Media Exposure: Communicable Disease and Communication Networks in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Don DeLillo’s White Noise

ABSTRACT:Pandemics are media events in that they reveal the hidden materialities of influence that shape the connections among bodies embedded in wider ecological and technocultural systems. Examining the relationship between communicable disease and communication networks, this article offers an analysis of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992) and Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984), two American novels that focus on subjectivities in flux and radically exposed to the forces of their material-semiotic environment. Drawing on insights from elemental media theory, cybernetics, and ecocriticism, I illustrate how coming to terms with the specter of pandemics entails a critical awareness of physical communication infrastructures.