Digital Life by Tim Markham, reviewed

By Simon Cocking, review of Digital Life Tim Markham available from Polity here.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the pervasiveness of digital media into our everyday lives is undermining cherished notions of politics and ethics. Is this concern unfounded?

In this daring new book, Tim Markham argues that what it means to live ethically and politically is realized through, not in spite of, the everyday experience of digital life. Drawing on a wide range of philosophers from Hegel and Heidegger to Levinas and Butler, he investigates what is really at stake amid the constant distractions of our media-saturated world, the way we present ourselves to that world through social media, and the relentless march of data into every aspect of our lives.

A provocation to think differently about digital media and what it is doing to us, Digital Life offers timely insights into distraction and compassion fatigue, privacy and surveillance, identity and solidarity. It is essential reading for scholars and advanced students of media and communication.

Digital Life by Tim Markham, reviewed

This book goes deep and delves into a lot of interesting and thought provoking concepts. It would probably also yield more insights on a second reading too. This is all to the good but we did find ourselves wondering if the cat was already out of the bag in terms of its purported main key concept that what ‘it means to live ethically and politically is realized through, not in spite of, the everyday experience of digital life’. 

Is this not already a truism, or perhaps rather a Trumpism, as we have already endured well over four, at times, draining years of seeing someones personality, id, ego and everything else repeatedly play out over digital media, Twitter in particular for the orange one.

One could argue, counter to Markham’s thesis, that the separation between our digital footprint and our ‘realworld’ presence has long since blurred. Or perhaps another way to look at it is that, already, our online profile, presence, and digital footprint is a clear expansion and manifestation of who and what we are. Therefore how we live ethically, and politically is intrinsically played out and amplified online, therefore how could it be ‘inspite’ of who we are, and what we think.

There are many interesting concepts in this book, but at times it felt like it would be no harm to reach out a little more to the actual reader and engage with them, and give them a sense of who Markham is, and what he thinks. Similarly in researching Markham for this book, his online presence on Twitter for example, felt a little opaque and hard to discern who he was, and what his persona was.

What he believed, what he advocates and how he lived ethically and politically in his experience of digital life. Surely thereby perhaps negating the fundamental premise of his proposed analysis of what digital life is, and what it means for us now in 2020 and beyond.

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