The Malleable Man: Psychopolitics and the Instructional Mode

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Arts and Culture (research) (MA)

Tieleman, Laurens (2022)

The Malleable Man: Psychopolitics and the Instructional Mode

Research master thesis | Arts and Culture (research) (MA)

Neoliberalism has altered the way in which the subject consumes and subsequently reflects upon media. A popular media genre on the internet nowadays is instruction videos, which can be consumed for various reasons, but usually rely on the notion of conveying to the viewer a certain set of skills. Since these media are therefore consumed for a specific purpose intended, the viewer already pre-establishes a certain attitude and understanding, and furthermore gains a reflective understanding of this phenomenon itself. This thesis aims to reconsider the notion of spectatorship through a lens of phenomenology, in order to reevaluate the idea of a spectator's own understanding of their experience of a medium, which this thesis names "cognitive spectatorship," and shows how the genre of instruction videos and this new viewing attitude play into the Neoliberal ideology.

philosophy of technology