Digital Life

Tim Markham

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781509541065, 9781509541058
• eBook ISBN: 9781509541072
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Conventional wisdom suggests that the pervasiveness of digital media into our everyday lives is undermining cherished notions of politics and ethics. Is this concern unfounded? In this daring new book, Tim Markham argues that what it means to live ethically and politically is realized through, not in spite of, the everyday experience of digital life. Drawing on a wide range of philosophers from Hegel and Heidegger to Levinas and Butler, he investigates what is really at stake amid the constant distractions of our media-saturated world, the way we present ourselves to that world through social media, and the relentless march of data into every aspect of our lives. A provocation to think differently about digital media and what it is doing to us, Digital Life offers timely insights into distraction and compassion fatigue, privacy and surveillance, identity and solidarity. It is essential reading for scholars and advanced students of media and communication.

1 Introduction

This book is intended as a provocation to rethink our pathologization of ordinary citizens’ digital lives as oblivious, apolitical and self-centred. We accept that people care, but about the wrong things and in the wrong ways – not least the emotional, attention-seeking, virtue-signalling outpourings seen on social media platforms. In academic circles, the concern is that the quest for experience in our digital lives is crowding out politics, at least politics conventionally conceived as solidarity with out-groups as well as in-groups, awareness of democratic rights and their erosion by commercial and surveilling forces, and commitments to political institutions and processes. This chapter aims to set out the book’s stall: instead of fretting about people thinking, feeling and acting in the wrong ways, we should do what any good phenomenologist would do: start with the experience of everyday digital life and ask not just what we stand to lose in a fast-changing world, but what we stand to gain.

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.

The thesis to be developed is that this wariness about the inherent inauthenticity of the digital is unwarranted. Drawing on phenomenological arguments, it will be suggested that whatever the digital brings into being is just as real as anything else; we always start from an inauthentic present, rather than some pure origin which has come to be contaminated by progressive technological revolutions in representation and communication. This insight has real-world implications for policymakers and regulators as well as scholars, for it raises the essential question of what a citizen’s knowledge of digital risks should look like. This, true to the phenomenological tradition, will not amount to the scales falling from an individual’s eyes so that they see the thing itself, stripped of layers of mediation. Rather, it has to be a practical, even bodily knowledge. That word ‘bodily’ can sound odd in this context, but it boils down to three straightforward propositions. First, digital knowledge can be affective rather than conscious, merely felt rather than hard won through cognition. Second, practical knowledge is about position-taking in relation to objects encountered in everyday life, increasingly digitally. And third, how we experience everyday life is less a series of discrete encounters and more about movement through an environment – in which objects often barely register at all. Put together, the knowledge required by citizens is neither cynical, forensic nor defensive. It instead consists in a sceptical agility: those swipes and taps we sometimes suspect render us impressionable can also be the deft application of acquired wisdom, knowing what kind of distance to keep as we move from one thing to the next.

The second type of critique of digitization concerns its systemic underpinnings and implications: the profit-seeking raison d’être of social media platforms and their complicity in further entrenching global inequalities; the degradation of public spheres by a combination of the elevation of the hyperbolic and personal above the measured and reasoned, the anonymity of some digital spaces, and the formation of what Richard Sennett (2012) calls intentive communities and we have come to know as silos or filter bubbles; the quiet rolling out of intrusive and illiberal legislation supposedly in the interests of security; the wielding of facial recognition and other monitoring capacities by authoritarian as well as democratic states; and the massive environmental cost of producing, maintaining and disposing of our digital infrastructures, systems and devices. In all these areas we rely heavily on campaigners, activists and experts to pile pressure on politicians and regulators in order to defend basic human rights of privacy, freedom of speech and accountability. Beyond that is the question of how we can ensure that the public are better informed about such systemic issues, especially because there is again a lingering suspicion that there is something about the way digital systems are designed, function and are weightlessly experienced that is inherently geared towards concealment. A pragmatic, if bitter, lesson to be learned from journalism is that there is in practice little scope for making people care more than they do, however serious the issue. But there are options other than throwing up our hands in resignation or doggedly persevering in trying to get people to see how things really are. As with the first category, then, the alternative to be set forward here is essentially ecological, a matter of how we move through digitally enabled and pervaded worlds. Different from public awareness traditionally conceived, this is knowledge of what it means to live and navigate through a world of which all of these phenomena are features, in which all manner of others also exist and suffer its depravities, and in which I am complicit and responsible.

The third kind of critique is both more philosophical and more radical, and concerns the extent to which digitization has reshaped the conditions of existence itself. How can we appraise, let alone resist and redirect, the contingencies of a world our experience of which is largely determined by those very contingencies? A more extensive discussion of digital ontology is presented in the next section; suffice it to introduce here the phenomenological characterization of thrownness: making familiar the world and the self into which we find ourselves always-already thrown, using ready-to-hand resources that are not of our making or choosing, is an intrinsic part of the human condition. There is an open question about the extent to which it is productive to encourage greater awareness in individuals that they are a product of digitization, as much as they think of digital devices as tools to put to their own ends. There is more at stake in how we as publics account for how we got to the present juncture in which all kinds of things have come to be taken for granted, and especially in what agency we have in relation to the future worlds and new normals that digitization will bring into existence. Here it will be argued that there is little point in working to retrieve what we have lost, experientially speaking, in the digital age, or in trying to extract or abstract ourselves from the digital in order to better assess what it is doing and could do for us. As with the first two categories of critique, the knowledge required here is practical: rather than revelation, it is by finding new ways of doing things that the contingency of our being-in-the-world is revealed and new ways of being are made real. This is not something that has to be done blind, but nor do we need to imagine an origin and a destination: it is a matter of experimenting, improvising, committing provisionally and repeating.

Digital ontology

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 sta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Care Deficit
• 3 The Affordances of Affect
• 4 Data, Surveillance and Apathy
• 5 Everyday Stakes of Being
• 6 Experience and Identity
• 7 Everyday Lives of Digital Infrastructures
• 8 Selfing in a Digital World
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement