Restless Devices: Recovering Personhood, Presence, and Place in the Digital Age

by Felicia Wu Song

So often we are more caught up in the process of broadcasting our performance and miss out on living more deeply into the experience of an unfolding moment. When our collective consciousness becomes increasingly colonized by thoughts about how post-able our life’s moments are, we have not only conceded our data and our social interactions to the proprietary spaces of social media platforms, we have also conceded the very phenomenological experience of our passing lives. As we fall into the routines of perpetually treating our lives as a potential source of click-worthy fodder that can be laid on the altar of social media, the tragic result is that the phenomenon of self-forgetfulness is almost impossible to achieve in this age of social media. And to lose out on the experience of self-forgetfulness is to lose the very cornerstone of love and delight.