Digital Culture and the Hermeneutic Tradition: Suspicion, Trust, and Dialogue

In our information age, deciding what sources and voices to trust is a pressing matter. There seems to be a surplus of both trust and distrust in and on platforms, both of which often amount to having your mindset remain the same. Can we move beyond this dichotomy toward new forms of intersubjective dialogue? This book revaluates the hermeneutic tradition for the digital context. Today, hermeneutics has migrated from a range of academic approaches into a plethora of practices in digital culture at large. We propose a ’scaled reading’ of such practices: a reconfiguration of the hermeneutic circle, using different tools and techniques of reading. We demonstrate our digital-hermeneutic approach through case studies including toxic depression memes, the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial, and r/changemyview. We cover three dimensions of hermeneutic practice: suspicion, trust, and dialogue. This book is essential reading for (under)graduate students in digital humanities and literary studies.

Inge van de Ven is Associate Professor of Culture Studies at Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences. She was Marie Curie Global fellow at UC Santa Barbara and Junior Core Fellow at Institute of Advanced Study, Budapest. Her monograph Big Books in times of Big Data was published with Leiden University Press (2019). Articles appeared in journals like European Journal of English Studies, Medical Humanities, Narrative, Digital Humanities Quarterly, Celebrity Studies, and Journal for Creative Behavior.

Lucie Chateau is a media scholar and digital culture researcher interested in meme aesthetics. She recently finished her PhD entitled Anxious Aesthetics: Memes and Alienation in Digital Capitalism, which investigated the subversive potential of aesthetics online. Her work has looked at a variety of meme genres such as depression memes, anti-capitalist memes and climate change memes, and argues we are witnessing the emergence of experimental aesthetic forms that negotiate new forms of representation under digital capitalism.