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 was suggested above that while the corporate objectives behind the expansion of the social media industries should be borne in mind, they do not fully determine the affordances of the practices that come to be endemic to one platform or another. Whatever these digital practices are, they are not dumb – that is, not the mute, pre-destined endpoints of structural determination. For Highmore it is the fundamental activity of distraction – turning away from one thing in order to turn towards another, or the latent energy of boredom and absent-mindedness – that clinches its potential to evolve into something more durable, namely an orientation towards the world and to others that is tenacious and principled. Distraction is above all an unresolved state, and that is what fuels subjective motion. I want to suggest that the way we feel our way through digital worlds is about more than a constant lack of resolution: it is also about provisionality. The idea is that a provisional state reveals what is at stake, and provisional practices of attending, responding, moving as well as subjectifying reveal positions taken in relation to those stakes. Provisionality is not about inconstancy of identity or ethics, but it does mean that these have to be thought of as exploratory, even experimental. It is common enough to talk of subjectification as a process rather than a destination, and similarly one’s response to the stake of a situation of thrownness is not all or nothing – positions must be taken but can also be revised or discarded as necessary. What sustains constancy over time are the repertoires developed individually and collectively for responding on the fly. The point of all this is straightforward enough: distraction is not passive but active; it is not naïve wonder but complicity; affect-driven motion is not about innocent pleasure-seeking but a matter of the unrelenting disclosure of the world and of one’s position in relation to it. The upshot is that our cultures of surfing and swiping are not displacement activities designed and embraced so that we do not have to think about the world as it really is and our responsibility for what happens in it. It is in the lightness and fluidity of these practices that the world, its stakes and our culpability are revealed – not when we stop to take a long hard look at the world and ourselves and decide once and for all what kind of stand to take, what kind of self to become.
It bears emphasizing that this is quite distinct from the cultures that have emerged on some social media platforms in which one is expected to have a ‘take’ on anything: knowing about something is insufficient to demonstrate cultural competence, and one must communicate an opinion for a post to pass muster. If being is conceived after Heidegger as thrownness into a world together with other people, that world is disclosed by way of otherness. Peters puts this succinctly when he writes that communication does not involve transmitting one’s intentionality; ‘rather, it entails bearing oneself in such a way that one is open to hearing the other’s otherness’ (1999: 17). The difference here is that surfing and swiping obviously do not require overt communication to take place; they are nonetheless position-takings or bearings that place one in a relation of otherness to whatever object, human or otherwise, is (barely) registered. Ganaele Langlois (2014) relates this specifically to the affective realm of social media, explaining that the embodied feltness of moving through these digital spaces is a process of relationality that can never be reduced to signification alone. Making sense is then a kind of flow through digital space that proceeds in relation to other flows, including the material, economic and political. This implies that the meaning of digital media is produced through movement, rather than discovered in situ, and meaning itself is thus as material and technological as it is symbolic or cultural. In an odd way it is the lack of clarity this provides
