Gray Media: A Psychopolitics of Deception
Lisa Blackman
Forthcoming 2027
- Languages
- English
- Dimensions
- 5⤫8 in.
- ISBN (Paperback)
- ISBN: 978-1-68571-342-3 (Paperback)
- ISBN (PDF)
- ISBN: 978-1-68571-343-0 (PDF)
- ISBN (EPUB)
- ISBN: 978-1-68571-344-7 (EPUB)
- BISAC subject codes
- BISAC: POL049000, SOC052000
- Thema subject codes
- THEMA: JBCT1, JBCT5, JBFK3, JMQ, JPHX
In the era of artificial intelligence, how can we tell we are being tricked? Indeed, is deception an anomaly or rather a defining force in contemporary media, culture, and politics? In Gray Media: A Psychopolitics of Deception, Lisa Blackman tracks deception as it emerges across AI and algorithmic systems, information warfare, and the psychological and emotional abuse of gaslighting. The approach is radically interdisciplinary, weaving together insights from cultural and media studies, affect studies, critical mental health and disability studies, speculative philosophy, and feminism and queer theory. The mixing of fields mirrors the unstable, shape-shifting nature of the deceptive phenomena the book investigates.
A central concept which links deception across the different areas is confabulation, a paradoxical form of reasoning, which blurs distinctions between the rational and irrational, legible vs. illegible, human vs. technical, intention vs. opportunity, emotional vs. reason, and moral vs. immoral. Linked to creativity and deception, Gray Media explores the longer histories of confabulating forms of reasoning and their tendencies towards cruelty, and dehumanization, shaping technologies of power, communication, and unfeeling within colonial and patriarchal rationalities. It offers new conceptual tools for understanding how contemporary subjects are shaped by – and navigate – the unstable conditions that are symptomatic of its operations, as well as opening to new forms of world-making and unlearning that are made possible, if (only) we can learn to feel differently.
Biographies
Lisa Blackman is a Professor of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London in the School of Media, Communications, and Cultural Studies. Lisa has a particular interest in forms of communication that are often framed as abnormal modes of perception, signs and symptoms of illness, or as weird and strange. Over the years they have developed a distinctive interdisciplinary approach to these phenomena, including voice-hearing, contagious communication, such as suggestive technologies, and the experimental apparatuses associated with investigations of a whole host of entities, practices, imaginaries, and imitative processes associated with “alien phenomenologies.” They have written six books, which bring these issues into the arts, humanities, and sciences, to reconfigure understandings of power and communication, showing the unstable boundaries between reason and emotion, sanity and insanity, self and other, and the human and the technical. Their research has shaped the fields of critical mental health studies, body studies, affect studies, hauntological studies, critical studies of data and algorithmic cultures, critical psychology, and psychosocial studies. Their books include: Hearing Voices: Embodiment and Experience (Free Association Books), Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and Media Studies (Palgrave – with Valerie Walkerdine), The Body: The Key Concepts (Bloomsbury), Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation (Sage/TCS books), and Haunted Data: Affect, Transmedia, Weird Science (Bloomsbury).
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Funding
Genres
- Cultural Studies+Critical Theory
- Media+Technology
Keywords
- affect theory
- artificial intelligence
- authoritarianism
- disinformation
- gaslighting
- information warfare
- psychopolitics