TY - JOUR T1 - The netlore of the infinite: death (and beyond) in the digital memory ecology JF - New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia Y1 - 2015 A1 - Lagerkvist, Amanda AB - 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 techno-spiritual 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. UR - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13614568.2014.983563 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Existential media: Toward a theorization of digital thrownness JF - New Media & Society Y1 - 2017 A1 - Lagerkvist, Amanda AB - 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-the-world), 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. UR - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1461444816649921?journalCode=nmsa ER -