UC Santa Barbara

“A World of VICE” examines one case study—digital media company VICE Media—as an aperture into analyzing the material and affective politics of 21st century media cultures, industries, and politics. VICE’s visceral, “immersionist” journalistic style, which privileges experiential knowledge and appeals to affective engagement over other more informative approaches, has been cited as its own unique form of innovation in journalism, youth content creation, advertising, and digital business. This dissertation uses VICE as a mode for understanding key changes in the cultural landscapes, industry organizations, and visual ecologies of digital culture. Broadly, I argues that increasingly speculative capitalist practices have facilitated a far-reaching extractive economy geared toward monetizing and enclosing upon affective capacities. I use key moments in VICE’s tumultuous history as a lens for examining the widespread social and economic contradictions that characterize 21st century global politics and culture.

This project builds connections between a rising interest across journalism, information studies, and critical media and communication studies in “the affective politics of digital media” and vital critiques of platform power. It is methodologically informed by what critical cultural studies scholars have called “conjunctural analysis,” in which tracing the always-already contested terrain of a conjuncture involves mapping the connections between the material and affective dimensions of culture. The first thread—which engages closely with the material dimensions of VICE’s empire-building project—examines shifts in cultural and economic power sparked by the rise of digital technologies, platforms, and industries. The first and second chapter focus on unpacking the spatial and industrial contexts of VICE’s rise, zooming in on the intersections between creative economies and urban renewal (chapter one) and the “messy middle” of digital video economies that gave rise to a viral digital news bubble (chapter two). The second thread examines how these material dimensions inform and are informed by broader changes in the affective landscapes of digital media and digital culture. This thread zooms in on the connections between affective politics and digital culture in journalistic (chapter three) and documentary (chapter four) video cultures, particularly as cultural production becomes increasingly entangled with the commercial and data-driven interests of social media platforms. This dissertation contributes to critical work occurring in contemporary digital media and cultural theory, global media studies, media industries studies, and journalism studies.