The diagram above characterize the idea about folds and folding laid out by Gilles Deleuze in his books about Leibniz (Deleuze 1992) and Foucault (Deleuze 1988). Folds are Deleuze’s affirmative alternative to the traditional idea of interior/exterior: in subjectivity, architecture, art, science, politics and other perspectives on life and non-life. Folds are critique of and response to the western idea of a dualistic world.

To use subjectivity as an example, modern western people have an instinctive sense of a inner self looking out on the world. Deleuze’s theory of the fold says that the interior/exterior distinction is a construction. Researchers in cognitive neuroscience explain this self construction of self awareness as a part of the brain creating a story with the subject acting as a self-aware rational agency. In reality, most of our actions seems unconscious and are only available to the interpretative part of the brain after they happened. In analogy with cognitive neuroscience we could say that The Interpreter (Gazzaniga 2011) or The Rider (Haidt 2006) is folding the world to create a sense of self awareness.

To take a wider perspective, the figure of the fold can also be used to make a sense of how the digital technology assemblage has folded reality into a new dimension called the web, www, cyberspace, the Internet, the net etc. We constantly talk about the Internet as something other than reality. And still, it is reasonably clear for most people that the Internet is just an expression of corporeal reality with the same incorporeal dimensions such as language, history and the future.

The phenomena of social media is yet another technosocial folding. Producers and consumers of old media existed in a fold were media producers formed the inside and consumers formed the outside, and the other way around, depending on the perspective, i.e. inside the consumer fold or the producer fold. New media or social media can be viewed as a refolding where producers and consumers suddenly are situated in the same fold. Quite suddenly, and in relation to technological change, we (socius) are becoming the media, now called social media. From now on, we are coding ourselves and others as producers and consumers simultaneously.

References

Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. 1st ed. Univ Of Minnesota Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault. 1st ed. Univ Of Minnesota Press.
Gazzaniga, Michael S. 2011. Whos in Charge Free Will and the Science of the Brain. Ecco.
Haidt, Jonathan. 2006. The Happiness Hypothesis.