All My Friends Live in My Computer

Trauma, Tactical Media, and Meaning

By Samira Rajabi

Rutgers University Press

All My Friends Live in my Computer combines personal stories, media studies, and interdisciplinary theories to examine case studies from three unique parts of society. From illness narratives among breast cancer patients to political upheaval among Iranian-Americans, this book examines what people do when they go online after they have suffered a trauma. It offers in-depth academic analysis alongside deeply personal stories and case studies to take the reader on a journey through rapidly changing digital/social worlds. When people are traumatized, their worlds stop making sense, and All My Friends Live in My Computer explores how everyday people use social media to try and make a new world for themselves and others who are suffering. Through its attention to personal stories and application of media theory to new contexts, this book highlights how, when given the tools, people will make meaning in creative, novel, and healing ways.

An emotionally intense, imaginative journey into the way our online lives mediate the experience and definition of the suffering subject. This book should appeal to a general audience as well as to specialists in media and communication and health communication who are intensely interested in how the new online world has shaped the most fundamental of human emotions and experiences.'
Andrea L. Press, co-author of Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism: How U.S. Audiences Create Meaning Across Platforms

An emotionally intense, imaginative journey into the way our online lives mediate the experience and definition of the suffering subject. This book should appeal to a general audience as well as to specialists in media and communication and health communication who are intensely interested in how the new online world has shaped the most fundamental of human emotions and experiences.'
Andrea L. Press, co-author of Media-Ready Feminism and Everyday Sexism: How U.S. Audiences Create Meaning Across Plat

SAMIRA RAJABI is the Director of Technology Influenced Pedagogy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She has published in the Canadian Journal of Disability, as well as in the book Social Media in Iran. She is a contributor to Cure Magazine since 2015 and an active member of patient support communities online.

Prologue
Part I Trauma and Media Theory
1 Introduction: Seeing through Suffering: Digital Mediation and the Suffering Subject
2 There Are Many Ways to Suffer
3 Putting It Out There: Tactics of Meaning Making in Digital Media
Part II Meaning Making Online
4 The Battle We Didn’t Choose: Angelo Merendino and Mediations of Grief, Disease, and the Trauma of Bearing Witness
5 Nothing Can Stop You: CrossFit, Trauma, and the Digital Remaking of Ability
6 Bullied by the Nation: The Symbolic Trauma of Iranians Living in the United States
7 Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

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