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Anxiety in the Digital Age

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Abstract

Our age is one of considerable upheaval. The modern technologies that have defined the twenty-first century have altered our very conception of reality. As our media landscape shifts from analog to digital, the world grows ever-faster and ever-complex, bringing with it a corresponding digital anxiety that this chapter argues mirrors that of the Enlightenment, and serves as a foundation utilising two examples of recent gothic media—the Slender Man Mythos and a video game, Amnesia—The Dark Descent—the concept of modern Gothic as a reaction to digital anxiety is explored, and the concept of a Digital Gothic is hypothesised, hinging on the problematisation of interaction in modern culture.

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Langdon, D. (2020). Anxiety in the Digital Age. In: Bloom, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33136-8_57

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