ABSTRACT
Cultural studies and media studies have been “flooded,” by aquatic metaphors. Globalization, for example, is sometimes seen as a calm and beneficent rippling sea of progressive movement, and at other times as an overwhelming tsunami, a “juggernaut, a force, a process, as asymptote” with unpredictable effects. In media discourse, the special fondness for metaphors of “flow” has roots in the ancient past of “deep time.” For John Durham Peters, the ocean can be seen as “the medium of all media, the fountain from which all life on earth emerged.” The ocean even has its artists. Vilem Flusser saw vampire squids as self-destructively orgiastic Georges Bataille-like artists whose polymorphous perversity led to their eating themselves and each other. Everyday netizens employ aquatic tropologies when they speak of “internauts” who “surf the net” and ride on “digital waves” while “navigating” floods of information and using “immersive media.”
