[Air-L] New book: Digital Life

[Tim Markham]

Dear all,
I’m pleased to announce the publication of my new book, Digital Life<https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509541058&subject_id=6>, with Polity Press.
Intended as a provocation to think differently about digital media and what it is doing to us, it argues that what it means to live ethically and politically is realised through and not in spite of the everyday experience of digital life.
Here’s the pitch: Digital Life<https://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509541058&subject_id=6> takes aim squarely at the prevailing conventional wisdom that the encroaching pervasiveness of digital media in our everyday lives is undermining core notions of politics, sociality and ethics. Its principal claim is simple: instead of ethical and political principles enduring in spite of the myriad distractions of digital life, such principles are constituted precisely through those distractions. That word constitutive is key, and it echoes Heidegger, for whom what we think of as inauthentic ways of being – idle talk and curiosity in his case, meandering about online seeking out diversion and affect in ours – should be understood as being just as ontologically foundational as anything else. All we have are the selves we constantly find ourselves thrown into, already acting in the thick of it.
That can sound like fatalism, as though we just have to accept what we find ourselves doing in whatever world we’re thrown into, but we’re also hardwired to make that world familiar and to take responsibility for that self. Likewise, it can sound like the past doesn’t matter, only the now, which would make it difficult to criticise the way our world is rapidly changing. But the past is always part of our experience of the present, just not as an origin from which we’ve departed and by implication to which we should seek to return.
We worry that while we’re better connected than ever our relations with mediated others are ersatz or virtue-signalling – but what if fleeting, ephemeral engagement is a better way of understanding our co-existence with others than deep reflection? Similarly, we fret that surveillance and data mining are fundamentally eroding ethical principles like autonomy and privacy – but what if there is no prior self to be defended against external forces? We express concern that the rise of identity politics has led to a new politics in which how people feel trumps all other reasoning – but what if the way someone feels isn’t seen as individualistic and reductive, but pre-individual, collective and thus political?
The failure to recognise the full horror of suffering witnessed on the run is not a failure of self, and nor is each instance of data mining a threat to the integrity of our very selves. The spontaneous, fickle and fissiparous formation of interest groups online might lack the dedication and determination of seriously minded political activism, and might seem driven more by the experience than outcome of engagement, but the things that emerge out of these digital constellations are no less political.
Political principles are not internal qualities, hard won and carefully honed, that we go about applying to the world as we find it; principles only come into existence as we go about acting, more often than not improvisationally and almost always provisionally. The whole point of living an ethical life is about what becomes of the ways we live in motion, grasping at knowledge and experience as we go, not randomly but rhythmically, drawing on collective repertoires that are of the world rather than us. This, finally, is what allows us to see that the ordinary stuff we get up to in our mundane digital existences is pregnant with the political.
Tim Markham<http://www.bbk.ac.uk/culture/staff/teaching-staff/tim-markham> is Professor of Journalism and Media at Birkbeck, University of London. He is also the author of Media and the Experience of Social Change: The Arab World<https://www.rowmaninternational.com/book/media_and_the_experience_of_social_change/3-156-2a905cfc-3a37-4722-ab73-8c40375aaab2> (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), Media and Everyday Life<https://www.macmillanihe.com/page/detail/media-and-everyday-life-tim-markham/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137477187> (Palgrave, 2017), and The Politics of War Reporting: Authority, Authenticity and Morality<https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9780719085284/> (Manchester, 2012); co-author of Media Consumption and Public Engagement: Beyond the Presumption of Attention<https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9781403985347> (Palgrave, 2007; 2010) and co-editor of Conditions of Mediation: Phenomenological Perspectives on Media<https://www.peterlang.com/view/title/23231?format=PBK> (Peter Lang, 2017).