S1/E4 Sita Balani & Alfie Bown: The gamification of social life

S1/E4 Sita Balani & Alfie Bown: The gamification of social life

According to Alfie Bown, we are in the middle of a ‘desirevolution’ — a fundamental and political transformation of the way we desire as human beings. Dream Lovers. The Gamification of Relationships attempts to understand how digital technologies are reshaping our subjectivity. This interview focuses on the unexpected interconnections Bown traces: between dating apps and work, pornography and geopolitics, smart cities and anxiety.

Links: https://www.brownsbfs.co.uk/Product/Bown-Alfie-Royal-Holloway-University-London/Dream-lovers---the-gamification-of-relationships/9780745344874

About Structure of Feeling

In this Surviving Society miniseries, Sita Balani draws on the ideas of socialist thinker Raymond Williams who coined the term ‘structure of feeling’ to capture our collective emotional experience of social change. Interviewing Kieran Yates, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Alfie Bown and Tabitha Lasley, these conversations reveal how writing can help us to trace the texture of everyday life, the rhythms of relationships forged as the old social contract frays, and the moments of possibility that emerge in this time of political rupture. These writers document the ways in which powerful political forces are felt in the tempo of an individual life, and the agency we have to shape this changing world.