Raimund Held

Raimund Held studied Theatre- and Media Studies as well as Sociology at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and Multimedia at the University of Applied Sciences Augsburg and MultimediaArt at the University of Applied Sciences Salzburg. He is a Research Fellow in Media Studies and is currently working on a dissertation focused on smart technologies. His research interests include theories of social media, user experience design, surveillance studies, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and Film studies.

Project:

With the increasing spread of social media and the enormous involvement of mobile smart devices in people’s everyday life and the living environment, different new situational or habitual media practices have evolved in the course of the 21st century. On the medial level, this development profoundly changed  self- and world-relationships between the medium and the user. At the same time, it can be observed how these practices are more and more intertwined with neoliberal capitalism and how they create new ways of self-marketing rooted in consumption within an economy of affect and attention. Especially the smartphone, as a digital self- and nearbody-technology with countless apps and techological functions, and as a spatial medium for appropriation, self-representation as well as location-based orientation, supports this development as it is ideally suited to promote the entrepreneurial „digital-self“ in a competitive manner. The focus of this research project are digital dating apps and their emotional-affective network effects during the digital flirting and matching process. In this project dating apps are understood as powerful, AI-supported entities, that are based on autonomous metrication processes, which function and operate as a reward-, feedback- and reaction-system between users. The project aims to find out how the technology of the dating app structures and modifies the communicative and relationship-forming code between users and which socio-cultural media practices are suggested, reinforced and normalized through the technology. Additionally, the research also focuses on analyzing the technologically induced effects within the interaction between the structure of the app, the device, and the user as „systems of intimacy“.