Description

With politics and the internet increasingly interwoven, new media design confronts the cultural challenges of the present

Over the past two decades, the relationship between politics and new media has tightened steadily, giving rise to a "superstorm" of sorts. Within this intersection, politics mingles with entertainment and communication is hyper-mediated through algorithms, memes and alternate realities. Anchored in a nostalgic past, designers who want to interact with politics face a great number of challenges involving issues such as agency, mediation and authorship. At the same time, it might be precisely this uncertain future that holds the key to questioning, critiquing and reformulating their role and purpose within the political sphere. Written from a historical-critical perspective, Superstorm: Politics and Design in the Age of Information traces the development of the superstorm from the 1960s to the present and proposes new coordinates that designers can follow in order to, eventually, face its relentless evolution.