Crossing the Human Limits: The Technologies of Wounding

Abstract

Mediated trauma pumped through information and communication technologies (ICTs), in highlighting the shared vulnerabilities and precarity of human lives, is also invested in the re-distribution and re-articulation of wounding and violence. This chapter examines what is transacted in the dissemination of human trauma through ICTs and how, within this affective architecture, we can come to understand the notions of wounding and woundedness as a pervasive condition of modernity invoking the human figure as continuously transgressed with the enlargement of trauma as a site of the political, visceral and commemorative whilst raising questions over our human qualities to feel as a community of affect through technologies which transmute trauma as part of their material commodification. The transmuting of trauma through technologies in the digital age means that trauma is re-absorbed as data and altered through its platform economics. Equally, trauma can be refracted through the digital terrain as banal content in which the wounded human becomes a transacted form within an incongruous spectrum ranging from the politics of pity to voyeurism. In the digital economy, trauma imagery enters another realm of disorientation in which it is pulled into typologies and vast ahistorical image repertories that hold non-contextual image as data. The digital economy re-modulates trauma through its own modes of (il)logic and turbulence, patterning trauma through its own modes of violence.

Citation

Ibrahim, Y. (2022), "Crossing the Human Limits: The Technologies of Wounding", Technologies of Trauma, Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 43-64. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80262-135-820221003