around notions of rights, consent or autonomy, but what do these terms mean in a digital world? The approach taken here is to reject any rarefied, abstract definitions against which we will necessarily be found wanting – there is nothing relativistic in claiming that such ethical terms have always emerged in media res, through and not in spite of the compromised, constraining environments in which they make sense. Digital ethics can only be meaningful to the extent that it originates from the mess of daily digital life, rather than being imposed on it from outside – hence the absurdity of reducing data consent to discrete acts of agreeing to a website’s terms and conditions. It is possible that consenting to the corporate collection of one’s data needs to be rethought in a more media ecological way – that is, as pertaining to the way we move through digital environments rather than what we know and think about this or that platform. This is hardly new: the proposition that ethical habits do not have to start from clear-headed decisions goes back at least as far as William James (2017 [1887]).
Autonomy in the digital age is a minefield because it is often conflated with choice. It is a basic phenomenological tenet that constraint is a necessary condition of subjectivity, not its preclusion – and yet there is something palpably unfair about a farmer locked out by software from the means to repair a tractor, or a dating app that constricts my ability to express my gender and sexual preference. Meanwhile there are familiar, longstanding theses about how there is little to be said for individual choice when all it does is outsource regimes of governmentality, or when the choices we are encouraged to make are so tawdry. The motives behind the constraint of consumer behaviour on a social media platform are a less promising ethical route than first appears to be the case. It seems intuitively appealing to expose the profit-seeking or surveillance motives that really explain the form and function of the digital environments we spend time in, but as with consent, awareness is not the route to autonomy when the latter is embodied and practical. It has been demonstrated (Devine 2015) that most users of music streaming services are completely unaware that the environmental footprint of this form of music consumption is far greater than with legacy media forms like the compact disc or cassette, and yet news stories about the topic gained no traction at all. If conscious awareness does not provide a viable basis for establishing the implications of our digital media habits, then current conceptions of media literacy may have to be rebuilt around the practical, manual knowledge of tool use. Kittler (1990) is quick to remind us that the belief that computers are mere tools at our disposal is a myth, that of homo faber.7 We are made through tool use as much as we make things with it, but this is not at all the same as arguing that we are the tools of technology. Mutual constitutivity is just that – mutual – and this shines a light on the far-reaching implications and possibilities of practical political concerns.
Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp’s influential book The Mediated Construction of Reality (2017) tackles the key question that arises from the existential grounding of digital media. In short, on what basis can we assess, critique and resist the influence of particular media organizations, and the digital industries collectively, on the rapidly changing parameters of everyday life? It is not enough to show that change is occurring, or even that it is happening without our awareness or consent. Instead, Couldry and Hepp foreground subjective losses, ways of being social that once gone cannot be remembered or reclaimed. In one sense this is inevitable: we cannot know genuinely what it was like to exist in relation to others a hundred years ago, let alone a thousand. But the acceleration of change – and, they maintain, the way the structures underpinning the experience of daily life are being reshaped towards commercial and surveilling ends – means that it is imperative we take stock of what we stand to lose. There is a level of nuance here that is comparable to José van Dijck’s The Culture of Connectivity (2013): the question is not so much whether we now enjoy less privacy, but what privacy now means, and how that apprehension of privacy became normal and with what consequences.8 Such a line of inquiry does not imply that we have become less social or less authentic in our relations to each other – as Simmel (1971: 133, in Couldry and Hepp 2017: 4) puts it, there has always been an artificiality to the sociability that we work hard at sustaining in order to feel authentically human together. This collective work is society’s care structure, and it is far from a futile endeavour (Scannell 2014; cf. Bourdieu 1994); it provides not only comfort but also the grounding of empathy and solidarity. Simmel’s insight shows us that there is an eternal tension between our always fluid sense of who we are and the changing frameworks in which we enact sociability.
Couldry and Hepp’s thesis goes well beyond the nostrum that we have forgotten how to be social in the age of digital media. In fact most people are very good at it, adopting and adapting to new forms of sociality so that they feel endogenous. Rather, their thesis is that the functional units of collective social construction are themselves derivatives of technological 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
