Abstract

Media Studies 2.0 seeks to rewire the discipline of media studies from prevailing notions of
aggregate third-person, top-down or imposed identities (as found within the domain of industrial mass
communications media) toward what it sees as the communication of new bottom-up, first-person or
singular reflexive identities favored within the post-fordist, post-industrial spaces of the internet, social
networking sites, second life-like domains and computer game spaces. This article will point toward
many of the hidden, though still important, intersections between these two supposedly separate
conceptions through the use of a case study that throws notions of clean “communication” into question.
From this it will go on to argue for a recognition of such new media spaces as better conceptualized
through Batailleʼs notion of ʻGeneral Economyʼ and Derridaʼs notion of ʻUndecidabilityʼ, as dually taken
forward in the work of Arkady Plotnitsky. The conclusion? Far from modern teletechnologies offering a
new sense of micro-community or as channels of individual self-expression (a new Rousseauian or
McLuhanesque global village of intimate contact), these emergent teletechnologies serve to further
displace or undecide the locus of any signature context of communication, which this article takes as a
cause for celebration.