Digital Life. Tim Markham
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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