Digital Life. Tim Markham
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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