Tied to the profundity of life and death, media are and have always been existential. Yet, as they are deeply embedded in the lifeworld on both individual and global scales, they currently capitalize on human existence seemingly without limit, while being mythologized as boundless harbingers of the future and as solutions to the predicaments of a world now poised on the edge. In this situation it is imperative to move beyond either the habitual or the sublime, to recognize that media are in fact of limitsDLsituated both in the middle of our lives and at the limit they constitute the building blocks and brinks of being.
In order to remedy the existential deficit in the field, in Existential Media Amanda Lagerkvist revisits existential philosophy through a reappreciation of Karl Jaspers' philosophy, and of his concept of the limit situation: those ultimate moments in lifeDLof loss, crisis and guiltDLwhich we are called upon to seize. Introducing the field of existential media studies in conversation with disability studies, the new materialism and the environmental humanities, the book offers a media theory of the limit situation which brings limits, in all their shapes and forms, onto the radar when we interrogate media. Lagerkvist argues that the present age of deep techno-cultural saturation, and of escalating calamitous and interrelated crises, is a digital limit situation, in which there are profound stakes which heighten existential uncertainty, vulnerability as well as potential fecundity. Placing the mournerDLthe coexisterDLat the center of media studies, by entering into the slow fields of mourning, commemorating and speaking to the dead in the online environment, she brings out that existential media ambivalently offer metric parameters, caring lifelines and transcendent experiences which ultimately display post-interactive modes of being digital in slowness, silence and waiting. The book ultimately calls forth a different ethos which powerfully challenges ideals of limitlessness, quantification and speed, and seeks out alternate intellectual and ethical coordinates for reclaiming, imagining and anticipating a responsible future with existential media.
Preface Note on sources Introduction: Media of Limits PART I Existentializing Media Chapter 1. Limit Situations (of the Digital): Restoring Karl Jaspers for Media Theory Chapter 2. Into the Slow Field: The What, The How and the Why Chapter 3. Existential Media Studies: Lineages and Lines Chapter 4. Existential Media: Propositions and Properties PART II Digital Limit Situations Chapter 5. Metric Media: Numerical Being, Marginal Beings and the Limits of Measuring Chapter 6. Caring Media: Beings on the (Life)line Chapter 7. Transcendent Media: Caring for the Dead, Relating at the Threshold Chapter 8. Anticipatory Media: Futurability on the Brinks of Time Postscript. Going dark: Refusals in slowness, silence and waiting Recommended Reading Index
"Amanda Lagerkvist is Professor of Media and Communication Studies in the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University. She is principal investigator of the Uppsala Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence. As Wallenberg Academy Fellow (2014-2018) she founded the field of existential media studies. She heads the project: ""BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of Biometric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds"" funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, in which her group studies the lived experiences of biometric AI, for example voice and face recognition technologies. She is the editor of Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture (2019)."
Reviews for Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation
Amanda Lagerkvist, an established scholar of media, memory and global urban landscapes, in this book breaks radical new ground, both for herself and for the whole field of media and communications research. Reflecting deeply not just on the inheritance of existentialist philosophy, but on the contemporary crises of climate change, datafication and the global pandemic, Lagerkvist's writing is fresh, precise and impassioned: this book urgently needs to be read. * Nick Couldry, London School of Economics and Political Science * We live through media and always have. Yet rarely do scholars take the courageous and risky approach of Lagerkvist in explaining what media do to how we understand our own existence. If Sartre were to write about existentialism today, this is how he would write - or rather, he might wish HE had written this. A deep and original account of how we through media, come closer to and push away from the limits of human existence. * Zizi Papacharissi, University of Illinois-Chicago *
