Digital Life. Tim Markham

follow Simondon’s framework in Molecular Revolution in Brazil (2008); likewise Stiegler in Technics and Time 1 (1998a). 7 See especially Winthrop-Young 2013: 75. 8 Yasmin Ibrahim (2019) argues that not only have we become more accustomed to being observed through data surveillance, but that data increasingly takes a visual form – something she sees as a manifestation of a broader trend she labels the aestheticization of everyday life. 9 Couldry and Hepp acknowledge Illich’s (1993) half-century history of how humans make meaning through technologies of storage. 10 Couldry and Hepp cite Alaimo and Kallinikos’s observation that ‘Once the social gets engraved into data, it ceases to be related to established categories and habits’ (2016: 16). 11 Couldry and Hepp’s work draws more upon (and extends) Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) conception of the lifeworld, or ‘social world’, though the approach taken in the present volume, more directly influenced by Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, shares the premise that the lifeworld is fundamentally intersubjective and predicated on active, patterned participation. The meaningfulness of everyday life in each approach then depends on habituated social practice; the work that goes into sustaining everyday life is precisely what enables it to be experienced as natural and (usually) unproblematic – a claim that derives ultimately from Alfred Schütz (1967 [1932]). For a more detailed discussion of Schütz’s understanding of the lifeworld, see Markham 2011. 12 Frosh writes: ‘This indifference is not one of boredom, ennui or alienation, but is a habitual material practice: a routinization of embodied and perceptual connective energies, both tactile and visual, that produces sameness from movement in a context characterized by the abundance of representations and perceptual stimuli’ (2018: 45). He notes that this has its origins in the ‘glance theory’ developed by John Ellis (1982) as well as Simmel’s blasé attitude (2012 [1903]) and Goffman’s civil inattention (2008 [1963]). 13 Highmore (2010: 163) notes that ‘In the English language versions of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin’s work “distraction” is the usual translation of the word Zerstreuung. The German term, though, is more evidently ambiguous and covers a wider range of meanings than the English “distraction”. The German term also seems much more insistent on the centrifugal movement of attention: “the German Zerstreuung might mean, at one and the same time, distraction, diversion, amusement, diffusion, preoccupation, absentmindedness, scattering, dispersion, and so on” (Vidler 2000: 82–3).’ 14 See Margalit 2002: 37, cited in Frosh 2018: 57. 15 See also Gane 2005: 29. 16 Butler’s Excitable Speech (2013: 27) also provides an effective frame for assessing how central hate speech has become to understanding what kind of spaces digital platforms are, and specifically the question of whether malicious speech acts are the product of a digital ecosystem rather than the individual per se. 17 ‘If, as Stiegler has it, “the being of humankind is to be outside itself,” the always already technical human is a human that is inevitably – prior to and perhaps even against his “will” – productively engaged with an alterity. Being-in-the-world therefore amounts to being “in difference,” which is also – for Levinas, as much for Stiegler – being “in time”: that is, having an awareness and a (partial) memory of what was before and an anticipation of what is to come’ (Kember and Zylinska 2012: 17). 18 This has echoes of Seamon’s ‘place choreographies’; see Moores and Metykova 2010. 19 As Peters puts it, ‘Studying how boring things got that way is actually a good way not to be bored’ (2015: 36).