Reclaiming the hollow heart. The agency of the transmediated self in everyday life-war realism (ever)

Abstract

This Master's thesis examines the struggle for self-agency as a tactical socio-psychological construct, contextualizing it as a site for observing the deep entanglement between war, everyday life, and personal psyche. It proposes a research framework for reclaiming lucid self-agency under conditions of cognitive and affective obscurity. To build its theoretical foundation, the paper traces the historical and political development of psychological tactics. A comparative analysis of the United States Army and the Chinese Communist Party reveals an evolving condition in which war and daily life have become increasingly inseparable. In response to the lack of adequate conceptual language, the paper introduce Everyday Life-War Realism (EVER), a term describing a lived condition where everyday life is encoded into ever-going micro-battlefields, devoid of geopolitical overtone. Drawing on the concept of the transmediated self, the paper explores how agency is shaped and contested within these entangled realities. Its core argument centers on a triangular tension between state power, cultural reaction, and individual psychic state. Generative AI (ChatGPT) supports interdisciplinary inquiry, alongside dialogic research with a diverse participant group. The paper offers both a theoretical framework and a long-term research proposal to explore living and resistance in a conflict-driven, mediated reality.