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Technophobia: Exploring Fearful Virtuality

Metcalf, Kathryne Young
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1558442740070796

Abstract Details

2019, Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, American Culture Studies.
With 171 million active users and a market value expected to climb to almost $17 billion in the next three years, Virtual Reality (VR) would appear to be a technology on the rise. Yet despite the public fervor for VR, our media landscape has long been marked by phobic depictions of the same—from William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), to The Matrix (1999), to Black Mirror (2011-present), VR fictions always seem to dread its presence even as their audiences anticipate these feared technologies. How, then, can we explain the durability of fiction fearing VR, and what use might we find for that phobic response? While ample previous scholarship has explored how horror and other forms of genre fiction reflect specific cultural anxieties, to this point little work has been devoted to technophobic fiction as it represents and serves to manage cultural responses to new and emerging technologies. As VR grows increasingly common, such fiction might offer a powerful tool toward anticipating its uses—good and bad—as well as to influence the ends for which these technologies are taken up. Through textual analysis of Ready Player One (2018) and “San Junipero” (2017), I explore how fears of capitalist subjugation, disembodiment, and the limitations of the humanist self come to be displaced in VR’s technological systems. This work clarifies the technosocial politics of VR as they penetrate what it means to be human, and how technophobia itself might be mobilized toward the creation of a better technological future.
Clayton Rosati, PhD (Advisor)
Edgar Landgraf, PhD (Committee Member)
117 p.
American Studies
Virtual reality; VR; technophobia; mediation; Marcuse; Ready Player One; Black Mirror; technophobia; science studies; STS; Marx; articulation; embodiment; posthumanism

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Metcalf, K. Y. (2019). Technophobia: Exploring Fearful Virtuality [Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1558442740070796

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Metcalf, Kathryne. Technophobia: Exploring Fearful Virtuality. 2019. Bowling Green State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1558442740070796.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Metcalf, Kathryne. "Technophobia: Exploring Fearful Virtuality." Master's thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1558442740070796

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

bgsu1558442740070796
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© 2019, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by Bowling Green State University and OhioLINK.