Existential media: Toward a theorization of digital thrownness

Amanda Lagerkvist

Abstract
Our digitally enforced lifeworld is an existential and ambivalent terrain. Questions concerning
digital technologies are thus questions about human existence. This theoretical essay employs
key concepts from existential philosophy to envision an existential media analysis that
accounts for the thrownness of digital human existence. Tracing our digital thrownness to four
emergent fields of inquiry, that relate to classic themes (death, time, being there and being-in-
and-with), it encircles both mundane connectivity and the extraordinary limit-situations
(online) when our human vulnerability is principally felt and our security is shaken. In place
of a savvy user, this article posits the ‘exister’ as the principal subject in media studies and
inhabitant of the digital ecology – a stumbling, hurting and relational human being, who
navigates within limits and among interruptions through the torrents of our digital existence,
in search for meaning and existential security.

Keywords : digital culture, existential philosophy, vulnerability, death, media and religion

Introduction
Human life, to state the obvious, is and has always been precarious. Yet today within the so-

called culture of connectivity, it seems that the entire lifeworld is assuming an idiosyncratic

existential vulnerability, with profound implications. Through the combination of rapid

technological shifts, emergent social norms in digital cultures and the elusive workings of

powerful algorithms and protocols, classic existential issues have become more and more

entwined with our digital lives. Our sense of time, memory, space, selfhood, sociality and

death are implicated – at least for networked populations of the Global North. Hence, we

seem to be, to speak in Heideggerian terms, thrown into our digital human existence, where

the ambivalent and massive task awaiting us is to seize our vulnerable situatedness, while

navigating through sometimes unknown waters (1927/1962: 174ff).

After the connective turn and in the light of cybernetic automations beyond

human will, intention and deliberation, it is tempting to place emphasis on the anomies of our

digital existence. Indisputably, social media technologies forcefully shape our communicative

practices, memories and identities, as microsystems evolve along with our user patterns (van

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Dijck 2013: 158). These perilous conditions clearly fade the lustre of the prevailing Silicon

Valley ideology of ‘endless opportunity’, ‘transparency’, or ‘limitlessness’. Yet, while we are

seeing something in our technologically enforced lifeworld that seems stronger than

‘affordances’ it is arguably still weaker than determinism. And digital media are existential

media, also and particularly when people share and explore existential issues in connection

with loss and trauma online; on digital memorials, in rituals of lighting digital candles, in

blogging about terminal illness and on suicide sites. As these examples reveal, our

communication culture offers both new existential predicaments, and at once new spaces for

the exploration of existential themes and the profundity of life. Questions concerning digital

technologies are thus questions about human existence.

This theoretical essay suggests that it is time for media studies to attune to the

big and basic questions in life, and to sound out and critically interrogate the lived and often

complexly ambiguous experiences of our digitally enforced lifeworld. Recent endeavours in

media philosophy posit a media ontology centered on the groundedness of being, and the

mundane materiality of technologies (cf. Scannell 2014, Peters 2015a). In addition, I propose

we retain an imperative focus on lived experience and pose the question: What does it mean

to be a human being in the digital age? In this pursuit I will bring some of the key concepts

from existential philosophy, as seminally defined by Hannah Arendt (1946/1994), into

conversation with media studies in general, and the field of media, religion and culture, in

particular. I will argue that an existential media analysis also needs to account for – and

reconcile its ontological claims with – the thrownness of the digital human condition.

Following Heidegger our thrownness implies being faced with a world where we are

precariously situated in a particular place, at a particular historical moment, and among a

particular crowd with the inescapable task of tackling our world around us and to make it

meaningful.

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 Challenging scholarship that posits existential meaning making as primarily an

everyday activity, I will propose that our digital thrownness is fruitfully conceived by

considering that the mundane and the extraordinary co-found (while often remaining separate

fields of experience in secular cultures) the existential terrains of connectivity. Don Ihde

reminded us in the late 1970s that all “(h)uman-machine relations are existential relations in

which our fate and destiny are implicated, but which are subject to the very ambiguity found

in all existential relations” (1979: 4). Today one may suggest that the machines have evolved

into tools of existence. Our being is now explored through, experienced in relation to, as well

as defined by these tools in a dynamic relationship of mutuality, tension, ambivalence and

change (cf. Mitchell and Hansen 2010). Reliant upon devices that enable our lives we are, in

the words of Sherry Turkle, “wired into existence through technology” (2011: liv). This

implies a heightened sense of embodied connective presence and/or anxiety and loneliness (as

Turkle suggests), saturating our mundane being-in-the-world. But our digital existence is also

related to those Jaspersian limit-situations: moments where our thrownness is principally felt,

and our security is shaken. I will in relation to both these dimensions stress the depth of our

human uncertainty and vulnerability, and suggest that an existential approach to digital culture

may set out, more specifically, to explore how existential security is sought, achieved or lost

in our era, and to gain detailed knowledge about how fundamental existential issues are

pursued when people’s lives and memories are increasingly shaped in, by and through digital

media forms.

Our digital thrownness will then be traced through four emerging fields of

inquiry that relate to four classic existential themes: death, time, being there and being-in-

and-with. This way, the article aims to open up an intellectual space where we may shed light

on our media as existential media. However, in order to further outline the contours of an

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existential media analysis, it is important to begin by relating it to previous work in media and

communication studies, and its different subfields.

Existence: from deficit to precedence

The question of existence – the meaning of ‘life’ is everywhere present

and nowhere considered in (…) media and communication studies.

(Scannell, 2014: 9)

Our media have always been existential – a fact that has not been sufficiently recognized in

media research. With important exceptions (e.g. Peters 1999, 2015a; Lagerkvist 2013, 2014,

Langlois 2014, Pinchevski 2014; Scannell 2014; Floridi (ed.) 2015, Miller 2015), existential

approaches have played a minor role in analyzing the media, or our ‘media cultures’.

However, the existential is evident in the concerns of representational media across history

(from for example petroglyphs and Greek tragedies to modern novels and fictional film) that

enable sense-making in relation to the precariousness of life and the basics of ‘why are we

here’. It is visible in ritualistic events of television and imagined communities of news papers,

where the media and popular culture fill the function of religions and offer communion with

the living but also, importantly, with the dead. The conjuring of the other side or the extra-

human, and thus the enabling of a sense of transcendence, is visible in the ample

allegorizations of recording media, such as photographs that summon those absent and/or the

dead; in writing through which the dead could speak to the living, and in the spiritualist

associations of the telegraph (Peters 1999). Jeremy Stolow summarizes what animates our

media’s techno-spirituality:

Because of their imponderable complexities, their autonomous

networked agency, their capacities to compress time, erase distance,

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 and reproduce sameness, modern technologies have thus come to be

understood as possessing transcendent and uncanny features (2013: 5).

As this article sets out to demonstrate, digital media pertain to all these dimensions but bring

them out in certain ways, since they have become environmental forces in the world (Floridi

2015). This essay’s mission is therefore to show how digital media have a uniquely existential

burden, resonance as well as potential. This means bringing forth the recognition that media

are indeed tools of everyday existence but they are at the same time momentous and life-

defining.

While questions of community, meaning and ways of being were key in early

ethnographies of networked cultures (cf. Turkle 1995, Markham 1998) as well as in

interventions from digital phenomenologists (Kim 2001) such analyses primarily stressed

technological opportunity within a taken for granted secular frame. Cultural studies, in its

earlier predominant forms, provided a similar reading of what the ‘existential’ meant for

people in modernity. For instance, John Tomlinson explicitly disregards the connection

between the realm of “existentially significant meaning” and the problem of existence as

“formulated either in the ontological anxieties of existentialist philosophy, or in the range of

formal religious responses to the human condition” (1999: 20). Thus he is reducing it to those

mundane activities, narratives and expressive forms through which individuals make sense of

their personal lives, and through which the everyday takes shape (such as going to the mall

and listening to pop music).

This neglect of religion and spirituality within cultural studies first came under

attack within the interdisciplinary field of media, religion and culture which advocates the

need for a broader understanding of the meaning making and mediated qualities of religion,

and of the religious qualities of the media (Hoover & Lundby eds. 1997, de Vries and Weber

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2001; Stolow 2005; Hoover 2006; Morgan ed. 2008; Lynch, Mitchell & Strahn eds. 2012,

Sumiala 2013). Through providing productive new analytical foci on people’s changing

relationship to transcendent and existential dimensions in life, focus is directed towards

uncharted and vernacular forms of existential meaning making, also in the realm of digital

media (cf. Campbell & Lö vheim 2011). In proposing an existential approach to digital

culture, I follow in the footsteps of these debates, and yet my ambition is also to move beyond

them. I am suggesting a reframing, in which we can envision an existential approach that is

not exclusively (or primarily) concerned with ‘religion’. Rather than beginning with beliefs or

creeds and their fate or transformations, I proceed on the assumption that existence precedes

religion. The starting point is thus to query about what it means to be a human being, to exist,

in the digital age.

Recently a small but significant upsurge of existential media ontologies offers

important clues in relation to this question.1 Paddy Scannell (2014) provides for a

Heideggerian reading of television in everyday life. Television is ready-to-hand in the way all

technologies and equipment are world-disclosing. Pursuing a hermeneutics of trust, Scannell

is inclined to argue for seeing the goodness in post-modern technology (including the digital),

and holds that there is a care structure built into them – they are literally user friendly and

“reconcile us to our worldly selves” (ibid: 86). This way they answer age-old existential

questions, in telling us about who and what we are. Television reveals through liveness the

meaning of life.

While harboring much less optimism about the digital age, John D. Peters

(2015a) nonetheless ploughs on in similar Heideggerian furrows and provides a material

account of both being itself and of media theory. By problematizing the subject-object

1 For instance, Mitchell and Hansen’s techno-anthropology relies on Stiegler’s project and stresses the co-
originarity of the human and technics (2010). Kember & Zylinska’s (2012) vitalist account posits mediation as
describing the hybrid process of the emergence of life itself, of becoming, in which human and non-human
entities are entangled.

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distinction in Western philosophy his aim is to bring media studies into conversation with the

natural sciences, theology and philosophy. Peters answers the ontological question: what is a

human being? by way of moving beyond the experiential and phenomenal, human

subjectivity and intelligence, winding up with the fact of human technicity. The world and the

human condition are pervaded recursively by human hand and crafting. Elemental media are

vessels and processes that bring the world into being: they reveal and conceal the world, and

they are the preconditions for life to thrive. The analysis settles on the boring and logistical,

infrastructural preconditions of being, and asserts the primacy of habitat and embodiment to

communication. In accord with currents of posthuman scholarship, one objective is

furthermore to question that meaning is in any way a privilege of the human mind. The

purpose is thence, in the spirit of pragmatism, to provide a media philosophy that preserves

and cherishes the cosmological and marvelous mystery that our technologized natural-cultural

being is a part of. Thus, ultimately Peters’s aim is to set off a theological turn in media

studies.

I will in the following stress that media are indeed “where we live and move and

have our being” (Mitchell & Hansen, 2010: xi). Yet I will argue that it is ever valid, and

urgently necessary, to hold onto while creatively re-envisioning the humanoid existential

project. Acknowledging the isomorphic relations between our being and technologies, as is

the prime mission of the ontological turn, does not lessen but in effect intensifies the fact that

we are also beings on the line. Hence, adding to the important media ontological ruminations

about our profound groundedness, an existential media analysis should also be able to address

our innate thrownness. This perspective both firmly acknowledges vulnerability as a given of

human existence – stressing the hardship and struggle of any human life whether in scarcity or

post-scarcity cultures (Butler 2003, Jackson 2011) – and accentuates what distinguishes the

current predicaments of the digital age.

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Toward digital thrownness

In light of the fact that the techno-scientific bureaucracies, the authoritarian logic of neoliberal

economies, the computer engineers, the cadres of the neurosciences and even increasingly the

humanities scholars themselves, seem to have evacuated their equations of the human I wish

to safeguard Dasein: the subjectivity, sociality, agency, ethical responsibility, spirituality,

suffering, and search for ‘meaning’ springing from human thrownness. Even as meaning

undoubtedly exists in nonhuman contexts, and as humans are co-constituted by their technical

environment, it is legitimate to claim that:

Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities.

Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being,

that Being is an issue for it….It is peculiar to this entity that with and

through its Being, this Being is disclosed to it. Understanding of

Being is itself a definitive characteristic of Dasein’s being. (Heidegger

1927/1962: 12, italics in original)

I envision an ‘understanding’ subject that resonates with the self as ‘exister’ emerging in Karl

Jaspers’s philosophy. This means that because human life entails momentous challenges,

individuals are:

thrown back on themselves. Nobody can feel guilt or suffer for me;

nobody can die for me. The ‘self’ of the ‘exister’ is the self that

existential philosophy is concerned with, not the self in the sense of an

autonomous subject that can realize itself at will in absolute freedom.

(Verbeek, 2005: 33-34)

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Beyond myths about a sovereign and all-knowing subjectivity, the exister is neither

omniscient, nor ‘the measure of all things’. The exister is mortal. She is a struggling, suffering

and relational human being. Her intermediary position as a conscious (yet often clueless)

embodied being provides for her the only known ‘entry point’ to navigate and craft the world

into which she is thrown. Conceiving of the existential this way both reclaims and resituates

subjectivity as it at once centers on and destabilises ‘the human’ (cf. Braidotti 2013).

The exister moves through the existential terrains of connectivity using tools of

existence. For Scannell such navigations reveal the human, meaningful and phenomenal now.

By contrast, philosophers of technology have often claimed that technology alienates us from

ourselves as human beings, hollowing out both meaning and value, and causing a crisis for

agency, presence and authenticity (cf. Jaspers 1951, Heidegger 1977, Dreyfus 2001/2011,

Han 2013). Heidegger (1977) famously argued that we are essentially enframed by

technologies: they reveal and conceal our world to us and dangerously call upon us to

perceive of it in a particular way: as ‘standing-reserve’ for exploitation. The way he

apprehensively mused about the dangers of autonomous technology echoes in recent

philosophizing about the digital age of automated operations “lacking in temporal or

existential duration” as they replace spirit, agency and thinking itself (Han 2013: 66, my

translation). Media scholars paint an even bleaker picture where the distinction between the

technological and the existential realm has dissolved: social media have become “meaning

machines” that through data mining “orchestrate, and derive value from, one’s sense of being

and existence” to protocol our very sense of ‘meaningfulness’ (Langlois 2014: 106). The

existential register has been colonized by software that participate directly in our affective

experiences. Sharing these concerns, Vincent Miller (2015) analyses the crisis of presence in

contemporary digital culture and retains Heidegger’s rustbelt definition of technology to

describe the core of the digital. Digital enframing reveals a world that is both personalised

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(reducing us to calculable properties) and in which we instrumentally objectify people and the

social itself as a standing reserve – a disposable to be exploited.

These accounts upset the prevailing and seemingly harmonious media ontologies of

everyday “being in and becoming with the technological world” (Kember & Zylinska 2012:

xv) by disclosing important aspects of our digital thrownness that relate to current forms of

immaterial capitalism. I will broaden this problematization by inserting the unsettling notions

of grand interruptions and stakes (death, loss, chance and crisis), into both the mundane flows

of ‘becoming’ and into the critique of digital capitalism. Consistent with the definition of the

‘existential’ provided by Hannah Arendt (1946/1994), I maintain that an existential approach

pins down the human exception. In situations of utter thrownness, that is those life-defining

moments – what Karl Jaspers called limit-situations – related to for instance death, loss,

conflict, suffering and guilt, the responsibility to take charge of ones life and give form to it

presents itself. Putting all humans in front of the abyss – in front of the irresolvable – they

entrust us with something that we have to act upon: “we become ourselves by entering with

open eyes into the limit-situations” (Jaspers 1932/1970: 278–279, translation modified). Here

we encounter the unspeakable, the limits of our understanding, what lies in the shadows,

beyond our immediate comprehension and control. Existential experiences are thus connected

precisely with limits and limitations. Our thrownness is furthermore a contradiction: it is an

openness to become human within limits (Jackson 2011).

In response to our thrownness, the digital media practices of concern have

something in common: they reveal a quest for existential security. This oxymoron I define in

deviation from Norris and Inglehart (2004) whose concern is with existential security is in

terms of material predictability as the antidote to religiosity, and the key explanation of

secularization. There is a clear need to further substantiate the existential in existential

security, by reintroducing its connection to the traditions of phenomenology and the

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philosophy of existence. One seeming possibility in this direction is to be found in Giddens’s

definition of ontological security (1990: 92), which underlines the phenomenological and

emotional sense of ’being-in-the-world’, trusting that people, things, places and our sense of

self are more or less consistent. Yet, existential security adds to this focus on the social,

material, and emotional the sense in which individuals may or may not integrate their being-

in-the-world into beneficial meaning making practices, or perhaps rather, meaningful

moorings (Peters 2015a), in the face of the challenges and uncertainties of life. Hence, by

contrast, I would like to define existential security existentially.

Here I follow Søren Kierkegaard, who highlighted the notion of uncertainty as

foundational for describing the relationship between human beings, their world and their God

(1846). Kierkegaard stressed life as movement: essentially to exist is to be in a stormy ocean,

where we are moving through it in a boat that is itself in motion (in Ihde 1990, p. 10). Despite

the contingency and finitude, ambivalence and absurdity of our lives, we navigate and attempt

to make meaning in the face of these conditions. Central to the approach, hence, is the

question of how or if – living with uncertainty – we may secure any sense of cohesion,

meaning, direction, purpose, ethics, grounding, continuity and community, that is, ‘existential

security’ in the digital age. The quest for existential security can involve the mundane struggle

of trying to regain control within our data-driven lives. But it may also involve both this-

worldly and otherworldly aspects of profundity, meaning and/or spirituality and the sacred. In

other words, the existential approach also accounts for immanent transcendence; for the

sacred within the everyday.

Existential philosophy both pinpoints and brings us back from our human

individual isolation, in its emphasis on openness, incompleteness and dependency as

inevitable parts of life (Arendt 1946/1994). This way existential security is not only an

individual quest, but also often a matter of seeking ‘meaning’ communally (Bauman 2007:

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14). Being is conceived as already being-with, and existence as always already coexistence

with others (Nancy 2000). Jaspers would argue that existential security can only be

temporarily achieved. He describes the living process as a quest for order; for individually and

collectively creating and securing a ‘shell’ of world-views and belief systems, in the face of

what he calls the antinomies of the human situation (1932/1970). Since human existence is

highly paradoxical, existential security is, moreover, a wished-for goal, never unambiguously

or permanently realized. The concept thus focuses less on its actuality than on the quest for it.

And (ultimate) meaning and non-meaning, community and isolation, light and darkness are

furthermore part of a never resolved tension in human existence. Existential meaning and

security are therefore the very opposites of established ideals in Western intellectual history,

that define meaning as ‘clarity of signal’ and communication as the ‘fusion of minds’ (Peters

1999, 2015a). They may involve sense-making and authentic encounters, but since they are

constituted by ambivalence and recalcitrant meaning, they in addition entail tracings,

inevitable limits, glitches and suspensions. The suggested approach embraces an ideal of

communication that is about “making do with fragments”, and about “patience amid

imperfections” (Peters 1999: 60-61). It enables us to draw near what seems non-sensical in

existence and can only be registered affectively, felt, marveled at or in effect believed. This

means that it recognizes interruptions and voids, silences and breaks, limits and limitations as

inescapable and perhaps, valued aspects of human existence in the digital age. And since “the

web like the world, is full of black holes” (Peters 2015a: 357), this moves us both theoretically

and empirically towards the antinomies of digital existence.

Fields of inquiry: Classic themes – new issues

An existential media analysis will offer a productive departure from the habitual either/or-

logic of human agency versus technological destining. Beyond conceiving of the internet as

either liberatory or controlling, deeply meaningful or trivial, it may be conceived as an

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existential and ambivalent terrain. In the following I will sketch out four interlinked areas of

study and move towards further highlighting the particular thrownness of our digital

existence. I concern myself with classical existential themes and ‘eternal’ issues, but also with

how these are given expression within the particular predicaments of the contemporary digital

age, relating both to the everyday and to the exceptional. Since existential philosophy

typically understands death as the key denominator of the existential terrain, I will begin with

the end.

(1) Death: our finitude and the digital afterlife

How may the very concepts of both death and mourning change as people live on socially

online after biological death, for extended periods of time? The limit-situation of loss is at

play in proliferating empirical phenomena such as web memorials (where you may create a

memory through posting images, texts, sound in order to commemorate the deceased, or

where you can light digital candles); in memorialised Facebook profiles (where you can

express grief through status updates, wall posts, photographs and condolences in the

commentary fields); and in support groups of virtual mourning where people through social

networking grieve as in pre-modern societies – together (Walter et al 2011/12). Studies of

such phenomena in the burgeoning field of death online (Kasket 2012, Graham et al 2013,

Moreman ed. 2014, Gotvid & Refslund-Christensen ed. 2015), show a de-sequestering as well

as a deferral of death in contemporary society (Lagerkvist 2013).

The digital afterlife encompasses a variety of phenomena and feelings. It spans

re-circulated textual remnants and search traces, our digital heirlooms, after-life social media

presence, posthumous memory, afterlife actants, after-death communication, and posthuman

and transhuman design. One may approach the digital afterlife as a space of managerial

reasoning, as it is replete with services we can buy in planning to say farewell to friends and

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contacts, ending the digital lives of our deceased relatives, or controlling how people can or

should remember or forget us in the future. By contrast, when mourners are talking directly to

the dead, who seem to be online as the listening end (Gustavsson 2011) a sense of techno-

spirituality is manifest. Communication with the dead, I argue, reflects the gist of social media

practices of our time: selves in constant connectivity even with the ultimate others – the dead.

Connecting with the dead is thus to relay ones self to the ubiquitous streams of

hyperconnectivity rather than to sound out voices from the beyond or aspire an exchange with

them. Encountering ‘Facebook ghosts’ in addition, that is active accounts with dead users, is

an estranging phenomenon; an intermediary realm of transcendence. It is also a space of

temporal crisis and of returnings. Reflecting the history of modern media in the 19th century

whose introduction implied that while “our bodies know fatigue and finitude…our effigies,

once recorded, can circulate through media systems indefinitely” (Peters 1999: 140) mourning

and memory practices online mark a “re-presencing” of the lost person and his/her body

(Brubaker et al 2013: 95). Facebook’s asynchronous nature further results in temporal

slippages, as users’ postings may “percolate thorough the network” in unpredictable ways

(ibid). This leads to the theme of time.

(2) Time: pace, memory and technological obsolescence

Contemporary diagnoses of our age have emphasized its 24/7-culture, our hurried lives, or our

lives in absolute present (Davis 2013, Crary 2013, Kaun & Stiernstedt 2014). Due to the

regime of digital temporality we have seen “the enveloping of the everyday in real-time or

near-instantaneous communications” (Hoskins 2011: 20), engendering claims that we, more

than earlier generations, live in the age of the now. Haunted by the fear of information loss,

we are at once compelled to constantly update ourselves while “keeping track, recording,

retrieving, stock-piling, archiving, backing up and saving” (Garde-Hansen et al. 2009: 5). This

constitutes a fundamental tension in our contemporary existence between saving and deleting,

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remembering and forgetting. This focus on pace has been challenged by media theorists, who

argue that our lived sense of time relies on uneven material privilege across the ‘power-

chronographies’ of our technologized existence (Sharma 2014). While the regime of the now

is indeed often dominant, there are also counter-tendencies such as the presence of a sense of

infinity online, or the ‘enduring ephemeral’ as a constituent of digital time (Lagerkvist 2014,

Chun 2010). Digital temporalities thus actualize the antinomy of the transient and the eternal.

And yet, as our era both praises and promotes temporal instantaneity and hyper-

connectivity this poses very real challenges and paradoxes for the networked populations of

the Global North. One of these has to do with our life among the dying media, due to rapid

technological obsolescence. This makes us vulnerable as to the status of our media memories,

whether they can ever be saved, and if we lose them, whether they can be restored (Peters

2015b). Our personal problems of saving ourselves, as well as our personal digital archive

fever, is paralleled, and in fact exceeded, by the sense in which all our Google-searches are

remembered, recorded and saved for posterity by the company (cf. Mayer-Schö nberger 2009).

Heightened existential anxieties about he ominous forever of data, have spurred urges among

the networked generations to be selectively deleted, and recent debates about the ‘right to be

forgotten’, warrant our serious attention.

(3) Being there: presence and absence

Where am I when my traces are all over? What does being there signify in digital culture?

The longevity and hauntings of data and the knowledge that search engines remember all our

virtual steps leave us ambivalent and quite vulnerable about where our traces may be situated

and how they may bear on our lives and afterlives (Mayer-Schö nberger 2008). This concerns

those parts of us that are circulating without our knowing precisely where and how, or even

whether they are there: our digital surrogates (Lagerkvist 2014). Digital culture thus

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challenges a ‘there’ with clear demarcations. This actualizes the key antinomy of absence and

presence in modern media life, connoting, as argued by Peters a “rash of incursions on the

human incognito” when the “capturing and dispersions of signals meant that the visual and

auditory signs of human personality were no longer tightly tied to the presence of a person’s

body” (1999: 140). Today, within opaque digital assemblages imbricated in our embodied

existence, our being there entails insecurities as to the status of our digital data traces and an

uncertainty about our capacity to gain a hold on them. This anxiety is about the possibility to

secure or keep track of our memories and “trace bodies” (Hong, 2015) when we

simultaneously know that they exist, that they are present, yet cannot feel their exact clout and

whereabouts. They are confusingly (un)beknownst to us, as are (for a majority of people) the

surveillance systems we have surrendered ourselves to.

Our being there, in the concreteness of the everyday bespeaks the vulnerabilities of

digital lives when our technologized existence seems ethically depleted, sated with trolling

(often with gendered and racialized dimensions), cyber bullying and revenge porn, causing a

crisis for accountable presence and inflicting human wariness, dissatisfaction, and hurt (Miller

2015). Our vulnerability as regards violations of privacy for instance, is subject to what

Charles Ess calls ‘dynamic ambiguity’, and activates a need for trying to retake control (that

is, to establish existential security), in the awareness of being targeted by corporations and

governments (2014: 55ff).

(4) Being-in-and-with-the-world: the self and others

In relation to the increased sense of evaporation of the public and the private in digital culture

one may ask what it means then to be a subject in the networked world? When our age is

replete with compulsions of self-promotion through “networked individualism”, the Who am

I-question is complex. And taking into account an unstable self that is not only mediated,

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processual and narrated but also increasingly quantified, networked, mined and visualized

(Geis 2008), the plot thickens even more. Our performative and affective ‘device bodies’

(Lagerkvist forthcoming) demand a theorization of the subjectivity of connectivity – the self

as both embodied, technologized and relational – and of media as in effect technologies of the

self. Such technologized self-formations are visible in (video)blogging, through profile

management and in selfie practices. Through selfies, our bodies, and parts of our selves, are

visually and graphically recorded and sometimes become viral through sharing and

representation in circuits of affective social energy and reflex gestural response (Frosh 2015).

Here a precarious embodied exister emerges through self-presentation by ‘consent,’ but these

practices may also involve experiences of distrust, distance, and alienation.

Besides these negative social aspects when ethical protocols disintegrate, in

studying online support groups, or publics that assemble around memories of individual and

collective trauma and grief, we may focus on solidaric and emphatic communication

(Lö vheim 2013) in limit-situations. Password protected support environments online provide

a different picture of the culture of connectivity, as they arguably constitute islands of

profundity, meaning and connective presence, partially untainted by the corporate logic of

social media and phatic communion (Miller 2008). Another important line of inquiry

describes how media performs the continuing role of ritual in our late modern digital

societies. Here we might pursue virtual mourning practices as rituals in search for existential

security, by approaching digital rituals (lighting digital candles, memory work in communities

of grief) as part of collective repair work for individuals, groups and society at large (Sumiala

2013).

Existential media: concluding remarks

17
In this essay I have suggested an approach to digital culture inspired by existential philosophy

drawing on several fields of study, and simultaneously providing a possibility for re-framings

within each of them: For media studies the existential approach conceives of the digital

outside of the secular framework of the mainstream, by attending to media life as an

existential terrain irreducible to (yet always related to) the social, the cultural, the economic or

the political. In the field of media, religion and culture, the approach challenges and pushes

beyond the predominant focus on religion, and proposes that existence is a fruitful point of

departure for understanding our contemporary digital cultures. And finally in relation to

internet research as well as the philosophy of technology, it provides for an important

reframing that moves us beyond both celebratory utopian discourses and those that one-

sidedly critique the developments at hand.

This essay has discussed an existential media analysis that complements the media

ontological projects of Scannell (caring media) and Peters (boring yet marvelous media), with

an approach acutely sensitized to our digital human thrownness. Existential media are also,

and importantly, momentous media. As tools of existence they involve experiences of

uncertainty, ambivalence and vulnerability. They entail meaningfulness and inescapable

tragedy and span both the mundane and the extraordinary. Hence, in laborious online

navigations for identity formation in the course of everyday life (in digital memory practices

of keeping track, recording and saving) as well as in dire times (of bereavement and

memorialization), or in moments of heightened sense of joy online (love, solidarity,

communitas), a register emerges that I call the existential. Learning more about this register

and how it both informs and is informed by digital tools of existence, also means learning

from people’s search for existential security and meaning, their loss of meaning, their

unspoken affectivity or outspoken despair – involved in experiences of loss (or being at loss)

– in what I call the existential terrains of connectivity. This approach underlines the

18
importance to pay attention to the agency of digital/social media materialities and their current

features of automation, quantification and the protocolling of meaning, sociality and memory.

But since digital cultures span and display key antinomies and tensions in human existence,

the question remains whether the existential may ultimately transcend the meaning machine.

This essay has argued that we will need to align technology-oriented perspectives that

probe our digital existence ontologically with ethnographically and textually situated

approaches, that interrogate cultural practices and lived experiences of the digital world. In

mapping four emergent fields of inquiry, I have provisionally traced both existential

predicaments and potentials that face our imperiled digital human condition. These relate to

redefinitions of death and mourning; to tensions between memory loss (technological

obsolescence) and the hauntings of everlasting data. They imply heightened senses of

connective presence and community and/or a potential crisis of presence, and enhance the

evaporation between public and private through the emergence of distributed selfhood.

Finally, I have posited a human being for the digital human condition as exister, that is a

precarious, embodied, relational, mortal creature; sometimes at loss, bewildered and in search

for meaning before the abyss. She is imbricated in socio-technological ensembles, traversing

these terrains more or less successfully, in search for what may be cautiously termed

existential security. Existential media studies actually require a paradigmatic change of

casting. The principal inhabitant of the digital ecology, our principal subject in media studies,

is not a savvy, early adopter, but the human being who sometimes stumbles, falls,

misunderstands, struggles, is vulnerable, hurting, speechless and finds no solution; but who

may also experience moments of ultimate meaning, community, support and fullness, as she

navigates through the torrents of our digital existence.

Acknowledgments

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This research is part of the programme “Existential Terrains: Memory and Meaning in

Cultures of Connectivity” (et.ims.su.se) funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg

Foundation, the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation and Stockholm University. I am

grateful to John Durham Peters, Mia Lö vheim, Ulrika Bjö rk, Vincent Miller, Peter Horsfield,

Charles Ess, Anna Haverinen, Yvonne Andersson, Michael Westerlund and Timothy

Hutchings for valuable suggestions for improving this essay.

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