Committee:
Stephen O'Leary (chair)
Doug Thomas, Thomas Goodnight.

Dissertation Title:
Programming the Apocalypse: Recombinant Narrative in Cyberspace

Abstract:

This study analyses the impact the World Wide Web and hypermedia technologies on the practice of apocalyptic rhetoric in cyberspace. As mass medium and subset of the Internet, whose qualities include data exchangeability, nonlinear hyperlinking, and lack of gatekeepers, the Web, the author contends, lends itself not only to more networked reasoning styles, but to mytho-logics. The creation of a virtual repository for human knowledge and a universal publishing platform in the form of the Web provide apocalyptically minded individuals with the discursive power and resources to reason mythologically, programming synthetic fusions of mythos and logos in the creation of apocalyptic narratives drawn from a variety of traditions. Such “recombinant narratives,” the author finds, provide individuals with a sense of cosmic and personal meaning by acting as symbolic theodicies.  Moreover, the phenomenon of data exchangeability, narrative programmability, and synthesis, the author contends, are evidenced by apocalyptically inflected neo-orthodoxies emerging on the Web which make apocalyptic scenarios intelligible in terms of digital technologies, even while denying or demonizing those same technologies.