“Reading the Machine: Digital Reading Practices and the Contemporary U.S. Novel,” investigates how emerging information technologies—networked devices, software programs, and algorithmic protocols—redefine cultural forms of textual production and reception. Focusing on the longstanding literary form of the novel as a point of entry, “Reading the Machine” develops a new account of the social, material, and aesthetic processes that constitute reading in concert with smart machines and social networks. At stake is an examination of how reading in the digital age has evolved within the larger political and technological systems of digital society. The project thus attends to pressing issues ranging from democratic participation to the racialized and unequal structure of cyberculture itself.

“Reading the Machine” demonstrates how contemporary fictions build pathways for creative, dynamic digital reading on the part of human and nonhuman readers, even as the economic and political infrastructures of digital technologies seek to limit that potential. The four body chapters of the dissertation juxtapose fictional narratives with case studies on hardware engineering, social networks, digital campaign analytics, and artificial intelligence. Central to the argument are novels and short stories about these technologies by prominent U.S. writers: among them, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) and “Black Box” (2012), Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010), and Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne (2017).

This dissertation investigates the intersection(s) of digital technology with minoritarian resistance, creativity, and play with and through the virtual body. Using this project’s case studies, I argue that the ephemerality and instability that attends a body-made-virtual does not so much threaten the racially embodied subject as offer it new modes of escape and re-becoming. These movements of escape, creativity, and resistance—movements I describe as acts of “digital disidentification”—function as strategies of survival and life for the racialized subject in the digital era. While these strategies do not negate the overwhelming and plentiful ways that digital technology reinforces systems of oppression, this project asks how the digital can be made to work simultaneously within and against such systems.

I take particular interest in the minoritarian movement towards alternative human (and explicitly inhuman) digital performance: of avatars, bots, spam, and swarms. These performances, I argue, correspond to the minoritarian subject’s already vexed relationship with, and exclusions from, personhood traditionally defined—its allegiance not only to white and normative subjecthood but to valorized ideas of the real, the offline, the natural, the organic. The case studies I explore, by contrast, invoke the artificial, the programmed and the digital inhuman as emergent avenues of minoritarian movement.

Finally, I treat amateur creatives on social media platforms as the focus of the project throughout. We begin in Chapter 1 with the #BlackOutBTS selfie project that emerged from a Black K-pop fan community in response to online racism. In it, I explore the selfie as a dynamic medium capable of restaging the racialized subject along self-directed lines. Chapter 2 then moves to look at online ASMR communities and their haptic-auditory productions to ask how rest, withdrawal, and even objecthood might be sites of resistance alongside traditional protest. Chapter 3 turns to virtual idols to explore embodied digital performance and capital—as well as what opportunities for rest and opacity might exist in the human-virtual hybrid performance. Finally, Chapter 4 explores the long-standing conflation between online K-pop fans and bots. How might the bot, this chapter asks, offer an emergent model of minoritarian being in the digital era?