649921

research-article2016

NMS0010.1177/1461444816649921new media & societyLagerkvist

Article

Existential media: Toward

a theorization of digital
thrownness

new media & society

1 15
The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1461444816649921
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Amanda Lagerkvist
Stockholm University, Sweden

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-the-world), 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 ecologya 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
Death, digital culture, existential philosophy, media and religion, vulnerability

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
Corresponding author:
Amanda Lagerkvist, Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University, PO.Box 27861, 11593 Stockholm,
Sweden.
Email: amanda.lagerkvist@ims.su.se

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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 implicatedat 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
(Heidegger, 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 Dijck, 2013: 158). These perilous conditions clearly fade the luster 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 endeavors
in media philosophy posit a media ontology centered on the groundedness of being, and
the mundane materiality of technologies (cf. Peters, 2015b; Scannell, 2014). 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 forand reconcile its ontological claims withthe 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.
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
(1979) 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 (p. 4). Today, one may suggest that the
machines have evolved into environmental and wearable tools of existence. Our being is

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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 (2011), wired into existence through technology (p. 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 peoples 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-withthe-world. 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 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 existentiala fact that has not been sufficiently recognized in media research. With important exceptions (e.g. Floridi, 2015; Lagerkvist,
2013, 2014; Langlois, 2014; Miller, 2015; Peters, 1999, 2015b; Pinchevski, 2014;
Scannell, 2014), 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 newspapers, 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 (2013) summarizes what
animates our medias techno-spirituality:
Because of their imponderable complexities, their autonomous networked agency, their
capacities to compress time, erase distance, and reproduce sameness, modern technologies
have thus come to be understood as possessing transcendent and uncanny features. (p. 5)

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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 essays 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. Markham, 1998; Turkle, 1995) 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 (1999) 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 (p. 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 (De Vries and Weber 2001; Hoover,
2006; Hoover and Lundby, 1997; Lynch etal., 2011; Morgan, 2008; Stolow, 2005;
Sumiala, 2013). Through providing productive new analytical emphasis on peoples
changing relationship to transcendent and existential dimensions in life, focus is directed
toward uncharted and vernacular forms of existential meaning making, also in the realm
of digital media (cf. Campbell and Lvheim, 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
(2014) 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 themthey are literally user
friendly and reconcile us to our worldly selves (p. 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 (2015b)
nonetheless ploughs on in similar Heideggerian furrows and provides a material account
of both being itself and of media theory. By problematizing the subjectobject distinction

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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 naturalcultural being is a part of. Thus, ultimately Peters 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 and 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 existencestressing 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.

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 non-human 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 Daseins being. (Heidegger, 1927/1962: 12, italics in
original)

I envision an understanding subject that resonates with the self as exister emerging in Karl Jaspers philosophy. This means that because human life entails momentous
challenges, individuals are

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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: 3334)

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 destabilizes 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. Dreyfus, 2001/2011; Han,
2013; Heidegger, 1977; Jaspers, 1951). 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, ones 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) analyzes the crisis of presence in contemporary digital culture and
retains Heideggers rustbelt definition of technology to describe the core of the digital.
Digital enframing reveals a world that is both personalized (reducing us to calculable
properties) and in which we instrumentally objectify people and the social itself as a
standing reservea 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 and 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 momentswhat Karl Jaspers called limit-situationsrelated 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

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of the abyssin front of the irresolvablethey 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: 179, 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 in terms
of material predictability as the antidote to religiosity, and as 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
philosophy of existence. One seeming possibility in this direction is to be found in
Giddens (1990) definition of ontological security (p. 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, 2015b), in the face of the challenges and
uncertainties of life. Hence, by contrast, I would like to define existential security
existentially.
Here, I follow Sren Kierkegaard (1846), who highlighted the notion of uncertainty
as foundational for describing the relationship between human beings, their world, and
their God. 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:
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 ifliving with uncertaintywe 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: 14). Being is conceived as already being-with, and existence as always already
coexistence with others (Nancy, 2000). Jaspers (1932/1970) 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. Since human existence is highly paradoxical, existential security is,

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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, 2015b). 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: 6061). It enables us to draw near
what seems nonsensical 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, 2015b: 357), this moves us both theoretically and empirically
toward the antinomies of digital existence.

Fields of inquiry: classic themesnew 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 existential and ambivalent terrain. In the following, I will sketch out four
interlinked areas of study and move toward 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.

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, text and sound in order to commemorate the
deceased, or where you can light digital candles); in memorialized 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 societiestogether (Walter
etal., 2011/2012). Studies of such phenomena in the burgeoning field of death online
(Gotvid and Refslund-Christensen, 2015; Graham etal., 2013; Kasket, 2012; Moreman
and Lewis, 2014) show a de-sequestering as well as a deferral of death in contemporary
society (Lagerkvist, 2013).

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The digital afterlife encompasses a variety of phenomena and feelings. It spans recirculated textual remnants and search traces, our digital heirlooms, afterlife 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 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 othersthe 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 etal., 2013: 95). Facebooks asynchronous nature
further results in temporal slippages, as users postings may permeate the network in
unpredictable ways. This leads to the theme of time.

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 (Crary, 2013; Davis, 2013; Kaun and 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 etal., 2009: 5). This constitutes a fundamental tension in our contemporary existence between saving and deleting, 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 (Chun, 2010; Lagerkvist, 2014).
Digital temporalities thus actualize the antinomy of the transient and the eternal.
And yet, as our era both praises and promotes temporal instantaneity and hyperconnectivity 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

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restored (Peters, 2015a). 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-Schnberger, 2009). Heightened existential anxieties about the 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.

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-Schnberger,
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 challenges a there with clear demarcations. This actualizes the key
antinomy of absence and presence in modern media life, connoting, as argued by Peters
(1999) 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 persons body (p. 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 (2014) calls dynamic ambiguity, and activates a need for
trying to retake control (i.e. to establish existential security), in the awareness of being
targeted by corporations and governments (p. 55ff).

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 Iquestion is complex. And taking into account an unstable self that is
not only mediated, processual, and narrated but also increasingly quantified, distributed,
mined, and visualized (Geis, 2008), the plot thickens even more. Our performative and

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affective device bodies (Lagerkvist, 2016) demand a theorization of the subjectivity of

connectivitythe self as both embodied, technologized, and relationaland 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
(Lvheim, 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 or
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

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 (yetalways 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

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more about this register and how it both informs and is informed by digital tools of existence, also means learning from peoples search for existential security and meaning,
their loss of meaning, their unspoken affectivity or outspoken despairinvolved in
experiences of loss (or being at loss)in what I call the existential terrains of connectivity. This approach underlines the 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 requires 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.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to John Durham Peters, Mia Lvheim, Ulrika Bjrk, Vincent Miller, Peter Horsfield,
Charles Ess, Anna Haverinen, Yvonne Andersson, Michael Westerlund, and Timothy Hutchings
and the anonymous reviewers for valuable suggestions for improving this essay.

Funding
This research is part of the program 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.

Note
1. For instance, Mitchell and Hansens (2010) techno-anthropology relies on Stieglers project
and stresses the co-originarity of the human and technics. Kember and Zylinskas (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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Author biography
Amanda Lagerkvist is associate professor of media and communication studies and Wallenberg
Academy Fellow in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University. She is head of the
research program Existential Terrains: Memory and Meaning in Cultures of Connectivity (et.ims.
su.se), which is funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Marcus and Amalia
Wallenberg Foundation, and Stockholm University (20142018). Her latest monograph is Media
and Memory in New Shanghai: Western Performances of Futures Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

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