The onlife manifesto: Philosophical backgrounds, media usages, and the futures of democracy and equality

Abstract

I focus on who we are–and who we are becoming–as human beings living in a hyperconnected age. These core matters of identity and selfhood are approached through both Medium Theory and the philosophical frameworks of phenomenology and Kantian and feminist ethics. Together these perspectives foreground important correlations between media usages, selfhood, and our preferred political and social arrangements. And, as indexed by changing practices and theories of “privacy”, Western societies are shifting from individual–rational notions of selfhood, as these have correlated with the emancipatory politics of democratic processes and norms, including equality–towards more relational–affective notions of selfhood. Historically, relational–affective selves correlate with non–democratic regimes and hierarchical societies. Hence a core question emerges: how far do these shifts towards more relational–affective selves imply a loss of democratic processes and norms? I explore this question by way of recent empirical and philosophical work that suggests that individual notions of selfhood may well survive in an age of (analogue-) digital media. Nonetheless, taking Confucian models of democracy, as resting on relational notions of selfhood, as examples–the democratic norm of equality is threatened. I conclude by arguing that our media choices and thus the kinds of selves we thereby choose to cultivate will determine in large measure whether our future societies will be more democratic or non-democratic, and more egalitarian or non-egalitarian.