Digital Existence ― Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture

Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture advances debates on digital culture and digital religion in two complementary ways. First, by focalizing the keywords ontology, ethics and transcendence, it builds on insights from research on digital religion in order to reframe the field and pursue an existential media analysis that further pushes beyond the mandatory focus in mainstream media studies on the social, cultural, political and economic dimensions of digitalization. Second, the collection will also imply a broadening of the scope of the debate in the field of media, religion and culture – and digital religion in particular – beyond ‘religion’, to include the wider existential dimensions of digital media. It will be the first volume on our digital existence in the budding field of existential media studies.

Amanda Lagerkvist PhD., is Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies and was appointed Wallenberg Academy Fellow in 2013. She is head of the research programme "Existential Terrains: Memory and Meaning in Cultures of Connectivity" (http://et.ims.su.se) in the Department of Media Studies at Stockholm University, funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation, and Stockholm University (2014–2018). With a particular focus on death online, the project explores the existential dimensions of digitalization by developing a theoretical framework for existential media studies. Lagerkvist’s research focuses on exploring memories of the dead online, after death communication, online mourning and shared vulnerability, the digital afterlife and the transcendence industry. She is currently writing a monograph entitled Existential Media. She has worked in the fields of media philosophy and media memory studies, and as a media phenomenologist she has previously contributed to debates on media and memory, time, urban space and performativity. She is the author of the monograph Media and Memory in New Shanghai: Western Performances of Futures Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and the co-editor of Strange Spaces: Explorations into Mediated Obscurity (Ashgate, 2009).