Stories Across Media

Published in 2023, The List by Yomi Adegoke explores how social media reshapes relationships, reputation and public judgement in the digital age.

The novel follows Ola and Michael as their engagement is disrupted when Michael’s name appears on an anonymous online list accusing men of abusive behaviour. Rather than focusing only on whether the allegations are true, the novel examines how quickly digital platforms transform private relationships into public narratives that demand immediate responses.

One aspect that stood out to me is how technology changes expectations around transparency and intimacy. Because relationships now exist partly online, silence itself can appear suspicious, making public figures feel pressured to respond before facts are fully established. This raises questions about whether digital activism can coexist with privacy, or whether visibility has become a condition of credibility.

At the same time, The List presents cancel culture as both a form of accountability and a source of uncertainty, showing how online justice can move faster than verification. Reading the novel made me think about how social media encourages people to interpret limited information quickly, reshaping not only how reputations are formed but also how trust operates within contemporary relationships.

 Works consulted:

The List Adegoke, Y. (2023) The List.

Seminar materials

In Black Mirror, the episode Beyond the Sea explores how technology promises connection while quietly exposing how fragile identity and intimacy become when physical presence is removed.

The replica system at first seems to solve the problem of distance by allowing the astronauts to remain involved in family life while physically separated in space. However, this solution quickly begins to show its limits. The replicas simulate presence, but they cannot fully replace shared space, touch, or emotional continuity, suggesting that technological connection always remains incomplete.

This tension becomes clearer through symbolic details such as Lana reading Valley of the Dolls, which reflects emotional dependency and mirrors her growing distance from David. Rather than presenting technology as simply helpful or harmful, the episode shows how it quietly reshapes what people accept as closeness.

As Bryant W. Sculos argues, Black Mirror often reflects distortions of the present rather than distant futures, and Netflix’s Tudum even describes Beyond the Sea as a “pandemic episode.” Seeing the story this way suggests that the episode is less about science fiction itself and more about how easily digital presence can begin to replace embodied relationships without fully sustaining them.

Works consulted:

Black Mirror: Beyond the Sea

Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

Seminar materials

Sculos, B. W. (2017). How Black Mirror Reflects the Present More than the Future. Class, Race and Corporate Power, 5(1). JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2307/48644409

Published in 1922, The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot presents London as a crowded yet strangely disconnected modern city shaped by uncertainty in the aftermath of the First World War.

This sense of instability appears immediately in the famous opening line, where “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land,” reversing the usual idea of spring as hopeful renewal and instead suggesting that change itself can feel unsettling rather than comforting after collective disruption. Like the work of contemporaries such as Virginia Woolf, the poem reflects a modernist interest in fragmented experience, moving between voices, locations and cultural references rather than following a single clear narrative.

Eliot presents London as a city defined by movement without connection, where people share physical space but remain emotionally separate from one another. Images of crowds crossing London Bridge suggest a shared urban routine, yet the repetition of voices creates the impression that individuals move alongside each other without truly interacting. Reading the poem alongside Savage Messiah and Small Axe makes this fragmentation feel less like a fixed historical moment and more like an ongoing question about who the city belongs to and how different communities experience London in unequal ways across time.

Works consulted:

The Waste Land Eliot, T. S. (1922) The Waste Land.

Savage Messiah Oldfield Ford, L. (2011) Savage Messiah.

Small Axe McQueen, S. (2020) Small Axe.

Seminar materials

Published in 2019, Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino explores how online platforms reshape identity by encouraging people to narrate themselves continuously for an imagined audience.

In the essay “The I in Internet,” Tolentino argues that digital culture rewards visibility and certainty, making identity feel less like something discovered and more like something performed. Rather than offering a stable sense of self, the internet creates pressure to remain legible, confident and consistent across platforms.

One idea that stood out to me is Tolentino’s description of a “cult of self-delusion,” where expression online can feel meaningful enough to replace action itself. This connects to the way personality increasingly becomes something that can be curated and optimised for attention, turning opinions, experiences, and even vulnerability into forms of content. Memes, for example, often function as compressed cultural texts that exaggerate identity traits while making them instantly recognisable to others, reinforcing the sense that the self exists partly through performance.

At the same time, reading the essay alongside class discussion made me think about how algorithms reward strong opinions while leaving less space for ambiguity or disagreement. Although Tolentino’s argument can feel pessimistic, it also highlights how digital communities shape what authenticity looks like and why identity online often feels both continuous and carefully constructed.

Works Consulted:

Trick Mirror Tolentino, J. (2019) Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion.

Published in 2013, Taipei by Tao Lin presents contemporary urban life as shaped by digital routines, drug use and a quiet sense of emotional distance.

The novel follows Paul as he moves between cities, relationships, and online environments, where experience often feels filtered through screens rather than fully lived in the moment. Instead of presenting technology as dramatic or disruptive, Taipei suggests that digital life gradually reshapes how identity is experienced from day to day.

Drug use in the novel contributes to this atmosphere of detachment, functioning less as self-expression than as a form of self-erasure that softens emotional intensity while also shaping Paul’s social relationships. At the same time, the narrative voice itself feels deliberately flat and repetitive, often seeming to “catalogue rather than interpret,” as one comment in the seminar suggested. This creates a form of literary cyber-consciousness in which identity appears partly externalised through searches, messages, and online presence. Paul’s return to Taiwan similarly complicates ideas of diasporic belonging, presenting cultural identity as fragmented rather than resolved.

Rather than romanticising digital culture or pharmacological escape, Taipei presents a generation adjusting to conditions of constant connectivity, where presence feels continuous but emotionally distant.

Works consulted:

Taipei Lin, T. (2013) Taipei.

Witt, E. (2023) ‘The Epistolary Novel: Tao Lin’s Taipei’. The Daily Beast, 18 June.

In Hamlet, questions of ambition, corruption, and moral decay shape the political world of the play, but Grand Theft Hamlet repositions these concerns inside a digital environment where performance takes place through avatars rather than physical bodies.

By staging Hamlet inside an online game world, the production shows that theatre does not depend entirely on shared physical space in order to feel immediate or collaborative.

One of the most striking aspects of Grand Theft Hamlet is not simply that Shakespeare is performed in a virtual setting, but that the process of performance itself becomes visible. Instead of hiding theatrical illusion, the digital landscape highlights how performance depends on collaboration, improvisation, and shared attention between participants. As London Playwrights note, even remote performance can allow audiences to “share in a moment that is also being experienced in thousands of other living rooms,” suggesting that theatrical presence can exist across distance rather than only within a traditional theatre space.

Seeing Hamlet performed through avatars therefore made me reconsider the idea that digital performance weakens theatre. Instead, the virtual setting makes the instability of authority, loyalty and moral certainty at the centre of the play more visible than traditional staging often does.

Works consulted:

Hamlet Shakespeare, W. (c.1603) Hamlet.

Grand Theft Hamlet (2024) Directed by Pinny Grylls and Sam Crane.

Seminar materials

Published in 1984, Neuromancer by William Gibson imagines a future shaped by digital networks, artificial intelligence, and corporate power, where identity is no longer limited to the physical body.

The novel follows Case, a hacker who is recruited to take part in a complex cybernetic operation that gradually reveals how technology reshapes both perception and agency. Rather than presenting cyberspace simply as a tool, Gibson describes it as a space that can be entered and experienced, suggesting that digital environments already function as extensions of human consciousness rather than separate from it.

Listening to the audiobook version of Neuromancer made this shift in perspective especially noticeable, since the dense descriptions of cyberspace and artificial intelligence feel less like distant science fiction and more like a sensory environment unfolding in real time. This makes the novel feel closely connected to contemporary questions about online identity and technological presence. In this way, Neuromancer does not only imagine a futuristic world, but also anticipates how digital space might change what it means to act, communicate, and exist across physical and virtual environments at the same time.

Works consulted:

Gibson, W. (1984) Neuromancer.

Gibson, W. (2002) Neuromancer (audiobook).

Released in 1954, Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock transforms the act of watching into the centre of the story, shaping both what Jeff understands and what the audience is allowed to see.

Based on 'It Had to Be Murder' by Cornell Woolrich, the film builds on the original story’s uncertainty but makes observation itself the main structure of the mystery. Because almost the entire film takes place inside Jeff’s apartment, the courtyard outside becomes a kind of stage, where each neighbour’s window works like a small frame within the larger frame of the screen.

This limited viewpoint makes the audience rely on the same partial information as Jeff, which increases the tension as the story develops. Rather than simply presenting a crime to solve, Rear Window draws attention to how easily curiosity turns into surveillance. The careful composition of space and viewpoint makes the audience aware that they are also watching the neighbours along with Jeff. In this way, Hitchcock shifts the focus from solving the mystery itself to questioning what it means to observe others from a distance, turning spectatorship into part of the story rather than something separate from it.

Works consulted:

Hitchcock, A. (1954) Rear Window.

Woolrich, C. (1942) It Had to Be Murder. First published in Dime Detective Magazine.

Seminar materials