implications of, finding the world and its manifold objects meaningful as such.18 The business of understanding the contingency of everyday life is both elusive and important; the notion here is that it is possible for the mobility with which one moves through digital worlds to be oriented simultaneously by appearances and by a pre-reflexive registration of their flimsiness. This is similar to the ironic stance towards the other developed by Chouliaraki, as it also is to de Beauvoir’s ethics of ambiguity. And it is not so difficult as it sounds, once the requirement of conscious reflection is taken off the table.
The subjective crisis presented by social media is commonly articulated in terms of prescribed or provoked presentations of the self coming to be mistaken for the self. Langlois thus makes the claim that the overriding objective of these mass, structured solicitations of self-documentation can only be one of appropriating and transforming the conditions of being. It is, according to her, a matter of social media practices of self-disclosure altering our perceptions not simply of who we are, but also how we can be (Langlois 2014: 122). Stiegler (1998b: 80–1) makes a comparable point when he writes of an inversion that has taken place such that contemporary digital media cultures relate the experience of life with such force that they seem not only to anticipate but to determine life itself. That word ‘force’ is doing as much work here as ‘pace’ was previously, as though it is inarguable that there has been a definitive usurping of being by the appearance of being – despite the fact that the distinction between the experience of everyday life and life itself has never been something that can be made a stable object of consciousness. Both metaphors are helpful as shorthand, but they allow the argument to run away towards a presumptuous conclusion; as does, arguably, the idea of the colonization of a space of subjectification by digital media. In all cases the realm of selfhood is imagined as something discrete, finite and originary, something that could previously be defended but is now overwhelmed by technology run amok. But if there is no natural, stable territory of subjectification upon which a critical ethics of being might be based, agility becomes a more important resource to have to-hand than resilience.
We have all had the experience, whether at work, or speaking publicly, or maybe performing on stage, of simultaneously understanding the importance of getting it right while also intuiting the preposterousness of the act in which one is engaged. This kind of peripheral glimpse of the arbitrariness of an established, expected performance as one goes about enacting it offers more in the way of practical knowledge than pausing to reflect on whatever it is that one is doing and why. The reason for this can be simply put, though it will be teased out in more methodical detail in the chapters to come. It derives from Levinas’s (1996) ‘ethics as first philosophy’, in which he argues that the basis for all ethical relations between humans is pre-reflective, rooted in a co-existence that is ontologically prior to making the other the object of one’s consciousness and contemplation. There is something destructive in the objectification of the other – partly explicable through a norm such as respect, and the responsibility to register and preserve their full human agency – but there is also a more basic principle at work here: that no knowledge of an object in the world, insofar as knowledge is generated by way of discourses that precede and exceed both subject and object, can approach the facticity of the thing itself. This basic tenet of phenomenological inquiry then opens up alternative ways of knowing an object, and in particular the embodied knowledge of everyday encounters.
Now, this could be taken to suggest that whatever makes digital spaces more easily navigable, more fluidly explorable, counts as meaningful knowledge of the digital – which seems the opposite of a critical perspective. But the point is to prise apart the critical and the perspectival; the former is not contingent upon the latter. In short, critical, practical knowledge of the digital, insofar as it propels wayfaring and thus meaning-making, is that which discloses the world to-hand – as always-already meaningful, navigable and useful – at the same time as it discloses that ready-to-handness itself is predicated on learned, embedded and collective practices of navigation and meaning-making. The performance of identity on social media reveals both the importance of doing it well, and the arbitrariness of its recognition as important – not in a reflective, media literate manner, but at the level of making one’s way through the platform experience. It feels like a meaningful thing to do, though it is thoroughly improvised; it feels like there is a lot at stake, and yet it is entirely provisional.
For Levinas as for de Beauvoir, how we come to co-exist in a world populated by unknown and barely known others is the basis of the self as an ethical project. This is counter-intuitive from a perspective that elides ethics and attention. Care, though, is distinct, a more fundamental disclosure of stakes. If we accept that there is no experiential access to being outside of ways of being, then the disclosure of the world as such through ways of being – as well as these ways being disclosed as the care structures they are – makes known simultaneously the seriousness and precarity attached to being in a world with others. Watching a news report about a far-flung calamity can feel like a perverse thing to do over dinner, and yet it can be registered as both absurd and as grounding the ethics of co-existence. And the same can be said of our relations with digital technology: ultimately what matters is not how well we understand how it works and with what political and material consequences, but the practical, at-hand, embodied knowledge that this or that technology is both the way the world is disclosed to us, and at the same time a way. It remains important to work towards better public understanding of the way people’s consent is secured, their data monetized, their identities profiled, and with what economic, political and environmental implications. It is also important for us to understand what is revealed in the way people move balletically through digital spaces, seemingly accepting their proclivities and impositions as just the way things are now – this is how you get to know and to be. It turns out that their existential investment in such spaces is intuitive and yet restless enough to be open to other ways of being. There is a fundamental lack of absolute final commitment and resolution that both discloses the world as a world on the go, and makes known that it could, and will, be different in time.
All of which brings us back to Couldry and Hepp and the laudable attention they give to the consequences for individuals’ everyday experience of the ‘world-making strategies of governing institutions’ (2017: 163). They take issue with Bruno Latour on the question of digital traces, and in particular Latour’s insistence that these give us direct access to experience. Instead, they counter that such directness cannot be assumed since those traces are dependent on the technical architectures and processes of institutions. Looked at another way, both perspectives are correct. It is undoubtedly right that we pay heed to the commercial and programmatic structuring of digital meaning-making practices, but if we take Heidegger’s account of thrownness seriously there is nothing less real about the meaningful experiences that emerge from such practices. Further, this generative inauthenticity does not commit Heidegger – or, I would argue, any of us – to accepting the status quo unquestioningly, nor does it absolve us of the responsibility for improving the (digital) world as we find it.
Lagerkvist (2018) has argued that the rise of distinctly troubling phenomena including trolling, automation, panopticism and big data warrant a new digital media ethics. The model she proposes does not derive from either the scale or unknowability of datafication, instead taking human vulnerability as its starting point. She stresses both the depth of uncertainty that is the condition of existence, and the basic drive to seek meaning and security as the fundamental motivation of everyday life, such that the ‘existential terrain’ of contemporary digital culture is co-founded by a combination of the profound and banal, the extraordinary and the mundane. Butler makes a similar claim in Precarious Life (2006), and it is implicit in Levinas too that the bottomless frailty of human existence provides the quickening spark of ethics. There is clearly a lot to be said for this position, and if we take Lagerkvist’s point that we increasingly turn to digital media to shore up this existential flimsiness then it makes sense that a digital ethics would seek to protect that quest for security from destabilizing exogenous forces. But I would suggest that there is rather less at stake in most digital encounters, and that it is this less meaningful realm of experience from which ethics should proceed. Lagerkvist’s point is that the profundity of existential contingency combines with rare moments of revelatory clarity
