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

In our information age, deciding what and whom to trust is a pressing matter. This book revaluates the hermeneutic tradition for digital culture, covering three dimensions: suspicion, trust, dialogue. Can we move beyond a surplus of both trust and distrust in and on platforms, towards new forms of intersubjective dialogue?

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 the Institute of Advanced Study, Budapest. Her monograph Big Books in Times of Big Data was published in 2019. Articles appeared in journals such as 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.