All My Friends Live in My Computer: Trauma, Tactical Media, and Meaning

175 Pages·2021·7.71 MB·English

by  Samira Rajabi

All My Friends Live in
My Computer

All My Friends Live in
My Computer
Trauma, Tactical Media,
and Meaning
SAMIRA RAJABI
Rutgers University Press
New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Rajabi, Samira, author.
Title: All my friends live in my computer: trauma, tactical media, and meaning /
Samira Rajabi.
Description: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020031053 | ISBN 9781978818958 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781978818965 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978818972 (epub) | ISBN 9781978818989 (mobi) |
ISBN 9781978818996 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Psychic trauma and mass media— United States. | Digital media—
United States.
Classification: LCC BF175.5.P75 R36 2021 | DDC 155.9/3— dc23
LC rec ord available at https:// lccn. loc .g ov / 2020031053
A British Cataloging- in- Publication rec ord for this book is available from the British Library.
Copyright © 2021 by Samira Rajabi
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission
from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street,
New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by
U.S. copyright law.
The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National
Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1992.
www .r utgersuniversitypress . org
Manufactured in the United States of Amer i ca
For my big, beautiful, messy, wonderful family,
My partner in life,
& My pups.
You are all my heroes.

Contents
Prologue ix
Part I Trauma and Media Theory
1 Introduction: Seeing through Suffering: Digital Mediation
and the Suffering Subject 3
2 There Are Many Ways to Suffer 15
3 Putting It Out There: Tactics of Meaning Making in
Digital Media 32
Part II Meaning Making Online
4 The B attle We D idn’t Choose: Angelo Merendino
and Mediations of Grief, Disease, and the Trauma of
Bearing Witness 59
5 Nothing Can Stop You: CrossFit, Trauma, and the
Digital Remaking of Ability 72
6 Bullied by the Nation: The Symbolic Trauma of Ira ni ans
Living in the United States 90
7 Conclusion 124
Acknowle dgments 135
Notes 139
References 143
Index 151
vii

Prologue
Songs of dead laughter, songs of love once hot,
Songs of a cup once flushed rose- red with wine,
Songs of a r ose whose beauty is forgot,
A nightingale that pipe hushed lays divine:
And still a graver music runs beneath
The tender love notes of t hose songs of thine,
Oh, Seeker of the keys of Life and Death!
— Hafez
When difficult t hings happened in my f amily, my f ather, an immigrant from
Iran, often had a poem from his cata logue of favorites at the ready. He called
on the wisdom of the poets he had grown up with to try to help us make sense
of what was happening, and to give meaning to and make meaning from the
challenges we faced. When my heart was broken, he would read me poems in
Persian about the fragility and importance of love. When I was met with chal-
lenges at work, he offered me poems on the importance of commitment to a
goal or ideal. When I was diagnosed with a brain tumor and sick for many years,
he would read to me of the nature of life and death. He taught me to make
meaning from the challenges I faced, and in so doing he taught me to see the
way others do the same.
It was in d oing the research for this book, and the doctoral degree that
inspired it, that I learned that my family was not unique in working tirelessly
to make meaning from the difficult things that happened in life. In fact,
I learned that meaning is at the heart of so much of what p eople do in their
day- to- day lives— meanings that are constructed for us and that we construct
using our social groups, alongside our thought leaders, and in our interactions
ix