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Digital Life emerges in the context of a broader shift in media philosophy, which entails two principal contentions. First, there is no epistemological route into ontology: we do not know our way towards being, as being arises out of the primacy of existence. It will soon become apparent that this is not a relegation of knowledge per se, but rather an argument from the Hegelian postulation that absolute knowledge means no knowledge at all – cumulative data gathering and reflection is not the path to enlightenment. The second contention has been argued for most forcefully by Friedrich Kittler, but is at heart a Heideggerian claim: humanity and technology are mutually constitutive; we do not exist in spite of all the digital infrastructure and content we have surrounded ourselves with, but precisely through it. Most recently, Amanda Lagerkvist has advocated this existential framing of digital media, and it has some quite profound implications for policymakers as well as theorists. It means that investigating digital life cannot be a matter of stripping away all the clutter that pervades our media saturated world to reveal what lies beneath: the clutter is the starting point; it is, in ontological terms, foundational.

It is sensible to lay down a couple of pre-emptive markers about where this leaves critical digital scholarship. The first is that it does not justify amnesia: no phenomenologist going back to Heidegger and Husserl would suggest that the primacy of experience means we just have to accept it as we find ourselves forever thrown into it. Morality is baked into thrownness and into our mutual thrownness with others; there is an imperative to take responsibility for it and its consequences, and part of that involves the forensic piecing together of what it means to be, to find oneself already out there in the thick of things as an opening gambit, and how that changes over time (see Hofman 2016).¹ This pushes us to think about our contemporary situation in terms beyond a cost-benefit analysis of what digitization has given us and what it has taken away. If the grounding of existence has shifted, then we need new ways of assessing what it means to live well. Philosophers have long argued, for instance, that the ethics of our relationships with distant others is contingent not on our knowledge about them, but just on that basic fact of co-existence. What does that mean in a context where we have an awareness of all those others who are out there, but on the whole only in a minimal, generic form? The same can be said of digital literacy, of the claims so often heard that digital ethics depends on individuals’ knowledge of the techniques and technologies that provide the basis of the stuff they consume – not to mention the workings of media economics and the profound significance of digital infrastructures. It will be argued instead that we would be better served, ethically speaking, by starting with the affordances and constraints that come with an existence spent navigating those systems, usually by feel alone. ‘Feel’ is not quite the same thing as intuition or gut instinct, cleaving more closely to Bourdieu’s sens pratique.² As he describes it, subjects are:

not particles subject to mechanical forces, and acting under the constraint of causes: nor are they conscious and knowing subjects acting with full knowledge of the facts, as champions of rational action theory believe … (they are) active and knowing agents endowed with a practical sense that is an acquired system of preferences, of principles, of vision and … schemes of action. (Bourdieu 1988: 25)

If not through conscious knowledge, then, how do digital scholars and users – existers, in Lagerkvist’s (2017) coinage – access that primary, generative experience of being amongst the digital? Historically one of the most persuasive ways has been through disruption: only when a tool is broken does its ready-to-handness become consciously registrable, and only when media are unexpectedly inaccessible does their sheer givenness become conceivable. Justin Clemens and Adam Nash (2018) helpfully tease this out by way of Giorgio Agamben’s conception of phenomenological anxiety, which goes far beyond occasional breakages and blockages to the annihilation of handiness itself – that is the only means we have of grasping the sheer contingency of our taken-for-granted everyday lives.³ By contrast, a common thread of this book is that the apprehension of contingency is rarely, if ever, revelatory, but rather a background hum that accompanies the improvisatory, provisional acts we engage in to sustain at-handedness and at-homeness. Shaun Moores (2015), and by extension David Seamon (1979) and Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), loom large here, in the evocative notion of a life lived alongly. But in addition to finding ontological security on the fly, constantly in motion from one digital thing to the next, that movement also affords the anxiety that is a necessary condition of care in the phenomenological sense; that is, of our having an interest in our own being. Clemens and Nash push this one step further in positing that if ontological care is temporal, and technology is fundamental in establishing the world as world, then what is technically possible and how we think of being are themselves co-determinate, stretching back in a chain to the ancient Greeks and before that to the development of writing.⁴

The originary technicity of being means that only that which appears as ready-to-hand can appear at all; there is nothing outside of graspability as a resource in an environment whose affordances are given by the history of technology.⁵ There is something a little maddening about the insistence that the sum total of what is imaginable is enframed by technology, but this is in effect no different from Foucault’s conjecture (1990 [1976]) that we have no means of understanding the self beyond the discourses of which we are products – or, less dispiritingly, there are no authentic selves to be discovered and protected from exogenous forces, only ways of selfing that can be scrutinized or nourished. There is then a continuity between the emphasis placed by Sarah Kember and Joanna Zyelinska (2012; see also van Dijck 2013; van Zoonen 2013) on the simultaneously generative and constraining nature of social media platforms and Michel de Certeau’s conception of everyday existence as imposition and affordance. It is always both. We can criticize Instagram on grounds of privacy, or commodification, or its entrenchment of narrowly unimaginative lifestyles, but only by way of selves predicated on intuitively grasped practices that are the product of a world in which Instagram is a thing, regardless of whether you or I use it or not. At the same time, though, navigating a world in which Instagram and its attendant cultures of practice are at hand to others and potentially to oneself is capable of sustaining that anxiety, phenomenologically speaking, that in turn makes it possible to understand, strictly defined, the utter contingency of the experience of social media. It is reasonable enough to suspect that digital media are designed to occlude the way they shape our experience of the world (Burke 2019), but understanding the latter is not a matter of standing back in order to get some perspective – it is a matter of diving in.

There is a worryingly heroic aspect to Heidegger’s notion of standing in a situation, grasping the nettle and taking responsibility for the self and world one finds oneself thrown into, which is questionable at best. But it is important that the ethical imperative he develops out of the condition of thrownness, which is built around the idea of fallingness from being, is not necessarily a redemptive one. The ins and outs of this ethics are for another chapter; for now what is important is that from a phenomenological perspective there is no point in trying to regain any kind of lost innocence associated with the pre-digital world, or in trying to attain a purer kind of being-in-the-world less contaminated by data. Fallingness and the alienation that goes along with it is a given; it is not just our default mode of experience but ontologically foundational. And that is what makes it possible to think of the kinds of states we often associate with digital media use – distraction, impatience, banal curiosity, affect-chasing – as starting points, not aberrations. Rather than accepting whatever compromised present we are served with, this simply means that there is no original sin for which we have to make amends. The ethics of digital media is not about atoning for what it has done to us, but about recognizing that the digital has always been within us, and we have always been within it. It is probably easier to think of the ethics of mutual constitutivity in the realm of relations between human subjects, and Emmanuel Levinas has been put to good use (see especially Pinchevski 2005a) in showing how ethics consists in the brute fact of co-existence, and not the intimate or attentive relations with specific others that may develop over time. Clemens and Nash similarly deploy Gilbert Simondon’s (2017 [1958]) model of the pre-individual⁶ to illustrate that individuation is anything but the emergence of discrete being: individuals exist in a perpetual, generative state of mutual transduction, and the same can be said of humans and their environments. The debate goes on about whether digital ontology is categorically novel, but the meaning of digital ethics is not built on shakier, more tainted ground than anything that came before. This is why arguments based on the intractability and unknowability of data, while useful framing devices, can only take us so far – the radical contingencies of the already-there world have always been constitutive of collective being-in-the-world and individual subjectivity in ways that cannot be made the objects of direct consciousness. They are, however, ready-to-hand, and their doing discloses a world of possibilities as well as strictures.

How then are we to think critically about digital life? There are countless concrete phenomena that demand to be called out as unethical: discriminatory usage of health data in the insurance industry, the prevention of the use of non-proprietary software and of autonomous infrastructural maintenance, the rolling out of AI-driven identification algorithms as non-optional standards, data surveillance carried out across ever-expanding parts of everyday life. These might all be said to revolve around notions of rights, consent or autonomy, but what do these terms mean in a digital world? The approach taken here is to reject any rarefied, abstract definitions against which we will necessarily be found wanting – there is nothing relativistic in claiming that such ethical terms have always emerged in media res, through and not in spite of the compromised, constraining environments in which they make sense. Digital ethics can only be meaningful to the extent that it originates from the mess of daily digital life, rather than being imposed on it from outside – hence the absurdity of reducing data consent to discrete acts of agreeing to a website’s terms and conditions. It is possible that consenting to the corporate collection of one’s data needs to be rethought in a more media ecological way – that is, as pertaining to the way we move through digital environments rather than what we know and think about this or that platform. This is hardly new: the proposition that ethical habits do not have to start from clear-headed decisions goes back at least as far as William James (2017 [1887]).

Autonomy in the digital age is a minefield because it is often conflated with choice. It is a basic phenomenological tenet that constraint is a necessary condition of subjectivity, not its preclusion – and yet there is something palpably unfair about a farmer locked out by software from the means to repair a tractor, or a dating app that constricts my ability to express my gender and sexual preference. Meanwhile there are familiar, longstanding theses about how there is little to be said for individual choice when all it does is outsource regimes of governmentality, or when the choices we are encouraged to make are so tawdry. The motives behind the constraint of consumer behaviour on a social media platform are a less promising ethical route than first appears to be the case. It seems intuitively appealing to expose the profit-seeking or surveillance motives that really explain the form and function of the digital environments we spend time in, but as with consent, awareness is not the route to autonomy when the latter is embodied and practical. It has been demonstrated (Devine 2015) that most users of music streaming services are completely unaware that the environmental footprint of this form of music consumption is far greater than with legacy media forms like the compact disc or cassette, and yet news stories about the topic gained no traction at all. If conscious awareness does not provide a viable basis for establishing the implications of our digital media habits, then current conceptions of media literacy may have to be rebuilt around the practical, manual knowledge of tool use. Kittler (1990) is quick to remind us that the belief that computers are mere tools at our disposal is a myth, that of homo faber.⁷ We are made through tool use as much as we make things with it, but this is not at all the same as arguing that we are the tools of technology. Mutual constitutivity is just that – mutual – and this shines a light on the far-reaching implications and possibilities of practical political concerns.

Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp’s influential book The Mediated Construction of Reality (2017) tackles the key question that arises from the existential grounding of digital media. In short, on what basis can we assess, critique and resist the influence of particular media organizations, and the digital industries collectively, on the rapidly changing parameters of everyday life? It is not enough to show that change is occurring, or even that it is happening without our awareness or consent. Instead, Couldry and Hepp foreground subjective losses, ways of being social that once gone cannot be remembered or reclaimed. In one sense this is inevitable: we cannot know genuinely what it was like to exist in relation to others a hundred years ago, let alone a thousand. But the acceleration of change – and, they maintain, the way the structures underpinning the experience of daily life are being reshaped towards commercial and surveilling ends – means that it is imperative we take stock of what we stand to lose. There is a level of nuance here that is comparable to José van Dijck’s The Culture of Connectivity (2013): the question is not so much whether we now enjoy less privacy, but what privacy now means, and how that apprehension of privacy became normal and with what consequences.⁸ Such a line of inquiry does not imply that we have become less social or less authentic in our relations to each other – as Simmel (1971: 133, in Couldry and Hepp 2017: 4) puts it, there has always been an artificiality to the sociability that we work hard at sustaining in order to feel authentically human together. This collective work is society’s care structure, and it is far from a futile endeavour (Scannell 2014; cf. Bourdieu 1994); it provides not only comfort but also the grounding of empathy and solidarity. Simmel’s insight shows us that there is an eternal tension between our always fluid sense of who we are and the changing frameworks in which we enact sociability.

Couldry and Hepp’s thesis goes well beyond the nostrum that we have forgotten how to be social in the age of digital media. In fact most people are very good at it, adopting and adapting to new forms of sociality so that they feel endogenous. Rather, their thesis is that the functional units of collective social construction are themselves derivatives of technological functions. This need not necessarily be experienced as disordered (cf. Latour 2005), but order is at stake when the parameters of interaction change (Couldry and Hepp 2017: 9). If this echoes Anthony Giddens’ (1994: 187, in Couldry and Hepp 2017: 10) diagnosis that we live differently in the world in late modernity than in other historical epochs, Couldry and Hepp go on to reflect specifically on whether datafication has ushered in something different again.⁹ Its impact is effectively epistemological, redistributing knowledge production in such a way that cannot help but reorder how we understand and work at sociality. It will be clear from the discussion so far that one does not have to go along with Couldry and Hepp’s call for a heightened understanding of these shifts in everyday life to agree that any systemic changes to the ways we make the world, each other and ourselves to-hand warrant close scrutiny – this is how history unfolds, after all. Likewise with their emphasis on individual sovereignty, on the right to control the means by which we constitute ourselves as social: in an important sense we have always achieved this through the internalization of anticipatory and reactive templates that precede us and will outlast us. That such ‘affective assemblages’ (Withy 2015) are hand-me-downs does not make them any the less genuine – the whole point is that they are collective and context-specific, which is what allows for sociability in the first place. If these templates change, even or especially if we adapt to them effortlessly, this is prima facie important. But change they always will. Couldry and Hepp ask us to confront the implications of these templates being rewired to pursue goals different from those of social actors.¹⁰ It is one thing to hold that being-in-the-world is always hugely contingent and, seen in one light, arbitrary – that does not make its stakes any less real. But to suggest that its reformulation according to distinct technological and economic logics carries a particular ethical urgency is compelling, and more incisive than calling out the big tech companies for their nefarious deeds.

Louise Amoore’s important work on social order (2011; 2013) sets out just what is at stake in new ways of being social whose infrastructures are algorithmic. In order to function efficiently, algorithms have to operate at high levels of abstraction, maximizing predictability by reducing the range of possible outcomes in any given interaction between individuals and digital objects. It is not that the programmer decides and enforces outcomes, but that less likely and more chaotic chains of events are excluded, resulting in a social space in which those futures are less likely. It is not a question of rewiring our minds or overriding our capacity for free will; the point is that selfing is always a process not a state of being, a set of practices we more or less manage using whatever resources we find to hand as we make our way about. We do not develop a toolkit and then go out into the world to be us; we do it as we go. This is not to say that we simply make it up, but the process is necessarily experimental. The import of Amoore’s intervention is to ask whether our facility with improvisation is curtailed when the tools at our disposal are simpler and more predictable in their outcomes. The issue, then, is not whether the tools are of our own devising – they never were – but whether their design, geared towards the efficient running of commercial social media platforms, reduces the untidiness and uncertainty that characterizes the particular manifestation of sociability that we want to defend. The all-pervasive spread of data collection raises the possibility that we are indeed predictable as populations to a degree to which many or most of us may not have been aware, and there is a sense that what is aberrant and unpredictable needs to be protected. But are we actually becoming more predictable? Over the course of this book it will be seen that the necessarily unknowable affordances of lives lived digitally suggest perhaps not, although not definitively.

The materialist phenomenology that frames The Mediated Construction of Reality provides a robust blueprint for continuing to investigate the constantly evolving ground upon which everyday life is built and worked on, and the book’s prioritization of processes of materialization and institutionalization is impossible to refute.¹¹ What remains an open question is whether the fact that the data processes underpinning normative practices of selfhood are largely unfathomable and shaped by the economic imperatives of social media platforms necessitates a degraded, less imaginative, more biddable kind of selfhood. In more tangible terms, Couldry and Hepp frame this through a critique of the kind of online personal branding that has become conventional across large parts of the social internet. Branding brings a lot of baggage with it, including the tacky commodification of identity pitched to a buyer’s market in popularity and status. There are, however, other ways of looking at self-presentation in digital (inter alia) contexts, from Erving Goffman’s (1990 [1959]; 2008 [1963]) exegesis of the rules governing everyday interactions – rules which, when looked at coldly, appear similarly arbitrary and flimsy – to Simone de Beauvoir’s (2015 [1948]) existential framing of the ethical self through projects. It is tempting to reduce digital selfhood to the fatuous #livingmybestlife tropes of Instagram, but the norm is perhaps closer to Lagerkvist’s stumbling existers who feel sharply the incessant challenge of our thrownness into digital worlds. For de Beauvoir, the building of an ethical, autonomous self is predicated on failure and compromise, on stuttering, tentative steps, on discontinuity and disorientation – the self would have no ethical heft without these features. Couldry and Hepp are certainly right to call for a renewed, unstinting scrutiny of the world-making strategies of governing institutions (2017: 163), but these institutions’ ability to curate the experience of everyday life through designing and controlling the building blocks of online social construction is by no means absolute.

The corollary of Couldry and Hepp’s deep mediatization thesis is that scholars and users alike need to be more open-eyed about where their selfing resources came from and with what implications. Paul Frosh is interested in exploring the less systemic, more tentative affordances of digital lives lived largely through peripheral vision. In The Poetics of Digital Media (2018) he sets out his stall by way of a reference to Annette Markham (2003, no relation), who has long argued that technology and everyday life are not only mutually constitutive, but are vitally connected. For Frosh, too, media are poetic in the sense that they perform poesis, bringing worlds into presence. This prefigures John Durham Peters’ assessment of the role of media infrastructures: they should not be thought of as grubby substitutes for previous modes of subjectification, since they are just as profoundly ontological. This is an important intervention, for it means that regardless of whether one thinks that social media platforms are irredeemably superficial and commercially implicated, they are no less existentially factual than what went before. Chapter 5 fleshes this out through a reading of Division One of Heidegger’s Being and Time, though the salient point is clear enough: the claim that mediatized forms of sociality are crowding out previously established ones, and that there is thus a danger in the former being mistaken for the latter, is not unassailable. Mediatized forms are as generative of the real as what they are said to be displacing; their ontological priority is not rendered flimsy or dubious by their origins or design. We do not have to like these newly ubiquitous platforms for social interaction, and indeed it is perfectly reasonable to call them out as inauthentic. Heidegger’s rejoinder, however, is that the inauthentic social worlds in which we are endlessly immersed are as factual as anything else. Ethics emerges from inauthenticity, not through its effacement.

For Frosh it is to be expected that the lifeworld will be tessellated with systems and structures beyond the realms of direct perception, from the microscopic to the astrophysical – and, one might add, from the intricate architectures of digital platforms to the macroeconomic forces governing a social space in a particular period. It is no surprise that he marshals Scannell early on, who marvels rather than frets at the observation that the post-industrial world individuals inhabit is more or less entirely dependent on infrastructure made by humans; that everything that makes the experience of everyday life possible, seamless and fruitful stems from technological and economic endeavours and sheer labour. If Scannell sees boundless possibilities in this new reality, and Couldry and Hepp see instead the evidently reduced resources we actually make use of in contemporary mediated life, Frosh perceives something more ambiguous. It is true that digital media, ‘by virtue of their connective, perceptual and symbolic attributes’ (Couldry and Hepp 2017: 9), shape our mostly taken-for-granted modes of being present, but they do so without full occlusion. Those modes of presence are able to be recognized, to be rendered objects of consciousness, opening up the possibility of reflexivity in a way that does not feature in Couldry and Hepp’s model. Like many others, Frosh considers the prospect of grasping the contingency of mediated lived reality through reflection on those rare moments in which the seams of the lifeworld are ruptured. But he soon moves on to explore other modes of being in a world amongst others and amongst technology, predicated on infrastructures and resources of social construction that are more tangential and transient, less assertive and substantive.

Frosh takes aim squarely at the ‘attentive fallacy’: ‘the assumption that the significance of representations is generated through an intense, focussed interchange between an attentive address and a formally distinct, unified text’ (2018: 13). Why, he counters, should we suspect that distraction is superficial and uncritical, even the ‘handmaiden of hegemony’? He goes on to question the derision with which many regard commodified forms of consumption and ‘pre-digested pleasure’, which might alternatively be thought of as ingenious means for dealing with the unimaginable quantities of representations calling for our attention. Indeed, more than a coping mechanism, the collective shorthand we develop in order to register the multitude of distant mediated others should be seen as a significant achievement of modern culture. Ben Highmore (2010) has similarly defended distraction as a kind of ‘promiscuous absorption’, one for which we should be grateful not just for want of anything else, but because this flitting forever from one thing to the next has real ethical affordances. Frosh, rejecting what he dubs the ‘rapture of rupture’, sees inattention – which, like distraction, is not numbness but an impatient, restless darting about – as a way of properly populating mediated worlds with the voices and bodies of others. It is these non-intense relationships we have with others – and here we could add digital objects and infrastructures of the technological and economic type – which provide the basis for a grounded, active ethics of being-in-the-world. Here, as Frosh puts it, indifference acts as a moral force in the taken-for-granted, pre-reflective experience of everyday life.¹²

Later in the same work Frosh goes on to sketch out some possible pathways from a pre-conscious practical response to mediation to a more fully-fledged ethical responsibility towards others, focusing on the kinds of easily acquired muscle habits associated with digital interface screens, though the truth is that we cannot reliably infer the form of that ethical sociability from its corporeal or affective origins. It still stands, however, that the apprehension of contingency need not be clinched through any kind of revelation, and that ‘both decentering and refocusing modes of disclosure’ (2018: 17) of the world, which are at the heart of all calls to challenge the new norms and conventions of digital life, do not depend on consciousness of crisis. This serves as a potent riposte to claims that digital media flatten the massively diverse range of human experience into a homogeneous play of images, so that the representation of a victim of war or famine registers no differently to that of a politician in the midst of a sex scandal or a protestor on the streets of a distant capital. Frosh sees this composite aggregate of ‘the human’ – which we manage to maintain as we cast our eyes from one thing to the next without pausing to reflect – as a productive form of ‘non-hostile habituation’, a being-with that is not just liveable but defensible too. And while there are problems with stereotypes, misconceptions and delusions that have real implications, the point is not to try to pull back or zoom in to see the representations we encounter in a less generic, more immediate fashion, but to tweak our habitual practices so as to form different aggregates of ‘the human’ as a category of minimal solidarity.

More broadly, Frosh’s defence of inattention opens up fertile ground for thinking about world disclosure in digitally mediated environments primarily through the prism of practical knowledge. The practices of which the latter consists are material in the sense that they are context-specific and of determinate form, and thus properly subject to historical and critical inquiry. They are also not set in stone: their routinization is a production of sameness through movement between innumerable digital artefacts, and while the energies this requires are exactly what present the world as world to us, if they are deployed differently there is no intrinsic loss of care structure. That is to say, the fact that we are collectively so invested in producing being-in-the-world does not necessitate that we are destined to disclose the world in ever more entrenched ways. There is a fluidity to our navigation of digital worlds which means that disclosure is dynamic. Over the past few decades it has been argued that this has left us all at sea, unable to maintain any firm experience of being-in-the-world and with others, or even of Dasein itself. But we are endlessly inventive when it comes to generating new contextual habits of practical knowledge and embodied techniques of disclosure that allow for perpetual motion if not ontological security. Of course, whether one sees this generative capacity for adaption as a submission to disciplinary regimes or simply as finding new ways to make the world familiar to us depends on what side of Scannell’s hermeneutics of trust/suspicion one stands (Frosh 2018: 18). But there is surely something substantial to explore in the fact that this facility for motion-enabling practical habits of world disclosure cannot be reverse engineered so as to produce a determinate mode of being. What we know of the world and how we know it digitally are slippery issues. There are equally real stakes attached to every mode of world disclosure that stabilizes for a time, but there is not a necessary subjective loss as one morphs into another.

If this all sounds like a rationale for embracing technological change whatever form it takes, it is in fact not so simple. Change and habituation are not opposing forces, but two sides of the same coin, akin to the countervailing components of escalation and de-escalation that keep a nuclear facility relatively but not absolutely stable. Frosh is sceptical, for instance, about devising newly immersive experiences through digital media in order to better understand the experience of others. Like Chouliaraki (2010) he is also mindful that even the most mawkish of heuristics – the use of music to evoke a particular response in disaster reporting, for instance – has its uses insofar as it orients the media user towards a determinate kind of practical knowledge. In short, we rely on stale tropes and tricks as cues to intuit ways of feeling that reveal the world to us in recognizable ways. The apposite point for the rest of this book is that feeling our way through digitally saturated worlds is productive: it is not a means of reaching a point where we no longer have to keep moving and adapting; rather, it is exactly how we come to know the world and feel at home in it.

Highmore draws on Walter Benjamin in linking distraction to absorption, and he additionally cites Kracauer’s meditation (1990 [1926]) on distracted attention in his Weimar essays.¹³ Common to all three is the commitment to the kind of embodied knowledge made possible by distracted motion from one object of attention to the next. Furthermore, there is nothing special about this – the distracted state does not require a great feat of imagination or creativity; it is just the daily work of making sense of the world around us. This in turn implies that distraction is an end in itself, and need not lead to any kind of wonderment or delight. Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (2007) makes a similar point, suggesting that while it is normal to think of the affective navigation of digital media as a constant search for the next affective hit, it requires only the barest hint of affective response to propel the subject along. Highmore does not extend this line of reasoning as far as Frosh, but the implication is clear: it is perfectly plausible that the kinds of practice we associate with digital media – surfing, grazing, prodding, swiping – are uniquely appropriate to developing over time the kinds of thin ties with maximal others associated with respect and solidarity.¹⁴ Nor is there anything accidental about this, for while indecisive media attention may appear to lack form and consistency, it is nevertheless the product of the historical interplay of everyday life and technology that has brought us to where we are.

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.

Langlois adopts Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988: 64) notion of the abstract machine in order to think through how meaning-making has come to be colonized by software. As with Couldry and Hepp, this is less about the appropriation by technology of signification than its role in organizing the flow of signals. Kittler is with us once more, and it is difficult to argue against an approach that seeks to examine how the conditions of meaning production are shaped through assemblages of technology, culture and, crucially, institutions.¹⁵ This book, though, is especially interested in examining digital subjectification, and from a phenomenological perspective that means investigating the myriad ways we enact practices of selfhood. There is no such thing as a digital self, but there are all kinds of digital selfings. Such a perspective is ultimately at odds with the Deleuzean framework Langlois develops, in which it makes sense to speak of the production of an ideal capitalist self. It is one thing to assert that economic and technological imperatives will colour the subjectifying practices we find ready-to-hand as we traverse digital worlds – how could they not? – but it is another to claim that this culminates in a complete, integral capitalist subjectivity, as though one mode of being human has simply been displaced by another. The same might be said of the ‘mining of the psyche’ (Langlois 2014: 88) allegedly typical of datafied platforms, in that there is a distinction between critiquing the retrieval, ordering and exploiting of subjective experiences and averring that this amounts to taking something from a previously intact, innocent self.

The present volume is not interested in the ‘selling of brains’ (Lazzarato 2014, quoted in Langlois 2014: 90), not because it has no concern for privacy, but because it rejects the notion of internal states innate to a stable subject, over which that subject has or should have sovereignty. This is in line with Judith Butler’s (1997) problematization of an interiority and exteriority of subjectivity. Subjectification is not about the expression of an inner self for an outer world; it consists entirely in enacting practices of selfhood in the world, practices which are of that world and not ‘of’ the self. Digital Life takes questions of privacy, consent and autonomy seriously, but not at all from a perspective that sees selves as being stolen, rented or substituted by data. Consider one of the main objects of critique encountered in this corner of the literature: the coercive reshaping of how individuals externalize self-image on social media. It is certainly right to scrutinize the ways in which people manage their online identities, and we can do so in much the same way that Goffman did in the mid-twentieth century, using the dramaturgical model of performances, replete with costumes and scripts, but without questioning the good faith of the players observed. To start from the premise that to exist is to be open to otherness is not to suggest that we go through the world discovering how different or alike ‘we’ are from others. Instead it means adopting the subjectifying practices we find available to us as readily usable resources – practices of externalization and internalization – and revealing our relationality and responsibility to others. There are real choices with real implications associated with how we respond to the world so revealed, but it is not a question of fidelity to a true or authentic self; integrity can only derive from an ethics inherent in a present into which we are thrown and that is ontologically prior to any purported sense of origin.

Butler’s notion of performativity encapsulates adroitly the fact that in institutionally and politically determinate contexts identity performances are not playful but incited.¹⁶ The subsequent danger is that we internalize these subjectifications and make them our own – that is how conformity is enforced, and potentially reveals the danger of digital worlds furnishing us with atrophied capacities for self-making that we come to believe are us. The salient point, though, is that this is not a matter of your or my identity being corrupted or usurped. Being-in-the-world proceeds through endless iterations of externalization and internalization; this is how we become who we are, but it is not a process that ends with the discovery of what was there to begin with. Selfhood starts in the middle; we come to feel ourselves as ourselves as we hone our improvisatory repertoires, but those practices emerge from without, not within. What could amount to a nihilistic account of the impossibility of authenticity or the vacuity of selfhood, however, points to a different way forward. The point of all this is that if the ways we have of being selves are of the world and not of us, then they are collective, and we have a collective responsibility for what those subjectivities reveal of the world and with what consequences. To live increasingly digitally is not, then, to experience subjective loss but to make that world familiar, enacting provisional selves that will come to feel natural. This will have, and indeed already has, significant affordances and implications, the contingency of which may be revealed as we develop routines and paths anew. There is little to be said for holding firm to a world and a way of being in it which we feel to be imperilled: making a home out of a world not of our own making, and fashioning an identity out of the selves we already find ourselves enacting, out there in the thick of it, is what we do.