Digital Existence

<p><em>Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture</em> advances debates on digital culture and digital religion in two complementary ways. First, by focalizing the themes ‘ontology,’ ‘ethics’ and ‘transcendence,’ it builds on insights from research on digital religion in order to reframe the field and pursue an existential media analysis that further pushes beyond the mandatory focus in mainstream media studies on the social, cultural, political and economic dimensions of digitalization. Second, the collection also implies a broadening of the scope of the debate in the field of media, religion and culture – and digital religion in particular – beyond ‘religion,’ to include the wider existential dimensions of digital media. It is the first volume on our digital existence in the budding field of existential media studies.</p> <p>Foreword, John Durham Peters; Digital Existence: An Introduction, <i>Amanda Lagerkvist </i><b>PART I: Media Ontologies </b>1 Irremediability: On the Very Concept of Digital Ontology, <i>Justin Clemens and Adam Nash </i>2 Umwelt and Individuation: Digital Signals and Technical Being, <i>Jonas Andersson Schwarz </i>3 Thrownness, Vulnerability, Care: A Feminist Ontology for the Digital Age,<i>Margaret Schwartz </i>4 Digital Unworld(s): The Bielefeld Conspiracy, <i>Yvette Granata </i><b>PART II: Being human: Extension, Exposure and Ethics </b>5 You Have Been Tagged: Magical Incantations, Digital Incarnations and Extended Selves, <i>Paul Frosh </i>6 Surveillance, Sensors, and Knowledge Through the Machine, <i>Sun-ha Hong </i>7 Social Media and the Care of the Self, <i>Ganaele Langlois </i>8 The Ethics of Digital Being: Vulnerability, Invulnerability, and ‘Dangerous Surprises’, <i>Vincent Miller </i><b>PART III: Transcendence: Beyond life, death and the human </b>9 The Internet is Always Awake: Sensations, Sounds and Silences of the Digital Grave, <i>Amanda Lagerkvist </i>10 Digital Rituals and the Quest for Existential Security, <i>Johanna Sumiala </i>11 Cybernetic Animism: Non-Human Personhood and the Internet, <i>Devin Proctor </i>12 Death in Life and Life in Death: Forms and Fates of the Human, <i>Connor Graham and Alfred Montoya; </i>Afterword, <i>Charles M. Ess</i></p>