Staying whelmed : a dialogical reading of the myth of the internet, the myth of America, and Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival.

Abstract

This thesis considers the construction of a myth of the Internet. Whilst as a society we are aware of many of the dangers and risks the Internet poses, we are seemingly incapable of or unwilling to make meaningful changes to the way we engage with it. This thesis places a myth of the Internet into a dialogue with a myth of America in order to posit that a narrative of the Internet as a social good and a tool of democratization works to stave off regulation, and that this occurs alongside an intense, neoliberal individualism that encourages us to understand the Internet as ‘good for me’, even as we understand it more broadly as ‘bad for society’. This narrative, this affective popular myth of the Internet, is then read through Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1895 – 1975) carnival, which allows for an examination of the myth as a tool of both subversion and containment. The Bakhtinian carnival is ambiguous, a negotiation of power and change. The Internet reflects this ambiguity, although unlike the medieval carnival Bakhtin describes, the digital carnival has not come naturally to its end. The digital carnival continues, keeping us in a state of what can be described as “permanent liminality” (Szakolczai 2017); carnival behaviours escalate so as to not become stagnant, which results in a loss of control, existential anxiety, and conflict which becomes more serious and dangerous as the carnival continues.