Amanda Lagerkvist

In classic existential philosophy and phenomenology, being human in itself defies numbers and measurement (Kierkegaard 1846/1960/2010; Jaspers 1932; Husserl 1954). By contrast, today an ideology of connectivity is fast emerging where numbers are taken to reveal the hidden truths of being, of selfhood and of the body. In effect, this ideology seems to accomplish a rewiring of human sensory experience to privilege the numerical, the discrete. This chapter discusses the ethos of quantification in bereavement online, and sets out by showing how numbers have become central for some mourners in the death online field. In the face of the death of their spouse or child, the lived experience of loss in online environments is also an experience of counting likes or hearts: of quantification. The chapter analyses the role of numbers in relation to online condolences, that is of ‘liking’ (or neglecting to like) an expression of utter exposure and bottomless grief. It picks up on Steven Connor’s provocative defense of quantification (2015, 2016). He argues that since we actually live in number humanists need to assess the ‘quality of quantity’, the feel of number ('quantality'), and attend to its philosophical and political imaginaries. This chapter argues in order to do so we need neither complacently accept the role, authority and clout of number, nor indulge in what Connor sees among humanists as an “angry panic,” about them, but simply to revisit phenomenology and its profound engagement with the shortcomings of numbering and quantification, in the realm of human existence. The chapter argues that this is a move needed in order to both phenomenologically perceive and critically interrogate the turn to numbers. In sharing work on a group of bereaved parents who built memorials to their dead children and a Facebook group of bereaved who mourn their partners,  and by bringing these phenomenally felt entanglements of grief and numbers into view, in this chapter I am intentionally hovering between defining online mourning as expressions of and co-constituted by technē; the way we craft and re-craft our world with and within media – and technics; the way technology may also be an agent of systemic objectification and cynical calculus (Heidegger 1927 & 1977, Dreyfus 1994,  Peters 2015). I show that what we would describe as immaterial forms of capitalism bleed into the vulnerabilities of bereavement online. Yet they do not exhaust the matter. Our media are existential media (Lagerkvist 2016) which is why they call for an ethics of ambiguity (de Beauvoir 1947): we have to be able to see the two sides of the phenomenon at once. When numbers count we may discern both an enhanced form of simply being there for each other in shared vulnerability (cf. Peters 1999, 2015, Lagerkvist & Andersson 2017), and a troubling depletion of the field of mourning online.

Our digitally enforced lifeworld is an existential and ambivalent terrain. Questions concerning digital technologies are thus questions about human existence. This theoretical essay employs key concepts from existential philosophy to envision an existential media analysis that accounts for the thrownness of digital human existence. Tracing our digital thrownness to four emergent fields of inquiry, that relate to classic themes (death, time, being there and being-in-and-with), it encircles both mundane connectivity and the extraordinary limit-situations (online) when our human vulnerability is principally felt and our security is shaken. In place of a savvy user, this article posits the ‘exister’ as the principal subject in media studies and inhabitant of the digital ecology – a stumbling, hurting and relational human being, who navigates within limits and among interruptions through the torrents of our digital existence, in search for meaning and existential security.

In an era that celebrates instantaneity and hyper-connectivity, compulsions of networked individualism coexist with technological obsolescence, amounting to a sense of fragmentation and a heightened tension between remembering and forgetting. This article argues, however, that in our era of absolute presence, a netlore of the infinite is emerging, precisely in and through our digital memory practices. This is visible in the ubiquitous meaning-making practices of for instance personal digital archiving through the urges for self-perpetuation; it is evident at sites where the self may be saved for posterity; it is discernible in the technospiritual
practices of directly speaking to the dead on digital memorials, as well as in the tendency among some users to regard the Internet itself as a manifestation of eternity, “heaven”
and the sacred. This article shows that by approaching digital memory cultures existentially, and by attending to the complexities of digital time, we may gain insights into important and paradoxical aspects of our existential terrains of connectivity. This makes possible an exploration into how people navigate and create meaning in the digital memory ecology—in seeking to ground a sense of the eternal in the ephemeral.

It is often claimed that modern media massively return the repressed yet unavoidable fact of death, which modernity had institutionalised and placed out of sight. Death is everywhere in the media age: in news, in fiction, and not least in the budding practices of sociality and memory on the internet. This article will revolve around what we may learn about media and death from the vantage point of how memory cultures are currently being transformed. Spanning a heterogeneous terrain, the ‘digital memory ecology’ comprises among other things the construction of a digital afterlife, commemorative communities of grief and remembrance, interaction in guest books, digital candles and commentary fields on digital memorials. This article argues that today death is far from the hidden supplement to culture as Zygmunt Bauman contends or that it is even making a mediated return to us, but is rather ubiquitous in the digital age. As such it is both de-sequestered and deferred. By launching the deliberately ambiguous concept of existential security, the article outlines a research agenda for how we may approach these tendencies.

Despite the fragmentation of audience behaviour and the pluralization of platforms within the media cultures of the digital age, cultural memory practices retain an important feature: They echo a basic existential quest for communitas. The present article compares two seemingly incomparable regimes of memory of our time: the anniversaries of 9.11 on Swedish televi- sion and web communities of commemoration of lost loved ones. It suggests through these contrasting examples that existential themes are pursued in the face of three challenges: the temporality of instantaneity, the all-pervasive networked individualism that makes memory into a matter of elective affinities, and the technological capacities that subject memory to end- less revision. The article explores the existential dimension of these memory practices in line with research within the culturalist emphasis on the study of media and religion. This debate recognizes the need for a broader understanding of the mediated qualities of religion and the religious qualities of the media. The article argues that both televisual anniversaries of trauma that invite audiences to an annual return, and our new multiple and fragmented media memories compel us to conceive of our hyper-contingent, late-modern digital age as a quest for meaning, transcendence and cohesion – for what Victor Turner (1969) called existential communitas.

Keywords: memory, digital age, existence, anniversary journalism, web memorials, communitas, death

During the ten years that have passed since the mediated terrorist attacks in the United States on 9.11, 2001, they have become—through instant historicization as well as endless repetitions—stable points of reference for transnational collective memory. Focalizing the anniversaries of September 11, 2002 and 2011, on Swedish television, this article pursues how the medium annually commemorates the tragedy. Fusing television research with memory studies, the argument is that we may approach the anniversaries as an electronic “lieu de mémorie”: a material-symbolic space reappropriated annually as media become vehicles for “working through” in commemoration, mourning, debate, and critique. Despite the fragmentation of both television and collective memory in the context of digitalization, on the anniversaries, Swedish television promotes itself as a central “nucleus” for connectivity offering viewers a return to the traumatic site—to the television set—while interpellating them as a “global we,” of media witnesses.

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