Digital Life

Conventional wisdom suggests that the pervasiveness of digital media into our everyday lives is undermining cherished notions of politics and ethics. Is this concern unfounded?

In this daring new book, Tim Markham argues that what it means to live ethically and politically is realized through, not in spite of, the everyday experience of digital life. Drawing on a wide range of philosophers from Hegel and Heidegger to Levinas and Butler, he investigates what is really at stake amid the constant distractions of our media-saturated world, the way we present ourselves to that world through social media, and the relentless march of data into every aspect of our lives.

A provocation to think differently about digital media and what it is doing to us, Digital Life offers timely insights into distraction and compassion fatigue, privacy and surveillance, identity and solidarity. It is essential reading for scholars and advanced students of media and communication. Introduction 1

2 The Care Deficit 28

3 The Affordances of Affect 43

4 Data, Surveillance and Apathy 63

5 Everyday Stakes of Being 79

6 Experience and Identity 97

7 Everyday Lives of Digital Infrastructures 114

8 Selfing in a Digital World 133

Notes 145

Bibliography 150

Index 162

“With this remarkable new book, Tim Markham will be recognised as one of the key theorists of digital media use in everyday living. His phenomenological approach is distinctive and his arguments make an original and valuable contribution to current debates in media studies.”
Shaun Moores, University of Sunderland

“Tim Markham’s Digital Life is a powerful and bold statement that our everyday interactions with and through media are ethically and politically meaningful. Erudite, wide-ranging and profound, it offers nothing less than a re-energized philosophy of human life in a media-saturated world.”
Paul Frosh, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

“[Markham’s] call on us to find ethics and politics within (and not outside of) the digital is inspiring... [the book] significantly contributes to defining the significance of media studies to contemporary concerns about what it means to live meaningfully and ethically in a ‘superconnected’ world.”
European Journal of Communication Tim Markham is Professor of Journalism and Media at Birkbeck, University of London.