All My Friends Live in My Computer: Trauma, Tactical Media, and Meaning

All My Friends Live in My Computer

All My Friends Live in My Computer

Trauma, Tactical Media, and Meaning

SAMIRA RAJABI

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rajabi, Samira, author.

Title: All my friends live in my computer: trauma, tactical media, and meaning / Samira Rajabi.

Description: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020031053 | ISBN 9781978818958 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978818965 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978818972 (epub) | ISBN 9781978818989 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978818996 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Psychic trauma and mass media—United States. | Digital media—United States.

Classification: LCC BF175.5.P75 R36 2021 | DDC 155.9/3—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020031053

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2021 by Samira Rajabi

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

For my big, beautiful, messy, wonderful family,

My partner in life,

& My pups.

You are all my heroes.

Contents

Prologue

Part I Trauma and Media Theory

1 Introduction: Seeing through Suffering: Digital Mediation and the Suffering Subject

2 There Are Many Ways to Suffer

3 Putting It Out There: Tactics of Meaning Making in Digital Media

Part II Meaning Making Online

4 The Battle We Didn’t Choose: Angelo Merendino and Mediations of Grief, Disease, and the Trauma of Bearing Witness

5 Nothing Can Stop You: CrossFit, Trauma, and the Digital Remaking of Ability

6 Bullied by the Nation: The Symbolic Trauma of Iranians Living in the United States

7 Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

Prologue

Songs of dead laughter, songs of love once hot,

Songs of a cup once flushed rose-red with wine,

Songs of a rose whose beauty is forgot,

A nightingale that pipe hushed lays divine:

And still a graver music runs beneath

The tender love notes of those songs of thine,

Oh, Seeker of the keys of Life and Death!

—Hafez

When difficult things happened in my family, my father, an immigrant from Iran, often had a poem from his catalogue of favorites at the ready. He called on the wisdom of the poets he had grown up with to try to help us make sense of what was happening, and to give meaning to and make meaning from the challenges we faced. When my heart was broken, he would read me poems in Persian about the fragility and importance of love. When I was met with challenges at work, he offered me poems on the importance of commitment to a goal or ideal. When I was diagnosed with a brain tumor and sick for many years, he would read to me of the nature of life and death. He taught me to make meaning from the challenges I faced, and in so doing he taught me to see the way others do the same.

It was in doing the research for this book, and the doctoral degree that inspired it, that I learned that my family was not unique in working tirelessly to make meaning from the difficult things that happened in life. In fact, I learned that meaning is at the heart of so much of what people do in their day-to-day lives—meanings that are constructed for us and that we construct using our social groups, alongside our thought leaders, and in our interactions with popular culture. I know this visceral need for meaning exists and persists not just from my research, but from my life. When I fell ill while working toward my doctoral degree, I immediately went online and found a community of sufferers like me, grappling with how they would wind through the catastrophes that took hold of their lives. When bad things happen, the meanings we all use to organize and govern our day-to-day existence can be called into question by the confronting nature of our suffering. In this book I ask: What do people do, using digital media, to respond to the big questions traumas force them to ask?

The journey to answer that question turned out to be precarious for me as both a scholar and a person who is no more immune to the whims of trauma than any other. In the fall of 2017, as I was writing this book, my mother was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. I returned to work a few days after my family shared the difficult news with me, feeling weary and unsettled. Through bleary eyes, I looked at my calendar in a strident effort to work through the pain. I was scheduled to edit what would later become chapter 4 of this book—a chapter about a young woman named Jennifer Merendino, who died a fast and tragic death from breast cancer. The stories told in this book, including Jennifer’s, are the stories of everyday people who go online to makes sense of the way the world can be so hard to live in.

Trauma, as we have come to know it in our society today, leaves virtually nobody untouched. The year 2017 was one of many traumas for me, my family, and my community—just like it was for many others. In addition to the painful diagnosis of my mother’s cancer, my family also suffered what I will call in this book a symbolic trauma, a form of suffering encompassed within the concept of trauma, but distinct in what causes it and what perpetuates it on suffering bodies. Our symbolic suffering started with the Trump administration’s executive order, more widely known as the travel ban, and to some the Muslim Ban. In January of 2017, Trump signed the executive order barring immigrants from a changing list of Muslim-majority countries from coming to the United States (Laughland 2017). The murky executive order was immediately and sloppily enforced across the country; green card holders, dual citizens, and travelers who’d gone through great lengths to obtain visas had no sense of whether or not they were safe. Though the cause of the trauma was the symbolic violence enacted by the United States of America, the feelings of suffering were very real, very visceral, and very painful. This suffering, like some physical traumas and most mental or emotional traumas, was invisible, and the news media made legible only those sufferers whose stories could be narrated according to the tropes of tragedy so commonplace in today’s twenty-four-hour news cycle. Immigrants from the countries on the list, like my family from Iran, suddenly felt antagonized and unwelcome in a country we had worked hard to be a part of. Previous champions of assimilation to the American Dream in my family fell silent as people that looked like us were turned away at airports. The life we had always known had suddenly become contingent on the whims of a reality-star-turned-president.

The compounding stress of multiple types of trauma in my own life and the concurrent flooding of my own social media feed with stories of other traumas at the hands of the state made clear that this book is more vital now than ever. Trauma has been relegated to the corners, a medical problem in need of a fix. When trauma comes to the fore in popular culture, it is tritely referred to as if a dismissive throwaway, in trigger warnings, and as a casual aside. I agree that trauma needs medicine, and indeed it is at the fore of the public imaginary, but our attention to it in mainstream conversations is haphazard at best. Society has long traumatized people in ways that go unacknowledged as traumas. States and institutions are callously and unceremoniously overlooked as perpetrators of harm, as violent actors wounding the body politic. When the violence of the state is not recognized as causing traumatic harm, that harm goes unacknowledged as having embodied effects, as causing suffering. Digital media is illuminating this suffering every single day. Suffering bodies have gone online to find space and meaning, and to make their bodies legible when their traumas, and the way trauma is socially understood, threatened to box them into a narrative that could be easily disregarded. This book will bring to light the larger geopolitical stakes of suffering bodies and the way their digital mediations offer fertile ground through which to understand how humanity is negotiating trauma socially, politically, and interpersonally.

Trauma, whether it happens to the body or mind, makes the ground beneath the person or people suffering from it feel shaky. The world doesn’t make sense to a trauma sufferer and often this is not just because of the individual experience of trauma but because of the way we have come to know suffering writ large. I have taken on this project of tracing digital mediations of trauma to understand how it is that people use media when they most need meaning. I link clear examples of embodied suffering and the gestures it motivates to the symbolic suffering caused by symbolic violence to highlight how trauma can inform media scholarship. Media have long been a site for meaning making. In All My Friends Live in My Computer, I outline the way digital affordances and user participation function in tandem across boundaries, places, and types of suffering to make meaning, to allow suffering to be seen, and to make legible those broken, othered, unruly bodies that our social constructions seldom make room for.

All My Friends Live in My Computer

Part I

Trauma and Media Theory

1

Introduction

Seeing through Suffering: Digital Mediation and the Suffering Subject

I first came across the meme that read, I love my computer because all my friends live in it, on a Facebook page for survivors of brain tumors that I was perusing for course research during graduate school. Next to the text was a cartoon drawing of a woman, with hearts for eyes, hugging her computer. At the time, I was in the hospital for my own brain tumor, my laptop gently perched on pillows on my lap, my head propped on ice bags, as I attempted to stay connected to the world beyond the hospital walls. I chuckled and thought to myself, Yea, kind of, and I continued to scroll. I didn’t think too much about that meme again until I was confronted by the case of Jennifer Merendino and the deep engagement digital users had with images of her journey through breast cancer. I recalled the meme again as I witnessed an injured athlete named Kevin Ogar catalyze a community through the digital mediations of the catastrophic injury he sustained during a CrossFit tournament.

Over and over this singular meme kept coming to mind as I bore witness to users engaging in digital media, as though they were my friends, each time life challenged them and confronted them with trauma. Again, I was reminded of the meme when, in January of 2017, I started to see countless posts across social media platforms about what was being called a Muslim Ban, as I realized people from a handful of countries listed by President Trump were being held at airports without due process (Bromwich 2017). As I dove into these various stories over the years, I discovered an uncharted landscape of suffering bodies, leaving testimony in the comments sections of YouTube videos, in the retweets of powerful images, and in the shares of viral media artifacts, memes, and articles. Often, even the most fleeting connections I observed were ripe with vulnerability and raw with emotion, while still seeming to create an affinity among users through the shared experience of suffering. It was as though the suffering fostered connection and created space to articulate something new, something necessary, and something meaningful.

Humans are fallible and human life is fragile. Encountering the world with fallible bodies and minds guarantees that those bodies will not remain unscathed by the various physical, mental, social, or cultural ills of the world. In a person’s lifetime, it is inevitable that they will experience hurt. It is what they do with that experience of hurt that is meaningful for this book. Digital media have become a repository for short-form testimonies of suffering. It is time to account for what these testimonies do in digital space. In some ways, existing in the social world, especially for many marked and marginalized bodies, is to exist in a perpetual state of trauma. For the bodies that do not conform, and often cannot conform to the social, normative boundaries constructed in and through culture, the world is a precarious place, and indeed, a dangerous place. This danger, however, doesn’t render people completely impotent; rather, as I will demonstrate in the pages that follow, it enables them to make new meaning. Digital media are cultural, participatory, political spaces that people engage with to make meaning from trauma, suffering, and life’s vicissitudes.

Within the global cultural imaginary, trauma is a central way of engaging with the world, particularly the past. Trauma has been one of the central ways we survey the past because it is central to how people experience the world, and experience notions of humanity (Fassin and Rechtman 2009, 20). The notion of trauma has changed over time and its space in social, cultural public life has increased in the last several decades. Much of the recent attention to trauma grew from the experiences of the Holocaust and then, in the United States in particular, the Vietnam War and September 11 terrorist attacks (Fassin and Rechtman 2009, 26; Rothe 2011). The language of trauma, and thus the ways of experiencing it, grew predominantly from medical, psychiatric discourses, even as it has become common in popular culture. This project enters the conversation around trauma with a clear and fundamental investment in its de-medicalization in order to place trauma within the social, political, and global context in which it takes place. That is, this scholarship disengages trauma from the normative boundaries of medical fixing, and instead examines how it progresses, shifts, and changes in culture. This gesture is necessary because it is often overlooked that the experience of suffering is always political (Bennett 2005; Cvetkovich 2003). Without diminishing or demeaning the need for medical attention to traumas, there needs to be a dual investment in the social and cultural experience of trauma to recognize how suffering bodies resist narratives of their suffering. All bodies are bound by social norms, borders, cultures, and more. In addition, trauma sufferers are bound by the rhetoric and discourse that surrounds pain, victimization, and trauma in medical fields but also in public space.

Mediation of trauma needs to be examined at the individual, social, and symbolic levels because they serve as symptoms of disjunctures in the fabric of social life. Thus, as a lens for examining meaning production in digital space, digital media about trauma offer a rich tapestry of testimony that is productive in understanding media participation and digital affordances.

Media Studies from the Lens of Trauma

Suffering demands to be seen. When locked away, trauma seeps out, insidiously injecting itself into the suffering subject’s everyday life and even the most mundane experiences. The confronting nature of trauma, combined with the pervasive need to presence oneself in digital space to constitute a curated identity (Couldry 2012, 51), leads to the widespread mediation of trauma. The current mediatic moment, constituted through capitalism and driven by technology, leads those who suffer to negotiate their experience online. It is in digital space that trauma sufferers contend with the central dialectic of trauma: the visceral need to share one’s suffering and the simultaneous impulse to deny its gravity (Herman 1997, 1). Knowledge is produced through actively engaging with the world; everyday experience functions as a teacher to suffering subjects who must learn to remake meaning. When people experience trauma, they become epistemically privileged in some crucial respect because of what they’ve felt and experienced (Wylie 2003, 339). Suffering bodies become privy to this epistemic privilege, therefore triggering a re-evaluation of the various schema by which life is led and, by extension, mediated.

Sufferers’ lives become instantaneously governed and defined by the pain, uneven memories, and up-and-down experiences informed by a sense of victimhood. Understandings of victimization come from received social and cultural frameworks, frequently told through media. These encounters with received culture force suffering material bodies to situate themselves in their symbolic universe, often necessitating a reorientation of the symbolic. Digital media enable one negotiative space through which these new circumstances can be articulated, mediated, re-mediated, and contested or resisted. Trauma, in changing the everyday lives of its sufferers, then shifts the everyday media produced using digital technology to account for life’s various contingencies—contingencies informed by the clash between one’s material reality and a new and changing recognition of the symbolic world. Mediation, for many, is an alternative or addendum to more conventional, therapeutic forms of coping with trauma, indicating that trauma is a useful optic through which to examine why and how media capture human imagination and participation when suffering is prolific. The what, why, and how of posting online, as well as the who, exactly, sufferers are posting for, become markers of identity that negotiate, resist, and re-mediate conceptualizations of the sick, the sufferer, and the victim as they seek legibility within a globalized circulation of meanings and ideas.

Digital media are spaces where stories are shared and meaning is made. This space is a bastion for resistive discourse while still being a massive, ideologically inflected marketing machine intent on reinforcing the most oppressive expressions of society. Recent events, from the suspicions of election tampering to the battle cry of women to be taken seriously as victims in the #metoo movement, have highlighted the varying shades of the possibility and refusal inherent in digital space. In all of this, one thing has remained consistent: digital space is an important place for the articulation, contestation, and negotiation of both personal and public life. Approximately 70 percent of Americans use social media, and some estimates count at least half of the world’s population to be online (Smith and Anderson 2018). What binds many of the current online movements and debates is the stories that underlie them. Le Guin (2004) says that, in stories, as dominant narratives become imbedded in society, they become internalized, yet imagination and an ability to envision alternatives to the present reality help overcome oppression. Though digital tools may reify dominant discourses around material bodies, as spaces for stories, they provide users a way to imagine alternate possibilities. Le Guin is deeply in favor of telling stories and making meaning: The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller (Le Guin 2004). Trauma causes an inherent questioning of the way things are or perhaps the way things have always been. Though suffering ensues,