Malcolm Ogden

Bio

Research Interests

My research focuses on the relationship between media, digital platforms, and bodily sensations. Specifically, I am interested in exploring how bodily sensations, in their entanglements with the socio-technical architectures of digital platforms, contribute to the emergence, repetition, and/or further mutation of semi-distinct yet often-overlapping kinds of content, such as ASMR, white noise, ambience, and pornography. In being informed by more recent Marxist-influenced accounts of platformization, my work generally involves an ambivalent approach to studying platforms, which is both contextually attuned and power-sensitive. This means seeking to understand how or in what ways platforms serve to “make productive” the social and the sensorial, while also tracking the many ways in which platforms function as infrastructures for more distinctly open-ended and experimental ways of being and relating.

Courses taught

Public Speaking (COM 110)

Media History and Theory (COM 257)

Electronic Media Writing: Theory and Practice (COM 267)

Critical Analysis of Communication Media (COM 327)

Game Studies (COM 427)

Academic Writing and Research (ENG 101)

Designing Networked Communication (ENG 317)

Communication for Engineering and Technology (ENG 331)

Publications

Malcolm Ogden (2020) “Killer apps: war, media, machine,” Book Review, Critical Studies in Media Communication 37(5): 514-518. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2020.1814118

Malcolm Ogden (2017) “The “necessity for exertion:” Protestantism, Ideology, and Expendability in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette,” Master’s Thesis, North Carolina State University.

Presentations

“LEGOfied Sound,” Conference Presentation, Society for the Social Studies of Sciences (4S) Conference, University of Toronto, October 2021.

“”Relaxing Sounds of An Oil Platform:” On the Eerie Pleasures of Networked Video,” Conference Presentation, Popular/American Culture Association Conference, June 2021.

“The Platformization of Fragrance,” Conference Presentation, Making Sense: A Humanities Symposium, Rice University, March 2021.

“”I’ll drive you home, you just sleep by the side:” Ambience, Infrastructure, and Networked Video,” Conference Presentation, Southwest Popular/American Culture (SWPACA) Conference, February 2021.

“Encountering the Alien Subject of AI: Instagram Stories and Algorithmic Recommendation,” Conference Presentation, CRDM Symposium, March 2020. [Event cancelled due to COVID-19]

“The Literacy Myth and Corporate Colonialism: An Analysis of Mark Zuckerberg’s “Is Connectivity a Human Right?,”” Conference Presentation, AEGS @ NCSU Symposium, March 2016.

Area(s) of Expertise

Internet Studies
Platform Studies
Computational Culture
Materiality and Infrastructure
Affect Theory
Posthumanism
Aesthetic Theory
Critical and Cultural Theory
Continental Philosophy (specifically Poststructuralism, Phenomenology, Marxism, and Psychoanalysis)