Digital Life. Tim Markham

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Название Digital Life
Автор произведения Tim Markham
Жанр Кинематограф, театр
Серия
Издательство Кинематограф, театр
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781509541072



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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.

      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.