Digital Media Lecture: "Gonzo Self-Help: Or, Personal Care in the Era of Platform Capitalism"

In conjunction with it search for an assistant professor in digital media, Film & Media Studies would like to invite you to a series of lectures on topics such as computational creativity and artificial intelligence. The lectures are open to the public, but seating will be limited so come early.

Tess McNulty Dartmouth College

Talk abstract:Of all the web’s varieties of quasi-therapeutic content, few have been so pervasive—so widely viewed, shared, and liked across multiple platforms—as “Gonzo Self-Help.” Vloggers and bloggers have flooded platforms with iterations of the popular genre, describing radical experiments in self-care, and bearing titles like “I Adopted a Child For a Day!” and “What I Learned From Giving Up Solid Food.” Collections of highly-viewed YouTube videos and Medium posts, 2019-2021, reveal not only the genre's prominence, but also its significance. Gonzo Self-Help has embodied an essential ethos of platform capitalism, concerning self-care. This ethos, and the genre that expresses it, now serve purposes both liberatory and exploitative.