Notes on the Streaming Metaphor

Rachel Tay is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in Duke’s Graduate Program in Literature. Spanning the intersections of aesthetics, computational culture, as well as the philosophies of media and mind, her dissertation, tentatively titled “Analog(ie)s of Attention,” considers the generic analogies by which attention has historically and technologically been mediated. Specifically, it pursues a speculative genealogy of three ubiquitous figures — streams, speculation, and simulation — in our intellectual and media histories to probe the sociopolitical dynamics that subtend our sustained attempts to theorise thought itself. Her writing can be found in Post45 Contemporaries, Mid-Theory, and is forthcoming in Techno-Orientalism, Vol. II., and special issue of Communications+1 on media aesthetics.