Digital Life

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Tim Markham. Digital Life

Contents

Guide

Pages

Dedication

Digital Life

Copyright page

1 Introduction

Digital ontology

Being digitally

Definitions and chapter overview

Notes

2 The Care Deficit

Levinas on duration as non-intentional consciousness

Affective intentionality and disclosive postures

Felt awareness and affective solidarity

Notes

3 The Affordances of Affect

Habituation and inhabitation

Finding our way about multiply digital environments

Moral wayfaring

Notes

4 Data, Surveillance and Apathy

Political subjectivity and the question of autonomy

Digitally interpellated selves

Big data and Hegel’s Lord and Bondsman

Notes

5 Everyday Stakes of Being

State of mind, mood and findingness

Idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity

Falling into digital worlds

Digital liveness and presencing

6 Experience and Identity

Merleau-Ponty on the primacy of experience

MacIntyre on the phoney depth of emotive value claims

Values as dispositional practices

Notes

7 Everyday Lives of Digital Infrastructures

Infrastructures are people, too

Everyday digital life and the dominant order

Living with digital platforms

Repertoires of infrastructural navigation

Notes

8 Selfing in a Digital World

Provisional selves

Being political digitally

From awareness to critical improvisation

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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For Emma

Digital Life resists the idea that there is something about the digital age that is corroding, corrupting or diluting of what it means to be human, to the same extent that it rejects a utopian projection of the digital Übermensch. Digital harms come in many forms that are not equally attributable to the logic of digitization, to the neoliberal economic framework that has facilitated its spread, or indeed to the forces of governmentality Michel Foucault diagnosed in the march of modernity. There are three broad groupings of problematizations of the pervasion of contemporary society by digital technologies, each requiring a distinct analytic lens. First there is the outright damage, often criminal in nature, wrought with the aid of digital platforms, software and hardware: disinformation campaigns, hate speech, propaganda, incitement to violence, financial scams, identity theft and so on. Collectively we defend ourselves against these through legal and political channels, though this is difficult since data is largely indifferent to national and other strictures. Beyond that is the question of how to ensure that citizens are better able to recognize and evade such harms, and here lies the suspicion that there is something unique about digital technologies regarding their ability to make things seem other than they actually are.

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Also threaded through that history, of course, is economics. The commercial basis of the ‘affect industry’ – the commodification of affective responses in order to inflate a lucrative market around practices of surfing and swiping – suggests that digital distraction should be seen as determined at least in part by the forces of global capitalism. Eva Ilouz (2007) calls this ‘emotional capitalism’, referring to the ‘cold intimacy’ that marks the way affect has come to be aligned with economic relations and exchange. Others (Hoggett and Thompson 2012) have written about the pacifying, quieting effects of media experienced emotionally or simply affectively, and there is at least some evidence that responding emotionally to bad news, for instance, is negatively correlated with doing anything concrete in response to it. It was suggested above that while the corporate objectives behind the expansion of the social media industries should be borne in mind, they do not fully determine the affordances of the practices that come to be endemic to one platform or another. Whatever these digital practices are, they are not dumb – that is, not the mute, pre-destined endpoints of structural determination. For Highmore it is the fundamental activity of distraction – turning away from one thing in order to turn towards another, or the latent energy of boredom and absent-mindedness – that clinches its potential to evolve into something more durable, namely an orientation towards the world and to others that is tenacious and principled. Distraction is above all an unresolved state, and that is what fuels subjective motion. I want to suggest that the way we feel our way through digital worlds is about more than a constant lack of resolution: it is also about provisionality. The idea is that a provisional state reveals what is at stake, and provisional practices of attending, responding, moving as well as subjectifying reveal positions taken in relation to those stakes. Provisionality is not about inconstancy of identity or ethics, but it does mean that these have to be thought of as exploratory, even experimental. It is common enough to talk of subjectification as a process rather than a destination, and similarly one’s response to the stake of a situation of thrownness is not all or nothing – positions must be taken but can also be revised or discarded as necessary. What sustains constancy over time are the repertoires developed individually and collectively for responding on the fly. The point of all this is straightforward enough: distraction is not passive but active; it is not naïve wonder but complicity; affect-driven motion is not about innocent pleasure-seeking but a matter of the unrelenting disclosure of the world and of one’s position in relation to it. The upshot is that our cultures of surfing and swiping are not displacement activities designed and embraced so that we do not have to think about the world as it really is and our responsibility for what happens in it. It is in the lightness and fluidity of these practices that the world, its stakes and our culpability are revealed – not when we stop to take a long hard look at the world and ourselves and decide once and for all what kind of stand to take, what kind of self to become.

It bears emphasizing that this is quite distinct from the cultures that have emerged on some social media platforms in which one is expected to have a ‘take’ on anything: knowing about something is insufficient to demonstrate cultural competence, and one must communicate an opinion for a post to pass muster. If being is conceived after Heidegger as thrownness into a world together with other people, that world is disclosed by way of otherness. Peters puts this succinctly when he writes that communication does not involve transmitting one’s intentionality; ‘rather, it entails bearing oneself in such a way that one is open to hearing the other’s otherness’ (1999: 17). The difference here is that surfing and swiping obviously do not require overt communication to take place; they are nonetheless position-takings or bearings that place one in a relation of otherness to whatever object, human or otherwise, is (barely) registered. Ganaele Langlois (2014) relates this specifically to the affective realm of social media, explaining that the embodied feltness of moving through these digital spaces is a process of relationality that can never be reduced to signification alone. Making sense is then a kind of flow through digital space that proceeds in relation to other flows, including the material, economic and political. This implies that the meaning of digital media is produced through movement, rather than discovered in situ, and meaning itself is thus as material and technological as it is symbolic or cultural. In an odd way it is the lack of clarity this provides that is most useful: there is no possibility of isolating any of these flows to assess its discrete impact, so that one could never infer meaning from platform architectures or economic imperatives. But it still means we can assert, pace Matt Fuller (2003), that the way we attribute meaningfulness to information depends at least in part on its formatting.

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