definitively.
The materialist phenomenology that frames The Mediated Construction of Reality provides a robust blueprint for continuing to investigate the constantly evolving ground upon which everyday life is built and worked on, and the book’s prioritization of processes of materialization and institutionalization is impossible to refute.11 What remains an open question is whether the fact that the data processes underpinning normative practices of selfhood are largely unfathomable and shaped by the economic imperatives of social media platforms necessitates a degraded, less imaginative, more biddable kind of selfhood. In more tangible terms, Couldry and Hepp frame this through a critique of the kind of online personal branding that has become conventional across large parts of the social internet. Branding brings a lot of baggage with it, including the tacky commodification of identity pitched to a buyer’s market in popularity and status. There are, however, other ways of looking at self-presentation in digital (inter alia) contexts, from Erving Goffman’s (1990 [1959]; 2008 [1963]) exegesis of the rules governing everyday interactions – rules which, when looked at coldly, appear similarly arbitrary and flimsy – to Simone de Beauvoir’s (2015 [1948]) existential framing of the ethical self through projects. It is tempting to reduce digital selfhood to the fatuous #livingmybestlife tropes of Instagram, but the norm is perhaps closer to Lagerkvist’s stumbling existers who feel sharply the incessant challenge of our thrownness into digital worlds. For de Beauvoir, the building of an ethical, autonomous self is predicated on failure and compromise, on stuttering, tentative steps, on discontinuity and disorientation – the self would have no ethical heft without these features. Couldry and Hepp are certainly right to call for a renewed, unstinting scrutiny of the world-making strategies of governing institutions (2017: 163), but these institutions’ ability to curate the experience of everyday life through designing and controlling the building blocks of online social construction is by no means absolute.
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.
For Frosh it is to be expected that the lifeworld will be tessellated with systems and structures beyond the realms of direct perception, from the microscopic to the astrophysical – and, one might add, from the intricate architectures of digital platforms to the macroeconomic forces governing a social space in a particular period. It is no surprise that he marshals Scannell early on, who marvels rather than frets at the observation that the post-industrial world individuals inhabit is more or less entirely dependent on infrastructure made by humans; that everything that makes the experience of everyday life possible, seamless and fruitful stems from technological and economic endeavours and sheer labour. If Scannell sees boundless possibilities in this new reality, and Couldry and Hepp see instead the evidently reduced resources we actually make use of in contemporary mediated life, Frosh perceives something more ambiguous. It is true that digital media, ‘by virtue of their connective, perceptual and symbolic attributes’ (Couldry and Hepp 2017: 9), shape our mostly taken-for-granted modes of being present, but they do so without full occlusion. Those modes of presence are able to be recognized, to be rendered objects of consciousness, opening up the possibility of reflexivity in a way that does not feature in Couldry and Hepp’s model. Like many others, Frosh considers the prospect of 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.
Frosh takes aim squarely at the ‘attentive fallacy’: ‘the assumption that the significance of representations is generated through an intense, focussed interchange between an attentive address and a formally distinct, unified text’ (2018: 13). Why, he counters, should we suspect that distraction is superficial and uncritical, even the ‘handmaiden of hegemony’? He goes on to question the derision with which many regard commodified forms of consumption and ‘pre-digested pleasure’, which might alternatively be thought of as ingenious means for dealing with the unimaginable quantities of representations calling for our attention. Indeed, more than a coping mechanism, the collective shorthand we develop in order to register the multitude of distant mediated others should be seen as a significant achievement of modern culture. Ben Highmore (2010) has similarly defended distraction as a kind of ‘promiscuous absorption’, one for which we should be grateful not just for want of anything else, but because this flitting forever from one thing to the next has real ethical affordances. Frosh, rejecting what he dubs the ‘rapture of rupture’, sees inattention – which, like distraction, is not numbness but an impatient, restless darting about – as a way of properly populating mediated worlds with the voices and bodies of others. It is these non-intense relationships we have with others – and here we could add digital objects and infrastructures of the technological and economic type – which provide the basis for a grounded, active ethics of being-in-the-world. Here, as Frosh puts it, indifference acts as a moral force in the taken-for-granted, pre-reflective experience of everyday life.12
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.
More broadly, Frosh’s defence of
