Digital Life. Tim Markham
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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