Cohen, Julie E. --- "The emergent limbic media system" [2020] ELECD 243; in Hildebrandt, Mireille; O'Hara, Kieron (eds), "Life and the Law in the Era of Data-Driven Agency" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020) 60

Book Title: Life and the Law in the Era of Data-Driven Agency

Editor(s): Hildebrandt, Mireille; O’Hara, Kieron

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Section: Chapter 4

Section Title: The emergent limbic media system

Author(s): Cohen, Julie E.

Number of pages: 20

Abstract/Description:

For several hundred years, political philosophers and legal theorists have conceptualized media technologies as ‘technologies of freedom’. Some things about that equation have not changed; certainly, access to information, the capacity for reason, self-determination, and democratic self-government are inescapably interrelated. In other respects, however, the operation of contemporary platform-based media infrastructures has begun to mimic the operation of the collection of brain structures that mid-twentieth-century neurologists christened the limbic system and that play vital roles in a number of precognitive functions, including emotion, motivation, and habit-formation. Today’s networked information flows are gradually being optimized for subconscious, affective appeal, and those choices have proved powerful in ways their designers likely did not intend or expect.