Frankenstein Meets the FAANG Five: Figures of Monstrous Technology in Digital Media Discourse

Abstract

This chapter first reprises the twofold argument from my book The Medium Is the Monster: the argument that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein effectively reinvented the meaning of the word "technology" for modern English, and that the media theory of Marshall McLuhan popularized this Frankensteinian sense of technology as human-made monstrosity. Then, to illustrate and elaborate that argument, this chapter turns to some popular representations of FAANG [Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google] technologies and activities (e.g. commentaries on Facebook and Twitter, Apple's 2016 holiday ad, and Amazon Prime Video's acquisition of the SF series The Expanse) and discusses the particular ways in which Frankenstein shapes and shadows these representations.