Hypervisor Theory: An Anti-Theory of the Media

Abstract

Media studies today is a rapidly evolving discipline, with diverse and sundry emphases. Media alternately refers to specific objects and apparatuses (film, television, radio, video games, virtual reality, etc.), positions (mass media, new media, social media, fandom), and methods (theoretical, communications and rhetoric-based, social scientific). Media is in danger of becoming a word that means everything, and thus means nothing.This dissertation configures a theoretical intervention that returns to the central question of what media means, positing a new, internal structure for media on the basis of reading (re-)mediation as primordial computivity and selection. In so doing, we establish a novel coherence for media studies through the construction of a computer- scientifically inspired "hypervisor," which entails a relativism that does not require choosing between alternate approaches yet refuses to erase distinctions. Through an interdisciplinary approach we combine resources from set theory, media theory, Continental philosophy, computer science, and linguistics to reposition the analysis of media's external, social effects on the basis of its newly discovered internal coherence, that of primordial computivity.