Michael Petit

Biography

Michael Petit holds a PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder and is author of the memoir Peacekeepers at War (Faber and Faber 1986). His study of media began with his dissertation on eighteenth-century British literature, The Queer Rise of the Novel, which examines how the formation of early-modern sexual identities are reflected and discussed in the concomitant rise and development of the novel. His interest in eighteenth-century print media forms and their connections to identity led him to consider the relationship among identity, technologies and media forms of different eras, including the contemporary. He is currently at work on Hooked, Distracted and Bored: Network Connectivity and Affect, a book that focuses on digital cultural practices and the challenges they bring for post-secondary teaching within the context of the affective power of digital communication technologies.Michael Petit holds a PhD from the University of Colorado Boulder and is author of the memoir Peacekeepers at War (Faber and Faber 1986). His study of media began with his dissertation on eighteenth-century British literature, The Queer Rise of the Novel, which examines how the formation of early-modern sexual identities are reflected and discussed in the concomitant rise and development of the novel. His interest in eighteenth-century print media forms and their connections to identity led him to consider the relationship among identity, technologies and media forms of different eras, including the contemporary. He is currently at work on Hooked, Distracted and Bored: Network Connectivity and Affect, a book that focuses on digital cultural practices and the challenges they bring for post-secondary teaching within the context of the affective power of digital communication technologies.

Research Interest

Michael Petit’s development as a scholar and educator is concurrent with the development of digital technologies, from the initially text-based internet platforms of IRC, MUDs and MOOs to eBay, Google, and the rise of selfie culture. His approach to digital media is informed by multidisciplinary perspectives, and his research on digital cultural practices reflects an interest in how technological affect—the ways these technologies grab us viscerally and engage us in an ongoing fashion—operates in academic settings and across cultures and networked publics at large. Theorizations of technological affect offer ways to understand and explain the political and cultural implications of digital cultural practices, and affect theory directly engages our current intellectual moment, a time when information machines have become so powerful and so seemingly lively that we know, perhaps even fear, that we may no longer be fully in control.