] manage to track the paths of
influence among its communities, the company might be able to offer
more effective and lucrative advertisements and promotions. (Baker, 2009,
p. 35)

As the Norman Lear Center’s report published from their colloquium, “The Economic of
Attention,” asserted, “Increasingly, attention is considered to be a form of capital. Some
economists argue that attention in fact constitutes a parallel economy run on a virtual cur-
rency” (Richard Lanham and David Merkoski, 2008, p. 2). Therefore, attention is not
solely about abstracted notions of subjectivity and modernity, it is about very real
economies of modern, laboring subjects.
Indeed, as several media scholars have explored (Andrejevic, 2003, 2007; Banet-
Weiser, in press; Jhally& Livant, 1986; Smythe, 1981; Terranova, 2000), in broadcast
and interactive media environments, viewing is labor, watching is work. In the era of
mass-media broadcasting, the attentive efforts of audiences were the commodity sold to

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commercial sponsors. In the interactive, online media sphere, even more attention is re-
quired: not merely watching but texting in votes, filling out fan profiles, uploading remix
videos, rating and favoriting characters, and socially networking with authors and per-
formers. Such attentive labor using media technologies is already or in the process of be-
ing wholly monetized. Therefore, much is at stake in the cases of technology users whose
attentions are ineffective, unproductive, disorganized, broken, or sick. One focus group
participant, imagining a world without communications media, described her attention in
economic terms: “The world would be simpler, but I also think it would be more produc-
tive, because I know that it’s a big distraction for a lot of people, including myself.”
Cases of Mismanaged Bandwidth often display a concern with attention. For ex-
ample, the UK Deafness Research campaign against headphones at intersections under-
scored the centrality of attention in its tips for safely crossing an intersection: the first
was, obviously, removing headphones. But they continued after this to advise, “Try to
concentrate on what you can hear, and pick out engine sounds from background noise.
Stop talking and keep quiet while you cross.” These two tips clearly suggest that, al-
though the campaign was against interference caused by headphones, removing them was
insufficient, and the two tips gesture to concern that the problem is related to an inherent
inattentiveness on the part of the user (“MP3 Players on Roads Can Kill,” 2006).
To apply a drug metaphor, in Mismanaged Bandwidth, communication media are
less Novocain or other opiates but closer to cocaine or amphetamines. The excited, over-
stimulated user gorges on more stimuli than they can effectively or safely process. They

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are similar to speed freaks, unable to continue a conversation or complete a project be-
cause they can’t maintain focus. However, unlike a constantly shifting, short-term hyper-
focus–an attention that moves rapidly from target to target (zipping from conversation to
changing music to organizing books to opening windows), the attention of Mismanaged
Bandwidth conditions is steady, yet split. Instead of focusing strongly on single objects
for short periods of time, but with strong attention, they continually focus on multiple
objects, but with weak attention. The damage to attention is more spatial than chronologi-
cal, a synchronic rather than diachronic splitting, dilution or division of attention. Mis-
managed Bandwidth is not a problem of short attention spans, but of multitasking, of
productivity, of efficiency.
The Central Park Jogger and Chatsworth Train Crash
What, then, does technopathological discourse around Mismanaged Bandwidth suggest
about the users of these technologies? I shall now examine the cases of the Central Park
Jogger and a recent Los Angeles-area commuter rail crash as examples of how technopa-
thological discourse performs cultural work of normalization, particularly in terms of
gender. Here, differential analysis will call attention to how the health risks of technology
use evoke and reinforce vectors of difference. In other words, pathologizing them along
other lines, such as race, gender, class, and sexuality, supports the pathologization of the
user as “sick.”
Sickness is frequently pathologization of the subject—not an “innocent” patient
but someone with something wrong with them, such as the “hysteria” of women mar-

186
ginalized and denied cultural power and voice. A male focus group participant linked dis-
traction to suggestions of a pathologically ill-tempered or overly emotional demeanor:
I’ll tell you what I’ve seen 1000 times. I bet every one of you have. I’ll
be driving and even though it’s a new law about the Bluetooth [that
requires handsfree devices], I see people on the phone, whether it’s a
man or a woman, it doesn’t matter, and they’re fighting with their
spouse or somebody. They’re screaming and yelling and using the
other hand, I don’t know why they do it, but they’re yelling and
stomping and going like this, pointing. The person on the other side
doesn’t see what’s going on, you know, and they’re going 35 to 40
miles an hour on the freeway because they’re so distracted and they’re
fighting and yelling and don’t have either hand on the wheel. You
know. I usually blow the horn all the way down to get them to stop. I
don’t care if they get mad. I’ve been flipped off, you know, the whole
nine yards, but they’re actually fighting on the phone.

A female participant agreed: “That happened to me on the way up here. It was a girl on
her thing. I’m yelling at her, and she jumped in front of me, and I blew my horn and I …
passed her. I got out of the lane and went passed her and I saw that she was on her Black-
berry, and it looked like she was yelling.” Another woman pushed the pathologization
further with comparison to alcohol abuse: “Because you know, like nine times out of ten
when someone’s driving crazy, you’re always thinking in your head they’re on their
phone. Like it’s not drunk anymore. It’s like they have to be on their phone.”
Technopathologies are attributed often to seniors, youth, hypochondriacs, the men-
tally ill, paranoid conspiracy theorists, and other marginalized/pathologized groups. As
one focus group woman said, “When it comes to technology, people are going to see
problems with their health where there are none. … Because people do that. Because
they’ll blame everything else around them for different things. A scapegoat.” And yet, by

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the end of our discussions, almost every participant admitted to some kind of technopa-
thology they had experienced. The difference seemed to be that what was wrong or
“sick” was attributing the problem or solution to anything systemic or social, such as
conspiracies, market regulation, or redesigning devices. Technopathologies were prob-
lems of the user’s practices, and changing or augmenting those individual practices were
the solutions.
For example, a recent Reader’s Digest cover story on information overload, and
its resultant stress and fatigue, places the blame almost universally on technologies, and
suggests amelioration almost exclusively through better (healthier?) use of them (Geraci,
2008). Absent are the human beings who create, perpetuate, resist, or try to change the
work expectations, colonization of private time and space, divisions of labor, and support
networks (or lack thereof) that create the context for this situation. The problem is not a
60-hour, dual-income workweek; the problem is that you are using your Blackberry
wrong.
However, subjects—technopathological or otherwise—are constituted along
multiple vectors. As mentioned in an earlier chapter, influential work by feminists of
color in the 1990s challenged the Eurocentrism and other biases of the white, Western
feminist establishment. To generalize a rich series of intellectual exchange, these scholars
and activists criticized essentialist notions of “woman” and “feminist” as reflecting pre-
dominantly white, Western, upper-middleclass women. Contrasting theories, noted ear-
lier, argued for understanding identity a combination of gender, race, class, sexuality, ge-

188
ography, national development, and other factors, using perspectives such as intersec-
tionality (Crenshaw, 1994), “New Mestiza consciousness” (Anzaldúa, 1994), interrelat-
edness (hooks, 2000), and postcolonial global coalitions (Mohanty, 2003). The impor-
tance of this work here in terms of differential analysis is foregrounding difference as
multiple and relational. Although research, narratives, and political activism can surely be
constructed to focus on solely one type of difference, one must not lose sight of how this
is an exclusionary practice. Admittedly, always incorporating every relevant type of dif-
ference is an impossible ideal, but that does not mean they should be forgotten. Moreo-
ver, as this chapter strives to demonstrate, different vectors of difference can be mutually
reinforcing: feminine stereotypes of wantonness, for example, are reinforced by stereo-
types of licentiousness among people of color, as Sander Gilman (1985) famously dis-
cusses in terms of Sarah Baartman, the “Hottentott Venus.” Again we see the epistemol-
ogy of contagion, the guilt by association. Vectors of difference may intersect, but this
geometric is inadequate in that it suggests the point of intersection remains a single coor-
dinate point. In reality, it swells, it grows like a tumor as pathologized difference is asso-
ciated with additional pathologized differences, and each confirms the suspicions of each
other in mutual reinforcement and justification. Therefore, the aspect of differential
analysis I wish to demonstrate here is not just the foregrounding of difference, or of the
multiplicity of differences, but in the additive and cumulative work of multiple vectors of
difference.
Differential vectors, such as a user’s class, age, and race, appear in debates around

189
Mismanaged Bandwidth technopathologies as ways of reinforcing pathologization of the
user’s technological practices. During the debate around an early ban on Walkmans and
headphone radios in intersections, a writer for the Washington Post wrote, “For a brief
moment in history, it looked like the onslaught of barbarians bearing boogie boxes (those
gigantic radios) might be silenced by the arrival of the biggest street corner status symbol
since alligator shoes. Enter the Sony Walkman and its myriad look-alikes, with their
wispy headphones hooked up to lightweight tape decks” (Allen, 1982). The class and ra-
cial allusions to working-class African-Americans are clear in “street corner” and “alliga-
tor shoes,” associating one form of pathologization (deleterious technology misuse) with
another more familiar one (class and racial stereotypes).
ii

Turning now to specific cases of Mismanaged Bandwidth, first I will present
Trisha Meili, the Central Park Jogger of the infamous “wilding” rape, in whose case we
see a clear narrative of sick and healthy usership reinforced by a gendered vector of dif-
ference. I will then proceed to discuss Robert Sanchez, the engineer in the LA-area com-
muter train crash, as an example of multiple vectors of difference at work.
In Meili’s case, we will see that when she is sick, she is over-stimulated. Her
senses are impaired. She is over-ambitious. Additionally, she is in many ways gender-
non-conformist. After her rape and 13 years of anonymity, in a publicized book and in-
terview with Katie Couric, she emerges a healthy user: less ambitious and more appropri-
ately gendered, exemplifying how the pathological continuum reinforces other normative
continuums, such as gender.

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In 1989, a 28-year-old investment banker, later known to be Trisha Meili, was
jogging at night in Central Park. She was brutally attacked, raped, bound, and left for
dead, but found in time for a hospital to slowly nurse her back to health. The case became
a media sensation, pushing aside stories such as the Exxon Valdes oil spill and closing
arguments of the Iran/Contra trial. Police arrested several suspects, all black and Hispanic
boys aged 14-16 from subsidized housing and housing projects. Media reports of their
confessions seized on the term “wilding” as their slang for recreational gang rape. The
case crystallized contemporary racial tensions and fears about urban decay and youth
lawlessness. The anonymous Jogger was chosen as one of Glamour’s “Women of the
Year” and People’s “Year’s Most Interesting People.” Leading up to and during the trial,
community leaders and family members voiced concerns that, Meili being white, the
prosecution and media furor were racially driven. Five boys, who claimed at trial their
confessions had been coerced, were convicted. Two were beaten by inmates upon arrival
in Rikers Island prison.
In June 2002, Matias Reyes, a convicted murderer, claimed from jail he had been
the lone rapist. DNA tests placed him at the scene and found no links to the convicted
boys. On December 19, 2002, a New York State Justice vacated the convictions of the
five young men, allowed by state law if new evidence arises that probably would have
resulted in a more favorable verdict (but it did not necessarily mean they were innocent).
Meili and prosecutors remained unsure and suspected that somehow the boys were in-
volved. Prosecutors could have gone to trial again, but chose to not. Later research sug-

191
gested that even the hype over the neologism “wilding” was incorrect and misleading: the
boys were quoting a then-popular Ton Lōc song, “The Wild Thing,” not “going wilding”
(Chancer, 2005; Michael Welch, 2004). In 2003, Meili revealed her identity and went
public with her autobiography, I Am the Central Park Jogger (2003). Media coverage
included a primetime, hour-long special with NBC News’ Katie Couric.
How does this relate to technopathologies? Much like my focus groups’ com-
ments and the victim in Graduation Day, Meili was wearing headphones while jogging, a
clear case of Mismanaged Bandwidth. However, most newspaper coverage I have been
able to find of this case at the time does not mention the headphones. This is odd. In
1989, the Walkman and similar devices had great cultural salience, as evidenced by the
number of films I’ve noted demonstrating this trope, even after 1989. Yet, at the time of
the attack, her wearing a Walkman is strangely missing from press accounts–despite be-
ing overtly criticized in similar cases, in stories run in the same paper, weeks both before
and after the event. The Tiffany Sessions article described earlier was a month before
Meili’s attack and comes from the New York Times, Meili’s hometown paper. A month
after Meili, another New York Times article described “stealing … personal items like
Walkman tape recorders and bicycles from vulnerable-looking people on the street” as
part of the normal and ubiquitous street violence of East Harlem youth gangs (Pitt, 1989,
p. B1). No mention of Meili. A 1991 Washington Post mugging article is similar (A. J.
Rubin, 1991). A 1994 New York Times article, “Subway Rape Victim tries to Prove
Agency Was at Fault” actually suggests contrary to its headline, blaming the victim in its

192
lede: “Adjusting the earphones of her Walkman, the young administrative assistant en-
tered the subway” (Hoffman, 1994, p. B1). In 1999, the New York Times deemed worthy
of mention the Walkman worn by a male victim in a Central Park killing (Roane, 1999).
Yet, despite being one the most infamous crimes in New York history, Meili’s Walkman
is missing until the 2002-2003 news stories. Her Walkman, conspicuously absent from
the accounts of the incident when it occurred, becomes a crucial piece of evidence in the
District Attorney’s report and news accounts regarding Reyes and the convicted boys.
Details of the type of Walkman and how it disappeared were among several consistencies
supporting Reyes’ account and inconsistencies in the boys’ confessions. These, combined
with the new DNA evidence, led to vacating the convictions of the boys originally ac-
cused of attacking Meili.
It is impossible to know with certainty why initial reports did not mention her
Walkman, when the same and other papers did mention Walkmans in other cases before
and after. Perhaps reporters and editors were rightly sensitive to the horrifying violence
of the case and taking extra care not to blame the victim by faulting her for wearing
headphones. Chancer argues that this case pitted gender against race. Perhaps what made
Meili unique in her technology use was that it implicated her in terms of gender, and this
had to be avoided to support her against the race of her attackers. This is further sup-
ported by the partial discrediting of Meili 13 years later, when the technology use does
appear. Once someone else was seen as a more likely culprit than the boys convicted of
Meili’s attack, Meili becomes less the noble white victim and more the hysterical woman.

193
The culpability is supported by the original absence of the Walkman detail in the media
as well as from Meili’s later autobiography. The Walkman does not make her look good;
it makes her a bad user. However, by this point, fears of the New York crime crisis had
lessened, due to Giuliani’s crime war and gentrification of the city. Furthermore, a post-
feminist cultural sensibility had become more entrenched, so perhaps editors were no
longer as concerned with blaming the victim.
One of Meili’s biggest media appearances, the Couric interview (“NBC Katie
Couric Exclusive: The Central Park Jogger,” 2003), calls attention to Meili’s headphones
at its onset. After a brief introduction of the case, Meili’s first appearance (not seen but
heard reading aloud) states, “I am that woman, until now known only as the Central Park
Jogger. And this is my story.” To which Couric’s voiceover replies:
She liked to listen to music when she ran. Billy Joel especially would help
her keep pace. An investment banker, she ran to release the stress of 12-
hour days on Wall Street. She ran to maintain the slender, muscular phy-
sique of a former ballerina. And she ran five nights a week, because de-
spite the danger, she says, there was something appealing about jogging
after dark.

The music is not mentioned again in the interview, yet its prominent, pointed, early refer-
ence defines the event. It is the first detail mentioned, with even the specificity of naming
what music she preferred. Couric links this immediately to a pathological description:
She is stressed out, a workaholic investment banker in the stereotype of 1980s Wall
Street greed and pathological over-ambition. She is obsessive about her body–the five-
times-a-week running will later be described as “compulsive.” The ballet history alludes
to stereotypes of a high-strung nature, obsessive with eating disorders, which, indeed, it is

194
foreshadowing. The interview will later make Meili’s history of anorexia explicit. Even
in her autobiography, she describes the disease since age 15 as having some “deep con-
nection” to her “compulsive need to run” (Meili, 2003, p. 32). In the interview, this then
links to further suggestions of pathology in her irrational jogging at night. She does not
stay within appropriate boundaries of safety (as if it is her responsibility, not the problem
of the city to keep the park safe), exhibiting reckless disregard for danger simply because
of an unnamed, unexplained, “something appealing” about it. She goes outside bounda-
ries in her pursuit of desire. In very few words, the beginning of the interview associates
technology misuse with an overambitious, reckless, pleasure-seeking, sick woman, glut-
tonous and over-desiring. Her attention, as directed toward goals and objects of desire, is
split over too many wants.
These connections are made not solely through textual modes. Couric chooses to
put her regular, newscasterly vocal emphasis on the word “music.” The sensory misman-
agement of stimuli is further emphasized by the cinematic techniques that put the viewer
in the subjective point of view of Meili. Much like the landmark way in which Possessed
makes the audience directly experience the mental illness of Joan Crawford’s character,
the opening of the interview attempts to make the viewer experience the impaired facul-
ties of the headphone-wearing jogger. This opening sequence’s illustrative shots of lights,
night sky, jogging feet, and pavement alternate with and dissolve in and out of perceptual
clarity. Some are in focus, some are not. The depth of field changes. There are temporal
shifts from present (Meili's book) to past (jogging, path). The “Billy Joel” line is spoken

195
over a dissolve from path to extremely out of focus, abstract traffic lights. Literally we
see, at the discussion of listening to music, a clear, sharp jogging path dissolve into a
warning system that we cannot clearly apprehend. The overall effect is disorienting, sug-
gesting unstable memory, consciousness, or perception. This is heighted by spare, omi-
nous music and sounds of anxious breathing, the panting of jogging that also sounds like
panic. It underscores Couric’s reference to “jogging alone” and the ominous sounds con-
nect music to the naïveté of jogging alone at night. When Meili says, “Nothing could
harm me,” the screen fades to black. Ominous string music again appears as the interview
fades up from black to a spooky shot of the moon among bare tree branches in shifting
focus and depth of field. (One almost expects a horror-movie cliché such as the ignored
“Danger! Stay away!” sign). Over this, Couric contradicts Meili: “Until the night....”
The opening sequence of the interview links listening to music on headphones as a
disorienting, defining element of the events of that night. Music, Walkman, or head-
phones are not specifically mentioned again, yet I suggest they remain in memory, un-
spoken, so that when the danger of jogging alone is mentioned; the further indictment of
“and wearing headphones” need not be spoken. Note Meili’s’ response later in the inter-
view:
Couric: When this happened, some people said, “Running alone in Central
Park at night? That girl must be crazy.”
Ms. Meili: That question bothers me a bit, because this—the implication
is, “OK, it’s my fault that—that I was raped and beaten and almost
killed?” These random acts, unfortunately, happen all the time.

This view is supported by one focus group that spontaneously remembered the

196
Meili case when discussing Mismanaged Bandwidth in general. As they discussed the
details of the case they could recall, several suggested blaming the user: One suggested
the problem is not the device but how aware the person wearing it is: “If you’re aware of
your surroundings, then you can hear them running up. If you’re not and you have some-
thing in your ears, you’re not.” One man mis-recalled her as dating a senator, thinking
perhaps instead of the affair Congressman Gary Condit had been having with murdered
aide Chandra Levy. Another man suggested that stereotypical feminine vulnerability was
the problem, not the technology: “A woman is obviously a better target than a man typi-
cally because they’re more vulnerable, but I don’t think that wearing the headphones
makes them more vulnerable.”
Bearing in mind the unspoken headphones, note now how the following section of
the interview moves to associate Meili’s career ambition with the disease of anorexia and
her seemingly irrational regard for her own safety. The infection of unbounded, desirous
ambition spreads:
Couric: In 1986, she landed at Salomon Brothers, so cutthroat, people
would say, no one would stab you in the back, they’d come through the
door with a hatchet. But not Trisha.
Mr. Vermylen: She stood out among her immediate peers and—and really
across the whole investment banking department as being very friendly,
always with a ready smile, always cheerful.
Couric: Running helped her cope with the pressure and with the secret
struggle. From the time she was 15, she suffered from anorexia.
Ms. Meili: I was very conscious of what I ate, and how much I exercised,
and that was part of the compulsiveness about running, that I always had
to be running.
Couric: Why was it so important to you?
Ms. Meili: Because I was feeling pretty average at work. I wasn’t any
speed demon or, you know, or track star, but I felt a lot of peace and a—I
guess a sense of accomplishment when I was out at night. And there were

197
other people out there, too, but usually not too many.
Couric: Were you ever afraid to run at night?
Ms. Meili: It’s hard to hear me say it, I guess, but no, I wasn’t. I wasn’t
afraid, because I had done it for a long time and nothing had happened.
And so I had some sense of security from that, and I also had this feeling
deep inside that nothing's going to happen to me.
Couric: So not even patches of the park creeped you out?
Ms. Meili: I did have some ground rules. I would never go to the north end
of the park, the northernmost end of the park, but, you know, I always did
go up to the 102nd Street crossdrive, always at the first part of my run. I
suppose I did realize that yes, it’s more secluded, but I’ll just get it over
with more quickly and then I’ll be fine.
Couric: Wednesday, April 19th, 1989 might have been a forgettable
day….

Elsewhere, her jogging at night and ambition are clearly criticized:
Couric: Phi Beta Kappa, just one on a roster of honors. You went to
Wellesley, two master’s degrees from Yale, including an MBA. … You
really were very impressive academically.
Ms. Meili: I was a very disciplined student. You know, part of it was that I
always wanted to be the best.
Couric: At first she wanted to change the world, and considered joining
the Foreign Service. But in bullish 1980s America, Wall Street was the
place to go.
Ms. Meili: I thought, well, let me just give this a try. Let me see if I can
compete, you know, with, you know, with the best and the brightest.

Her tomboy childhood underscores gender nonconformity. Anorexia emphasizes her
pathologization. The targets of her ambitious competition range from childhood brothers
to the boys’ club of 1980s Wall Street—a path chosen over the more traditionally femi-
nine diplomatic corps of Foreign Service.
The absence of the Walkman detail from initial media accounts and Meili’s auto-
biography suggests self consciousness, an awareness of dynamics of blaming the victim.
Yet there is ample blaming of the victim as over-ambitious, unbounded, pleasure-seeking.

198
Systemic discussions are missing: Park lighting? Police patrols? What about the poverty
of the youths involved? Why did they not have any place better to go that night? (Even
with the outcries of racism during the trial, discussions tended to look at racism in terms
of individual prejudices, not systemic inequalities and inequities.) Similarly, in the Tif-
fany Sessions case discussed earlier, it did not “blow the mind” of local law enforcement
that listening devices were designed in such a way as to create sense-impairing volume in
the first place. Or that we, as a society, have men lurking in bushes waiting to pounce on
coeds.
Much like the camera pan to the murdered jogger’s signifier of sexuality, her
curvy ass, at the end of the Graduation Day murder sequence, the technological patholo-
gization is heavily gendered. Both are sick users in that they have their perceptual de-
fense systems dangerously fractured. Yet, particularly in Meili’s case, this choice to do so
is clearly articulated as a gender issue: she is too ambitious and too vain (body issues). To
stay thin and release stress from trying to compete with the boys, she runs–compulsively–
at night–wearing headphones. It is not her fault that she is attacked, but the implication
clearly remains that if she hadn’t been doing these things, she wouldn’t have been at-
tacked. The chain analysis is clear. Moreover, her punishment is the most heavily gen-
dered imaginable: rape.
Couric’s concluding words to the interview make these factors clear: “Trisha still
loves to run, but once a week now, no longer every day. Gone is the hard-charging pro-
fessional trying to prove herself on Wall Street. But for all that was lost, she says, she’s

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found something far greater: The true measure of her success, the capacity to be generous
and to love.” Ambition is abandoned and safely relocated from the competitive boys’
club of finance to a more feminine caregiving career as an inspirational speaker. Meili
emerges as more appropriately gendered by the interview’s conclusion.
What does Meili suggest about sick users, and healthy ones? Differential analysis
questions entertainment and stimulation as mere pleasure; it raises the issue of distrac-
tion: If I am looking at this, what am I not seeing? Differential analysis foregrounds con-
sumption’s central role as a component of hegemonic capitalism. Is raises the question,
What could the monies and energies I spend on entertainment and consumer pleasure be
otherwise redirected to? In the emphasis on consumption, what is lost? If I shop, there-
fore I am–what am I not? Bright lights illuminate but they also blind.
Cases of Mismanaged Bandwidth involve too thoughtless or improper media
(over)use. The sick user does not know how much is “too much,” or too much for a par-
ticular occasion. The sick user is free to use many and numerous forms of media. Too
free. Bearing this in mind, it is clear that the sick user does not make proper use of this
freedom. She is unsocialized, not realizing that some boundaries are more acceptable to
break than others.
iii
Not following social rules suggests a deeper trait: she is selfish. Such
selfishness or greed betrays another trait: she desires too much, more than she can handle.
She wants to jog and consume music, to be entertained and cross the street, to enjoy pri-
vate conversations and participate in public space. In turn, a healthy user, rather than
sickened by Mismanaged Bandwidth, could be seen as merely acquisitive: Stimulation-

200
seeking, happily and obediently consuming distraction but—through care or luck—not to
their own or anyone else’s detriment. Connected yet productive, she is engaged in enough
consumption so that she has to keep her job. She seeks out multiple streams of stimuli,
but knows how to properly choose from among them.
The dynamics of Meili’s Interference continue today. A 2008 email broadcast to
the entire student body of the University of Southern California did not specify the gen-
der of the victims in two cases, merely described an “assault” on one student and another
being “deceived into letting three strangers accompany that person home.” However, a
few pages later, the strong condemnation of “sexual crimes” suggested at least one was a
classic gendered case of Interference: among the basic precautions urged was to “never
wear earphones while walking alone” (Jackson, 2008).
Another recent case with different circumstances but clear pathologization along
multiple differential vectors, demonstrates again the cultural work of this technopathol-
ogy. On September 12, 2008, a Metrolink commuter rail train failed to stop at a presuma-
bly red signal, colliding with a Union Pacific freight train in Chatsworth, a region of Los
Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. The worst train crash in modern California history,
it resulted in 25 deaths and 135 injuries, many requiring extended hospitalizations. An
official investigation of the cause of the crash by the National Traffic Safety Board is on-
going. Preliminary investigation and analyses by Metrolink and transportation researchers
have noted that a possible contributing factor could be fatigue from the engineer’s sched-
ule—he worked a split shift of 11
1
/
2
hours divided by a 3
1
/
2
-hour break, meaning he had

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only 9 hours away from work in which to rest between shifts. Another issue raised was
the possibility of technical malfunctions: the stoplight may have actually shown green in
both directions, and backup safety systems definitely failed to prevent the crash. Indeed, a
later analysis of the Metrolink crash by the California Public Utilities Commission dis-
closed that, a decade prior, Metrolink and other commuter rail systems had requested and
received an exemption from federal requirements to post safety signs reminding engi-
neers of speed restrictions at important points in the track. The requirement had been in
response to 1996 passenger train accidents; the 2009 report concluded that the safety
signs should be installed after all (Connell, 2009).
However, the factor that received the most (and most sensationalistic) media cov-
erage was that the engineer was sending text messages while driving the train, his dis-
tracted attention causing the accident in a clear case of Interference.
iv
Although the engi-
neer’s phone was not recovered, one of his recipients showed a message from the engi-
neer time-stamped at one minute before the crash; later NTSB investigation placed the
message’s dispatch at 22 seconds before the crash. Researchers studying NTSB data con-
cluded that the last message had been sent a few seconds after passing the signal, mean-
ing the engineer was most likely conscious at the time of signal-passing in order to be
composing the message, but likely distracted by this very act in a state of “inattention
blindness” that caused him not to see the signal. Texting at the controls was already for-
bidden by Metrolink rules, but, less than a week after the crash, the California Public
Utilities Commission passed an emergency temporary ban on cellular communications by

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train crewmembers. A week later, the state of California outlawed texting while driving.
Press coverage of the event progressed from sensationalistic fixation on texting
and an investigation of the dead engineer’s personal life, to racist and homophobic slan-
dering of the engineer in conservative and far-right media. Initially, typical headlines fo-
cused on texting, such as “Engineer was Texting Before Deadly Crash” (Press, 2008a),
“Texting eyed in fatal train collision” (Sahagun & Rohrlich, 2008), “LA Metrolink crash
puts focus on dangers of texting” (Wood, 2008), “Feds look into texting before deadly
train crash” (Press, 2008b), and “Text messaging may have caused train wreck that kills
25 in California!” (Dij, 2008). On September 28, a search of Google News for Metrolink
texting yielded almost 3,000 results; Metrolink exhaustion found only 655, and Metrolink
split shift only 498.
However, while focusing on the technology, such reports, even immediately after
the accident, also quickly suggested the pathologizing of the technology users. In the
words of the Staten Island Advance: “Texting + driving = lunacy” (“Texting + driving =
lunacy,” 2008). Some reports’ pathologizing skewed toward the engineer’s audience: The
Wall Street Journal ran the headline “Rail Fans in Deadly Light: Subculture Includes Boy
Who Texted Engineer in Crash” (Audi, 2008) and several outlets ran stories investigating
communities of “fervent, obscure,” and “loco” rail hobbyists or “foamers,” about whom
“some wonder if their fervor goes too far” (S. Gold, 2008a, 2008b; Hennessy-Fisk &
Gold, 2008). However, this focus on rail fans, who were typically teenage males, sup-
ported pathologizing of the engineer to varying degrees. Many reports specified that the

203
engineer was texting “teenage rail enthusiasts,” as CBS News reported. Similarly, a head-
line from a FOX News affiliate wrote: “Report: Metrolink Engineer Texting With Teen
Moments Before Killer Commuter Crash.” Why the relevance of age? Had he been tex-
ting middle-aged sports fans, would headlines have read “Texting with Baby Boomer” or
“Railfan Retirees”? One understanding of this is that the tradition of associating new
communications technologies with youth and juvenile delinquency—from rock-n-roll
transistor radios to antisocial Walkman-wearing and more recent “sexting” panics—adds
a sensationalistic thrill to the story. However, it also serves to pathologize the engineer:
What was he doing texting teenage boys?
The implication being, of course, that engineer Robert Sanchez was a pedophile.
Sanchez was indeed gay, and mainstream investigation of his personal life proceeded to
be picked up by conservative talk radio and white supremacist websites to associate and
load pathologization upon pathologization: race, sexuality, ethnicity, and mental health
all came into play, buttressing the portrait of Sanchez as not merely a sick user but a sick
man deserving of wholehearted condemnation for causing—perhaps intentionally—the
accident.
The pathologization of Sanchez in the media began with mainstream reporting,
such as the AP story “Metrolink engineer’s life held challenges” (Risling, 2008). Al-
though sympathetic in tone and ostensibly a human-interest story providing background
on the engineer, the information it provided was quite dark:
In the years leading up to his death in the locomotive of Metrolink 111,
engineer Robert Sanchez’s life was marked by personal tragedy, jail time
and concerns about his health and job security.

204
His HIV-positive companion had committed suicide, he was concerned
about his diabetes, and he feared a brush with the law could end the career
he loved.
The National Transportation Safety Board is looking at Sanchez’s back-
ground after determining that human error and not mechanical failure was
likely to blame…

Note the juxtapositions and linkage of physical illness (HIV, diabetes, health con-
cerns) with character failings (jail time, job security, suicide) in framing the cause of the
accident as human error. Human error could have just as easily been distraction from a
text sent to him by a pestering 85-year-old trainspotting female retiree transplanted from
Manchester to Chatsworth; however, the background tragedies this article and others take
care to reveal compound the pathological associations with Sanchez, and thereby justify
suspicious leaps to greater assumptions about him. He was “friendly” but “private and
quiet,” a “recluse.” In 2002, he pleaded guilty to stealing video game consoles. In 2005,
his HIV-positive partner hung himself in their garage—on Valentine’s Day, the morning
after the couple had argued and Sanchez had wanted to break up.
The Los Angeles Times’ article, “Metrolink 111 engineer led solitary life marred
by tragedy” (Quinones, 2008), showed a picture of Sanchez smiling and cuddling a
puppy, yet pushed the pathologization further. He was not merely friendly and quiet; he
was “relentlessly upbeat” and “intensely private,” “polite but guarded,” and “different.”
Although the article did acknowledge the split shift as a possible contributing factor, as
well as diabetic shock, this was surrounded by much personal detail that had little to no
relevance other than pathologizing the engineer: Sanchez led a “nomadic” life, with re-
cent addresses in six states (Hmmmm … shifty). He and his partner bought a house to-

205
gether in 2000 but “No one in [his partner’s] family knows how the two men met.”
(Hmmmm, why’d they keep it a secret, must’ve been something dirty.) They reporters ac-
quired and quoted from his partner’s suicide note, which began, “Rob, Happy Valentine’s
Day” (Sick!). His former lawyer tells reporters that, at the time of his video-game jail
time “‘He was going through some personal issues—he didn't tell me what they were,’
Wong said. ‘He said that's the reason he wasn’t able to make good judgments. He said a
lot of things were going on that caused him to make stupid mistakes.’” (Hmmmmm….).
Sanchez also had not one, not two, but three traffic citations and federal and county tax
liens against him, both resolved. (Hmmmm, criminal!) He made a friend in the grey-
hound-breeding community and took her to lunch at “Thai, Brazilian and other ethnic res-
taurants” but “was reluctant to talk about much besides dogs and trains.” (Hmmm, evasive
luncheons at foreign restaurants!). This last quote—“reluctant to talk about much besides
dogs and trains”—was especially disingenuous, as it immediately followed a paragraph in
which the friend described Sanchez as often talking about his partner, their house, his
childhood, animals, and 4-H. And yet, it is described as weird that he socialized with a
woman in her 70s and did “unusual” things like wearing a tuxedo to a dog show. Another
neighbor reported that “Sanchez once told him that he knew some teenagers enamored
with trains that he’d occasionally wave to on his route,” and the lengthy profile concludes
with the specter of Sanchez messaging the “teenage rail enthusiasts.”
The stereotype of the lonely, wounded gay man courting the enthusiasm of enam-
ored teenage boys is far from subtle. As a nation, we continue to be in the grip of an on-

206
going pedophilia panic and, certainly without excusing child abuse of any form, the bog-
eyman of a sick sexual predator confirms and reinforces the constitution of a sick tech-
nology user. The biological illnesses, mental illnesses, criminal background, and other
suspicious details all reinforce this.
As does arguably, race and sexuality, which appear more overtly pathologized as
the story expands beyond mainstream media, in reader comments,
v
websites, blogs, and
alternative media. A Boston gay news organization, drawing on the LA Times and AP ar-
ticles, pushed the suicide angle with “Bereaved Gay Man at Controls in L.A. Train
Crash” (Melloy, 2008) without explaining why he was still bereaved after more than five
years. A conservative blog, picking up on reports from LA-area talk radio that also drew
on LA Times and AP reporting, ran a post titled “KFI: Metrolink crash engineer was psy-
cho gay killer” (Varones, 2008) pushing not only the suicide angle but that his partner’s
family believed he had also murdered his partner. Conservative political group (and sup-
porter of the then-current campaign to ban gay marriage in California) Campaign for
Children and Families bannered their website with the headline “LA train engineer was
an unstable homosexual” (“Off the rails,” 2008). A website associated with David Duke,
WhiteCivilRights.com, ran the headline “Gay Latino Train Engineer Texting Boys, Killed
Pedestrian Before Big Crash” (Buchanan, 2008), also drawing on mainstream media re-
ports to craft this portrait of Sanchez and adding the element of a fatal pedestrian colli-
sion with a train Sanchez reportedly was helming. Another white supremacist site, News-
Net14 (“Global and Local News for Europeans Everywhere”) ran with “Gay Hispanic

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train engineer crashes train while texting young boys, kills 25” (2008). One conservative
blogger quoted the entire CBSNews.com article, “Details In Train Engineer’s Troubled
Past Emerge,” as support within his own post titled, “Homosexuality is a Dangerous
Mental Disorder. Study: Homosexual lifestyle strongly linked to depression, suicide”
(Mathis, 2008).
More recent reports have come out as the investigation progresses that Sanchez
once put a teenage boy at train controls, a blatantly illegal and unsafe practice, but,
moreover, one which calls to mind the sodomy-like pose of Sanchez standing behind the
boy, perhaps even with arms around him or hands on his shoulder.
vi
Some evidence has
continued to suggest the signal light may have been malfunctioning, and that the driver of
the other train tested positive for marijuana. Sanchez did not but, revealingly, the mem-
bers of one of my focus groups transferred this detail onto him. While they at first had
concern for Sanchez as merely distracted by a technology that they had been discussing
negatively, this switched when the pedophilia allegation was brought up, and then rein-
forced by the incorrect association with drug use. The chain of pathologization clearly
shifted blame from system and technology to the individual:
FEMALE: Wasn’t there a story about a train that—and the texting.
FEMALE: Yeah.
…
MALE: Yeah, the whole [inaudible]
…
FEMALE: I don’t know the total details, but I just knew that they thought
it was caused because he was texting- (agreeing at once)
FEMALE: He sent one 15 seconds before the-
MALE: He didn’t hit the switch. The switch would have put the trains on
different tracks, but he was texting and passed the switch out and bam.
MODERATOR: Did anyone not hear of this story?

208
FEMALE: I didn’t.
MALE: How many people died? I don’t remember how many people [in-
audible]
MOD: Quite a few of them.
MALE: 65 people died.
MALE: Yeah. It was pretty bad.
FEMALE: Too many.
MOD: Did anyone hear in the news coverage on this or in talking to other
people of any other factors that were involved in the accident other than
the texting?
MALE: I thought they said somebody was in there with him.
MOD: Somebody was in the-
MALE: Yeah.
MALE: That he’s had someone in there before.
MALE: Oh, yeah, that’s what I mean, before.
FEMALE: Yes.
MALE: [inaudible] that was on a train, and he actually took on a ride.
(agreeing at once)
MALE: And that supervisor got fired over that.
MALE: But there was another guy-
FEMALE: The text message-
MALE: There was another guy in another way going the opposite way
who was texting him as well, texting him back.
MOD: In the oncoming train?
MALE: I think it was the oncoming train, and you know, so they were
both texting each other, and they have per second the last text in between.
…
MOD: Did anyone hear anything about anyone involved in that accident?
MALE: Yeah, he tested positive, didn’t he?
MOD: I’m asking-
MALE: I heard he tested positive. I work for [governmental agency].
FEMALE: Positive for what?
MALE: Marijuana.
FEMALE: Oh.
MALE: That’s what I heard.
MOD: Who was it that tested positive?
MALE: The driver of the train that was texting. That’s what I heard. I
don’t know if it’s true or not.
MOD: Anyone else heard? (talking over)
MALE: [A person I know] died on that train.
MOD: Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.
MALE: And he tried talking her into going for the train ride that night,
and she had to stay at work and work overtime.

209
MOD: Did anyone hear anything else about this engineer and the acci-
dent?
MALE: I didn’t hear anything about substance abuse.
FEMALE: Neither did I. They might have kept that out of it. [the media]
MOD: Anything else about him or his personal life or anything?
FEMALE: Well, I heard that he was depressed. You know, he had a rough
life, going through some depression.
MALE: He was texting a 12 year old.
FEMALE: Yeah, he was texting young kids.
MALE: A lot of minors, young kids.
FEMALE: Really? Because I didn’t hear that.
FEMALE: Yeah, young boys which is-
MOD: How many people had heard that aspect? [counting] Two?
[others saying no at once]
MALE: Which one, the substance thing?
MOD: Well no, that the people he was texting when he was-
FEMALE: About texting young kids.
MALE: So he was a pedophile? Yeah, I didn’t hear that.
FEMALE: Well, you don’t know. He may have just gotten along with
them.
MALE: If you’re texting little kids, it’s a problem.
FEMALE: He was smoking drugs.
MALE: When they’re not your children.
MOD: There are a lot of different aspects of the story that were floating
around.
MALE: Yeah, right.

Again we see how pathologization works to obscure systemic factors: the trans-
portation infrastructure, the working hours and conditions, the mental health of a gay La-
tino widower in a racist homophobic culture with no national mental healthcare. Even if,
for example, homosexuality was correlated with depression and suicide, it doesn’t mean
homosexuals are inherently sick more than the conditions of a homophobic culture drive
them to suicide or depression. Or, for another example, as one comment posted on the LA
Times article about Sanchez protested:
the nomadic lifestyle? hey, come’on. this is what happens when every job
out there is 'temporary' and the idea of a real working class 'career' with

210
the same company in the same location is just kaput. This is how people
live nowdays. (Quinones, 2008)

As Kirby (1997) argues in her study of railroads and early silent cinema, the train
engineer is a paradigmatic figure of America, the West and all its national mythos, and
masculinity. Therefore, a gay Latino filling those shoes in California, a western state em-
broiled in a gay marriage legal battle, and, more specifically, Los Angeles, epicenter of
immigration protests and controversies, is in many ways an unsettling image to begin
with, and the rush to pathologize and condemn him supports longing for traditional no-
tions of nation, masculinity, and sexuality. Sanchez offers a scapegoat for anxieties
around these changing social roles and ongoing debates. Moreover, there is a long history
of using minorities as examples of the mis-use of new media, as negative examples in
explaining and teaching the use of emergent technologies. “Sanchez at the Throttle” links
historically to “Cohen at the Telephone,” a 1916 comedy routine of a stereotypical Jewish
man’s ineptitude with the new device (which was the first-ever million-selling comedy
record in the US), or the stereotypical feminine clumsiness and predilection for gossip
presented in the training films for telephone usage described earlier.
Desire and Distraction
The focus groups I conducted were largely bereft of sympathy for sufferers of technopa-
thologies. Sufferers were not even viewed as unfortunate, but criticized with outright hos-
tility as “paranoid,” “lonely, and “old” “hypochondriacs” that should be told to “shut up.”
The participants generally found technologies powerful, important parts of their lives—
yet strangely immutable to change and exempt from responsibility. Rather than designers,

211
manufacturers, or the free market perfecting a consumer product, the consumer was ex-
pected to adapt to the product. The onus for healthy technological relations was solely
that of the user.
In cases of Mismanaged Bandwidth, consumption, entertainment, and stimuli-
seeking all have a distracting effect. Jogging down the path, distracted by happy music,
we do not hear the rapist approaching. Texting friends at work distracts us from seeing a
warning signal and we crash our train. But note the process by which the user is again to
blame. How dare she wear a Walkman while jogging alone—it’s almost like she was ask-
ing for it! How dare he text while on the job—you know it’s because he’s a dirty brown
pedophile! Consider the double standard: we are constantly bombarded with incitements
to do these exact things. Images of women out exercising alone with headphones on have
been a hallmark of advertising, from recent iPod ads to the very first magazine ad for the
Walkman. Wireless phone carriers have been waging a marketing bombardment to en-
courage texting anywhere, any time (how many times must the mantra “always con-
nected” be repeated?), for over a decade in pursuit of the revenue stream seen in Asia.
Moreover, even leftist academics celebrate the people-power of texting “smart mobs”
(Rafael, 2006; Rheingold, 2002) to challenge global banking oligopolies and topple gov-
ernments. When such strong exhortations repeat from such extreme ends of the ideologi-
cal spectrum, how dare anyone blame the victim for doing exactly what they were told to
do in so many circumstances from so many corners? Diseases of Mismanaged Bandwidth
are pathological dissimulation from the very choruses of media use they exemplify. As

212
feminist theorists applied in their analyses of anorexia nervosa and agoraphobia, the pa-
thology is actually the social ideal: starvation is slenderness, homebound recluses are
merely staying in their proper domestic setting. Headphoned rape victims, train engineers
who cause wrecks while texting at the wheel, and other sufferers of Mismanaged Band-
width are doing exactly what they were told to do.
They are not victims or sufferers of technologies, users who get sick for using
technology wrongly: they are sick because they take it too far. They desire stimulus, me-
dia and information but too much, at the same time, and the wrong kinds. They desire
inappropriately: Not merely desire but the wrong desires: for the same sex, for the wrong
age, for a leadership role for a Mexican-American, for American citizenship, immigra-
tion, for a gay man in a traditionally masculine role.
If Mismanaged Bandwidth disorders can be understood as problems of excessive
and mis-directed desire, of sensory gluttony, then they again echo drugs in evoking paral-
lels to drunken gluttony and stoner munchies, of piggy coke fiends hovering up line after
line, rail after rail, pile after pile of powers and crystals. But the drugs here are media
sensations and stimuli, compulsively gorged on such that they have deleterious impact on
perceptual faculties and environmental awareness.
Multiple vectors of pathologized difference work together to support blaming of
the patient/user. This, in turn, serves to distract from system social or institutionalized
factors. While some members of my focus groups clearly pathologized sufferers of tech-
nopathologies, others were more sympathetic. However, what was consistent was that the

213
parties least responsible were systems and institutions, such as device manufacturers and
government regulatory agencies. The least feasible solutions were activism, litigation,
legislation, and other forms of large social change. The most common and acceptable so-
lutions were individual changes in use—minimization and moderation of use, exercise,
and other self-disciplinary practices, or purchase of protective devices or moving to safer
environments.
Conceptualizing this as attention helps underscore how technopathologies
pathologize the user more than demonize the technology. In one article on the 1982 at-
tempt to ban headphone-wearing at intersections, the New York Times belittled the users
at risk, arguing that, “Only a few pedestrians would be protected from their own oblivi-
ousness by forcing headphone wearers to take them off when they cross the street”
(“Walkman v. Talkman,” 1982). The problem is not the addictive drugs, it’s the drug ad-
dicts. Such personalization of the disease also displaces any social and systemic con-
cerns: Texting or doing email on the job because there’s no time to do it alone. Social
beauty standards and ideals of femininity that require an ambitious female banker to run
compulsively to stay thin and attractive. A lack of social support and mental health care
for a grieving gay widower, who, in lieu of which, encourages him to seek out friendships
and admiration from texting railway fans. A home environment so filled with labor—
professional, family—and entertainment—computer, phone, game system—that the only
place one can enjoy again the pleasure of concentrating on uninterrupted music with
headphones is when working out. A workload and information-saturated mediascape that

214
requires multitasking of listening to podcasts and audiobooks to stay informed and cul-
turally literate within one’s professional or social spheres. The blatant social pathologiz-
ing of Meili and Sanchez shows how technopathological discourse is normalizing dis-
course. They are the wrong kinds of users, and, by focusing on sick users, we lose sight
of what are sick-ening aspects of society.

215
Chapter 6 Endnotes

i
The biological symptoms of this are similar in many ways to neurasthenia.

ii
Such cases suggest the antisocial rudeness of Resistance technopathologies and Audio Zombies,
previously discussed. I do not consider my typology of disease patterns mutually exclusive but often
interactive. Antisocial Resistance can clearly lead to Mismanaged Bandwidth.

iii
Compare the celebration of someone who seeks transcendent experiences through mountain-climbing and
dies from a fall to the condemnation of someone who seeks transcendent experiences through sexual
exploration and dies from a disease or violent partner.

iv
The NTSB had just concluded investigation of a May 28, 2008 rail crash in Newton, Massachusetts,
determining that similar rumors about engineer-texting were unfounded.

v
Most of the 90 comments posted to the LA Times article in the 48 hours after it was published were
critical of this coverage: “los angeles times is really empty of a soul.” However, a few did speculate that
Sanchez’ diabetes or possible act of suicide made him and Metrolink responsible.

vi
The outrage over a visitor in the control room seems less justified when one recalls that inviting children
into the cockpit of airplanes used to be common practice, satirized with pedophilic humor famously in
Airplane!.

216
Chapter 7: Promiscuity: Transdimensional Infections, Reproduction, and Sounding
The Ring

“Stay here and keep watching TV until you die”
– Dead Waves

In an earlier chapter on the Overload technopathology of electrosensitivity, we saw how
technologically facilitated overstimulation of the bioelectrical nervous system echoed the
archaic disease of neurasthenia. These cultural complexes had gendered diagnoses, eti-
ologies, and treatments, which, even when discredited, persisted culturally, as in the se-
questering of feminine discourse in online networks of electrosensitive health activism
and representations of pathologized feminine desire and emergent schizophrenia in Pos-
sessed. At the conclusion of that film, a psychiatrist explained that, “Sometimes … the
wires are crossed. … Shock follows shock until eventually the mind gives way. … In a
biblical sense, we might say that such a person is possessed of devils. And it is the psy-
chiatrist who must cast them out” (Bernhardt, 1947).
That pivot—from devil possession to mental illness—is historically less of a leap
than we might consider it today. The “inventor” of neurasthenia, neurologist George
Miller Beard, wrote an extended parallel between the psychology of the 1692 Salem
witch trials and the trial of contemporary presidential assassin Charles Guiteau: “Both
trials were the result of ignorance of the nervous system in disease—that of Guiteau, ig-

217
norance of insanity; the Salem trials, ignorance of insanity, hysteria, trance, and allied
states, more complex phenomena than those of insanity alone, but all referable to the
nervous system” (Beard, 1882, p. 28). That Beard, a neurologist, expounded on psychol-
ogy in relation to spiritualism, is an example of how less discrete such disciplines and
discursive arenas once were. Beard notes, “My studies of the nervous system have many
times led me into circles quite as superstitious and grotesque as the circle that constituted
the attackers in the witchcraft trials” (Beard, 1882, p. 28)—something no psychologist or
neurologist would likely say today.
Yet, I suggest a dim, unconscious, or collective memory of such associations lin-
gers. In this chapter, associated health, technology, electricity, and the supernatural are
taken to an extreme in Promiscuity technopathologies.
i
In transdimensional infections,
electric communications technologies connect unwise users to harmful supernatural
forces. The technological conduit connects ethereal realms of the dead to the electrical
nervous systems of the living. Although seemingly sheer fantasy today, from the history
of electricity and medical it makes perfect sense. Yesteryear’s ether was closely related to
today’s electricity. My insisting on this historical perspective is intended to resist under
appreciating such narratives as simply metaphoric. In order to appreciate technopa-
thological discourse as having real effects and performing real cultural work, it is neces-
sary to not dismiss even its more fantastic extremes as technophobia. There has been sci-
ence behind them, at different times, in somewhat different ways, but perfectly logical,
very real, and not necessarily replaced wholly by modern beliefs. A recent panic swept

218
Nigeria concerning “satanic” mobile phone numbers. These digits, when appearing on a
mobile phone, would send the recipient into convulsions and fatal vomiting. Fear grew to
the point of telecom companies issuing statements and alerts to contain it; Text messages
circulated listing numbers to avoid. One rumored explanation was that dead spirits were
invading our world. Other theories were less occult:
Aaron Rezay, in another letter to The Guardian (August 2, 2004), noted
that smart Nigerians, with their foreign collaborators may be experiment-
ing on some techniques to beat the Nigerian Communication Commission
(NCC) at their own game, by trying to access the various available net-
works through an unauthorized frequency. In so doing, there would be a
violent audio reaction, which is caused by radioactive or hyperactive (ab-
normally active) sound. This in turn could cause a brainstorm (violent
mental disturbance), which eventually may result in brain haemorrhage
and profuse bleeding. (Agbu, 2004, p. 17)
ii

Although this example is outside the United States, I describe it for the clarity
with which it illustrates multiple forms of Promiscuity, ways in which communication
technologies link to harm. One theory behind the calls suggests Promiscuity’s connection
to harmful elites. The users who cross inappropriate boundaries in “trying to access the
various available networks through an unauthorized frequency” work with suspicious
“foreign collaborators” and try to usurp the national network. No explanation is offered
for why this should entail a violent “audio reaction.” The existence of harmful audio
and/or radioactive frequencies seems taken for granted. There are always boundaries one
should not cross. Moreover, the users are pathologized, suggesting technology marking
the degenerate, as they are bad citizens, “smart Nigerians,” suggesting the sense of cocky,
uppity, or too clever for their own good. The dominant theory, that mobile phones can

219
cross boundaries to the afterlife, suggests technologies allow malevolent spirits to harm
us. All involve users who inappropriately transgressing boundaries—worldly, technologi-
cal, and civic—and suffer as a result.
This chapter focuses on transdimensional infections, which, as suggested previ-
ously, have a deep presence in histories of electric communication technologies and are a
common theme in many fictional narratives. Numerous horror films have involved super-
natural forces coming through a technological conduit to control a person, typically af-
flicting them with scars, disfigurement, disease, pain, and death. My case study here of
Promiscuity will be a transdimensional infection in the form of cursed technologies: the
Koji Suzuki Ringu novels (Suzuki, 2003, 2005, 2006a, 2006b) and their cinematic ver-
sions, remakes, and offshoots (hereafter referred to as the broader cultural field of
Ringu+). Differential analysis will examine how the gendered logics of Promiscuity in-
volve technological subjects who are networked liberally, but connections are differently
valued. Connection is good—users here are not withdrawn or resistant. However, differ-
ential analysis amplifies how acts of “hooking up” are subject to many qualifications and
double standards. Network ties are not merely strong or weak; they can be good or bad. A
connection can be clean or dirty; a node can be a slut. However, drawing on sound stud-
ies, I will argue that Ringu+ is less concerned with inappropriate desire for connection
and more with the consequences of desire: the reproduction of bad technological subjects.
Sick users here are not merely sluts, they are bad mommies.

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History: Degeneracy, Gender, Demons, and Discreteness
At their most basic, cases of Promiscuity echo the historic medical condition of degener-
acy, in which lesser-developed and/or evolutionarily backsliding lifeforms, or the ideas or
habits of such lifeforms, infect, tempt, pervert, or otherwise drag down the normal popu-
lation. A classic example of this would be the historic perspective of female prostitution:
Women become prostitutes because they are constitutionally weaker than men. They
have less ability to resist temptation, persuasion, and earthly pleasures. Note that this is
not merely the pleasure of sex: one historic concern regarding prostitution is women’s
susceptibility to consumer enticements. Shopping and leisure entertainments, such as at-
tending the movies, were feared as presenting women with too many options upon which
to spend money, with prostitution the ready method for refilling coffers. Moreover,
lower-class and women of color were even more susceptible to succumbing to prostitu-
tion. Then, in the classic feminine stereotype of the temptress-whore, they solicit good
and upstanding men, dragging them down into dissolution, both in terms of corrupting
their characters but also in spreading venereal diseases to them, which they, in turn,
spread to wives and children, in a familiar associative logic.
The idea of a corrupting degenerate echoes some seventeenth-century theoretical
physics, such as the “occult super-elemental qualities” of Lisbon physician Duarte Ma-
deira Arrais. In his natural philosophy, mysterious qualities of elements could awaken
similar qualities, previously unseen, in other substances. The most obviously example
would be a lodestone “magnetizing” another object, awakening its inherent force of at-

221
traction or repulsion (Heilbron, 1979). While this is an example of physics, not medicine,
recall that in the past these are not separate realms—especially where electromagnetism
is concerned. Note as well how the triggering of “occult qualities” matches an associative
logic of contagion, like degeneracy or theories of latent homosexuality. In the past, traits
of biological predilection and moral character were not as separate as today distinct biol-
ogy versus personality. A moral failing could be genetic: certain races, genders, ethnic-
ities, and nationalities were considered inherently lacking in moral fiber. For example, a
book on medical uses of electricity details the characteristic features of those with a
“nervous diathesis,” that is, “a constitutional tendency to diseases of the nervous system”:
fine, soft hair, delicate skin, nicely-chiseled features, small bones, tapering
extremities, and frequently by a muscular system comparatively small and
feeble. It is frequently associated with superior intellect, and with a strong
and active emotional nature. By these general features the fine organiza-
tion is so positively distinguished from one of an opposite character that it
is most readily recognized even by those least accustomed to the study or
temperaments. It is the organization of the civilized, refined, and educated,
rather than of the barbarous, and low-born, and untrained—of women
more than of men. It is developed, fostered, and perpetuated with the pro-
gress of civilization. (Rockwell & Beard, 1871, p. 286)

Such racialized characteristics are made more explicit when the authors explain that the
nervous diathesis is also apparently resistant to fevers, adding:
It is among the brain-working class that the nervous diathesis is most dis-
tinctly marked and most frequently observed.
This great law also applies to races and nations. … History and general
observation seem to show that nearly all savage tribes are more liable to
fatal attacks of certain forms of inflammatory and febrile disease than the
civilized. The history of the North American Indians seems to point to this
fact with considerable conclusiveness. Making all proper allowance for the
better sanitary conditions, the higher prudence, and the stronger force of
will in the civilized man, it would appear that he is less liable to contract
certain forms of inflammatory disease than the barbarian, even when ex-

222
posed to the same influences.
The nervous is the prevailing diathesis in the United States. (Rockwell,
1871 & Beard, p. 288)

Assuming degeneracy or the nervous diathesis are discrete relics of discredited
science and colonialist racial ethnography neuters them in the past, exempting the present
from their influence. This is not the case. The Mismanaged Bandwidth case of the Metro-
link train engineer, discussed previously, also exhibits Promiscuity in the panic around
his texting boys—the risk of a degenerate’s influence. Current trends in biotechnology,
psychopharmacology, evolutionary biology, and other fields indicate a resurgence of, if
not the explicit racism, classism, and sexism of this earlier, less-differentiated model, a
re-integration of personality characteristics and biological predispositions.
iii
Even though
being cursed, haunted, or possessed by evil spirits may be one of the most ancient etiolo-
gies of disease, as recent as the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, studies of
demon possession, witchcraft, neurasthenia, and mental disease were part of commingled
spiritualism and philosophy rather than the nascent discipline of psychology (Lutz,
1991a). Even today, beliefs persist of disease as spiritual retribution, such as AIDS, and
demon possession. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal dropped out of the running for the
2008 Vice Presidential slot on the Republican ticket shortly after his writings about per-
forming an exorcism on a woman in college became widely known (Dunn, 2008). A re-
cent documentary (“MSNBC Live Exorcism documentary,” 2007) states that, “According
to [Christian exorcist Bob] Larson, an individual’s psychological problems are the devil’s
doorway into the soul.” Larson immediately says, “Through abuse and torment, demons

223
gain entry, and as a result, they’re hanging onto your life, making you miserable today.”
When Larson also says that “Some of you are in dissociative denial! Some of you have
things that have happened to you in your past, deep, painful experiences,” note the circu-
larity of etiology and association: past abuse and torment is inflicted, yet it is the victim’s
“dissociative denial” and “psychological problems” that are the “devil’s doorway.” A fur-
ther vector of reinforcing individualized pathologization lies in the historic gendering of
spiritualism and mediumship as feminine, seen more recently in Aihwa Ong’s (Ong,
1988) ethnography of possession among female Malaysian factory workers as protest
against dehumanizing factory conditions, religious activists who assert homosexuals are
demons, and the Texas Supreme Court’s dismissal of a lawsuit against a Pentecostal
church for traumatizing and injuring a teenage girl during a forced exorcism.
This is explicit in fictional narratives as well. The film Pulse 2: Afterlife (Soisson,
2008a) is one of a series of four: the original Japanese Kairo (Kurosawa, 2001), the US
remake Pulse (Sonzero, 2006), and two direct-to-DVD sequels, Pulse 2: Afterlife and
Pulse 3: Invasion (Soisson, 2008b). In these films, spirits of the dead discover that elec-
tric communication technologies, from phones and faxes to computers and wi-fi, offer a
path back to the world of the living. Whether because the afterlife is overcrowded or they
merely miss the world of the living (motivations vary across the films), these spirits begin
luring viewers to webcams and websites. They infect them with a plague of suicidal de-
pression (echoing neurasthenia and the zombie hordes of advanced Resistance) that
reaches epidemic proportions, wiping out cities. Other times they directly kill living vic-

224
tims, who become malevolent spirits joining in the invasion. Pulse 2 is particularly inter-
esting for its gendered usership. The story involves a rejected woman—here a divorced
mother, and the spurned female is a trope discussed previously in the film Possessed—
seduced by spirits online. She writes over several diary entries:
Terri signed me up with a dating service ... for losers. ... Spending all my
time in chat rooms. I can’t eat, can’t sleep, it’s a sick world out there. Es-
pecially at night. ... I found a strange website. People actually seem to be
killing themselves in front of their webcams. Once I got over the horror of
it, I realized there was something almost welcoming in their despair. A
kind of shared pain nobody else could possibly understand. ... I must get
these dark thoughts out of my head.

She is ruled an unfit mother and, possessed by spirits, tries to kill her daughter,
but during the process disintegrates into a statue of ash (alluding perhaps to the Biblical
story of Lot’s wife) and fully entering the spirit world. She proceeds to torment her ex-
husband and daughter, attacking his new girlfriend, a jealous tramp, and turning her into
a spirit as well. The two women, formerly rivals, then cooperate in killing the man. In
short, the technology-facilitated possession by spirits in this film is centered on weakened
women, hysterical in their jealousy and out-of-control desires. Although evil spirits are
the culprit and technology the conduit, the victims are also to blame, pathologized by
their own susceptibility as degenerates: the crazy bitches get sick and fatally infect the
normal man.
Cursed Technologies and Reproduction of Subjects: Ringu+
I turn now to a specific type of transdimensional infection, cursed technologies, in the
cluster of films and novels associated with Ringu. Although the events of the original

225
three novels and story collection—in English, Ring, Spiral, Loop, and Birthday—do not
unfold in a linear fashion, I will relate their events in chronological order for clarity: Sci-
entists working on artificial intelligence create an electronic world called The Loop. Al-
though it mirrors our world, it is not a virtual world in the sense of a fake environment
with which we engage, but more an electronic Petri dish or terrarium in which sentient
digital lifeforms are born and evolve in an accelerated but parallel path that mirrors hu-
man evolution. The Loop is a digital reflection of humanity, yet wholly autonomous. At
one point in Loop history, a psychic woman is publicly humiliated and commits suicide.
Her bastard child, Sadako, who is intersex or hermaphroditic and has even stronger psy-
chic powers, attempts a career as a stage actress but also suffers humiliations, a sexual
assault, and a fatal attempt on her life. Furious with the world that has hurt her, and with
her own inability to have children, just before her death she mentally wills her rage into
an open television-signal frequency and onto a videotape being recorded. Burned into the
filings of the magnetic tape are a disturbing series of images from her life. This tape in-
fects its viewers with a “ring-virus” that kills them in a week if they do not make a copy
of the tape and show it to some new user, reproducing the cycle. As the tape-viewing
spreads virally, Sadako’s spirit manages to impregnate a woman and enter the world of
the living. Reporters investigating the fatal videotapes write up the story, which becomes
a hit book and movie. However, these mediated versions of the narrative also carry the
same viral curse as the videotapes. Through their spread, and the methods by which Sa-
dako has learned to physically reproduce herself, Sadako clones repopulate and eventu-

226
ally take over the world, snuffing out genetic diversity and killing the human race.
However, all of this is only within the electronic world of The Loop. Scientists
observe its events through computer visualizations, watching the virtual world unfold at
its accelerated pace, and revisiting its past. (Although the Loop-world has died, because it
was all digital data, its every moment and inhabitant was stored, and therefore Loop-time
can be rewound and replayed.) Unfortunately, at one point the ring-virus crosses over
from the Loop into the “real” world, unleashing a cancer-like plague that threatens to de-
stroy our world as well. Through communications and character-transfers between the
two worlds, interventions in the events of Sadako and the ring-virus halt its spread, re-
storing balance to the Loop world and stopping the cancer plague in ours.
Numerous films have been made from these books: Ringu (H. Nakata, 1998),
Rasen (Iida, 1998), Ringu 2 (H. D. Nakata, 1999), and Ringu 0: Batsuday (Norio, 2000)
in Japan; The Ring Virus (Kim, 1999) in Korea, and The Ring (Verbinski, 2002), The
Ring Two (H. Nakata, 2005), and Rings (Liebesman, 2005) (an interstitial short film) in
the US. In Japan, there have also been television versions; throughout Asia and in the
West there have been many films and TV episodes and anthologies exploring similar
themes, such as One Missed Call (three Japanese films and one US) (Asou, 2006; Taka-
shi Miike, 2003; Tsukamoto, 2005; Valette, 2008), the previously discussed Pulse films,
Phone (Ahn, 2004), Txt (Tuviera, 2006), and Dial D for Demon (Hin-Sing, 2000). The
first Ringu film was unprecedented both in its local popularity and international impact,
sparking not only these imitators, but also stylistic innovations of the horror genre and a

227
new uptick globally in the cyclical popularity of the horror genre. In Japan, it even
spawned its own technopathology, with Sadako becoming a common vision in a wave of
kanashibari, or childhood night terrors (Schegoleva, 2001).
Ringu+ is clearly about usership. The Ring Virus (Kim, 1999), a Korean version
of the first novel and the film which hews most closely to the books, opens with the cam-
era slowly tracking across a variety of communication technologies: from a close-up of
analog television static (similar to the iconic opening shot of Poltergeist), the camera
creeps upstairs to a bedroom, showing a VCR, CDs, computer, cell phone, pager, and
Walkman. The tracking shot terminates with a young girl unnaturally contorted atop her
bed. Although we soon realize she is doing yoga, her awkward position foreshadows the
fatal convulsions the virus causes, as well as the possession contortions in much Ringu-
inspired Asian horror, such as the One Missed Call films and moments in the Ju-On se-
ries (Shimizu, 1998, 2003, 2006). Moreover, her location on a bed suggests sexual posi-
tions, and, as I will describe, reproduction is a central theme of Ringu+. The girl’s un-
natural state is linked with media use from the establishing tracking shot and a pager that
commences buzzing the moment we see her in this position. This underscores the film as
a narrative of usership, as does the pager’s message, which we will learn later to have
been, “Did we see what we were not supposed to see?” After this shot, a friend calls and,
during the course of their conversation, dies from the virus. She listens to his death throes
as her TV turns itself back on, and a white-out signals her death from the virus.
Such anxiety around media and communications technologies has been read as

228
symbolizing the returns of various repress-eds—traditional folkloric culture, pre-
industrial relations, feminine sexuality and intuition—through their medium of oppres-
sion—technologies representing modernity and the West. Alternately, with their titular
central-core imagery—circles and openings repeated visually and conceptually through-
out with well-openings, gaping mouths, eyes, moons, round mirrors—Ringu+ is ripe for
gendered, psychoanalytic interpretations. However, I offer a different understanding of
these texts, developed from a sound studies perspective. The sounds of Ringu+ will lead
us to their focus on the reproduction of self and others as users.
The first element of a sound studies approach is, simply, paying attention to
sound. Looking for and listening to sound helps one attune to significant moments in the
narratives and major fulcrums of the plots in Ringu+ that might not be noticed or noticed
in the same way if one simply takes them as visual narratives, which their orientations
around looking at videotapes or a virtual world suggest. Yet sound studies readies one to
notice representations of sound at key moments: The title’s English homophone of multi-
ple meanings across the same sound—“ring” as geometric circle, cycle of repeated
events, wedding band, or hailing sound of a telephone—is not an accident of translation
but explicitly noted in the book, and each of these meanings are relevant. In the first cases
of ring-virus death, a warning of impending death is announced by a mystery phone call,
moments after viewing the tape. The appearance and disappearance of these calls are a
crucial clue in geographically uncovering the mystery. The psychic powers of Sadako
and her mother, which attract to them their humiliations and sufferings that incite the nar-

229
ratives, are indicated by a high, metallic screech or whine, a sound that recurs in the imi-
tation films as death rattles and gasps of telephonic spirits and demons. Sadako’s public
humiliation, and the ruining of what appears to have been her one chance at happiness,
has to do with the inappropriate public playing of audio tapes, implicating betrayal by her
one and only potential lover, a theater troupe’s sound effects man. Moreover, the telling
of this back-story serves in the books and films as what humanizes Sadako, transforming
her from wrathful spirit to a more sympathetic monster, in the classic tradition of gothic
horror, such as Frankenstein, the ür-text of gendered technology narratives. Sound, there-
fore, is not only a signature marker of the series and its villain/heroine, it is central to the
inciting events of the narrative, and those are the narratives by which sympathetic in-
tersubjective understanding of the villain, and thereby her redemption, is achieved. Sig-
nificantly, the final image of the books is one of intersubjective communion bereft of vis-
ual contact. Furthermore, the telephone rises in significance from an adjunct technology
in the first Ring narratives to the central technology in many Ring-inspired films, such as
Phone, the One Missed Call films, Txt, and Dial ‘D’ for Demon, suggesting the impact of
the aural aspects of The Ring narratives.
Sound performs similar work of humanizing in Jon Cruz’ (1999) work on slave
songs as a crucial empathetic link in the abolitionist movement. Sound not only provided
for expression, community, and identity building among American slaves, it also, he ar-
gues, was a major medium by which whites came to see them as fully human: it commu-
nicated a degree their subjectivities, reproducing a degree of their suffering for whites to

230
experience. Cruz’ work is representative of body of sound studies work theorizing consti-
tution of subjectivities, which aids in reading Ringu+. Aural practices such as improvisa-
tion, spoken word, and verbal play have been examined as processes of collective identity
formation (Becker, 2000; Keil, 1994; Mackey, 1986, 1993), and audio technologies have
been analyzed as facilitating communication of and interplay between a variety of subjec-
tivities. At a literal level, audio technologies contribute to the formation of subjects
through cybernetic means: transmitting information relevant to understanding that subjec-
tivity. For example, in terms of regional or ethnic identities, hearing the sounds, musics,
voices, and tongues of a Polish radio program enable its audience to better understand
themselves as Polish-Americans. Combined with the nation-building and -binding effects
of communications media in general, audio plays a major role in forming national sub-
jects. Gendered, sexed, and sexual subjectivities are brought into play as well, whether in
feminized practices of consuming audio, such as Adorno’s emotional and rhythmically
obedient listener-types or in gendered fan practices (Gottlieb & Wald, 1994; Wald,
2002). Feminist musicology has seen gendered subject formation in the very structure of
Western serial composition (McClary, 1991, 1993), and queer scholarship has explored
identification processes between sexuality and opera recordings and collectors (Kosten-
baum, 1993). Sound is involved in counter-subjectivities of subcultural identity forma-
tions and practices, such as the ska and blue beat of Jamaican immigrants appropriated by
along class lines by British skinheads, or communities of 8-track collectors and rave en-
thusiasts. The formation of broader subjective categories, such as past/present,

231
real/fantastic, geographic/personal, and self/Other, is explored in, for example, Kun’s
(2005) work around Tijuana and various analyses of exotica music (Lanza, 2004; Taylor,
2001). Race has been a heavily analyzed vector of sonic subject formation. For example,
Gilroy (2003) describes how music acts as a technology of community and continuity for
African Diaspora. The production of African-American subjectivity and modernity
through oral/musical and literate/written interplay is central to Moten’s (2003) work on
the history of subjection and formation of black avant-garde and that of Weheliye (2005)
on the potentials of technological mediation. Raw sound materials have been appropri-
ated and reworked for racial self-expression, such as turntablism, scratching, sampling,
percussion, vocoders, and reggae dub and dancehall sound systems (Gray, 2005; Henri-
ques, 2003; Rose, 1994; Weheliye, 2002, 2005). Aural markers of racial difference are at
once known, expressed, and communicated, yet demonstrated as highly contingent, un-
stable, and mutable when “original” songs, melodies, or narratives are reworked through
genre, voice, lyric, (re)appropriation, remix, mashup, and cover version Lipsitz (1994).
Sound studies provides rich resources to theorize sound as constitutive of subjectivities,
and sound is central to Ringu+.
However, I wish to refine constitution to something more specific to Ringu+: not
simply the production of subjects but their re-production. Ringu+ are narratives obsessed
with reproduction: The Loop is a reproduction of our world. Sadako is the child of a psy-
chic and sick man, reproducing their traits. Although Sadako’s pathologization evokes
earlier discussions of feminine neediness and sensitivity—her desire for love evoking

232
Louise from Possessed or her daughters, the crazy jezebels and clinging vines of Poison
Ivy, Fatal Attraction, Hand that Rocks the Cradle, and Obsessed—the true terror of Sa-
dako lies in her reproductive capabilities, which challenge heteronormative patriarchy
through various forms of asexual reproduction. Sadako reproduces herself as a pregnancy
in one woman, as a virus on the tape, and the tape reproduces itself through news stories
and films. Reincarnating a central character’s dead son is the mode by which a human
becomes a traitor to Sadako’s cause; another character is reproduced both within the
Loop world and in our world. Another Loop character is reincarnated in our world as a
scientist’s son. The “cure” for persons infected with the ring virus is to reproduce the tape
and an audience for it. Suzuki notes in his biographical statement that he is “a respected
authority on childrearing and has written numerous works on the subject” and wrote Ring
“with a baby on his lap.” Reproductions continue in the films, themselves reproductions
of the novels, which also prominently feature reproduction of the curse and its secrets
through phone calls, gossip, and web-based clubs of thrill-seeking teens. Finally, any nar-
ratives about communications media evoke reproduction. Broadcasting’s semantic roots
lie in agriculture—reproducing crops—and evangelizing—reproducing the word of God
and his subjects (Hamilton, 2007). As Benjamin (2005) most famously explores, commu-
nications media are inherently about reproduction of formerly singular cultural objects.
iv

Furthermore, each “new” communications medium reproduces formal qualities and usage
practices of previous media (Grusin, 1999; Manovich, 2001; McLuhan, 1994, 1995).
What subjects, then, are reproduced in Ringu+ narratives? Technological subjects.

233
The Sadako clones that repopulate and take over the Loop in the novels and, in the films,
the surviving or healthy technological subjects are those appropriately disciplined in their
technological practices: They join Sadako, they reproduce the virus. These subjects are
constituted through the contradistinction of pathologization: the “bad” users who connect
indiscriminately to supernatural toxins are abnormal, sick users from whom we perceive
cultural ideals of healthy, normal, good users. The users of Ringu+ are literally ill, physi-
cally and mentally. They watch a tape, receive a call, or read a book and become nau-
seous, sickened, anxious, and emotionally labile, and then often die. The screech of Sa-
dako and her mother is painful, like extreme tinnitus: In a scene from Ringu 2, patients at
a mental hospital become agitated and violent from hearing it. In various Ringu+ plots,
characters are hospitalized or institutionalized from traumas associated with aspects of
the ring virus. Moreover, the books reveal that this is not psychosomatic or a purely ethe-
real, psychic curse: the ring virus is a real virus, a hybrid of Sadako’s DNA and the
smallpox virus that was reproduced in her from her rapist, which then becomes a form of
cancer in the “real” world. Indeed, the disease of smallpox is, like sound, crucial to the
events of Ringu+. Sadako’s death and rape occur on the site of a former smallpox colony,
her rapist a former doctor there and the last surviving smallpox-infected person in Japan.
It is also where the first viewing of the infected tape occurs. Moreover, it is on this site
where bad users of technology start the plague: In the novels (unlike the films) there is a
patient-zero videotape, an epidemiological epicenter. The tape, when first viewed, had
instructions at the end explaining that, to save themselves, they must copy the tape and

234
show it to someone else. The vacationing teenagers who first view Sadako’s creation,
thinking it a joke, intentionally erase over the instructional section of the tape, imagining
that this will make it even more scarier to those who find and view it next. The Patients
Zero of the ring-virus epidemic are technology users who do not follow the directions—
bad users—and apocalyptic horrors result. Indeed, users are given directions throughout
Ringu+: “You should screen your calls,” schoolgirls warn in One Missed Call (Japan).
“Don’t look at the phone,” warns a woman blinded by the curse on her Phone. Direction,
protocol, and procedures multiply as teens tell each other how the ring curse works, what
you’re supposed to do and not do, and provide instructions for participating in Rings. As
the son says with shock, in one of the most horrifying surprises in the American Ring,
“That’s not what you were supposed to do!”
The Ringu+ narratives represent the “bad user” as not merely a slutty user who
hooks up promiscuously to dangerous supernatural forces, but one who cannot control the
reproductive consequences of connecting. The problem is not simply the bad girl, but the
bad pregnant girl who produces more bad subjects, draining the welfare state, swelling
the lower classes, being unproductive, ending diversity and life in the Loop, and infecting
the “normal” population. The promiscuous user crosses boundaries there for our safety,
bringing demons and cancers into the realms of those who were good to begin with. She
is Patient Zero, the deserving sufferer who passes her disease on to “innocent victims”
such as crack babies, innocent children online, and heterosexuals.

235
Differential Analysis: Hooking Up
Although I refer to Promiscuity in the sense of indiscriminate connections via communi-
cation systems, the language of networking and home electronics persists in the sexual
meaning of promiscuity: consider the colloquialism for casual sexual encounters, “hook-
ing up.” The form of differential analysis I will apply here is to examine how hooking up
varies, specifically drawing on feminist theorizations of a previously described postfem-
inist cultural sensibility.
What does hooking up suggest in the context of a postfeminist culture? A com-
mon analysis would be that, although the cultural value placed on “hotness” suggests per-
sistence of an ethos of feminist sexual freedom and liberation, the actual containment
seen in numerous paradigmatic postfeminist narratives suggests the opposite. Hotness is
de rigueur, but teen girls’ blowjobs or “complete lack of back-door shyness” on the new
Beverly Hills 90201 and United States of Tara, respectively, set negative examples and
draw the line. Promiscuity is acceptable in terms of display—the exposed midriffs and
booty shorts of Girls both Next Door and Gone Wild—but sluttiness is still sluttiness.
Perhaps even more so, as its libratory politicization is rendered as quaint, archaic, or mis-
guided. Postfeminist hooking up is, in short, a tease.
This suggests then a qualification of technological “hooking up,” which tends to
be absent from discourses of media and communications. From the rhetoric of cell phone
advertising to academic network theories, connection tends to be viewed as a universal
good. Being and staying connected is good, and more connections are always better.

236
Negatives tend to be bracketed in terms of visibility, as when technologies of connection
elicit privacy and surveillance concerns. However, the mere state of hooking up or plug-
ging in is unquestionably good. Differential analysis recognizes that all hooking up is not
viewed equally. There are certain things a good user doesn’t do, and a user who does do
them, or does them at the wrong time, in the wrong way, with the wrong person—well,
she is sick.
Differential analysis, then, drawing on insights from feminism, naturalizes the in-
discriminate connections of Promiscuity. They are not accidents, they are the rule.
Pathologizations of users who blithely connect to deleterious forces are not exceptions
but morality tales of indiscriminate hooking up. Moreover, feminism calls attention to the
seemingly contradictory rhetoric around this: The healthy user is connected, yes, but—
although loudly celebrating and displaying her connections and connectivity (How many
Facebook friends do you have?)—she is not too freely connected, as is the sick user (To
Catch a Predator, anyone?). This feminist perspective again calls attention to tropes of
blaming the victim. For example, the Promiscuity example of connection to harmful
elites, here using extra-low-frequency (ELF) mind control, makes this explicit, in lan-
guage that suggests the feminized penetration of disease and culpability of the patient.
Indeed, the sufferer, given such degenerate habits, here is arguably asking for it:
Think about what you do that allows it in ... Anything that opens the root
chakra opens you to ELF. Drinking alcohol, smoking, illegal and legal
drugs (including prescription and over-the-counter), and even some herbs
open the root chakra. Anything that sexually stimulates the root chakra
area opens you up, ready to receive ELF and the programming that it con-
tains. This means anytime the genitalia responds to anything you are a
candidate to receive programming, from advertisements to movies and

237
books, to sexual activity. (Swerdlow, 2008, p. 320)
The degree to which you are affected is a direct result of many factors,
from your location to your personal receptivity to these waves. (p. 330)
If you are receptive to ELF, there is a part of your mind-pattern that is al-
lowing it in. The most important part in keeping it out is correcting the
mental imbalances that allow it to enter into your auric field in the first
place. Like so many things, the basic mind-pattern behind allowing in ELF
is a victim mentality. (p. 332)

Although powerful forces have controlled all humanity for “aeons,” and their mind-
control technologies cause your illnesses, such sickness is nevertheless largely due to
your licentious behavior, sexuality, and character defects. A feminist is immediately
struck by the significance of a phrase such as, “Think about what you do that allows it
in.”
Gayle Rubin, in her influential essay, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory
of the Politics of Sexuality,” argues that there is a “hierarchical valuation of sex acts”
(1993, p. 297). That is, some sexual acts, pairings, genres, props, positions, or styles are
seen as better than others: they are more respectable, safe, and/or healthier (note again the
association between moral judgment and medical pathology). Among many provocative
moves in the essay, Rubin suggests than anti-sexual Puritanism is not the problem; the
problem is how difference plays out across sexuality. She examines sexuality as a vector
for differential analysis, and, although her specific focus is on sex and sexualities, she
gestures to the abstraction and generalization of her analysis:
Progressives who would be ashamed to display cultural chauvinism in
other areas routinely exhibit it towards sexual differences. We have
learned to cherish different cultures as unique expressions of human in-
ventiveness rather than as the inferior or disgusting habits of savages. We
need a similarly anthropological understanding of different sexual cul-
tures. (1993, p. 297)

238
Here Rubin suggests that the Eurocentric chauvinism of imperialist colonizers, scientists,
and reformers toward “savage” native populations parallels the scorn for unfamiliar (and
oftentimes deemed “savage”) sexual acts. Just as the one field has changed its perspective
into a new relation of difference, so should the other. Worshipping the sun is no more un-
evolved Christianity than polyamory is unevolved monogamy (nor necessarily the re-
verse, as some would argue).
Rubin’s sexual differential analysis could be applied to technology. There is
clearly a “hierarchical valuation of technological acts.” My project seeks to demonstrate
such valuation using medical paradigms, however, one need only look at discourses in
the 1990s on netiquette and Internet newbies so see similar hierarchical valuation in ac-
tion: “HOW DARE YOU TYPE AN EMAIL IN ALL CAPS?!” Moreover, Rubin’s sex-
derived analysis is particularly apt, as sex is, in many ways, potentially the ultimate in
connection or hooking up: orgasm as networking, in which nodes enmesh and transcend
their singularity. And, if all sex acts are not the same, neither are all connections. This is
the first insight of differential analysis: to ascertain (and then map) the differences and
their hierarchical valuation, to acknowledge the “the political dimensions of erotic life.”
Note “dimensions” suggests multiplicity and variation; it is not “the politicization of
erotic life.” Therefore, I suggest analysis of the political dimensions of technological life.
As suggested earlier, the intersection of these provides a starting point. Legislation at-
tempts, such as the Communications Decency Act and Children’s Online Protection Act;
panics, spectacles, and other cultural excitements over internet predators, online kiddie

239
porn in newsgroups, or (blue)toothing and sexting—all of these indicate intersections of
devalued sexual acts and actors (childhood, intergenerational, representation, exhibition-
ism, voyeurism, promiscuity, fornication) and devalued technological acts (seeking love
and affection online, blurring distinctions between public and private, circumventing pa-
rental and other authorities, inauthentic misrepresentations of self).
Particularly suggestive of this has been the recent controversy over teen sexting:
the kiddie porn panics of the 1980s and 1990s
v
succeeded in strict definitions of what
constituted child pornography: any representation of a child—even a drawing that never
involved an exploited live model— in which the child could be interpreted in a sexual
way—the child did not have to be naked or posing lasciviously. Nude family photographs
or recontextualized clothing catalog pictures were inclusive, and their sharing was a
crime. Therefore, the sharing of naked, lasciviously posed, and provocative images of
underage children sent through mobile phone messages were clearly distribution of kid-
die porn. Except, wait a minute, the pictures were taken and sent by the models them-
selves to partners and friends. Even if forwarded or posted subsequently by others with-
out the originator’s consent, it was still argued by some that the originator was at fault for
posing for, taking, and sending the picture in the first place, and they were threat-
ened/charged with kiddie porn laws. Others argued this was absurd and blaming the vic-
tim; sexting teen girls were clearly not child pornographers. This conundrum arises from
incompatible vectors of difference: the sexual prohibitions created in the 1980s and 1990s
were based on a hierarchical valuation of sexual acts—eroticizing youth and representa-

240
tions of sexuality in general. What was not anticipated was that technological advances
could one day make the “victims” and “perpetrators” of such acts the same person. Sex-
ting girls could not be purely innocent victims because, not only were they committing
devalued sexual acts, but devalued technological acts—using technologies to circumvent
parental authority and social mores.
vi
As technological users and sexual subjects, they
were clearly on the wrong end of the hierarchy—yet this was incompatible with one of
the strongest vectors of difference in Western culture: age. Their deviance as technologi-
cal and sexual subjects was incompatible with their privileged status as innocent children.
Moreover, their gendering as female and their middle-to-upper class status made them
difficult to frame as juvenile delinquents. In sum, there are hierarchical valuations across
sexuality and many other social fields, and they do not exist or operate in isolation from
one another. Sexting girls are examples of technopathological promiscuity, if compli-
cated, in that the harmful agents they connect to can begin as benign friend or lovers, but
progress to embarrassing audiences beyond, including those who forward, comment
upon, or repost the images maliciously.
As these and other technopathologies of Promiscuity make clear, all networking is
not equal. There are bad forms of hooking up. A good user connects, but knows her lim-
its. In short, she is not a slut.
Ah, yes, but who isn’t a slut in postfeminist culture? And, if there is a dominant
sensibility of having achieved sexual liberation, isn’t sluttiness celebrated rather than
denigrated? As suggested previously, libratory rhetoric of women empowered by sexual

241
liberation are in many ways illusory, in a fashion parallel to the libratory rhetoric of users
empowered by interactive technologies. Such illusory rhetoric of liberation is a trope of
postfeminist culture, part of a sensibility that includes willing sexual subjectification
combined with a focus on individual empowerment and an accompanying “almost total
evacuation of notions of politics or cultural influence” (Gill, 2007, p. 153). Within this
context, then, what is a slut?
Not an easy question to answer. Journalist Ariel Levy suggests a distinction be-
tween the noun “slut” and the adjective “slutty” as an appearance or affect. It may be a
prize toward which some teens strive for “bragging rights”—playing games such as “slut
on the bus,” in which the winner is the first to have participated in ten sexual acts named.
Yet other informants make clear a distinction between a hypersexual appearance and ac-
tually being a slut who has sex. “These are not stories about girls getting what they want
sexually, they are stories about girls gaining acclaim socially, for which their sexuality is
a tool. While it would be ‘weird’ for a teen girl to pursue sexual gratification, it is crucial
that she seem sexy—raunchy, willing, wild” (Levy, 2005, p. 145-146). In contrast, a pro-
slut and pro-postfeminist essay in a feminist e-zine does not acknowledge this distinction,
and defines slutting as triumphant escape from the gendered double-standard that for-
merly prevented women from sexual liberty: “Postfeminism is all about CHOICE. You
can choose to have sex now, later or never, who to have sex with, not with, what to wear,
what not to wear, what to do or not do, etc. Complete and utter liberty” (Mansbridge,
2008). In Feona Attwood’s recent literature review of work of the term, some scholars

242
specified that the hypersexuality of postfeminist subjects signified sassiness, not slutti-
ness (Griffin, cited in Attwood, 2007, p. 242). Others saw sluttiness as a marker only for
specifically raced and/or classed white/trash sexuality (Penley, White, cited in Attwood,
239). Attwood concludes that “the slut” is an ambiguous discursive space. Unlike the
classic virgin/whore dichotomy, it is unclear exactly what constitutes a slut today. Such
ambiguity may render it potentially productive (Griffin, cited in Attwood, 2007, p. 242),
but ultimately, Attwood concludes, it is an impossible ideal.
vii

The impossibility of ideals is evidenced by limit cases, situations under which
their logics fail.
viii
What are the limits of a postfeminist slut? Where does the appropri-
ately networked user cross over into being a promiscuously hooking-up sicko? Many
possibilities spring to mind. For one, self-sufficient lesbian sexuality—consider the po-
tential for online economies to provide economic empowerment and independence for
women and other disempowered by patriarchy.
ix
Arguably the fascination with online
mail-order brides involves not only the titillation of such a blatant “political economy of
sex” (Levy, 2005) but also the threat of online resources facilitating female escape from
various cultural, geographic, economic, or familial constraints (if for not always better
situations). There also remains the fear of voracious, needy feminine desire: what would
Possessed’s Louise do today with AdultFriendFinder.com, mobile surveillance systems,
and personal data mining?
Is the specter of the slut simply one of rampant, empowered feminine desire? Or,
as analyses of postfeminist culture suggest, is desire not the problem, but actually desire’s

243
potential effects? Angela McRobbie sees the issue as not so much about sex in and of it-
self, but in reproduction and childbirth as markers of being lower class, about mother-
hood without sufficient support so that cultural and economic productivity is hindered (A.
McRobbie, 2009). One does not have to look far for anecdotal evidence of this argument:
the obsession with reproduction, paternity tests, and parenting on the talk shows of Jerry
Springer and Maury Povich; the trend of pregnancy narratives Juno, The Secret Life of an
American Teenager, Baby Mama, and Knocked Up. Through these and other popular dis-
courses, the class-based aspects of reproduction that McRobbie suggests are reiterated.
When associated with lower classes, pregnancy evokes the welfare state rejected by neo-
liberalism and the specter of unproductive subjects in general: mothers removed from the
workforce, children ineffectively raised due to limited resources, consumption limited to
spending on childrearing. Excessive—excess arguably the always-lurking shadow side of
late capitalism—multiple births are the fascination of reality TV shows such as Jon &
Kate Plus 8, 18 Kids and Counting, Table for 12, Raising Sextuplets, and the in-
development project of “Octomom” Nadya Suleman. In the latter case, her status as a
“welfare mom” fueled the transformation from multiple-birth starlet to object of scorn.
Similar dynamics were at play in media frenzies around Britney Spears and Sarah and
Bristol Palin, or shows such as 16 and Pregnant and I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant.
Moreover, class dynamics function in reverse and complicated directions: the fascination
with Madonna’s and Angelina Jolie’s interracial adoptions suggest class mobility as a
form of racial transcendence, yet Kate Gosselin’s perceived evolution from regular-mom

244
to greedy celebrity was branded as “From Mom to Monster” by Star the same week as
Time pondered “The Mystery of Michelle [Obama].” My point is that, while I agree that
working-class motherhood is a marker of problematically unproductive reproduction, I
also want to suggest this is a complicated dynamic, as reproduction and meanings of
motherhood occur differently across not just class but race, sexuality and gender (e.g.,
Oprah’s two-time “pregnant man”), and other vectors of difference. It therefore has dif-
ferent impacts on productivity, consumption, and labor, and these are perhaps more
acutely felt in times of environmental consciousness and economic recession, both em-
phasizing scarcity of resources. I would expand McRobbie in arguing that, while thought-
less reproduction may have specific class-based association, it also more broadly calls
attention to general cultural anxieties around mothers and motherhood. It is not only that
lower-class mothers are reproducing, it is that we are in the midst of a panic around the
definitions and expectations of motherhood.
Therefore, the slut remains ambiguous because the issues of slutting’s conse-
quences are unresolved: reproduction, but also disease, contraception, and abortion. Just
as postfeminist culture espouses an illusory rhetoric of feminism already achieved; the
rhetoric of sexual liberation is illusory: The “effects” are not dealt with, freedom from
reproduction has not been achieved. It’s not just about hooking up to bad things that hurt
you, it’s about reproducing more bad things: unproductive subjects, cycles of sexual
abuse, myths of homosexual recruitment, compulsions and addictions. Bad reproduction
is that which produces unproductive subjects. The pregnant mother is removed—for as

245
little time as possible—from the labor market. Reproduction hurts productivity and con-
sumption. Unauthorized reproductions online threaten the stability and integrity of con-
sumers’ market profiles. Do we target the sexting girl with ads for Barbie, Victoria’s Se-
cret, or Seventeen magazine? Moreover, her inappropriate technological use risks the
greatest unproductivity at all: her disconnection from the network, her removal from the
online economy, whether by parental punishment or legal retribution. Discourses of slut-
tiness sidestep concerns and controversies regarding sex education, childcare, birth con-
trol, and access to health care, that contribute to unproductive reproduction. As we saw in
my analysis of Ringu+, the ultimate problem involved is reproduction without control, a
needy woman whose desire to reproduce is unproductive to the point of destroying the
entire world. This gendered logic applies to technology. The user is connected, but knows
her limits, as we saw in the example of sexting and various social networking controver-
sies. These limits apply to not only with whom she hooks up, but the resultant reproduc-
tions. Reproduction in this case being, not in the sense of children, but in terms of repro-
ductions of her self and subjectivity. As Chun writes,
Rather than simply allowing people to exercise what Walter Benjamin
once called their “legitimate claim to be reproduced,” the Internet circu-
lates their “reproductions” without their consent or knowledge. … Compu-
tation’s rampant reproductions … literalize control. This control gives us-
ers greater access to each other’s reproductions. Putting [internet traffic
reading software] sniffers into “promiscuous mode,” for instance, accesses
all the traffic going through a cable. (Chun, 2006, p. 4)

Technopathologies of connection indicate the impossibility of a human “promiscuous
mode”—we cannot monitor all traffic, all circulation. We know our unauthorized repro-

246
ductions are in controllable, uncontrollable, and ambiguous circulation, from our Nin-
tendo Wii avatars visiting the homes of friends to chain-postings warning of our personal
photos appearing in Facebook ads. Unsurprisingly, one case of a less extreme form of
Promiscuity, in which technologies merely mark a degenerate or delinquent, involves
blaming TV for contributing to teen pregnancy (L. Harrison, 1980).
In conclusion, technopathologies of Promiscuity perform again perform cultural
work in of blaming the individual, but differential analysis drawing on feminism and
sound studies suggests it is not only the individual sick user that is the problem, it is their
reproduction of new sicknesses and new sick users. This focus obscures, among other
things, issues of motivation: What needs does promiscuity fulfill? Why do teen girls feel
the only, or the best, or the most important route to validation is through sexualization?
What drives the popularity of social networking sites? What gaps in mental health treat-
ment and social services drive sociopaths to seek others online? What pains does the de-
linquent assuage in mediated culture and communion? Pathologization also obscures the
role of men of other partners in reproduction: Where is their responsibility in this?
Clearly they are involved in heterosexual promiscuity and reproduction, yet variously
pathologized women remain the focus. Where is the male partner? Moreover, where are
the sexting or harassing gay men? Or, for that matter, lesbians? Sadako may have been
about to reproduce through her atypical biology and psychic gifts, yet arguably it is the
acts of men in her narratives that drive her to reproduce her curse. Rhetorics of choice
notwithstanding, this suggests perhaps that double standards persist: it is more acceptable

247
for some—typically men—to network promiscuously. For example, common in transdi-
mensional infections is the male priest or shaman, an expert brought in to “handle” the
malevolent force one has connected to. Most famously, this happens bereft of technology
in the Exorcist films,
x
but in a specific technopathological context in both US (Valette,
2008) and Japanese (Takashi Miike, 2003) versions of One Missed Call. In this series of
Ringu rip-offs, a spirit sends voicemails from the future, with a signature ringtone, that
allows the recipient to hear the sounds of their impending death. In a climactic scene in-
voking the spirit force for a live reality TV program, the male evangelist in the US ver-
sion explains, “Spiritual energy exists in the same electromagnetic spectrum as light or
microwaves. It’s no surprise it can travel through cellular phones. And it grows there like
a seed, where it eventually manifests as hallucinations, spiritual disturbances, and finally
death.” Possessing this knowledge, he then commands the demon, “Be gone from this
cell phone!” Even if these male exorcists subsequently fail, they are positioned as noble
heroes with the authority and power to mediate worlds, instead of being the victims of
technopathologies, sickened from unhealthy connections, or the partners in (re)producing
them.

248
Chapter 7 Endnotes

i
Promiscuity involves connection, not content. It does not involve cases of unhealthy genres or narratives,
differing in several ways from the social-scientific tradition of “media effects” research (e.g., whether
pornography is addictive or violent cartoons induce aggression). Such content does not transform the
carrier technology—pornography and violent cartoons do not make their magazines or televisions
inherently toxic, as do curses. Similarly, avoiding a particular channel, publication, or genre can block
dangerous content, whereas promiscuous connections to, for example, sociopaths, can occur on any
telephone or social networking site, making the entire communication technology suspect and risky. In all
of these cases, harm is inscribed in the medium. Furthermore, the malevolent agent, whether ghost or serial
killer, is concrete. They have more sentience and agency than a nude picture or splatter film; they directly
communicate with their victims. In content-based, media-effects research, the “evil” is abstracted into
harmful representations: exposure to evil ideas as opposed to evil itself. Finally, the threats here are not
dependent on susceptible users. A cursed text message or possessed record album can hurt any user; the
media-effects model, as it has evolved, is much more focused on at-risk audience populations (e.g., the risk
to children of porn on the Internet).

ii
The scholar writing on the Nigerian “killer calls” appropriately warns readers not to dismiss the panic as
primitive hysteria, and cites a continuing history of similar panics in the industrialized West (Bartholome &
Wessley, 2002).

iii
The implications of this only reinforce a neoliberal, entrepreneurial perspective of sickness as one’s own
responsibility, echoing the emphasis on personal choice and individualism in postfeminist culture.

iv
Although, as Weheliye (2005) notes regarding Benjamin, the original is perhaps weakened by the copy,
but the very notion of the original’s aura is also constituted by and requires the copies, making the
reproduction of copy/original actually a two-way, mutual re-production.

v
For background on these, see Rubin, Califia.

vi
For more on this see (Hickox, 1992).

vii
Queer writer Patrick Califia’s comments on a related impossible ideal, that of sex radicalism, could well
apply: “We are pretending we have already arrived, achieved legitimacy, and taken our place at the table.
What pathetic crap” (Califia, 1994, p. 20).

viii
See discussions of limit case as method in Weber, TJ Clark, and Ginzburg.

ix
A purely anecdotal observation suggestive of a topic for future research would be the predominance of
queer and transgendered persons involved in early web design and site-building.

x
Although the resort to electro-cerebral technologies of EEGs to control supernatural hooking up appears
in similar forms in both Exorcist II: The Heretic and Ringu 2.

249
Chapter 8: Feedback: Repetitive Stress Injury, Internalized Assessment, and Ad-
justment

In this chapter I turn to perhaps one of the most familiar technopathologies, that of repeti-
tive stress injury, as a case study in the Feedback disease frame. Here, the sick user’s
body is damagingly invaded by the technology, whereas a healthy user’s body is merely
flexible, adaptive to the technologies. Previous chapters have examined a technopathol-
ogy across varied sites and texts, here I wish to instead focusing on a single artifact, a
cluster of four illustrations, each containing a photograph, diagram, and captions. The
cluster forms the dominant visual of one webpage, the “Computer Workstation eTool”
(“Computer Workstations,” 2003), part of the Safety and Health Topics section of the
larger website of the United States Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health
Administration. Using techniques of visual studies and drawing on insights from Fou-
cault, Foucauldean feminist work on the body, my focus groups, and the history of ana-
tomical drawing, I will argue for a differential insight of temporality. It is not merely that,
in technopathologies of Feedback, the healthy user is constituted as having a pliable and
willing body, but that this is an ongoing process. Here, the two-way flow of energy and
influence between user and tool is not a moment of injury or a single adjustment. Moreo-
ver, it is not merely that users must adjust constantly, but that that adjustments are in re-
sponse to judgments. Contrary to celebratory rhetoric around technological systems of
feedback as inherently empowering users, Feedback evaluates bodies in wrong positions,

250
actions, shapes, or orientations. These cycles are internalized and personalized, and, as
we have seen throughout, disease diverts attention from systemic and social factors. In-
deed, Foucauldean scholar of risk and insurance, François Ewald, writes that the increas-
ing focus on genetics as the source of illness could be a cultural shift that
spells the end of the vision of illness inherited from Pasteur: that of an
event caused by aggressive outside agents, against which the organism de-
fends itself. In its place, we are presented with the notion that each of us is
the source of our own health, that we are not handed the same deck of
cards by nature, and that there is nothing we can do about it. Pasteur’s vi-
sion was more comfortable: it meant we were not personally responsible,
it considered us to be victims of illness, even though, by means of an em-
phasis on hygiene, it made public health a collective responsibility. The
genetic vision makes us responsible for our illness: powerless, but respon-
sible nevertheless, since we are the source of our own illness. And even
more so in the sense that it makes us responsible for managing out health
optimally. (Ewald, 1999, p. 18)

While Ewald’s specific subject is health insurance and genetic testing, it applies quite
readily to the expectation of the user to take responsibility for their own technopathologi-
cal prevention and cures, as in adjusting their bodies to the postures and comportment
suggestion to prevent repetitive stress injuries. Such opinions were repeatedly asserted in
my focus groups. In the case of the ergonomic illustrations, I will argue that this is ac-
complished through a combination of internalized medical and aesthetic gazes, which
work to constitute a healthy user as one who is successful in participating in ongoing
feedback and adaptation, and in the joining of mechanical and organic.
Theories of Looking, Bodies, and Judgments
There is a history and a genealogy to medical looking, to seeing bodies with a clinical eye
for health and pathology. The early books of Foucault examine the process of discursive

251
constitution of subjects: how the individual comes to know him- or herself as an individ-
ual and, moreover, as a culturally and historically contingent construct of a specific type
of individual, with specific delineations of subjectivity—rather than simply growing into
or embracing a transhistorical essence, in the liberal humanist tradition of a natural, uni-
fied subject. Most famously, in A History of Sexuality: Volume I (Foucault, 1990), Fou-
cault examines the shift from “abnormal” sexual acts to abnormal actors, exploring how
classification and prosecution of homosexual acts by institutions such as medicine, crimi-
nology, and sexology created a discursive formation, a structure of power and knowl-
edge, that allowed the Homosexual as an identity to come into being (and, ironically, gird
subsequent liberation movements). In his works on the history of ideas—specifically, the
idea of certain categories of identity and subjectivity—Foucault charts how the perime-
ters and articulations of knowledge at a particular time and place—the “horizons of the
imagination”— map subject-positions available within a discourse to be taken up, and
positioning subjects within that discursive formation. Particularly in the early trio Mad-
ness and Civilization (1988), The Birth of the Clinic (1994), and The Order of Things
(2002) —whose conceptual unity Foucault stressed (1998, p. 326)—he explores, respec-
tively, the conceptual models, theoretical networks, and categorical options that make
possible institutional structures and arrangements regarding psychopathology, clinical
medicine, and natural history. In these archaeologies of varied but related sciences, he
delineates the process of knowing one’s self and place in the world. In The Birth of the
Clinic, Foucault performs a structural analysis of “not only medical discourse, but of the

252
very possibility of discourse about a disease … the conditions of possibility of medical
experience in modern times” (1994, p. xix). He examines a history of medical perception:
looking at bodies sick and healthy.
i
He describes the development of a “medical gaze”
during the Enlightenment, a process by which the practice of medicine shifts from a doc-
tor asking a patient, “‘What is the matter with you?’” and, consulting his archive of ar-
cane knowledge, choosing the appropriate classification of affliction and remedial treat-
ment, to one of asking, “‘Where does it hurt?’” and observing the disease manifest within
the patient.
Disease breaks away from the metaphysic of evil, to which it had been re-
lated for centuries. … Disease becomes exhaustively legible. … It is when
death became the concrete a priori of medical experience that death could
detach itself from counter-nature and become embodied in the living bod-
ies of individuals. (1994, p. xix)

In this reorganization of what can be medically seen and said, of how elements of the
phenomenon of pathology are reconceived and redefined, the ontology of disease moves
from an outside agent to the individual itself. Foucault outlines “a welding of the disease
onto the organism” (Foucault, 1994, p. xix), arguing that, in the early 1800s, “the being
of the disease disappears” (1994, p. xix). Disease changes from a thing, an essence, to an
action—that action being the patient’s response to something in their environment. It is a
shift from disease as invasion or attack to disease as reaction: “Disease is now no more
than a certain complex movement of tissues in reaction to an irritating cause: it is in this
that the whole essence of the pathological lies, for there are no longer either essential dis-
eases or essences of diseases” (1994, p. xix). Moreover, this process has entailed a bring-

253
ing into the bright light of the medical gaze “the whole dark underside of disease” (1994,
p. xix)—death. Foucault summarizes this complex process in his conclusion:
For clinical experience to become possible as a form of knowledge, a re-
organization of the hospital field, a new definition of the status of the pa-
tient in society, and the establishment of a certain relationship between
public assistance and medical experience, between help and knowledge,
became necessary; the patient had to be enveloped in a collective, ho-
mogenous space. It was also necessary to open up language to a whole
new domain: that of a perpetual and objectively based correlation of the
visible and the expressible. An absolutely new use of scientific discourse
was then defined: a use involving fidelity and unconditional subservience
to the colored content of experience—to say what one sees; but also a use
involving the foundation and constitution of experience—showing by say-
ing what one sees. It was necessary, then, to place medical language at this
apparently superficial but in fact very deeply embedded level at which the
descriptive formula is also a revealing gesture. And this revelation in turn
involved as its field of origin and of manifestation of truth the discursive
space of the corpse: the interior revealed. The constitution of pathological
anatomy at the period when the clinicians were defining their method is no
mere coincidence: the balance of experience required that the gaze di-
rected upon the individual and the language of description should rest
upon the stable, visible, legible basis of death. (1994, p. xix)

That is, modern medicine relied on demonstrating the disease through speaking of one’s
perception of it, a process based on dissection of bodies of the dead.
ii
“Death left its old
tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret”
(1994, p. xix). Disease is understood in terms of death, and, moreover, the individual is
understood in part through disease. Western culture’s
first scientific discourse concerning the individual had to pass through this
stage of death. Western man could constitute himself in his own eyes as an
object of science. … From integration of death into medical thought is
born a medicine that is given as a science of the individual. And, generally
speaking, the experience of individuality in modern culture is bound up
with that of death. (1994, p. xix)

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The bounded, unitary subject is known through the finitude of mortality, and honed
through specific variations of disease.
The space of disease is, without remainder or shift, the very space of the
organism. The medicine of diseases has come to an end; there now begins
a medicine of pathological reactions, a structure of experience that domi-
nated the nineteenth century, and, to a certain extent, the twentieth, since
the medicine of pathogenic agents was to be contained within it, though
not without certain methodological modifications. (1994, p. xix)
iii

I have chosen a set of ergonomics diagrams as this chapter’s artifact for the clarity
with which they suggest Foucault’s medical perception: the swollen tissues and sore
joints of repetitive stress injuries are clearly “pathological reactions” to the user’s envi-
ronment. While not fatal, I suggest Death still hovers over them. Their forward-looking
preventative format—“Do this or else you will suffer”—evokes the ultimate “or else,”
death. One could protect oneself from outside, invading agents forever; the prevention of
decay and injury, however, evokes the body’s inherent fragility, vulnerability, and, ulti-
mately, mortality.
Arguably the intellectual move of centering social analysis with the body begins
with feminism. Understandably, then, a large body of feminist work has appropriated and
expanded upon the work of Foucault, theorized looking and diseased bodies, but in more
specifically gendered terms. While not contradicting Foucault’s theories, it adds the im-
portant point that all bodies are not the same. If Foucault argues that perception consti-
tutes, feminist scholars add that perception constitutes with specificity. Teresa de Lauretis
(1987) points out that, while Foucault and other discursive, postmodern, or poststructural
theorists do move thinking past essential, natural identities of difference, they do so at the

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expense of moving into a position of generalized one-sexedness, one that erases or denies
sexual differences in women’s subjectivity, their histories of oppression, and the prior
epistemological contributions of feminism. Attempting to redress this, de Lauretis theo-
rizes the gaze of the cinematic spectator rather than medical professional (although her
theory is certainly applicable). Conceiving of cinema as one of many social institutions of
power and knowledge that produce gender—gender conceived not as a thing, but as a
representation of relations—she theorizes the cinematic gaze as a “technology of gender.”
De Lauretis combines Foucauldean constitution of subjects with Althusserian ideological
interpellation and Lacanian psychoanalysis to argue that the differential categories of
gender as social construction are both the product and processes of representation and
self-representation, of which motion pictures are a major technology and practice that
ideologically function in this production of gendering. Laura Mulvey (1975) draws on
Freudian psychoanalysis to theorize a heterosexual, gendered division of labor in the
cinematic gaze: the active male viewer looking at the passive female image. Agency and
control are culturally more invested in the active, male viewer: he who gazes has more
power than she who is gazed upon. Although she asserts that her theorizing is specific to
film, it is relevant here, particularly in conjunction with de Lauretis: the medical gaze
similarly produces sick and healthy subjects, with evaluations and thereby agency, con-
trol, and power attached. Gender is constituted through not only who is looking and how,
but also what is looked at. Subsequent feminist scholars have taken ideas of power, look-
ing, and constitution of subjects into explicitly medical realms, examining with a gen-

256
dered perspective the practices of medical looking (L. Cartwright, 1995; Dijck, 2005;
Hartouni, 1997; Laqueur, 1990; Maines, 1999; O'Connor, 2000; Park, 2006; Schiebinger,
1987). The medical gaze constitutes not merely individuals, but gendered individuals
through power relations and processes of looking medically.
While there have been many other amendments, critiques, complications, and re-
workings of gaze theory, including its reversal in postfeminist notions of the empowered
object (Baumgardner, 2004; Berger, 1977; Gill, 2007; Hall & Rodriguez, 2003; Holm-
lund, 2005; Sturken & Cartwright, 2001), what I wish to maintain and reiterate here is the
notion of looking as relational and evaluative. Viewing and being viewed are not neutral
display or inspection but value-based flows of assessment and judgment. Far from neu-
tral, a gaze assesses—even, or perhaps especially, when the subject is the object, as in
these diagrams.
As mentioned earlier, another feminist, differential insight I wish to now bring
into the discussion is a vector of further specificity: that of temporality. The technique of
differentiating the phenomenon asks not only how it plays out over different types of
bodies, but at different times. While Foucault addresses that lives end, and in this finitude
the bounded individual is known, it is also important to realize that a gaze likewise must
end. A gaze is not infinite. We look to other things and, potentially, return to look again.
Such finite temporality underscores looking as a process, as relational, and as evaluative.
As Sarah Banet-Weiser has written, the content of much online interaction in the media
practices of young women and girls tends to be evaluative of the user, forming part of

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normalizing discourses of ideal femininity and gender (Banet-Weiser, in press). Just as
feminist theories of the gaze located viewing relationships in gendered hierarchies of
power, here the gaze is expanded to interaction: looking becomes “look at me” as girls
post videos and photos in anticipation of evaluative responses, ratings, comments, and
other feedback, to be received and incorporated into future, adjusted, postings and per-
formances. Just as feminist scholars explored the power differential in active and passive
looking, here the power differential is examined in the evaluative nature of interactions,
recognizing the imperatives for change and conformity its judgments contain. Or not. The
termination, continuation, re-focusing, or returning of the gaze are all decisions, choices,
judgments of whether or not the object of our inspection is still worthy of our looking at
it. (Here we find ourselves again considering the politics and economics of attention sug-
gested in the earlier chapter on Mismanaged Bandwidth.) Usership is also constituted
through the acts and relations of looking, especially medical looking. Usership is consti-
tuted through not only who is looking and how, but also what is looked at, the evaluative
information imparted from such looking, what adjustments are made based on that
evaluation, and what happens again when of if the looking is repeated.
Both Foucault’s medical perception and feminist gaze theory posit a separate
looking subject and object, but what about when these are one and the same? Foucault’s
subsequent work, such as Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality series, does
examine the idea of an internalized, self-monitoring gaze, but does not do so with as
much of a specific context of medical perception and disease. Feminist theorizing has

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also done so, particularly in terms of beauty standards and body norms, in which a femi-
nine subject internalizes the masculine, inspecting gaze ascertained from media images of
femininity, and judges her own body on these terms (Balsamo, 1996; Banet-Weiser,
2004a; Bordo, 2003a, 2003b; Joseph, 2009; McRobbie, 2009; McRobbie & Garber, 1997;
Mulvey, 1975; Portwood-Stacer, 2006). In the case of gendered diseases, the disease re-
sults from various reactions to the ideal image: taking its logics to extremes, protesting it,
misunderstanding it. However, what of looking at a picture that is ideal, not as achieve-
ment, but as prevention? What if the idealized image does not inspire disease but is ex-
plicitly one intended to prevent the viewer from becoming diseased? Moreover, what if
the relation to individual subjectivity is even more explicit: it is not merely an ideal im-
age the viewer perceives and then relates to herself—“That is a beautiful woman on the
screen. I think that I might be a better, more valued, more powerful woman if I looked
more like her”—, but it is even more overt in its address for the viewer to interpellate
herself into the ideal image—“You must look like this or else you will not be normal. Do
this or else you will be worse, sick, failed, devalued, disempowered, and possibly dead.”
This is the case with ergonomic diagrams intended to prevent repetitive stress in-
juries, such as those from working on computers. The individual user is constituted as a
technological subject in part through technopathological discourses, such as diseases of
the Feedback pattern. In line with Foucault’s analysis of medical perception, we see not
an invading, evil agent, such as in Promiscuity’s transdimensional infections, but the dis-
ease “welded to the organism,” a literal reaction of an individual’s tissues to their envi-

259
ronment. Moreover, this medical gaze is clearly internalized: the viewer is put in a clini-
cal position of looking at an image and relating it to themselves. Rather than looking at
someone else’s sick body while mentally comparing to an ideal of a healthy body, the
user-viewer here looks at someone else’s healthy body while mentally comparing it to
their own. This process is in line with feminist theorizing on beauty and body ideals, yet
even more explicit. Instead of the viewer thinking, I should be that image, the image ex-
plicitly states, Be this, viewer, or else. Rather than the pathological extreme resulting
from the ideal, the ideal is presented to prevent the extreme. The individual in general is
constituted through pathological discourse and perception, the technological individual—
the user—in specific is constituted through technopathological discourse and perception.
Moreover, as with gender, this is a constitutive process of relations, not between men and
women, but users and technologies. As with gender, there are hierarchies of value at play:
a healthy user is a good user, a productive user, with more social prestige, power, and
(ostensibly?) agency than a sick user. As with gender, we also see differences at play: as I
will describe in my conclusion, the bodies involved vary in terms of class.
Although Foucault can be maddeningly quiet on gender, it is implicit with a minor
amendment: He examines gazes such as those of scientists, doctors, the law, and law en-
forcement. These are all positions of authority and power. The crucial and not insignifi-
cant amendment feminism makes is acknowledging that, in a patriarchal society, author-
ity and power are associated with normative masculinity and the male sex, therefore Fou-
cault is repeatedly analyzing the male/masculine gazing subjects, even if he does not

260
specify this, and the female/feminine objects of the gaze.
But in the case of ergonomic diagrams, the viewer is both. She must view the pic-
ture, but also view herself within the picture, and, in an ongoing process of assessing her-
self in relationship to the picture, sees her body both failing to meet and aspiring towards
that ideal. She must reflexively think as both clinician and patient, subject and object,
masculine and feminine, valued and devalued. I will argue that this process involves not
only the internalization of a medical gaze that Foucault and Foucauldean feminists de-
scribe—with repetition, specificity, difference, variation, and power relations—but also
combined with what I describe as an aesthetic gaze. The user must be not only a doctor
and patient, but also an artist and model.
Feedback, Interactivity, and Repetitive Stress Injury
As described earlier, technopathologies of Feedback can range from portable music play-
ers causing deafness to cell phones causing baldness. All such bodily injuries and muta-
tions can be understood within a classically Marxist perspective as cases in which the
user’s body bends to accommodate the tool, rather than the tool extending and enhancing
the body’s productive capabilities (K. Marx, 1978). In the interaction between user and
tool, the user and her body are more pliable than the device; they are injured by feedback
from the device. Such interaction is here related to the interactivity of much new-media
discourse, when flow between users and communications media is celebrated for ena-
bling the user to provide feedback, to produce changes to content and/or communicate
with the producer or other users. Rather than just sending a one-way message or simply

261
broadcasting a show to an audience, the receiver talks back to sender, the audience tells
the producers what they think about a show. Feedback is the person on the end of the
telephone call as opposed to a letter; it’s the texting hordes of American Idol viewers
whose democratic revolution storms the Bastille of previous oligopolies of elite talent
show judges and A&R executives. As my sarcasm suggests, technological discourse can
embrace feedback uncritically. After decades of one-way media broadcasting controlled
by powerful elites, the ability of audiences and individuals to not only provide feedback
but create their own content has been championed in earlier technologies, such as Super-8
film and cable television public access channels, but exploded with Web 2.0, internet-
driven technologies.
But interactivity is at least a two-way flow, with users not only sending but also
receiving feedback for them as well. Users can not only produce, they can give feedback
on other’s productions and receive feedback on their own in an orgy of comments, rat-
ings, links, stars, forwards, and embeds.
Differential analysis casts a narrow eye on the celebratory hype surrounding on-
line feedback and interactivity, recognizing the imperatives for change and conformity its
judgments contain. It is a constant stream telling you what you are doing right and wrong.
It constitutes an incitement to adaptation. One is free to ignore it–disable comments, ig-
nore trolls, falsify reviews, rate them as unhelpful–but differential analysis recognizes
that freedom does not mean absence of consequences. As a thousand internet marketing
books and user guides will tell you, there are real ramifications for not incorporating

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feedback, in terms of site traffic, search engine rankings, and advertising dollars. Even
narrowcasted, niche audiences have to be given what they want—what communications
revolution is this, then?
Feedback technopathologies are a literalization of this process. Instead of tech-
nologies conveying linguistic or numeric messages of judgment on and assessment of our
virtual selves (hot or not, popularity rankings, incoming links, favoriting, etc.), in Feed-
back technopathologies, technologies directly impart messages of pain and injury upon
our physical selves. Feedback technopathologies are a direct looping back of mechanical
energies into user’s physical bodies. As thousands of ergonomics statements warn, a user
should hold wrists a certain way and sit at a certain angle in relations to computers, lap-
tops, and keyboards to avoid developing soreness in wrists, arms, fingers, neck, back, and
shoulders. Similarly, users of iPods, and Walkmans before them, risked damage to their
hearing anatomy if they listened with volume too loud.
Technological feedback is here embodied in disease, as corporeal maladjustments.
Users over-react, are too receptive to feedback. The shape of the machine and the mo-
tions of its use overpower them, damaging their health. It is bodily pliability taken to the
extreme of fragility or amorphousness. Like an over-sensitive person who can’t handle
criticism, taking it too far, catastrophizing and having an emotional breakdown in re-
sponse (shades of the excessive sensitivities of neurasthenia and electrosensitivity), the
sick user here can’t handle the adaptive messages from the technology, and is physically
damaged by them. Their bodies surrender rather than adapt. One incorporates the tech-

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nology more than one’s body can stand. The subtle messages to use less or use differently
are not heeded, and damage results. The sick user submits too entirely to invasion by the
machine. The criticism, judgment, and assessment are taken too far, too literally, to the
point that the body breaks down.
Device modifications could help with this: you could buy a laptop stand or spe-
cially designed keyboard to stave carpal tunnel; iPods added a setting that users can set to
establish a maximum volume limit. See? Problem solved. However, differential analysis
again sees this as a modification of the player, not the rules of the game. Computers and
their input devices are not permanently redesigned to be more healthful; the user is ex-
pected to adapt their posture and purchase accessories to prevent injury to themselves.
Portable music players are not redesigned to be incapable to issuing deafening volumes;
their users are expected to set this themselves. Those that don’t are bad, stupid users.
Moreover, rhetoric of individual liberty reinforces this: People should be free to play vol-
ume loud or slouch at a traditional keyboard, just as they should be free to smoke or carry
guns. Those who get hurt and complain are bad users; those who want to change the de-
vices or their conditions or use are trying to take away your freedom.
The healthy user, then, is pliable. She is accommodating, heeding feedback in
smaller, more precise adjustments and refinements rather than absolute submission. As
one focus group participant said in response to a discussion of RSI from computers,
“Definitely desktop computers [are dangerous] more so than laptops because you have to
sit in a certain position. [Another female agrees.] You know, if you have a laptop, you

264
can sit in your bed or get comfortable or you can lay on the ground or whatever” (empha-
sis mine). She incorporates feedback and adjusts to suggestions successfully, but without
body breaking down. The user is flexible, adaptive, agile, and willing but not to the de-
gree of losing corporeal integrity, not to the point of fluidity or deformity. The healthy
user bends to the machine; the sick user bends over, and breaks.
The can be seen in the case of repetitive stress injuries and the ergonomic dia-
grams intended to prevent them. To focus on one variation, carpal tunnel syndrome: the
sick user experiences irritation, inflammation, soreness, and sensitivity in the wrists and
forearms. This is due to two aspects of the technological interaction. One is shape: the
lower edge of the laptop, desk, and/or keyboard presses against the wrists and forearms
resting there. This pressure is a message: I am here, we are in contact, you are attempting
to occupy the same space as I. The healthy user heeds this message and lifts her wrists,
typing with arms elevated at the appropriate angle. They may also heed this message by
purchasing a cushion to soften the point of contact. The sick user does not heed the mes-
sage, leaving their arms in place—yet this act of seemingly ignoring the machine is in
actuality a submission to it. As long as the interaction between user and machine contin-
ues, the pressure-message of the machine is stronger than that of the user’s flesh. The
user’s flesh indents, curves, bends. It does not resist the pressure; it receives it. In this
way the machine enters the body. The user does not compromise enough, she accepts the
machine too much on its own terms.
RSI was one of the most familiar and spontaneously recalled technopathologies in

265
my focus groups, and understood as a process of adjustment. As one male participant
said, “Carpal tunnel. That’s basically with the computer. … So, it’s the way your com-
puter is set. If you keep sitting at the same place, eventually you’ll get sore. That’s why
you move the computer or fix the chair.” Note that the problem is your sitting position
and duration, and the way you have set the computer and chair—not their designs to be-
gin with or workloads that force you to be sitting there for so long. Later, when one man
was describing the special ergonomic chair he used to stop recurrences of neck soreness
from sitting at the computer, a female participant made the personalization even more
explicit:
If you have good posture, no matter what kind of chair you’re in, if you’ve
got good posture, you’re going to keep your posture up no matter what
type of chair you have, but I’ve experienced that. Sometimes if I’m on the
computer for hours at a time, which is most of the time, you know, you
tend to lose your posture because you’re tired.

This perspective of blaming users, but then acknowledging that they themselves have the
same problem, was common throughout my focus groups.
The other aspect of the interaction is temporal: quantity and persistence of use, the
repetition of repetitive stress injury. The healthy user takes breaks, does stretching exer-
cises, does not work at the keyboard for too long at a time, for too many days in a row.
The sick user, however, uses too much, continuously, for too long, uninterrupted by
breaks. The sick user is clingy, obsessive, a workaholic. The healthy user steps away
from the machine and shuts it down or puts it to sleep. To use the lingo of couples ther-
apy, the healthy user is differentiated. The sick user is enmeshed in the device, both in

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physical proximity and intermingling but also in the act of use. The feedback from the
machine is, simply, its availability: I am here, I am on, always, always responsive. Use
me. The sick user keeps responding to this, the green power-on indicator light akin to a
two-way radio user’s code “Over” meaning, not finished, but I have understood your last
transmission, made my response, and am ready and waiting for the next communication.
The healthy user can just say no, “Over and out.” The healthy user can walk away, resist
the invitation to continued interaction. The sick user cannot, she acquiesces too much to
the invitation to participate and interact.
Recall as well the temporal aspect to this, Feedback as an ongoing process. Carpal
tunnel pain does not appear instantly. There are warning signs. It progresses, like many
diseases. And again the sick user accepts this, does not adapt to or receive the early warn-
ing messages but instead continues to accept the effects the machine has upon her, until
her body receives its messages so strongly her body breaks down, and she is unable to
continue the interaction. However, a differential analysis asks the question: Who is able
to just say no? Who has the luxury of resisting Feedback?
Looking at Feedback: OSHA’s Ergonomics Diagrams
The eight figures contained within four frames below (Fig. 2) are taken from a section of
the website of the United States Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health
Administration. Within the Safety and Health Topics of the website are a series of
“eTools,” described as “‘stand-alone,’ interactive, Web-based training tools on occupa-
tional safety and health topics. They are highly illustrated and utilize graphical menus”

267
(“Computer Workstations,” 2003, index). Along with their downloadable versions,
PowerPoint presentations on other topics, informational static pages, Expert Advisors
(downloadable interactive programs for assisting with compliance in regulated areas such
as asbestos standards and fire safety), and eMatrix (a tool for hazard exposure and risk
assessment in hurricane response/recovery work), this section of the website provides an
extensive discursive formation regarding appropriate laboring subjects. It is literally the
State telling people how to work. As such, it is discourse with very real effects, such as
lawsuits, fines, and compensation claims. It is part of the production of categories of
good and bad work, good and bad workers.
And, in turn, healthy and sick users. The diagrams below are from the suite of
Ergonomics eTools, a microsite on Computer Workstations. Pages address topics such as
“Selecting and arranging your workstation components,” “Workstation Environment,”
specific workstation components (telephones, monitors, keyboards, etc.), and the page
from which these diagrams are taken, “Good Working Positions.” The diagrams are the
dominant component of the page, taking up about one screen’s worth of real estate on a
two-screen page. The other half is predominantly thin text, with airy spacing between
paragraphs, and consisting mostly of two long bullet lists. I choose to focus on these dia-
grams for several reasons. One is to apply the ideas of this project to a visual artifact and
analysis, and to do so in an in-depth, detailed analysis of a single artifact. Second, while I
would not go so far as to say this is perfectly representative of all ergonomics diagrams, it
does exhibit many conventions of ergonomics diagrams in general and on this website. I

268
also chose this example as one coming from a position of great institutional authority, not
to mention accessibility. The site and diagrams are easy to find and view using standard
web-browsing technology, and do not employ any high-bandwidth features, such as vid-
eos. They are easier to find than, say, an illustration in a manual or textbook, and are easy
to view on even a dial-up connection. They are usable both as the page on the live web-
site and as a downloadable file that could be viewed on an offline computer or presented
to groups in a non-networked environment.

269

Fig. 2: “Computer Workstations.” (2003, April 23). OSHA Ergonomic Diagrams.

270
To provide a brief summary, the field of visual studies examines, among other
things, what sort of viewing practices and, in turn, viewers, are constituted by visual arti-
facts. This is not a deterministic perspective of media autonomously shaping conscious-
ness, but one of articulating technological materials and practices that participate in the
discursive constitution of subjects, following the ideological currents of the society in
which they are embedded. Visual media are arguably particularly apt for examining con-
stitution of subjectivities: Althusser argues that “the structure of all ideology, interpellat-
ing individuals as subjects ... is specularity” (2005, p. 322); a perspective from which his
student, Foucault, famously follows with panopticism (1995). Similar to psychoanalytic
feminism, Bhabha (2005) indicts the “scopic drive,” pleasure in seeing, as a key compo-
nent of power and discipline. Debord’s critique of the contemporary society of the visual
spectacle involved the displacement of action by passive contemplation of commodities
by commodities (Debord, 2005; Jay, 1994, pp. 428-429). Foucault (1995), however, fa-
mously argued this had transitioned to a society of surveillance. Visual scholars have il-
lustrated how analysis of the viewing technologies and practices of looking can suggest
social relationships and subjectivities (e.g., Crary, 1990; S. M. Smith, 2004). Historical
inquiries along these lines include Crary’s (1990) work on the camera obscura and
stereoscope, Acland (2007) on tachistoscopes, Currell (2007) on speed reading and
Friedberg’s (2006) querying the fragmented consciousness of digital windows in graphi-
cal computer interfaces. In essence, the visual inquiry is: What practices of viewing or
use do technologies of representation and visual narratives involve, and how do these

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practices shape concepts of appropriate viewer/users?
To now apply visual analysis to these diagrams, I begin examining certain aes-
thetic and iconographic elements. Common in ergonomic diagrams are the lines of an an-
gle, often drawn along body parts such as the spine or wrist. Here they are layered over
the seat and back of the chair, but clearly indicating the proper-degree angle between
thighs and back. The angles shown include an unspecified but visible 90-degree angle, a
larger one specified in caption as “greater than 90 degrees,” and another described more
precisely as “between 105 and 120 degrees.” These angled lines presume a viewer with
mathematic and anatomical knowledge: she is expected to relate the line to not only the
shown body in the picture but her own body, particularly the angled articulation of thigh
bones, hips, and spine. The diagram does not show a spine; it is not an anatomical dia-
gram. Arguably, the true curvature of the spine would make such a literal illustration too
confusing and seemingly in contrast to the clear, straight angle shown. The viewer then is
expected to relate the angle-line to his or her own anatomies, but not too literally.
The line is also red. It is the only red element to the diagram. It stands out even
more given that the diagrams and photographs are mostly neutrals: black, grey, white,
and beige, the only exception being the blue header band to each quadrant. Red is a color
with a long history as communicative, going back to the iron oxide used in Ice-Age cave
paintings. Red is a color used throughout ergonomic diagrams on this site and elsewhere,
but judiciously, typically to emphasize important elements: body angles, angles of vision,
pain radiating out of a neck, and the angled positions and ranges of motion for arms, el-

272
bows, and wrists. Red not only emphasizes these elements but their medical significance:
from the Red Cross to barber poles, the color has long been associated with blood and
life. Ancient Neanderthals sprinkled red pigment on their dead, it is thought, to restore
corpses to a warm, lifelike appearance. In Christian art, red symbolizes Christ’s blood
shed for our eternal lives, as well as live-giving and victorious Divine love, all providing
our eternal rebirth. Rebirth through national revolution is also suggested through red’s
popular association with socialist and communist movements. Red suggests love, sex,
and the procreative act. In alchemy, red represents sulfur, which forms a duality with the
color white, which signifies the process of transformation, another kind of rebirth. Other
associations of white with death—bones, the pallor of corpses—also explain the
red/white duality, also seen in barber poles and the Red Cross. It is also thought that this
duality relates to ancient theories of procreation, in which red blood mixes with white
sperm to create life, and the two colors coming to represent creation in general. Red sig-
nifies both life and threats to life. Communicating dangerous threats to life constitute
warnings and proscriptions: do this or else risk a threat to your life, as in red stop lights
and stop signs. Here, a warning to hold this posture or else. The red here, and in signifi-
cant elements of other ergonomic illustrations, warns not only that this is what must be
done to preserve life, or healthy living, but also suggests the creation of life, the
(re)production of healthy users, or technologically laboring subjects (Biedermann, 1992).
The gaze here is medical in Foucault’s sense as well, but a medical gaze that is in-
ternalized and reversed. The red lines of posture are also the lines along where pain oc-

273
curs. It is the disease made literally visible, as in the process of the medical gaze Foucault
describes. This is underscored by occasional red elements elsewhere that directly signify
radiating waves of pain. Moreover, the process of associating the patient with abstracted
bodies of knowledge, of relating the symptoms to underlying discursive structures of
knowledge and categories that constitute disease, is suggested here as well by the multi-
modal style of communication. Within each box there is a photograph, a diagram, and
text. The viewer is expected to relate the isomorphic image of the photograph to the ab-
stracted geometrics of the diagram to the linguistic information of the text. This synthetic,
diagnostic mode is one Foucault describes as well, one difference being, however, that
Foucault describes a doctor viewing a patient and comparing them to medical knowledge
and images in the doctor’s mind. How does this patient deviate from health? What dis-
ease does such deviation signify? In contrast, in these diagrams, the same act is per-
formed, but reversed and internalized. The viewer is presented medical knowledge and
images of health to view. They are then expected to compare them to deviations, if any,
in themselves, in a powerful call to reflexivity. The images are taken from a website: you
are literally sitting at a computer while looking at images about how to sit (or stand) at a
computer; the urge to compare-and-adjust is nearly irresistible. The patient and doctor are
united in this model of medical perception, as they compare the visible knowledge in the
diagram before them to the invisible experience in their mind of their own sensations and
memories.

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The Viewer as Constituted
The viewer here is sick. The presumption is that they will not heed the early feedback in
their bodies warning them of approaching disease, and take appropriate measures to pre-
vent it from getting any worse, otherwise why would such diagrams need to exist?
Moreover, the tone and address are directed toward the user, not the manager or trainer of
the user. It is not “Be on the lookout for this” but “[You] do this yourself.” Surprisingly
missing from ergonomics diagrams are good/bad diagrams: do sit like this, don’t sit like
that. This suggests that the viewer may be doing the wrong thing. Better persuasion, iden-
tification, or interpellation will be achieved by a presenting a positive, aspirational ideal,
even though in terms of pure visual communication the message of right and wrong pos-
ture could be communicated more clearly by a juxtaposition.
The viewer needs disciplining. Overdetermination in general suggests anxiety
about these apparently simple modifications and postures, that the viewing subject may
be resistant or unresponsive. Within each quadrant, identifiers are unnecessarily repeated.
For example, the text in the blue header bar reads, “Upright sitting,” immediately below
which a bold-face lead-in to the copy reads, “Upright sitting posture,” as does the caption
to Figure 1 and its mouseover pop-up text (not visible here). Four textual repetitions to
reinforce both a photographic and diagrammatic depiction of upright sitting. Despite the
ideology of isomorphic images these diagrams seemingly operate within, the viewer ap-
parently is not expected to “get it” from images alone. This suggests the user here is con-
ceived as a sick user, someone who does not heed warning messages. Similarly, you can’t

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just tell them something once, you have to tell them multiple times in multiple ways. As
with the poor prioritization of channels of information seen in Mismanaged Bandwidth,
they need direction, focusing of attention, disciplining of distraction. As discussed previ-
ously, the user is stimulation seeking, which justifies the multiple modes and media em-
ployed here (text, photo, diagram, popup, download, repetition, and general superfluity).
One of my focus groups expressed similar sentiment in describing sufferers of RSI and
eyestrain as lazy and too inactive:
FEMALE: Muscular problems in general is just not using your muscles
enough. They get like lazy, like how kids sit on Game Boys all day or
whatever or computers instead of running around playing like I used to do.
So, it’s just in terms of not using it, I would call that becoming weaker.
MODERATOR: So, like muscles atrophying and becoming weak because
they’re not being used as well?
FEMALE: Yeah, they’re not being used. …
MALE: Just sitting down is not good for the disks in your spine. Sitting
down too much watching TV or being at the computer and driving.

The viewer is also feminine. First, the viewer is already sick or potentially sick,
and the associations between disease and femininity have already been discussed. One
woman in my focus group suggested this of RSI in general, by connecting to another
form of feminized loneliness and over-consumption of media:
FEMALE 1: People who are on computers all day, literally playing PC
games all day, I mean that does take an effect on your shoulders and your
necks and yeah, the carpal tunnel syndrome. People would definitely not
even have to sit at a desk job, they could stay on the computer all day and
play a game and get carpal tunnel. Cell phones–people sometimes–it’s just
people are on them 24/7 ….
FEMALE 2: Could I just add something here? When you’re talking
about–I don’t know a lot of people who play games all day long, but I do
remember years ago, I think it was on 60 Minutes that there are people,
mostly women and some of them are truck drivers and stuff, who will read
a Harlequin romance book a day. [Female 1 agrees.] So there are people

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who are so unhappy with their lives that they are looking for an alternate.

In the diagrams, the model is a woman. While many ergonomic photos and illustrations,
at this site and elsewhere, use men or unisex figures, the female model here emphasizes
femininity. A female model could suggest encouraging feminine (sick) viewers to iden-
tify with a feminine image. The feminine viewer is further suggested by the model’s gaz-
ing at screen, not the keyboard, suggesting touchtyping, a feminine skill associated with
secretarial work and often contrasted by masculine over-emphasis on their ability only to
“hunt and peck.” Moreover, it is arguably a lost or disappearing skill, no longer a stan-
dard offering of high schools. Why then, include an illustration that apparently demon-
strates the necessity of a disappearing skill, particularly in a twenty-first century demon-
stration of appropriate techniques for using new-media communication technologies?
And, if it is intended as touchtyping, why not say first and foremost that touchtyping is a
necessary skill for proper posture and computer use? I suggest the relegation of touchtyp-
ing to implicit rather than explicit expression suggests a residual gendering of the tech-
nology of keyboards and an additional gendering of the viewing subject here as feminine.
I’m not suggesting that creators of this diagram explicitly said to each other during pro-
duction, “Women already know how to touchtype, so they can hold this posture, and we
don’t have to tell viewers to learn to touchtype.” What I am suggesting is that underlying
gendered expectations of technology use and the technology user viewing these diagrams
form the logic behind suggesting a posture that, objectively, is not possible for most users
today, because they cannot touchtype. Indeed, one focus group participant discussed lack

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of typing skills as an example of how her mother exemplified a pathologically bad user:
My mother likens herself to the Unabomber, and she can’t even type. In
fact, every time she needs something typed–I bought her a fax machine,
which she can manage. She lives in New Jersey. She will scribble some-
thing on paper, fax it to me, then I have to type it on the computer, print it
out, and fax it back, and then she cuts off the edge that shows it came by
fax. That’s how she types.

Furthermore, despite the overdetermined masculine rationality of these many
charts-their diagrams, numbers, angles, figures, and perhaps even the word “ergonom-
ics”— we are dealing with a traditionally feminine topic, one that has already been sug-
gested several times in my focus group quotes: posture, or to put it more in the language
of Victorian health and beauty guides for women, comportment. It is a subject stereotypi-
cally associated with the nagging female dowager relative: “Grandma used to nag at me /
to straighten up my spine,” sang Carly Simon on an early hit album (Brackman, 1972).
Or, as one focus group participant described:
FEMALE: My mom had always told me as a kid don’t sit that close to the
TV.
MODERATOR: We talked about TV and eyesight, but how would TV af-
fect your posture or your muscles?
FEMALE: Oh, I think just the same. I know me, as a kid, I sat on the floor
and watched TV. So, if you don’t do a lot of exercises or anything I think
to help your posture, as kids, you have a tendency to slump over, and I
think that would develop spinal problems and shoulder problems for sure.

Submitting to or rebelling against such nags is a common trope in narratives of youthful
and adolescent masculinity. Moreover, the subject of posture has a gendered history. A
1869 health and beauty guide for women, written by two male doctors and originally
published as The Laws of Health in the Relation to Human Form, specifies in an early

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chapter, “The Human Figure as a Whole,” that these issues are more important for
women: “What we shall say applies particularly to the female figure. For men and
queens, says an old French proverb, have the privilege of being ugly” (Brinton &
Napheys, 1994, p. 22).
Finally, in what is admittedly unique to this series of diagrams but nevertheless
quite fascinating, is that the diagram—the anatomical ideal to which the viewers are
meant to reduce the photographs and compare themselves—grows breasts. Both the
numbering of the Figures one through eight, and their left-to-right, top-to-bottom ar-
rangement suggest a clear, linear progression and order for viewing the quadrants. In
each progressive quadrant, as the viewer and the model acquire more appropriate pos-
tures and thereby become better users—and the model in the diagram has progressively
larger breasts. This is a somewhat stupefying detail, in which one must take recourse in
the reality of a discourse, rather than of its subjects, referents, or creators’ intent. I cannot
fathom any reason for a designer intentionally doing this, nor is my project here psycho-
analytically framed such that I could argue it is some sort of visual Freudian slip. Yet
there it is, or perhaps I should say there they are, and they certainly contribute toward a
discursive constitution of feminine, diseased users.
Why not put breasts on all four images? I will not argue intent, but I will suggest
this progression speaks to the viewer’s temporality. It has the effect of underscoring the
process of incorporating and adapting to feedback. Constituting the viewer in time is nec-
essary to speak to the position not as a pose but a process. One does not merely adjust

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one’s position, one keeps adjusting one’s position. One thinks of such ongoing, internal-
ized disciplinary practices—the constitution of docile bodies—as explicated in Foucault’s
later work, such as Discipline and Punish, but the idea is present in Clinic as well: “But
Death is also that against which life, in daily practice, comes up against; in it, the living
being resolves itself naturally: and disease loses its old status as an accident, and takes on
the internal, constant, mobile dimension of the relation between life and death” (1994, p.
155). A healthy posture is not achieved but aspired to and continually attempted, as part
of the internal, constant, mobile relations of daily well being. Indeed, movement and pos-
ture are among the “disciplinary practices of femininity” Bartky (1988, p. 65) describes,
along with things such as body size, dress, and makeup, that constitute gendered versions
of Foucault’s docile bodies that willingly participate in their own processes of normaliza-
tion.
Here, discrepancies between photos and diagrams subtly acknowledge that these
are perhaps impossible ideals, at the very least gesturing to the temporal, ongoing process
of adaptation and adjustment: In the photos of Figures 6 and 8, the model’s elbows do not
achieve the 90-degree angle of the corresponding Figures 5 and 7 diagrams. The model’s
head in Figures 4 and 8 tilts forward more than in their corresponding diagrams, which
suggest downward vision should be accomplished only by lowering the eyes, not the
head. In all photos, the model’s arms are angled forward, rather than falling perfectly
down the center of the side of her chest, parallel with her torso, as in the diagrams. In all
photos, each arm and leg is not aligned with the other; the diagrams show pairs of arms

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and legs so perfectly aligned that we can only see the one closest to us, eclipsing its part-
ner perfectly. It is unclear whether this last discrepancy is a deviation or not. It could be a
convention of the diagram to show only one leg and arm in perfect profile, an example of
a viewer who is positioned as capable of the complex medical gaze Foucault describes.
Indeed, the viewer here is capable of medical perception. One aspect of the de-
velopment of medical perception Foucault describes is associated with the development
of pathological anatomy, and the change in the semiotic function of the symptom-as-sign.
In the earlier clinical model of medical perception, a symptom, perceptible from surface
observation of the patient, is a sign of a disease: an observable fever signifies a disease,
such as Yellow Fever. However, the development of pathological anatomy leads to
greater understanding of pathological processes, heretofore invisible, occurring beneath
the surface, such as what Foucault calls tissual communication and tissual reactions
(1994, pp. 149 & 159). Knowledge of these processes leads to a new relationship of
symptom and sign, observable symptoms now better understood as relating to a variety of
possible diseases:
The clinical sign referred to the disease itself, the anato-clinical sign [now
refers] to the lesion; and although certain tissue alterations are common to
several diseases, the sign that reveals them can say nothing about the na-
ture of the disorder: one may observe hepatization of the lung, but the sign
that indicates it will not say what disease is responsible for that condition.
The sign, then, can refer only to a lesional occurrence, never to a patho-
logical essence. (1994, p. 160-161, emphasis mine).

In this new perception, “now the sign speaks alone,” and, although what it says is neces-
sarily true, it is “never quite certain” (1994, p. 160). This new medical gaze, then, is not

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only surface observation but, in mentally referencing bodies’ internal parts and functions,
it is also more spatial, integrative, multisensory, and penetrative. The clinical gaze is a
more abstract and spatial process:
In assigning to disease silent paths in the enclosed world of bodies, patho-
logical anatomy reduces the importance of clinical symptoms and substi-
tutes for a methodology of the visible a more complex experience in which
truth emerges from its inaccessible reserve only in the passage to the inert,
to the violence of the dissected corpse, and hence to forms in which living
signification withdraws in favour of a massive geometry. (1994, p. 159,
emphasis mine)

The viewer of these ergonomics illustrations performs a similar type of perception as they
progress, as numerically indicated, from each diagram to the subsequent, corresponding
photograph. The diagrams are not anatomical medical illustrations, but resemble more
than anything the anatomical dolls of figure drawing and illustration. While they do not
show internal bones, they are suggested by the dots indicating joints. Their separation of
limbs suggests organs, dissection—that bodies are composed of parts. As black and white
line drawings, they are surface and yet transparent: we can view the outline of parts over-
lapping with others. Moreover, relating back to temporality, as van Dijck (2005) has sug-
gested in her study of women and medical viewing, ideals of transparency suggest not
only the ability to alter bodies, but an imperative for their change and improvement. The
viewer here performs a “massive geometry” in putting flesh on these diagrams, relating
them to the photographs, understanding this relationship as a temporal, ongoing process,
and then relating that relation to their own bodies, postures and work processes. The
viewer does not reduce the visible to an abstraction, but, starting with the abstraction,

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progressively embodies what is visible.
Finally, the viewer these images constitute is not only perceiving with a medical
gaze, but with an artistic or aesthetic gaze. What I suggest here is an amendment to Fou-
cault’s medical gaze, which, admittedly, is already quite complex, but it lacks an impor-
tant aesthetic component. While it is synaesthetic in the sense of being multi-sensory—a
gaze that not only sees but hears, touches, feels, and tastes—his analysis lacks an address
of aesthetics in the sense of beauty, of visual standards of good taste. While staging an
encounter between Bourdieu and Foucault on the subject of medicine is beyond my scope
here, I do wish to suggest here that the viewer of this diagram does think aesthetically, as
an artist. First, the resemblance of the diagrams to figure-drawing dolls overtly suggests
an artist’s gaze. Second, although the style of these illustrations is not that of medical il-
lustration, their intent and function most certainly are: arranging and posing body parts
and displaying structured anatomies in the service of understanding disease, both in terms
of treatment and prevention. These may not be “medical illustrations,” but they most cer-
tainly illustrate medicine, and the history of this act is one of tension between empirical
science and humanistic art.
Briefly, early human anatomical illustration was based on animal dissection, re-
vered classic templates in medical books, and surface observation. As with Foucault’s
medical gaze, human dissection makes this process more complex. Leonardo da Vinci’s
fifteenth-century innovations in drawing from dissection and observation inspire the
revolution of Andreas Vesalius, who creates the first complete and comprehensive obser-

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vational human anatomy text in 1543.
iv
Anatomical illustration after Vesalius is not only
scientifically much more accurate, but prettier: in an effort to respect and humanize the
dead, they are classically posed, replicating postures from art and daily life (revived re-
cently in the popular BodyWorlds touring exhibits). An 1852 history of anatomic illustra-
tion presents a teleology in which, beginning in the 1770s, the form is perfected through a
“combination of utmost anatomic truth with artistically beautiful reproductions” (Chou-
lant, 1852, p. 25) as “only the combination of these two tendencies can satisfactorily
serve advanced anatomic science” (Choulant, 1852, p. 25). However, this does not last,
as, in this tension between art and science, art eventually is purged as unnecessary and
unscientific. Scottish surgeon and illustrator John Bell is instrumental in this develop-
ment, with his uncompromisingly brute illustrations and influential books. In his 1794
Engravings, Explaining the Anatomy of the Bones, Muscles, and Joints, he bemoans “the
subjection of true anatomical drawings to the capricious interference of the artist, whose
rule it has too often been to make all beautiful and smooth, leaving no harshness” (Bell,
1794). Sean Smith’s (2006) history of anatomic illustration posits an earlier, crucial turn-
ing point in severing art from science with the new, strictly scientific approach of Renais-
sance anatomist Hieronymus Fabricius ab Acquapendente (1533-1619). This reaction
against art will become the norm such that, by 1926, the eminent American surgeon,
Fielding Garrison, in a limited-edition, privately published history of classical anatomic
illustration, will plea for art’s return from banishment, and make clear not only the impor-
tance of the medical gaze, but also its aesthetic dimension: “The practitioner [of medi-

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cine], … in bedside diagnosis, must cultivate something of the vision and the discriminat-
ing intelligence of the artist” (1926, p. 9). He adds later, “The real physician, born to the
purple, will always be something of an artist in his way of seeing things (1926, p. 56).
My point is that, whether incorporating or excising the artistic elements of anat-
omic illustration, the medical gaze must contain enough of an aesthetic component in or-
der to be able to recognize those artistic elements in the first place. While the sober,
monochromatic, overdetermined rationality of these ergonomic diagrams seems bereft of
artistic elements, I argue their absence is constitutive. The art-shaped hole in these illus-
trations of medicine is a heavy presence, gestured to by the figure-drawing dolls, that tells
the viewer: “Think scientifically [not artistically].” The art-science dualism is central to
the history of anatomic illustration, and the elements of a dualism are mutually constitu-
tive.
Much like that of gender. And, indeed, in the previously mentioned Victorian
guide to women’s posture and health, the chapter on the human figure makes an explicit
connection between healthy shape, pose, symmetry, grace, and aesthetics. Healthy norms
are rooted in classical art, whose proportions “cannot be transgressed, even in the small-
est degree, without offending a practiced eye” (Brinton & Napheys, 1994, p. 21). “The
medical adviser, … we hope, will bear in mind that he has before him in the case of every
woman a double duty, first to save her life and health, and secondly to preserve her per-
sonal charms” (Brinton & Napheys, 1994, p. 35). Moreover,
one of the most common causes of ungracefulness in motion. ... lies in
diseases peculiar to women. None but the physician knows how frequent
these diseases are. None but he fully appreciates what a terrible foe they

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are to beauty, not to speak of health and happiness. The lady reclining on
the fauteuil, and the wash-woman standing at the tub, victims to these dis-
tressing maladies, alike reveal in the positions they assume, and in the gait
they adopt, an unconscious effort to “save themselves,” and to avoid the
suffering which an unwary motion or a painful position gives. What a
marplot this is to beauty! (Brinton & Napheys, 1994, p. 35)

Discourse of healthy posture and graceful positioning appeared in my focus groups as
well. As one woman said, “There’s positions that you can put yourself in with keyboard,
like the thing that you put in front of your keyboard and that’s on your keyboard. Like
you put yourself at a specific … height … and then it just causes less stress in your
body.” Another described adapting to the ergonomic keyboards as “awkward,” suggest-
ing how she felt her own lack of grace. Another woman, although somewhat dubious,
associated her sister’s pain specifically with “weird posture” rather than merely repetition
of movement: “Some people get carpal tunnel, and I know that some people think that’s a
direct cause of sitting and just moving and having your wrists in a stable place. Like I
said, my sister, she has a lot of shoulder and back problems. She has to go to the chiro-
practor all the time, and they say it’s because you sit at a weird posture all day long.”
Moreover, several participants in their 50s and older repeatedly asserted that RSI was an
aging person’s disease. Despite younger focus group members discussing their own expe-
riences of RSI, one woman reiterated, “I don’t know anybody young with carpal tunnel,
actually.” The association of RSI with aging, I suggest, reinforces the association of a
healthy user possessing the upright posture of youth and graceful aesthetics.
Pliability and Class
In sum, the healthy user suggested by Feedback here is a viewer that merges and internal-

286
izes evaluative gazes both medical and aesthetic in ongoing processes of assessment and
adjustment. She is able to hold both roles in the viewing relationship, subject and object,
but also know how to judge and evaluate those positions, again and again. Banet-Weiser
and Portwood-Stacer, in their analysis of reality-TV programs and beauty pageants, argue
that makeover narratives and their “visual display of the plastic, technologized body …
privilege a more general cultural narrative about the plasticity of the self,” (2006, p. 267)
citing similarly plastic selves in Bordo’s (2003b) influential work on body size, eating
disorders, and gendered disease that I have discussed previously. In these ergonomic dia-
grams in particular and technopathological discourse of Feedback generally, we clearly
see “display of the plastic, technologized body.” And what are posture diagrams, if not
tools in a user’s technological makeover?
Finally, what else does a differential analysis say here? I have already suggested
genderings in operation, and in cycles of value and assessment. But the final aspect of a
differential analysis would ask, How else do these bodies vary? How else does the tech-
nopathology of RSI play out across different bodies, different sick and healthy users? I
have already mentioned an age-based vector of difference that came up in focus groups,
but wish to focus on class in the diagrams analyzed here.
OSHA offers ten ergonomics eTools: Computer Workstations, Electrical Contrac-
tors, Baggage Handling, Beverage Delivery, Grocery Warehousing, Healthcare, Poultry
Processing, Printing, Sewing, and Sewing [Spanish]. Computer Workstations, the eTool
from which my illustrations come, is the only white-collar profession (with the possible

287
exception of Healthcare’s nurses).
Of the other eTools, there are no diagrams at all in Electrical Contractors, Bag-
gage Handling, Beverage Delivery, or Grocery Warehousing. The dense and lengthy
Poultry Processing eTool—almost 100 separate pages—details guidelines for numerous
different roles on the factory line, from Lung Vacuumer to Kill Room Attendant. It typi-
cally has a single illustrative photograph of a corresponding factory worker, but these are
casual snapshots (possibly stills from low-resolution video) not posed models demon-
strating postures or techniques. Nor are they juxtaposed with diagrams. In fact, their pur-
pose is unclear, as they are not in any way instructional: both the employer who hires and
the worker who fills the position know basically what a person looks like doing that par-
ticular job. Many pages are text-only checklists or litanies of bulleted steps and direc-
tions. Two diagrams appear in Healthcare eTool, but not juxtaposed with matching pho-
tographs. There are several monochromatic illustrations, not in the main eTool but when
you link to their Guidelines for Nursing Homes, but no diagrams at all. A separate page
of Ergonomic Equipment features many photographs illustrating ambulatory equipment,
such as lift chairs and bathing systems, but these are more like catalog pictures, and there
are no similar diagrams for the posture of the healthcare worker. Printing, Sewing, and
Sewing [Spanish] have a few diagrams similar to those in Computer Workstations. Print-
ing’s Lithography page reproduces my Figure 6 photo, but without the corresponding
diagram, and changing the red line to several red circles around different body parts. Fur-
ther down the page is a diagram of appropriate reach distances on a horizontal work area.

288
However, these are the only two on a page of over 50 photographs and graphic illustra-
tions. Flexography and Screenprinting pages both reprint the same computer image,
within a similar context of many photographs. Flexography also includes one atypical
diagram juxtaposing do/don’t do positions in lifting a heavy roll of paper; Screenprinting
has no diagrams at all. The pages of the Sewing eTools are similarly mostly photos and
illustrative graphics, with a few diagrams included. However, no section has the same
preponderance of diagrams as Computer Workstations. Furthermore, none have diagrams
juxtaposed with corresponding posed photos, as I described there.
The lack of standardization in visual communication style is surprising given a
subject so standardized: the physics of angles of motion, weight, and force; the geometry
of positions. The implication seems to be that the medical gaze is differently classed. The
tension between art and science, the internalized adjustments, the mental connections, the
spatial geometries do not seem as evidenced in the blue-collar eTools. The subjects and
objects seem more distinct, with all the power relations and valuations this implies: the
“user” in the Computer Workstations eTool seems to be self-monitoring; the “employ-
ees” in eTools such as Sewing (note the difference in terminology) do not seem to be the
intended viewers, as text repeatedly makes indications, such as “Train employees to use
proper lifting techniques.” Computer Workstations directly addresses the user: “This is a
comfortable working posture in which your joints are naturally aligned.” The potential
sufferers of Feedback from computer-related RSI are granted more subjectivity, auton-
omy, and agency than those who potentially suffer from its mechanical, blue-collar ver-

289
sions. While the disease and its treatment/prevention do not seem to overtly vary along
class lines—good users are still pliable but not fluid—the modes of communicating them,
and the viewers they constitute, certainly vary.

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Chapter 8 Endnotes

i
“Clinic” referring both to the teaching hospital itself and the practice of clinical medicine, due to an
unfortunate effect of translation from the French.

ii
Although Foucault argues that the common historical belief in a sudden availability of corpses for
pathological anatomy is a myth constituted by medicine as part of this larger process, Park and others also
debate his account. However, consistent with the rest of this project, I am more interested in the reality of a
discourse than in the reality (or not) behind a discourse.

iii
For various philosophical and methodological reasons, Foucault does not analyze the twentieth century in
depth, providing fertile ground for his revisionists and critiques. For example, Kittler redresses Foucault’s
lack of incorporating the influence of communications technologies on discursive formations and resultant
structures of power and knowledge. Also, as I will discuss, feminist scholars added gender specificity to his
analysis of bodies, sick and healthy. However, I am going to continue to argue for the continued relevance
of “a welding of the disease onto the organism” on the grounds that, while Foucault’s model of medical
perceptions has perhaps evolved over the last century, it has not been fundamentally displaced. Moreover,
as I have maintained throughout, archaic or residual models of pathology do not just disappear, but linger,
echo, and continue to exert cultural relevance.

iv
Although, as Park (Park, 2006) notes, there is a distinct, separate history of dissection and anatomical
knowledge in situations such as private autopsies and holy reliquaries, separate from the tradition of
surgical theaters.

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Conclusion: Sick Users and Healthy Users

I have presented evidence of ongoing discourses that associate various forms of disease
with electric communication technologies. Taking technopathological discourse in the
Foucauldean sense as part of what forms horizons of knowledge and understanding, it is
constitutive of the subject position of the user. The subject position of “the user” is not as
familiar or immediately understood as, for example, those of masculine and feminine het-
eronormative subjects, as feminist analyses of gender ideals have addressed and articu-
lated. Although we do not tell children to “Buck up and be a user,” have usership pag-
eants, or compose songs such as “What Makes a User a User” or “Thank Heaven for Lit-
tle Users,” this does not mean that we do not have expectations and ideals of appropriate
technology use and users. As this project has demonstrated, technopathological discourse
can be examined as a normalizing discourse, one that constitutes ideals of usership
through narratives of deviance, of ideals failed or transgressed. The normal user is consti-
tuted in part through the abnormal user. I will now summarize what sick, abnormal users
these technopathologies have described and propose what this, in turn, says about healthy
users. Here are the disease patterns I have presented and attributes they suggest:
Overload: Here a user is sickened by the essences of technology: electricity, ra-
diation, light and sound waves, and the like, short-circuiting their systems and manifest-
ing a wide variety of physical and mental symptoms. These damaging, excess stimuli can
be something they bring upon themselves, as in cases of addiction, or something thrust

292
upon them, as in conspiracy theories and general onslaughts of technological modernity.
The Overload frame represents users who are receiving more stimuli than their systems
can handle, or stimuli of a frequency incompatible with their own. This stimuli comes
from the continuum of bio-electrical energies, the invisible frequencies that represent not
only mythic powers of life and death, but also, by their invisibility, suggest the alienation
of industrialized life, the disappearance of visible, logical, analog processes of production
of both goods, devices, and knowledge. These are, then, ultimately good or unavoidable
forces, but sick users are not able to handle them. The sick user is overstimulated,
whether by choice or not, but always because she is constitutionally oversensitive. They
are overstimulated beyond that which their natures can accommodate.
Resistance: In these cases, isolated and withdrawn users choose technology over
humanity or sociability. They disregard how their usage practices affect others, or they
are changed by their technology use such that they become hostile, aggressive, or violent
toward others. Whether merely rude or fully sociopathic, these users are antisocial, and
what is that but independence taken to extremes? Such sick users are misanthropic, egois-
tic, and reclusive.
Mismanaged Bandwidth: Users here perform inexpert triage in that they cannot
evaluate importance and choose between multiple streams of information and sensation.
They are not overstimulated, but they do not choose appropriately from the wide variety
of stimuli they are receiving. Such users lack proper discriminating, prioritizing, and hi-
erarchizing skills. In other words, in not placing proper importance on certain stimuli,

293
they are overly relativistic or pluralistic, too uncritical. They do not place proper value
judgments. The sick user is amoral.
Promiscuity: Literally, a promiscuous user is over-networked to the point of im-
properly and excessively “hooking up,” too freely and indiscriminately connected, such
that the user is harmed by dangers connecting to her through electric communication
technologies. This suggests a user who is reckless, lacking good judgment, and capri-
cious—specifically in not regulating their desire for connections. They want to hook up
with others, but are not sufficiently discerning in to whom they connect; they do not suf-
ficiently heed warnings of dangers on the network. Given the many narratives of merely
the presence of networked degenerates, I suggest this less a portrait of innocence or tech-
nological naiveté and more one of selfish disregard. This is further underscored in that
the user is networked, meaning their dangerous hookup has consequences, it can spread
to and infect others. The sick user is not only somewhat greedy in her desires for connec-
tion, but also selfishly indifferent to the consequences of her connections for others in
society, or willing to overlook these consequences in the name of satisfying her desire for
connectivity. She is gluttonous and callous.
Feedback: Conditions of Feedback involve a user’s body affected, infected, or
mutated by the technology. The user does not heed warnings of injury or directions for
appropriate use and is too receptive to interaction with technologies, to the point that the
body breaks down. The user literally lets the technology under their skin; it gets too much
into them. The bodies of these sick users, then, are too easily influenced, too receptive,

294
overly accommodating. Their bodies lack integrity enough to preserve distinction and
separateness; they become enmeshed and undifferentiated. In this sense, sick users are
too fluid, vulnerable, submissive, permeable—bodies almost servile or obsequious in
penetrability and accommodation.
While I would not go so far as to construct a universal sick user, some generaliza-
tions can be made. The sick user is unrestrained and unlimited. She goes too far in con-
nection, aspiration, adaptation, introspection, and usage. Sick users are frequently por-
trayed as having qualities such as being gluttonous, callous, overly sensitive, overly ac-
commodating, misanthropic, and amoral. These five patterns, and the qualities they sug-
gest, have some similarities and interplay, from which further generalizations can be
made. The sick user is in a relatively unbounded environment, yet lacks judgment to
bound herself. This recalls the previous discussion of unboundedness in pathological cul-
ture. The absence of boundaries is sickness, but it is also freedom. The sick user is free.
Too free. She does not impose proper limits. She is undisciplined, unsocialized, not real-
izing that some boundaries are more acceptable to break than others: Compare the cele-
bration of someone who seeks transcendent experiences through mountain-climbing and
dies from a fall to the condemnation of someone who seeks transcendent experiences
through sexual exploration and dies from a disease or violent partner. Not following so-
cial rules suggests a deeper trait: she is selfish. Most clearly this is seen in the Resistance
frame, but others suggest it as well, such as the greedy personal appetites of Overload and
Promiscuity’s excessive connections. Such selfishness suggests another trait: she desires.

295
The sick user wants too much: too many connections, too many dreams, too much expe-
rience, to please and accommodate too much, too much alone time, too many mediated
pleasures and experiences. The global networks of communication technologies free us to
chase these desires. Freedom, however, is sick. Or sickness, more accurately, for in free-
dom limits are absent. Freedom implies unboundedness, a lack or failure of effective en-
closure, whether it is corporeal, psychic, or categorical. The sick user is a free subject
who makes improper use of that freedom because she lacks appropriate skills and sociali-
zation, combined with possessing character flaws of selfishness and gluttonous desire.
She does not deserve freedom, because she is inherently incapable of handling it.
To a feminist, such an argument is quite familiar.
What, then, are the characteristics of a healthy user? As I have suggested, it would
be tempting to think of sick as the opposite of healthy, that a normal user of technology is
the opposite of an abnormal one. However, following the modern pathological paradigm
instigated by Freud and expanded by Foucault, it is through abnormality that we can ex-
trapolate the “normal” as a matter of degree. In this method I am indebted to the feminist
appropriation of Foucault in gender studies, particularly the cultural analysis of feminine
disease and symptomology as exaggerations of ideal femininity (Bartky, 1988; Bordo,
2003b; A. McRobbie, 2009). This approach of abnormal as an exaggeration or amplifica-
tion of normal is not without medical parallels, either, such as cancer, allergies, diabetes,
hypertension, obesity, and neurasthenia all being exaggeration of healthy biological func-
tions. Therefore, I suggest the healthy user is a less extreme version of the sick user, a

296
reduction of the diseased.
Rather than an overstimulated, oversensitive user who falls victim to various
maladies of Overload, the healthy user can handle it. Bearing in mind Promiscuity and
Feedback, this does not mean the healthy user is ravenous or simply able to absorb any
quantity of technological stimulation. It is a question of degree. Sick users are overstimu-
lated and oversensitive, suggesting healthy users are neither isolated from stimulation nor
numb to it, but simply stimulated and sensitive. They desire and seek out stimulation and
are able to receive it, happily and obediently consuming distractions but—through care or
luck—not to their own or anyone else’s detriment. To use a sexual metaphor, the sick
user is horny and insatiable, and the healthy user is neither frigid nor prude, but merely
possessing a healthy sex drive. As a technological example, the healthy user welcomes
the visual stimulation of the light from the laptop screen, but they are not so sensitive as
to get a headache from the glare, or, if they do, they do not complain about it. The healthy
user is not a hypersensitive techno-drama-queen, but someone who accepts and incorpo-
rates stimulation and its effects into the normal experience of their life and identity as a
technology user. They are acquisitive and accepting.
Although independent, this is not taken to a Resistant extreme of withdrawing
from the social body or resisting its overtures or influence. If sick users are misanthropic,
egoistic, and reclusive, healthy users are not selfless, philanthropic humanitarians, but
balanced more appropriately between individualism and collectivity. They are team play-
ers; they do not hate the team, but, maintaining structural integrity, neither do they sacri-

297
fice individuality to it. They are “not a joiner” in the sense of not being easily seduced by
groups and losing themselves. Cognizant and respectful of the network and their place in
it, they do not withdraw (or attack) but fully participate without losing themselves. They
are the natural athlete who joins the football team without becoming a jock, the student
who reads Ayn Rand without becoming an acolyte. The healthy user plays a session of
Nintendo Wii after work, with their distinct avatar that wanders across the network and
mingles without them, but they do not indulge in marathon weekend sessions of World of
Warcraft, neglecting food, sleep, or children in service of their guild. She is not needy or
dependent on the group: she remains self-reliant enough to resist the wrong sorts of
groups and is, in that sense, “not a joiner” or anti-collective. The healthy balance could be
seen as a productive and engaged company employee who remains not susceptible to un-
ionization, excessive socialization, or other special interest groups at work.
The healthy user is proficient enough not to Mismanage Bandwidth. Multitasking
necessitates valuation. You cannot navigate data effectively without a hierarchical menu.
Anything does not go (and as suggested earlier, can result instead in Overload). The user
by necessity must evaluate, but, bounded by Resistance, evaluation clearly is not rejec-
tion or withdrawal. If the sick user is amoral in failing to differentiate and judge streams
of information and stimuli, the healthy user is not a strict moralist, not absolutely catego-
rizing certain streams as bad. This would necessitate cutting them off, ending them, a
form of Resistance. It is a degree of criticalness that is too extreme, that would limit the
amount of potential streams, that would say some streams are simply wrong. The healthy

298
user lacks this degree of idealism or striving toward a perfection of only the best or better
streams. They instead have more of a free-market perspective: all streams are out there,
but the savvy techno-citizen knows which streams to choose, and in what order and de-
gree of importance. The issue is not culling, weeding, cropping, or winnowing, but zoom-
ing, emphasizing, switching, and ordering. To use a technological example, the user does
not watch every program on their DVR. (For, if this were the case, how would we build a
profile of preferences and prioritize, necessary for effective marketing to that user?) But
neither do they have the a la carte option of simply choosing certain channels to not come
into their home: the spectrum of consumption options remains wide open. Instead, the
healthy user consumes multiple streams, but with preference and distinction. The healthy
user is personalized, has preferences. In this way, Mismanaged Bandwidth can be seen as
related to preserving the individual structural integrity seen in Feedback.
Rather than the Promiscuity of the networked sick user, the healthy user is appro-
priately networked and connected, within appropriate bounds. She cruises intranets more
often than electronic frontiers. Not too connecting too much, she is discriminate in hook-
ing up. The desire to connect is still there, as is its practice, but contained within the
proper channels or circles: not in the cyber red-light districts where predators lurk, nor in
the ethereal realms of the supernatural. This suggests a healthy user who is hungry for
connection, but has sensible appetites, perhaps even on a diet. Moreover, their respect for
not only their own wellbeing but also that of others—not wanting to spread degeneracy
and infection to others in the network—suggests that this appetite is circumspect in

299
awareness of potential consequences, not only for self but the network as a whole. A
team player, the healthy user connects respectfully, for example, downloading large audio
or video files (legally purchased) at home on his personal connection, rather than at work
or a public wi-fi network where his connection and consumption would have a negative
impact on the bandwidth available to others on the network. Not gluttonous and callous,
but neither ascetic and humanitarian, healthy users are hungry yet considerate.
However, as technopathologies of Feedback reminded us, this is not to the point
of servile or obsequious penetrability and accommodation. As I hope is becoming clear,
my technopathological frames do not operate in isolation but inform one another and in-
deed my organization of them has been more a hermeneutic than description of actual
functions of discrete separateness. Bearing this in mind, one sees the healthy user as one
who incorporates feedback and adjusts to suggestions successfully, but without the body
breaking down. A structural consistency and coherence are maintained. Flexible, adap-
tive, agile, and willing to change, he maintains enough difference and individuality so as
not to disappear, formless, into the masses. The user is not fluid, not absorbable liquid. If
the sick user takes the machine too much into her own body, losing her integrity, the
healthy user is not wholly separate from the machine, resisting its advances and over-
tures, but instead reasonably accommodating, bending to the technology without losing
herself in it. She is pliable and adaptable. He does not take feedback to the point of dis-
appearing into mimesis, becoming the machine. She is still recognizably distinct and
separate, but flexible, malleable, obedient, and compliant. To use a technological exam-

300
ple, he is merely the operator who fits her machine well, a keypad operator with cal-
loused thumbs and wrists held at the proper angle, but not broken fingers or carpal tunnel
syndrome. She is neither a utopian fantasy of cyborg union nor bodily transcendence
through the upload of consciousness into electronic data streams, but instead remains
knowable and identifiable as her distinct self.
In sum, the healthy user, if taken as an evolved, civilized, or constrained version
of the degenerate sick user, appears hungry yet considerate, moderate in desires, acquisi-
tive and accepting, a pliable and adaptive “team player” who is also “not a joiner,” main-
taining their own distinct personal preferences and evaluations. She is appropriately con-
nected within limits, not promiscuously indiscriminate in linkages. He does not seek to
go outside those limits, but is content in her place. She is not damaged by feedback but
accommodating and incorporating, docile and pliant. His perceptual abilities are not dan-
gerously interfered with and diminished, but neither are they too critical, sharp, or ques-
tioning. She is not resistant to others, but is content on her own, happily self-reliant with
no need to join, unite, or organize collectively. He is overstimulated, but rather than being
overloaded by it, he enjoys and seeks out opportunities to consume more: he can handle
it. Clearly, many of these suggest “healthy” limitation or boundedness. This also implies
a degree of content trust, loyalty, and security—believing that the bounds are correct, and
whoever set them knew what they were doing. Therefore, she has a lack of suspicion or
being on alert; she is uncritical.
Potential “reads” of this subject position—e.g., the user as ideal neoliberal sub-

301
ject, as postfeminist subject—are complicated by the historical continuity of pathological
technoculture. Whether and, of so, how, aspects of this portrait fluctuate over the decades
is material for future research. For example, John Durham Peters eloquently associates
historic broadcasting media with schizophrenic disorders, and speculates on the future:
Schizophrenia’s vocal-aural delusions fit with the radio, television, and
telephone, media that were saturated with nonverbal codes and simulated
sociability. Digital media, in contrast, favor data-processing and logistical
convenience over the staging of face-to-face interaction. The ‘it’ disease
for new media, with their low-affect machine interfaces, appears to be
autism. But that is another story. (2010, p. 138)
What hopefully has been made clear, however, is that, just as technologies are far
from discrete, neutral vessels for action and information, so too are technology users far
from discrete, neutral actors manipulating technological devices. There are clearly good
and bad users, and this hierarchical valuation, as I have shown, has clear impacts on the
persons, groups, and discourses related in technological processes and actions. Therefore,
although at times verging on the baroque or grotesque, technopathologies are not mere
anomalies or curiosities. They are us. Their lifeblood is ours. We make our culture, and
we make the machines in it, even those that sicken us, even those that sicken some of us
differently than others. If this project has had an uppermost goal, it has been to join other
voices that need to be heard now more than ever, shouting that technologies are neither
messiahs nor nemeses, but are portraits, warts and all, and ones that we ourselves paint.

302
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Appendix: A Chronology of Technopathologies
This appendix contains examples of technopathologies related to electric communication
technologies. Listed are all examples referenced in the main text, plus many additional
ones not described. They are listed in chronological order and categorized by year.

1869
Overload: Disease theorized as electrical in nature in medical book (W. R. Wells, 1869).
1869-1900s
Overload:
• Diagnosis of neurasthenia relates a variety of mental and physical problems to a
nervous system whose overstimulation is caused by “modern society,” of which
the telegraph is a significant component (Beard, 1882, 1972 ; Gosling, 1987;
Hoover, 1999; Lutz, 1991a; Ng, 1999; P. Y. Schwartz, 1999)

1889
Feedback:
• Marvin describes “aural overpressure” reported by the British Medical Journal
in 1889, a condition consisting of recurring ring echoes, excited nerves, tinnitus,
“giddiness and neuralgic pains” from telephone overuse (1988, p. 132).

1899
Promiscuity:
• The journal Medical News reported on telephones carrying germs (“Echoes and
news: Diseases from Telephones,” 1899).

1902
Promiscuity:
• In André de Lorde’s Grand Guignol play At the Telephone, a psychopath forced
a man to listen to the murder of his wife and child over the phone (de Lorde,
1925).

1909
Promiscuity:
• The Baltimore Electrical Supply Company offered for sale a “sanitary transmit-
ter mouthpiece,” consisting of a brass clamp and glass or porcelain mouthpiece
that could be removed for sanitation (“Electrical Appliances,” 1909, p. 58).
Overload:
• A 1925 Lancet news item recalls research of a 1909 French Naval surgeon into
wireless telegraphy as causing an increase in neurasthenia among naval men. Al-
though dismissing the concerns as outdated, he stops shy of entirely dismissing

346
the association: “The report just received from New Jersey of the death of six
women in a wireless testing department from nervous collapse followed by fever
and unconsciousness will therefore not be debited to the action of long wave cur-
rents until exact information is received” (“Wireless Injury to Health,” 1925, p.
1353).

1930s
Promiscuity:
• The Payne Fund studies of the 1930s famously explored the relation between de-
linquency and motion pictures.

1934
Overload:
• Diverse ailments associated with modern technology are suggested in lyrics
from “Anything Goes,” a song written after the peak of neurasthenia but before it
had fully vanished (Porter, 1934).

1947
Overload:
• Film Possessed (Bernhardt, 1947) links diagnoses of neurasthenia and schizo-
phrenia in a portrait of pathologized feminine desire, with references to spirit pos-
session and conflation of biological and electromagnetic energies.
Resistance:
• In Gian-Carlo Menotti’s short comic opera The Telephone, a woman is so enrap-
tured by her telephone that her boyfriend has to leave the house and call her in or-
der to get her attention and propose (Eaton, 1974).

1951
Promiscuity:
• A Place in the Sun (G. D. Stevens, 1951) is a film that prominently associates
oversexed and homicidal youth with portable radios.

1953
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• Technologies interfere with a character’s senses and make them vulnerable in
the film The Blue Gardenia (Lang, 1953).

1955
Promiscuity:
• In the opening of the classic youth-problem film, Blackboard Jungle (Brooks,
1955), the title cards announce concern with causes and effects of delinquency,
followed by shots of interracial male couples jitterbugging to rock and roll, pre-
sumably coming through a portable radio into an inner-city schoolyard, trumpet-

347
ing the infection of the public school with degenerate forces.

1956
Promiscuity:
• A Wall Street Journal article on transistor radios from 1956 calls them “a boon
for teen swains. … Transistor radios … [are] not so apt to run down the car bat-
tery when played long hours with the auto parked and the engine turned off” (Ap-
ple, 1956, p. 1).
• Japanese film Crazed Fruit (Nakahira, 1956) prominently associates oversexed
and homicidal youth with portable radios in homage to A Place in the Sun (G. D.
Stevens, 1951).

1959
Overload:
• Electrosensitivity suggested in the film, The Tingler (Castle, 1959).

1960
Resistance:
• Low-grade Audio Zombie suggested in depiction of a frail loner absorbed in ra-
dio in Les Yeux Sans Visage (Franju, 1960).

1961
Promiscuity:
• An ethnographic study of “Negro Teen-Age Culture” in the Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science noted “a universal interest in
music, which seems to work [upon them] like a narcotic” creating an “intense”
“craving” for stereos, records, and transistor radios, often driving them to steal to
support the habit (Himes, 1961).

1964
Overload:
• Addiction to television in episode of the television series, The Twilight Zone
(Bare, 1964).
Resistance:
• Low-grade Audio Zombie suggested in depiction of a frail loner absorbed in
transistor radio in Nightmare (Francis, 1964).

1965
Overload:
• Pastoral Psychology reported on a meeting of the Acoustical Society of Amer-
ica at which transistor radios were listed as a contributing factor to “urban
sound.”
i
This condition was seen to “contribute to circulatory troubles, loss of
hearing, fatigue and emotional disturbances, nagging, and wife beating” (“Notes

348
and News,” 1965).
Promiscuity:
• A New York Times feature laments changes in the Bronx’ Grand Concourse
connects delinquent youth, audio technologies, and race (Weinraub, 1965).

1967
Resistance:
• In Dr. Orloff’s Monster (Franco, 1967), radio frequencies control a reanimated
corpse to do a mad scientist’s bidding.

1969
Resistance:
• Television blamed for mental poisoning, brainwashing, and inciting violence
(Terrence, 1969).
• Doctors, government officials, and other authorities fault TV for youth violence
and inability to communicate (Mahoney, 1969b).
• Television accused of “feeding the egos of malcontents who go on a rampage
and ‘then run home to watch themselves on the 6 o'clock news’” (“Hayakawa
Blames TV for Riots and Looting,” 1969, p. 29).
Promiscuity:
• The National Enquirer warned of a rapists and perverts on computerized dating
services (Mahoney, 1969a).
• Concerns focused on connecting to obscene phone callers (Blaine, 1969).
• Elite degenerates manipulate masses using television and other electronics
(Calder, 1969).

1971
Feedback:
• A study of journalists includes reports of ear pain and heat from extensive tele-
phone use; another documented dysesthesia of the scalp from mobile phone use
(both cited in Snowden, 2007).

1972
Resistance:
• A Wisconsin senator editorialized that television viewers’ susceptibility to
pharmaceutical advertising would create a US drug culture (Nelson, 1972).
• A National Enquirer front page bellowed, “COMPUTERS ARE TURNING US
INTO A NATION OF LAME BRAINS.” In the story, a retired Air Force Senior
Management Analyst of 15 years warned:
Unless we are careful, the computer may soon warp our thinking abilities
as a nation—just as the automobile has withered out walking ability. …
The growing trend today of using computers to make important decisions
in government, business, and industry is one of the deadliest illnesses of

349
our society. … Computers are like electronic Frankenstein monsters. (Cas-
sidy, 1972, p. 5)

1973
Resistance:
• Television’s isolating effects somehow combining with factors such as
“women’s lib” so that it “develops children into passive listeners and gives them a
distorted impression of the real world’” (Balfour, 1973).
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• Technologies interfere with a character’s senses and make them vulnerable to
death or injury appears in the film Tombs of the Blind Dead (de Ossorio, 1973).

1974
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• Technologies interfere with a character’s senses and make them vulnerable to
death or injury in the film Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (Grau, 1974).
Resistance:
• In the song popularized by Helen Reddy, “Angie Baby” (O’Day, 1974), a de-
mented, isolated girl lives alone in her room with her radio and fantasy boy-
friends, eventually kidnapping a real boy and trapping him inside her radio.
• The Spanish cult zombie film Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (Grau, 1974) presents
the angry dead reanimated by the sound waves and “ultrasonic radiation” of a pest
control system.

1975
Promiscuity:
• Psychopathic telephone harassment and stalking in the film Black Christmas
(Clark, 1975).

1976
Promiscuity:
• An editorial described the defiant blasting of transistor radios on public busses
by young “rebellious” blacks as part of “insidious evil” that perpetuated their own
oppression (Maleson, 1976).

1977
Promiscuity:
• The gay adult film Killing Me Softly (Ellie, 1977) concerned a man who falls in
love with a serial killer who must kill to achieve orgasm. Although the telephone
network is not central to any aspect of the plot or killer’s method, a shot of star
Jack Wrangler holding a phone receiver with a shocked expression is the common
image used from the film, appearing on both the case of the VHS release and the
front and back of the DVD release—suggesting a technological hooking up that

350
actually does not appear in the film, but was apparently was considered a titillat-
ing way to market it.

1978
Promiscuity:
• The image of slasher godfather Michael Myers holding a telephone receiver to
his ear in Halloween is iconic enough to be repeated in the navigation menu of a
DVD release of the film (Carpenter, 1978).

1979
Promiscuity:
• Psychopathic telephone harassment and stalking in the film When a Stranger
Calls (Walton, 1979).

1980
Overload:
• Headaches from 3D movies (Kerbel, 1980).
Resistance:
• “Computers Are Turning Kids Into Dropouts” (O'Neill, 1980).
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• Technologies interfere with a character’s senses and make them vulnerable to
death or injury in the film He Knows You’re Alone (Mastroianni, 1980).
Mismanaged Bandwidth; Promiscuity:
• A victim enveloped in telephone conversation does not notice a killer’s ap-
proach and psychopathic telephone harassment and stalking in the film Don’t An-
swer the Phone! (Hammer, 1980).
Promiscuity:
• Psychopath as a noted user of a portable stereo in the film New Year’s Evil (Al-
ston, 1980).
• TV blamed for contributing to teen pregnancy (L. Harrison, 1980)

1981
Resistance, Overload:
• Characters partially live within television studios and programming in the film
Shock Treatment (O’Brian, 1981).
Resistance:
• TV leads us down antisocial paths through mesmerism and hypnosis (Bannister,
1981).
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• A user is unaware of impending danger because they are listening to music in
the film Graduation Day (Freed, 1981).
Promiscuity:
• Psychopath as a noted user of portable stereo in the film Diva (Beineix, 1981).

351
• Hypnotic mind control and fatally sickening communication technologies devel-
oped by TV advertising companies appear in the film Looker (Crichton, 1981).
Feedback:
• Hearing loss or tinnitus associated with audio technologies (Eppingham, 1981).
• Telephones injure the body, often fatally, when they become semi-autonomous
in the film Murder by Phone (M. D. Anderson, 1981).

1982
Overload:
• Addiction to video games in the television series, Square Pegs (Hughes, 1982).
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• In 1982, a New Jersey township attempted to ban Walkman headphones on
drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians at intersections (“Consumer Saturday: Head-
sets And Ear Damage,” 1982; “Walkman v. Talkman,” 1982).
• Technologies interfere with a character’s senses and make them vulnerable to
death or injury in the film The Dorm That Dripped Blood (Obrow, 1982).
• A headphoned listener is unaware the approach of a general threat that does not
immediately kill him in the film Poltergeist (Hooper, 1982).
• A headphoned listener does not hear a shouted warning in the film La Balance
(Swaim, 1982).
• In response to a New York Times article comparing drivers wearing headphones
to Deaf drivers, a letter-writer targeted the pathology of “blocked hearing” as a
problem of attention: “Deaf drivers, abnormally alert and with enviable safety re-
cords, are well acquainted with their situation. Not so the plugged-for-sound driv-
ers, whose blocked hearing is relatively novel, to say nothing of their diverted at-
tention” (Leff, 1982). Note as well how the positive case, Deaf drivers, is still de-
scribed as “abnormal,” evidencing the pathological as extreme or exaggeration of
the ideal, rather than opposite.
• During the debate around an early ban on Walkmans and headphone radios in
intersections, a columnist for the Washington Post expressed the personal
pathologization he felt wearing his Walkman, describing hostile glares from pass-
ers-by and being told by his boss that he looked like an idiot. “They hate Walk-
men. Lots of people do.” Yet he concluded his defense through contradistinction
with bad users of a different age and suggestively, race, positing as the bad exam-
ple youth carrying around “elephantine radios” blaring music everyone else could
hear, what were often called at the time “ghetto blasters” (R. Cohen, 1982, p.
AI).
ii

• The Washington Post associates pathological use of portable stereos with work-
ing-class African-Americans (Allen, 1982).
• New York Times belittles Walkman users at risk in intersections (“Walkman v.
Talkman,” 1982).
Promiscuity:
• In the film Island of Blood (Naud, 1982), the killer uses a portable radio as his

352
calling card, blaring a sadomasochistic rock song whose lyrics provide inspiration
for his killing methods.
• In the film Poltergeist (Hooper, 1982), the daughter communicates with spirits
through television.
• Spirits gain access to controlling victim through a computer in the film Evil-
speak (Eric Weston, 1982).
• Spirits gain access to controlling victim through Walkman headphones in Am-
ityville: The Possession (Damiani, 1982).

1983
Overload:
• Addiction to video games in the film Nightmares (Sargeant, 1983).
Overload; Feedback; Promiscuity:
• Addiction appears with hallucinations and physical mutations due to a hidden
television signal designed by elite techno-vigilantes to purge society of porn-
watching deviates signal in the film Videodrome’s cable broadcast (Cronenberg,
1983).
Resistance, Overload:
• Pathological immersion in the virtual reality system of the film Brainstorm
(Trumbull, 1983). One character dies from virtual-sex-induced heart attack.
Resistance:
• Video games: “Pac-Man Fever Drives Teenager to Burn His House Down”
(Meyers, 1983).
• An Assistant Professor of Pediatrics warned that a video game based on a horror
movie “‘legitimizes cruel and inhuman behavior. … It could feed the fantasies of
seething idiots and degenerates” (Regan, 1983, p. 61).
• Pathological immersion of characters entering video games in the film Night-
mares (Sargeant, 1983).
• Pathological immersion in character entering video games in the music video,
“Do You Computer?” (Iris, 1983).
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• Refinements to Walkman design include smaller earphones that fit inside the ear
rather than over it, hopefully reducing safety risks by letting in more environ-
mental sounds, if sacrificing music quality (Fantel, 1983).
Promiscuity:
• Poor ventilation and enclosed spaces of early cinemas were seen as increasing
the likelihood of carrying one of the many infectious diseases borne by the lower
classes (Hansen, 1983).
Feedback:
• Hearing loss or tinnitus from audio technologies (Policy, 1983; A. B. Smith,
1983).

1984

353
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• A user is unaware of impending danger because they are listening to music, as
seen in the death sequences of Walkman-wearing Ginger and her boyfriend in The
Terminator (Cameron, 1984).
Mismanaged Bandwidth; Promiscuity:
• Technologies interfere with senses and create vulnerability to death or injury in
the film Friday the 13th Part IV: The Final Chapter (Zito, 1984). Oversexed and
otherwise miscreant camp counselors sport headphones.
Promiscuity:
• Psychopathic telephone harassment and stalking in the film Murder Rock (Fulci,
1984).
• The song “World Destruction” by Time Zone, a collaboration between hip-hop
pioneer Afrikkaa Bambataa and Sex Pistol John Lydon, listed technopathological
conspiracies among manifold cultural problems including racism, religious fun-
damentalism, and nuclear war: “The CIA is looking for you. / The KGB is smarter
than you think. / Brainwash mentalities to control the system. / Using TV and
movies—religions of course.”
• Spirits gain access to controlling victims through landline telephones in A
Nightmare on Elm Street (W. D. Craven, 1984).
Resistance:
• Personal stereos associated with unhealthy “Walkman effect” (Hosokawa, 1984,
p. 176).

1985
Mismanaged Bandwidth; Promiscuity:
• A user is unaware of impending danger because of listening to music. In Friday
the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (Steinmann, 1985), surly pseudo-Goth Violet
wears her Walkman everywhere from breakfast to hanging out the laundry, and
dies while break-dancing to Pseudo Echo on her bedroom stereo. Characters also
watch a scene on television from A Place in the Sun (G. D. Stevens, 1951), a film
that associates degenerate youth with radios.
Promiscuity:
• In the cult classic zombie comedy Return of the Living Dead (O'Bannon, 1985),
a mortician meant to be understood as a Nazi in hiding, is introduced with an ex-
treme close-up of his Walkman earphones, listening to the German Afrika Corps
march song, “Panzer rollen in Afrika vor,” followed by a medium frontal shot of
him wearing the headphones while he works, followed by a wider shot of the
same. The gang of protagonist teens in the same film—an undifferentiated amal-
gam of new wavers, punks, hip-hop, leather, and stripper subcultures—are also
predominantly marked by the boom-box radio they carry into the cemetery, the
camera close-in on the machine as they enter the site of the film’s horrors.

1986

354
Mismanaged Bandwidth; Promiscuity:
• A user is unaware of impending danger because of listening to music. In Friday
the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (T. D. McLoughlin, 1986), a teen meets his death
absorbed listening to a loud car stereo. Oversexed and otherwise miscreant camp
counselors sport headphones.
Promiscuity:
• Spirits gain access to controlling victims through vinyl LP in the film Trick or
Treat (C. M. Smith, 1986).
Resistance:
• In the novel Bedouin Hornbook (Mackey, 1986) a woman, lost in listening to a
Walkman, does not hear the phone call from her male lover, who has just been ar-
rested by the police.

1987
Resistance:
• TV leads us down antisocial paths through mesmerism and hypnosis (Brecher &
Brecher, 1987).
• The boredom TV induces can suppress the immune system, causing “backache,
headache, insomnia, chronic fatigue, and sexual impotence” but only due to TV’s
isolating, antisocial nature, unlike going to the movies (Haley, 1987).
Promiscuity:
• Spirits gain access to controlling victims through a television in the film A
Nightmare on Elm Street III: The Dream Warriors (Russell, 1987).
• A ghost uses ham-radio broadcasts to lure victims in Ghosthouse (Lenzi, 1987).

1988
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• A victim enveloped in telephone conversation does not notice a killer’s ap-
proach in the film Psycho Cop (Potts, 1988).
Promiscuity:
• Evil spirits come through telephones in the film Dial: Help (Deodato, 1988).
• Early telephone users worried about putting a telephone in the room with a sick
person, lest calls transmit illness to the party on the other end of the call (Marvin,
1988).
• A New York Times article on teen drug dealing and use warned in its headline,
“Ask Not for Whom the Beeper Tolls” (Roberts, 1988).
• Hypersexuality in a 1988 New York Times exposé on AIDS among “reckless and
irresponsible” adolescent homeless prostitutes concluded with the tragic image of
a boy and Walkman (Daley, 1988).
• In the mid-nineteenth century, a New England professor weighed concerns
about the risks of future telegraph cables linking Americans to possibly diseased
and dangerous Europeans (Marvin, 1988, p. 132).
• Possession and cursed technologies appear through a Walkman in Halloween

355
Night (Mundhra, 1988).
• The film Halloween Night (Mundhra, 1988) fictionalized a cultural panic
around Satanic backmasking in rock music in its story of LP records and cassettes
that mesmerize a high school nerd, revive a dead rock star, remotely control other
machines (e.g., turning a shop-class drill on to kill a bully), and emit fatal green
ectoplasm from headphones.
Feedback:
• Technologies injure the body, often fatally, when they become semi-
autonomous in the film Dial: Help (Deodato, 1988).
• Technologies injure the body, often fatally, when they become semi-
autonomous in the film Pulse (Golding, 1988).

1989
Overload:
• Ronell (1995) deconstructs telephonic devices, history, and experiences to sug-
gest their schizophrenic affect on modern thought.
Resistance, Feedback, Promiscuity:
• Characters enter TV shows and movies in the film Shocker (W. Craven, 1989).
Spirit of electrocuted psychopath travels through bodies and electrical currents to
attack people.
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• A New York Times article is illustrated with a missing-persons poster for Tiffany
Sessions, a Florida woman who had disappeared during a “fitness walk.” The
poster and the article’s lede point out that she’d worn a black Walkman radio
(Stockton, 1989, p. C12).
• Technologies interfere with perceptual senses and make a character vulnerable
to death in the film Skinned Alive (Killough, 1989).
• Trisha Meili attack and initial press coverage (see discussion in Chapter 5).
Mismanaged Bandwidth, Promiscuity:
• New York Times article described “stealing … personal items like Walkman tape
recorders and bicycles from vulnerable-looking people on the street” as part of the
normal and ubiquitous street violence of East Harlem youth gangs (Pitt, 1989, p.
B1).
Promiscuity, Feedback:
• Spirits gain access to controlling victims through telephone pay-services in the
film 976-EVIL (Englund, 1989). Telephones injure the body, often fatally, when
they become semi-autonomous.

1990
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• Technologies interfere with perceptual senses and make a character vulnerable
to death in the film Slash Dance (Shyman, 1990).
Promiscuity:

356
• Obnoxious yuppies and cannibal psychopath are noted users of portable stereo
in the film Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3 (Burr, 1990).

1991
Resistance:
• Characters enter TV shows in the film 976-EVIL 2: The Astral Factor (Wynor-
ski, 1991).
Promiscuity, Feedback:
• Spirits gain access to controlling victims through telephone pay-services in the
film and technologies injure the body when they become semi-autonomous in the
film 976-EVIl 2: The Astral Factor (Wynorski, 1991).

1992
Resistance, Overload:
• Dangerous virtual reality system and users in the film Lawnmower Man (Leon-
ard, 1992).
• Characters living within television in the film Stay Tuned (Hyams, 1992).
Promiscuity:
• Possession and cursed technologies appear through radio in Beyond Darkness
(Fragasso, 1992).

1993
Resistance, Overload, Feedback, Promiscuity:
• Characters immerse in virtual reality game, technologies injure the body, often
fatally, when they become semi-autonomous, and an executed killer’s spirit lives
through electric technologies in the film Ghost in the Machine (Talalay, 1993).

1994
Promiscuity:
• Poor ventilation and enclosed spaces of early cinemas were seen as increasing
the likelihood of carrying one of the many infectious diseases borne by the lower
classes (Sklar, 1994).
Resistance:
• Personal stereos associated with “ecstatic alienation” (Moebius, 1994).
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• A New York Times article, “Subway Rape Victim tries to Prove Agency Was at
Fault” suggests, contrary to its headline, blaming the victim in its lede: “Adjusting
the earphones of her Walkman, the young administrative assistant entered the
subway” (Hoffman, 1994, p. B1).

1995
Overload:
• Weiss (1995) described the recorded voice or radio as inherently hallucinatory

357
and schizophrenic.
Resistance, Overload:
• Addiction to and immersion in the virtual reality systems of the film Strange
Days (Bigelow, 1995).
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• A user is unaware of impending danger because they are listening to music. The
music video “Renee” by 1990s hip-hop group Lost Boyz (1995) shows a head-
phone-wearing girlfriend killed by a drive-by shooting.

1996
Overload:
• Addiction to CD-ROM in the film Subliminal Seduction (A. Stevens, 1996).
Resistance, Overload:
• Characters immersed in the virtual reality system of the film Lawnmower Man
2: Jobe’s Revenge (Mann, 1996).
Resistance:
• Absorption with the Internet is blamed for people neglecting relationships such
that they lose jobs and families (P. Smith, 1996).
• A letter to the National Enquirer blamed the “entire problem” of telephone cour-
tesy and manners degenerating into rudeness on “high technology, like answering
machines” (J.B., 1996, p. 29).
Promiscuity:
• Psychopathic telephone harassment and stalking in the film Scream (W. D. Cra-
ven, 1996).

1997
Resistance, Overload:
• Characters immersed in virtual reality video games indistinguishable from real-
ity in the film eXistenZ (Cronenberg, 1997).
Resistance:
• “Alienating” and “anti-social, atomizing effects” of the Walkman were criticized
from its introduction (du Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay & Negus, 1997, p. 89). Zom-
bie-like metaphors are used in descriptions of sufferers’ catatonic self-absorption
and disconnection from the real world as “Walkpeople,” “iPod people,” “glassy-
eyed” “plague-carriers” with “autism” (du Gay et al, 1997, pp. 115, 118, 140).
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• Laws restricting phone use while driving (Kolata, 1997).
• The co-principal investigator of a 1997 Canadian study on cell-phone-distracted
drivers placed the blame on the fact that “‘people are not fully aware of the limita-
tions of their attention’” (Kolata, 1997, p. A30).
Promiscuity:
• Poor ventilation and enclosed spaces of early cinemas were seen as increasing
the likelihood of carrying one of the many infectious diseases borne by the lower

358
classes (Kirby, 1997).
• Association of technologies with youthful criminality and victimhood in “Police
Say Teen-Ager Died For His Sneakers and Beeper” (Roane, 1997).
• Association of technologies with youthful criminality and victimhood in “These
4 Friends Were—Slaughtered for a Cell Phone” (J. Blosser, 1997).
• Hilmes (1997) relates how the new electric public sphere created by radio
brought about fears of infection and corruption from contact with African-
American music and culture by those who previously were isolated from contact
with it.
• Tabloids blame the Internet for teen homicide (Blosser & Nelson, 1997).
• Psychopathic telephone harassment and stalking in the film Scream 2 (W. D.
Craven, 1997).

1998
Overload:
• Addiction to virtual worlds in the film Virtual Girl (Gabai, 1998).
Resistance, Overload:
• Characters entering TV show in the film Pleasantville (G. Ross, 1998).
• Characters living within a television production in the film The Truman Show
(Weir, 1998).
Resistance:
• Low-grade Audio Zombie suggested in depiction of a frail loner absorbed in LPs
and record player in Little Voice (Herman, 1998).
• Personal stereos associated with “electronic narcissism” (Chen, 1998).
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• Reader’s Digest warned of “Dangers Beneath the Dash” (Levingston, 1998).
• Technologies interfere with a character’s senses and make them vulnerable in
the film I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (Cannon, 1998).
• A headphoned listener does not hear someone else’s death in the film Urban
Legend (Blanks, 1998).
Promiscuity:
• Psychopathic telephone harassment and stalking in the film I Still Know What
You Did Last Summer (Cannon, 1998).
• Cursed mobile phones in the film Gakko no kaidan G (School Ghost Story G)
(Shimizu, 1998).
• Cursed multiple technologies in the film Ringu (H. Nakata, 1998).
• Cursed multiple technologies in the film Rasen (Iida, 1998).

1999
Overload:
• Numerous sources and manifestations in conspiracy theory. See (X, n.d., ads
suggest 1999).
• Seizures from animated cartoon parodied on television comedy The Simpsons’

359
episode “Thirty Minutes over Tokyo” (Reardon, 1999).
Mismanaged Bandwidth, Resistance:
• Headphoned listening is inherently unnatural (Kittler, 1999, p. 37).
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• Laws restricting phone use while driving, New York Times warns of “road daze”
(Hafner, 1999).
• Crary (1999) argues that a nineteenth-century crisis in focus and concentration,
aided and abetted by technologies of visual communication, forms the root of to-
day’s attention deficit disorder.
• The New York Times deemed worthy of mention the Walkman worn by a male
victim in a Central Park killing (Roane, 1999).
Promiscuity:
• Communication technologies not only help locate and stalk victims, but also re-
cord and/or broadcast their murders in techno-snuff film 8mm (Schumacher,
1999).
• Spirits lure victims to harm using phone and Internet in the film House on
Haunted Hill (Malone, 1999).
• Possession and cursed technologies appear through multiple technologies in
The Ring Virus (Kim, 1999).
• Possession and cursed technologies in the film Ringu 2 (H. D. Nakata, 1999).

2000
Overload:
• Cancer and other risks associated with cellular phones and towers. (Hayden,
2000).
• The Diagnosis (Lightman, 2000), an acclaimed and popular 2000 novel, a re-
view of which in the New York Times was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, con-
cerns a harried businessman succumbs to overwhelming fatigue, confusion, and
amnesia, wandering the city in a state not unlike Louise in Possessed, although
the etiology is explicitly linked to the surrounding environment of electric com-
munication devices and technologies. Although Lightman changes the sickened
protagonist to male, he maintaining many attributes gendered feminine, and
pathologically so. His protagonist’s sickness parallels decreasing masculinity, as
his wife grows shrewish, has a cyber affair, and becomes more of a drunk. He is
cuckolded and further emasculated by losing his job and failing as a father. The
cause of his condition is never named, but clearly mirrors the technopathology of
electrosensitivity, a condition of the Overload pattern.
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• Legislation against cell phones and driving in Suffolk County, NY, elicited user
pathologization, with associations along class lines:
The laws have been prompted by a conviction among lawmakers that
drivers using cell phones are distracted, and more likely to harm them-
selves and others. … “There are too many people with too much money

360
talking unnecessarily,” said Dr. Shawn P. Cannon of East Hampton. “Half
the population in the Hamptons is driving around talking about dinner res-
ervations.” (Kelley, 2000, pp. B1, B10).
Promiscuity:
• The Walkman of the titular American Psycho (Harron, 2000) was so associated
with him as to be included as an accessory in his action figure.
• Psychopathic telephone harassment and stalking in the film Scream 3 (W. D.
Craven, 2000).
• Cursed technologies appear as videotape in the film The Cursed Video (Taka-
aki, 2000).
• Cursed technologies and possession appear through mobile phone, text mes-
sages, and pager in Dial D for Demon (Hin-Sing, 2000).
• Cursed technologies and possession in the film Ringu 0: Batsuday (Norio,
2000).

2000-2006
Overload:
• Electrosensitivity postings to online discussion groups.

2001
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• Communications media associated with crises of attention (Crary, 2001).
Overload:
• Cancer and other risks associated with cellular phones and towers (Carlo, 2001;
Kane, 2001).
Promiscuity:
• Cursed technologies and possession appear through multiple technologies in the
film Kairo (aka Pulse) (Kurosawa, 2001). See discussion Chapter 6.
• In Japan, Ringu+ spawned its own technopathology, with Sadako becoming a
common vision in a wave of kanashibari, or childhood night terrors (Schegoleva,
2001).
Feedback:
• Technologies injure the body when they become semi-autonomous in the film
How to Make a Monster (Huang, 2001).

2002
Overload, Promiscuity:
• Addiction appears with hallucinations due to a snuff website in Feardotcom
(Malone, 2002).
Mismanaged Bandwidth, Resistance:
• Headphoned listening is inherently unnatural (Takasugi, 2002).
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• Technologies interfere with a character’s senses and make him vulnerable to

361
death in the film Jason X (Isaac, 2002).
• Trisha Meili attackers convictions vacated, second wave of press coverage (see
discussion Chapter 5).
Promiscuity:
• Early telephone users worried about putting a telephone in the room with a sick
person, lest calls transmit illness to the party on the other end of the call (Tomes,
2002).
• In the 1940s, cultural critic Theodor Adorno referred pejoratively to youth as
“the radio generation” (2002).
• Communication technologies in murders in techno-snuff film Reality Kills (Ze-
linsky, 2002).
• Communication technologies in murders in techno-snuff film .Com for Murder
(Mastorakis, 2002).
• Possession and cursed technologies appear through audiotape in True Terrifying
Experiences: The Cursed Cassette Tape (Unknown, 2002).
• Possession and cursed technologies in the film The Ring (Verbinski, 2002).
Feedback:
• The deaths of characters in video games cross over to deaths of their players in
Jason X (Isaac, 2002).

2003
Overload:
• Television addiction in documentary The Tube (Trozzo, 2003)
• Cancer and other risks associated with cellular phones and towers (Leonardi,
2003).
• Addiction to video games in the film Maximum Surge Movie (Bourque, 2003).
• Sterne notes “listeneritis” and “radioitis” for the hallucinatory “phenomenon of
the radio operator hearing something in the static where there was nothing at all”
(2003, p. 272).
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• A headphoned listener does not hear someone else’s death in the film A Sol-
dier’s Girl (Pierson, 2003).
• Trisha Meili autobiography and interview with Katie Couric (see Chapter 5).
Promiscuity:
• The Chinese blockbuster film Cell Phone (Xiaogang, 2003) places the titular
technology central to a morality tale condemning adult infidelity.
• A psychopath as a noted user of personal stereo headphones in the film High
Tension (Aja, 2003).
• Cursed technologies appear as mobile phones in the film Ju-On: The Grudge 2
(Shimizu, 2003).
• Cursed technologies appear as videotape in the film Cursed Video: The Movie
(Koji, 2003).
• Cursed technologies appear as death-omen voicemails in the film One Missed

362
Call (Takashi Miike, 2003).
• Possession and cursed technologies in the novel Ring, US publication, (Suzuki,
2003).
• Cursed phone in Ju-On: The Grudge 2 (Shimizu, 2003).
Feedback:
• “Computer Workstation eTool” (“Computer Workstations,” 2003) discusses re-
petitive stress injury from desktop computers as part of the Safety and Health
Topics section of the larger website of the United States Department of Labor,
Occupational Safety and Health Administration. See discussion Chapter 7.

2004
Overload:
• Cancer and other risks associated with cellular phones and towers. (Burgess,
2004).
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• When the devices were first introduced, a New York Times essayist worried,
“That [his iPod-wearing friend] hasn’t been hit by a car while listening to The
Kinks speaks for the existence of angels” (Holland, 2004).
Promiscuity:
• Nigerian panic concerning fatal “satanic” mobile phone numbers.
• Horror short Left Behind in the Mountain (Kashihara, 2004) associates over-
sexed and homicidal youth with portable radios.
• Simon’s cultural history of electrification describes the very functional example
of fears that public nighttime illumination would lead to increasing “drunkenness
and depravity” (2004, p. 72). Being able to see at night more clearly provides a
condition for imbibing later into the wee hours, it also facilitates operation of the
public spaces where drunks congregate and encourage each other, after which
they can take their drunkenness out into public streets and homes. Simon also
notes the normalizing cultural work of such pathologizations: degeneracy defined
heightened susceptibility among the lower classes, but heightened susceptibility in
the upper classes, indicated merely a sensitive, refined nature.
• Spirits encourage suicide through a cassette tape in the “Cassette Tape” segment
of an anthology film and lure victims to harm using phone in the same film’s “A
Drop of Blood” segment (“Tales of Terror from Tokyo and All Over Japan Vol-
ume One,” 2004).
• Both possession and cursed technologies appear through mobile phone in Phone
(Ahn, 2004).
• Both possession and cursed technologies appear through mobile email and mes-
saging in Chain Mail (Ikezoe, 2004).
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• A newspaper article on the emergence of the iPod mused, “Who would com-
plain about this avalanche of music? But who can cope with it? [iPod early
adopter] Brant admits to the pressures of such superrichness. He feels obliged to

363
listen for all he’s worth. He doesn’t deny that he may not be listening as well as
he once did. If you can listen to everything, you may end up hearing nothing”
(Holland, 2004).
Mismanaged Bandwidth, Resistance:
• Withdrawal is shown to have harmful, antisocial effects in the film November
(G. Harrison, 2004), in which an unfaithful woman’s headphone-wearing causes
her boyfriend’s death.
Resistance:
• In the horror comedy Shaun of the Dead (Wright, 2004), a central joke is the
lack of difference between brain-dead zombies and alienated consumer-citizens.
The opening title sequence presents a series of blank-faced, spaced-out, “normal”
people, including men checking cell phones, followed immediately by a horde of
young adults lurching down an alley, jerking heads to in unison to music, one in
front clutching a white electronic device. In an attack later in the film, a zombie
can be seen still wearing headphones.

2005
Overload:
• Addiction to video games in the film Hellraiser: Hellworld (Bota, 2005).
• Addiction to internet pornography in the film Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life
(T. McLoughlin, 2005).
• Death of celebrity lawyer Johnny Cochran from a brain tumor spurs media cov-
erage of possible risks from cell phones.
Overload, Promiscuity:
• Addiction, hallucinations and possession due to a spirit-infused television sig-
nals in the film Dead Waves (Hayama, 2005). Their broadcasts possess viewers
with depression, hostility, and suicide. While authorities debate whether they are
just mentally ill, possessed viewers infected others with involuntary exposure,
forcibly holding their eyes open (Hayama, 2005).
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• Technologies interfere with a character’s senses and make them vulnerable to
death or injury in the film Land of the Dead (Romero, 2005).
Mismanaged Bandwidth, Promiscuity:
• A headphoned listener is unaware the approach of a general threat that does not
immediately kill them in the film Brink (Cooper, 2005). Both possession and
cursed technologies appear through a personal computer.
Promiscuity:
• A New York Times article on how the removal of attendants turned subway bath-
rooms “creepy” associates Walkman with degenerates (M. F. Cohen, 1995).
• Psychopathic telephone harassment and stalking in the film Long Distance
(Stern, 2005).
• Spirits encourage suicide through a phone and a recording studio in the film The
Booth (Nakamura, 2005).

364
• Cursed technologies appear as death-omen voicemails in the film One Missed
Call 2 (Tsukamoto, 2005).
• Both possession and cursed technologies appear through multiple technologies
in the film White Noise (Sax, 2005).
• Possession and cursed technologies in the novel Spiral, US publication, (Su-
zuki, 2005).
• Possession and cursed technologies in the film Ring Two (H. Nakata, 2005).
• Possession and cursed technologies in Rings (Liebesman, 2005) (an interstitial
short film on DVD)
• Possession and cursed technologies in the film One Missed Call 2 (Tsukamoto,
2005)
Promiscuity, Overload:
• Hypersexuality appears in the notorious delinquency movie through webcams
and online porn addiction, Cyber Seduction: His Secret Life (T. McLoughlin,
2005).
Feedback:
• The deaths of characters in video games cross over to deaths of their players in
the film Stay Alive (W. B. Bell, 2005).

2006
Overload:
• Electrosensitivity activist group websites observed.
• Electrosensitivity and related syndromes, such as chronic fatigue, are blamed
directly on our technological environment by many leading gurus in the alterna-
tive health/spiritual practice of kundalini yoga (Shannahoff-Khalsa, 2006, pp.
183-190).
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• The UK Deafness Research campaign against headphones at intersections
(“MP3 Players on Roads Can Kill,” 2006).
• Deafness Research UK launched a public safety campaign against mobile listen-
ing devices at intersections (“MP3 Players on Roads Can Kill,” 2006).
• Technologies interfere with a character’s senses and make them vulnerable to
death in the film Alex Rider: Stormbreaker (Sax, 2006).
• Technologies interfere with a character’s senses and make them vulnerable to
death in the film Final Destination 3 (Wong, 2006).
• Technologies interfere with a character’s senses and make them vulnerable to
death in the film The Hills Have Eyes (Aja, 2006).
• Technologies interfere with a character’s senses and make them vulnerable to
death in the film Gwoemul aka The Host (Bong, 2006).
Promiscuity, Resistance:
• Audio zombies in the novel Cell (King, 2006).
• Cursed technologies and possession appear through mobile email and messaging
in the film Txt (Tuviera, 2006). Low-grade Audio Zombie suggested in depiction

365
of a frail loner absorbed in phone.
Promiscuity:
• Earbuds shown in the introductory shot of the girl on work release from juvenile
detention in See No Evil (Dark, 2006).
• Media sensations link degenerate criminals and their acts with online communi-
cation networks, such as the “Craigslist killer” Philip Markoff, accused of solicit-
ing and luring victims through the classified ad site, and the “MySpace Murder”
of 22-year-old Daniel Varo and two of his friends, after falling into a violent cir-
cle of ex-cons and drug dealers, involved escalating tempers and threats on the
social networking site (Shactman, 2006).
• Psychopathic telephone harassment and stalking in the film Black Christmas
(Morgan, 2006).
• Psychopathic telephone harassment and stalking in the film When a Stranger
Calls (West, 2006).
• Psychopathic telephone harassment and stalking in the film Zodiac (Fincher,
2006).
• “Hellish Phone Call,” a short item from the Weekly World News, read in its en-
tirety:
This Week in History: 1907 A.D.
The first telephone was installed in St. Mary Mincent Hospital in Uppsala,
Sweden, but was promptly removed because doctors thought the devil was
using it to communicate with them. Historians know now that the devilish
communications were nothing but a bad connection due to primitive tech-
nology, but at the time, the Catholic institution was incensed. “I picked up
the line and heard this jarring static, followed by a hiss and a murmur," Dr.
Fluvin Schnager, who was head surgeon at the time, told Christ's Mercy
magazine. “The telephone was clearly possessed, so I promptly unhanded
the menacing ear piece and threw it clear across the room.” Several other
nurses listened in on the line and also agreed the only explanation for the
spooky sounds were demons from the underworld. “Satan is not allowed
here, as I will not have his presence undermine this deeply religious hospi-
tal in any way,” Schnager said to his staff. “Tell the devil to take his phone
and go back to Hell.” (Wagner, 2007)
• Cursed technologies appear as mobile phones in the film The Grudge 2 (Shi-
mizu, 2006).
• Cursed technologies and possession appear through multiple technologies in the
film Pulse (Sonzero, 2006).
• Cursed technologies and possession in the novel Loop, US publication, (Suzuki,
2006a).
• Cursed technologies and possession in the novel Birthday, US publication, (Su-
zuki, 2006b).
• Cursed technologies and possession in the film Pulse (Sonzero, 2006).
• Cursed technologies and possession in the film One Missed Call Final (Asou,

366
2006).
• Cursed technologies in the film The Grudge 2 (Shimizu, 2006).
Feedback:
• Obesity and acne are incurred through abuse of a Massively Multiplayer Online
Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) in an episode of South Park (Parker, 2006).

2007
Overload:
• iPod users heightened vulnerability to lightning, news, tabloids, medical journal.
(Fitz, 2007b; Heffernan, 2007; Ryan, 2007).
• Insomnia from television and computer monitors (Horse, 2007, 34)
• Reports of “ringxiety” or “fauxcellalarm,” described people feeling the phan-
tom vibrations of cell phones and pagers not actually buzzing (E. Simon, 2007).
• An AT&T commercial featured a tween girl who had been converted into talk-
ing completely in text-messaging abbreviations, suggesting aphasia.
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• NY State Sen. Carl Krueger proposed a bill banning use of portable electronic
devices while crossing city streets (“N.Y. lawmaker hopes to ban iPod use in
Crosswalks,” 2007; Rapoport, 2007; Ryan, 2007; Young, 2007).
• A victim enveloped in telephone conversation does not notice a killer’s ap-
proach in the film Halloween (Zombie, 2007).
Mismanaged Bandwidth, Promiscuity:
• Technologies interfere with a character’s senses and make her vulnerable in the
film Hostel 2 (Roth, 2007). A sequence depicts super-wealthy sadists around the
world using their mobile phones and PDAs to compete in an auction to torture and
kill college girls.
Promiscuity:
• One reformer worried about the telegraph, “‘It is a well-known fact that no other
section of the population avail themselves more readily and speedily of the latest
triumphs of science than the criminal class’” (quoted in Standage, 2007, p. 105).
• Association of technologies with youthful criminality and victimhood in “Ore-
gon Teen Shot after iPod Stolen at House Party” (Press, 2007).
• Hypersexuality appears in Calvin Klein’s CKN2U fragrance uses text-
messaging lingo to market to today’s “technosexual” youth (Wilson, 2007).
• Earbuds in the introductory shot of the problem son in the TV series Damages
(Coles, 2007).
• A report from the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center blamed a 2005-2006
national increase in violent crimes—the first in 12 years—on the concurrent rise
in popularity of iPods and portable media devices. Such “iCrimes,” the report ar-
gued, follow a history of crime increases due to introduction of expensive, high-
status products: the technology tempts the criminal and makes the victim vulner-
able (Roman & Chalfin, 2007).
• A “MySpace bully” narrowly escaped felony convictions for connecting

367
through the social networking website to a depressed, “emotionally fragile” 13-
year-old girl and then driving her to suicide (“MySpace Suicide Case Leads To
Tougher Laws,” 2007).
• The Telegraph trumpeted “MySpace and YouTube—a killer’s new forum” after
a case of Finnish school shootings (Diaz, 2007).
• Delinquency and sociopathic behavior combine and run rampant in the case of
recently convicted University of Washington student, Amanda Knox, who, as a
20-year-old studying abroad in Italy, was accused of participating in a sex-and
drug-fueled murder of British student Meredith Kercher. The case became an in-
tercontinental media sensation, and the British press adopted Knox’s nickname,
“Foxy Knoxy,” from her MySpace account, suggesting her content on the social
networking site verified a degenerate character at odds with her wholesome repu-
tation and appearance. An headline in the Daily Mail promised “Foxy Knoxy: In-
side the twisted world of flatmate suspected of Meredith’s murder,” but delivered
only a passing reference to date rape in a short story Knox had written—the rest
being posts about “twisted” topics such as tea and yoga. And yet, one person
commenting on the article online wrote, “Is there anybody normal on MySpace?
It’s quite scary that children go on the internet unsupervised to talk to such
strange people” (Hale & Hale, 2007, Comments section, “Suzanne”).
• Communication technologies record and broadcast murders in techno-snuff film
Vacancy (Antal, 2007).
• Fatally hooking with degenerates online is the central conceit of Rick Reed’s
novel IM (2007).
• Spirits lure victims to harm using radio in the tabloid serial “One Ticket to
Death, Please,” (Roller, 2007).
• Both possession and cursed technologies appear through numerous technologies
in the film 1408 (Håfström, 2007).
Feedback:
• Tabloids report studies warning, “TV Makes Kids Fat!” (Fitz, 2007c).
• Repetitive stress injuries attributed to handheld devices (Menghrajani, 2007).
• Hearing loss or tinnitus from audio technologies (Fitz, 2007a).
• TV and video iPods lead to a baby with mutant “fly eyes” (Stewart, 2007).
• Female baldness caused by a combination of cell phones, pagers, video games,
and video iPods (Siegel, 2007).
• Small particles emitted by some laser printers can lodge in pulmonary crevices,
resulting in cardiovascular difficulties, respiratory irritation, and cancer (He,
2007; Judge, 2007; “Laser printers may pose health risks,” 2007; Sorrel, 2007).
• In the film Transformers (Bay, 2007), scientists demonstrated a harnessed alien
power by converting mobile phone into a “nasty” autonomous killer—implying
that the threat is latent in all technologies.

• In an ad for Boost mobile, a youth-centric phone brand, a rambling blonde
woman mutters that, due to all her text messaging, she thinks she is getting carpal
tunnel.

368

2008
Overload:
• A Reader’s Digest cover story on information overload, and its resultant stress
and fatigue, places the blame almost universally on technologies, and suggests
amelioration almost exclusively through better (healthier?) use of them (Geraci,
2008).
• Neurologist Oliver Sacks (2008) associated urban sound and noise with epileptic
seizures, and wondered if iPods and general background music are partly to blame
for the increase in earworms (a song “getting stuck” in one’s head) and musical
hallucinations.
• Brain tumor of Sen. Ted Kennedy spurs media coverage that typically asked, “Is
Ted Kennedy’s brain tumor causing you to re-think your use of cell phones?” not
“Can cell phones be made safer?” or even “Why should employers expect us to be
reachable twenty-four hours a day?”

Overload, Promiscuity:
• Addiction appears with hallucinations due to an ethereal cell phone transmission
in the film One Missed Call (Valette, 2008). Both possession and cursed tech-
nologies appear through death-omen voicemails in the film One Missed Call
(Valette, 2008).
Overload, Resistance, Promiscuity, Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• Addiction, hallucinations, zombie-like homicidal paranoia induced when an un-
known force takes over all communications systems, enslaving viewers and lis-
teners, and sending them into paranoid, homicidal rages. A victim enveloped in
telephone conversation does not notice a killer’s approach in the film. All in the
film The Signal (Bruckner, Bush & Gentry, 2008).
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• Injury due to technologies exacerbating general clumsiness. The president of the
American College of Emergency Physicians noted a “tragic” increase in serious
and fatal emergency room injuries due to texting-and-driving collisions, but also
distracted and poorly concentrating users merely tripping, falling, or walking into
things while texting: An aide to then-presidential-candidate Obama twisted her
ankle while using her Blackberry and falling off a curb (Associated Press, 2008;
“Text Messaging: Emergency Physicians Express Safety Concerns As Kids Go
Back To School,” 2008).
• An email broadcast to the entire student body of the University of Southern
California did not specify the gender of the victims in two cases, merely described
an “assault” on one student and another being “deceived into letting three strang-
ers accompany that person home.” However, a few pages later, the strong con-
demnation of “sexual crimes” suggested at least one was a classic gendered case
of Interference: among the basic precautions urged was to “never wear earphones
while walking alone” (Jackson, 2008).

369
• Engineer Robert Sanchez texting in Metrolink commuter rail crash, wide press
coverage. (see discussion Chapter 5).
Promiscuity:
• Communication technologies not only help locate and stalk victims, but also re-
cord and broadcast their murders in techno-snuff film Untraceable (Hoblit, 2008).
• A conspiracy author described how extra low frequency (ELF) electromagnetic
bombardment from satellites, TV, radio, computers, and other communication
technologies was used by the 13 families of the Illuminati to subjugate humanity,
inducing mind-numbing, tinnitus, depression, aggression, fear, paranoia, dissocia-
tion, multiple personalities, changes in behavior, moles and bodily markings,
changed vision, blank expression or affect, nightmares, obsessive-compulsive be-
havior, substance abuse, and amnesia (Swerdlow, 2008).
• Omniscient, homicidal surveillance technologies of government conspiracy ap-
pear in the film Eagle Eye (Caruso, 2008).
• Spirits encourage suicide through a television in Shutter (Ochiai, 2008).
• Cursed technologies appear as celluloid movie film in the “From Out of the
Rain” episode of the BBC series Torchwood (Bassett, 2008).
• Both possession and cursed technologies appear through multiple technologies
in Pulse 2: Afterlife (Soisson, 2008a).
• Both possession and cursed technologies appear through Pulse 3: Invasion
(Soisson, 2008b).
• Connection to harmful elites using extra-low-frequency (ELF) mind control
signals.
Feedback:
• Study associates computer and video games with obesity (“Restricting Kids’
Video Time…,” 2008).
• A University of Buffalo study showed that restricting children’s videogame and
television time also decreased their individual Body Mass (Shrieves, 2008).

2009
General:
• Technopathology focus groups conducted, Pasadena, CA
Mismanaged Bandwidth:
• In the film Friday the 13
th
(Nispel, 2009), an earbud-wearing camper finds pot
plants in woods, but doesn't hear killer’s approach and is murdered
Promiscuity:
• Vanity Fair claimed that the Internet “made possible” and “enabled” the crimes
of the “Craigslist Murderer” (Orth, 2009, p. 156).
• Communication technologies record and broadcast murders in techno-snuff film
Vacancy 2 (Bross, 2009).
• A European Union study of youth and online risks concluded that young users’
perceived the responsibility for safe identity management online as resting with
themselves, not government, family, or industry (Lusoli & Miltgen, 2009).

370
• Omniscient, homicidal surveillance technologies of government conspiracy ap-
pear in the film The Eschelon Conspiracy (Marcks, 2009).
Resistance:
• Private listening combined with public talking have been castigated in mobile
phone use, when callers disregard others, turning them into “cell phone victims”
(Song, 2009).

371
Appendix Endnotes

i
Lanza (2004) suggests this trend’s origins in the Industrial Revolution, with conditions such as
“Boilermaker's Disease” brought on by the factory noise such as scraping metal.

ii
Such cases suggest the antisocial rudeness of Resistance technopathologies and Audio Zombies,
previously discussed. I do not consider my typology of disease patterns mutually exclusive but often
interactive. Antisocial Resistance can clearly lead to Mismanaged Bandwidth.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Scott, David Travers (author)

Core Title Killer apps and sick users: technology, disease, and differential analysis

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 03/09/2010

Defense Date 02/03/2010

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag cinema, users,communication,cultural studies,difference,disease,feminism,Foucault,gender,history,media,OAI-PMH Harvest,pathologization,technology

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee chair), Balsamo, Anne (committee member), Kun, Joshua (committee member), Thomas, Douglas (committee member)

Creator Email dtraversscott@gmail.com,dtraversscott@mac.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2870

Unique identifier UC1320934

Identifier etd-Scott-3540 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-298635 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2870 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Scott-3540.pdf

Dmrecord 298635

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Scott, David Travers

Type texts