Feeling Together: Cinema and Practices of Sociability in the Post Media Condition

In this article I consider how the contemporary intermedia network provides the framework for the creation, the development and the sensible experience of the social bond. I call such a process “sociability”, by gathering a term used by the philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel at the beginning of the XX Century. I provide my arguments through the analysis of Star Trek (J.J. Abrams, 2009), the "rebooting" of the intermedia well – known saga. I assume that this movie should be considered a theoretical audiovisual discourse about the relationship between media and sociability in the contemporary condition. I focus on three points. Firstly, I identify the dynamics of sociability in three stages: feeling of being together, feeling of acting together and feeling of feeling together. Secondly, I argue that in this ongoing process, the distinction between direct interactions and mediated ones is not relevant: the ground for sociability process is neither a physical nor a digital one, but an "assemblage" of both. Thirdly, I regard the cinema as the medium which, better than others, can build great epic narratives of the processes of sociability. In the case analyzed, even the construction of the fandom community (which is a very important feature of the Star Trek phenomenon) is transformed into an epic narrative.