In 2010, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks made headlines with major internet releases of classified information, mainly from US government sources. Three years later Edward Snowden was declared a traitor when, with the help of three journalists, he exposed thousands of classified NSA documents. These exposures of classified data have been lauded by open-access advocates and excoriated by US government officials. Discussion of these data dumps has largely focused on the question of their content, or on the legitimacy of releasing confidential information to the globally networked public. In this talk I pursue a different tack, taking up the formal and affective qualities of their releases, the way they function as instances of what I call “datamediation.” Their impact, I argue, derives as much from their perpetuation of an affectivity of exposure as from the content of what they reveal.

Grusin is a leading figure in new media studies. He has written both theoretically and interpretively about the relations between new media and old, most recently in Critical Inquiry (“Radical Mediation,” Fall, 2015); previous works include Premediation: Affect and Media After 9/11 (2010) and, with co-author Jay David Bolter, Remediation: Understanding New Media (2000).