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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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.

      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.

      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.