ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how contemporary discourses on media addiction have increasingly gravitated toward neuroscientific studies of events in which media forms or platforms have induced epileptiform effects in users, ranging from nausea and dizziness to blackouts and seizures. The result is a discourse in the Foucauldian sense—a field of rationality stretched across a manner of speaking about media excess (addiction and overuse) and ways of seeing and measuring it (neurosciences), which comes to hinge on the threshold for toxicity. This encourages paradigms of self-management, in which individual users are enjoined to scrutinize and to personalize their media use.
To counter such discourses, this chapter proposes a closer look at neuroscientific research on media effects. If neuroscientific studies are not subordinated to social discourses (as is common in cultural studies) or reduced to unidirectional cause-and-effect scenarios (technological determinism), they pose a challenge to cultural studies and media studies to address the politics of singularity. Because neuroscientific studies direct attention to intensities and singularities without imposing a hierarchy on medium and message, they offer powerful insights into what is at stake in media studies today: not only the polyvocal nature of messages, but also the “polyvalent” operations of media.
