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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.
List of contents
Table of contents:1 Introduction
2 The Care Deficit
3 The Affordances of Affect
4 Data, Surveillance and Apathy
5 Everyday Stakes of Being
6 Experience and Identity
7 Everyday Lives of Digital Infrastructures
8 Selfing in a Digital World
Notes
References
Index
About the author
Tim Markham is Professor of Journalism and Media at Birkbeck, University of London.
Summary
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.
Report
?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
