Clare O’Gara is a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin — Madison.

I study what people make and do with and through digital technologies. My work broadly explores how power contours the cultural objects and discursive frameworks by which humans attach their bodies, identities, beliefs, and fantasies to new media. As a cultural studies scholar, my approach to media literacy extends critical attention to texts, performances, and subjectivities historically dismissed as frivolous, artless, and unruly.

My dissertation project, tentatively titled Eating the Internet: Metaphors of Consumption in New Media Discourse, explores how the embodied language of consumption (a cosmology inclusive of, among other things, ingestion, digestion, excretion, waste, metabolism, diet, health, and disease) has structured discourse about new media since the late 20th century. Across four chapters, I trace how film and television representations, the journalism industry, Big Tech oligarchs and aspirants, and digital users/creators have operationalized metaphors of consumption to make sense of their relationships with new media technologies, from virtual reality, to user-generated short-form content, to social media platforms, to artificial intelligence. Eating the Internet considers what makes consumption so enduring as a discursive formation, exposes the ideologies that scaffold its allure, and theorizes alternative symbolic frameworks for reckoning with the affective dimensions of media encounter.

My additional research interests include: digital identity formation and self-presentation; micro-celebrity, social media entertainment, and the influencer industry; platform and interface studies; alternative internet histories; representations and discourses of artificial intelligence; gender and sexuality studies; sports and fitness media.