[ecrea] Digital existence - Call for chapters

*Call for chapters*

*
*

*DIGITAL EXISTENCE *(Ed.) Amanda Lagerkvist

What does it mean to be a human being in the digital age? How do media
relate to Being itself? And how can we account for the lived experiences
of our digitally enforced lifeworld, and for the thrownness of digital
human existence (Lagerkvist forthcoming)? Taking stock of John Durham
Peters’s recent proposition that media studies may have the grandiose
ambition to “be a successor discipline to metaphysics, as the field
which accounts for the constitution of all that is” (2015: 320) this
volume will address the big and basic questions in our contemporary
digital lives.


This book calls for chapters that offer a theorization of our
contemporary digital existence, by appraising our */media
ontology:/* how media relate to our being. Contributions to this volume
may raise questions such as: What are the implications of being “wired
into existence through technology” (Turkle 2011), that is through our
digital devices?How do digital media bring about ‘life’? How does the
digital relate to matter, embodiment, and signification? How can we
account for individuation within our cybernetic existence? How is our
being-in-the-world crafted today by big data?


The volume further seeks to highlight the particular features of our
*/digital exposures/*. What is the purchase of software on our sense of
meaning, affect and being? Does hyper-connectivity imply a heightened
sense of embodied connective presence – through social media, tagging,
and sharing selfies – or is anxiety, insecurity, shock and loneliness
saturating our mundane being-in-the-digital-world? What does it mean to
‘know’ that we are being surveilled? How do big data affect the
prospects for achieving meaningful phenomenal human knowledge? How can
we account for the future of memory and meaning in the data-driven life?
And what is the role of technological affordances for producing a
culture of trolling and hate?


This is closely related to ways of */being human/*//that emerge in the
post-digital situation, and to questions such as: What existential
challenges and potentials are involved when our selves are networked,
quantified and distributed? And how may post-human discourse and design
aid or obstruct us in addressing our existential problems? What are the
ethical predicaments of anonymity online, or the moral costs involved in
the loss of anonymity in social media? When collective identities and
memories seemingly eradicate in the digital age, how are existentially
imperiled groups voicing their collective concerns online? How do people
ritualize their common experiences in digital environments, and what are
digital rituals bringing about?


Our digital existence is also related to those existential experiences
that involve the extraordinary and /*the transcendent*:/ the experiences
of endings, the beyond and of ghostly, mediated returns and echoes. The
volume will therefore address questions such as: How can the
‘existential’ push forward debates on digital religion? What is the role
of death and the yonder in media theory?How is mourning both digital and
material and what kind of media concept emerges from these
concatenations? What are the remediations of the Facebook ghost, and the
role of repetition and returns for media theory? How do the digital
temporalities of the enduring ephemeral, the everlasting and the
hauntings of data, echo in media practice and philosophy?

Abstracts are invited under four thematic sections:

*1. Media Ontologies*

*2. **Exposure*

*3. **Being Human*

*4. **Transcendence*

**


*Timetable*

**

oDeadline for chapter abstracts *January 30, 2016 *(submit your abstract
of _300 words_ to (amanda.lagerkvist /at/ ims.su.se)
<mailto:(amanda.lagerkvist /at/ ims.su.se)>). Chapter abstracts will be peer
reviewed by external readers.

oNotification of accepted submissions *February 29, 2016.*

oDeadline for first full chapters: *October 30, 2016. *The chapters
should be 7000 words,**and referencing per Chicago manual of style.

oEstimated publication date: *September 2017.*

**

*Amanda Lagerkvist*
PhD Associate Professor
Wallenberg Academy Fellow

Dept. of Media Studies (IMS/JMK)
Stockholm University
PO. Box 27861
115 93 Stockholm

email: (amanda.lagerkvist /at/ ims.su.se) <mailto:(amanda.lagerkvist /at/ ims.su.se)>
http://www.su.se/
http://www.wallenbergacademyfellows.se
<http://www.wallenbergacademyfellows.se/>
_http://et.ims.su.se_




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