Investigating digitally mediated temporal experience: From empiricism to ethics

Abstract

Much recent scholarship in the field of media phenomenology has investigated the role of temporality in shaping our experience of digital media in everyday life, as well as the ethical and political ramifications that flow from it. Consistent with the central phenomenological tenet of locating the present as ontologically prior to any past origin, the idea is that in order to properly understand the texture of day-to-day digital navigation our focus should not be on discrete media texts or objects, but on the way they are experienced first and foremost as presents into which we find ourselves repeatedly thrown. The aim of this article is to establish an empirical framework for scrutinizing the ethical dimensions of digitally mediated temporal experience. The traces of this experience are not paths from a past or causal origin, but traces of mobility experienced as always-already presentness.