Lagerkvist, A. - Existential Media (2016)
Lagerkvist, A. - Existential Media (2016)
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
(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:
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and reproduce sameness, modern technologies have thus come to be
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
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
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
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
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
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,
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
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
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
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
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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
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
Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities.
that Being is an issue for it….It is peculiar to this entity that with and
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
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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
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
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
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
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
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
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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-
moorings (Peters 2015a), in the face of the challenges and uncertainties of life. Hence, by
foundational for describing the relationship between human beings, their world and their God
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
Existential philosophy both pinpoints and brings us back from our human
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
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
logic of human agency versus technological destining. Beyond conceiving of the internet as
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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.
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
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
re-circulated textual remnants and search traces, our digital heirlooms, after-life social media
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
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
slippages, as users’ postings may “percolate thorough the network” in unpredictable ways
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
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
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
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
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’
as both embodied, technologized and relational – and of media as in effect technologies of the
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
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
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).
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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
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
reframing that moves us beyond both celebratory utopian discourses and those that one-
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,
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
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
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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
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
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
Acknowledgments
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This research is part of the programme “Existential Terrains: Memory and Meaning in
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
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