Animalisation, subjectivity and the Internet

Digital and virtual forms of culture are intensely choice-based. In the absence of meta-narrative, we are constantly being solicited as an agent of choice, between alternatives, to follow links. To examine this most modern of issues Fabian Schäfer turns to the mature traditions of philosophy. Distinguishing Japanese cultural critic Azuma Hiroki’s concept of human and animal action, and the influential German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s authentic and fallen selves, in terms of the notions of choice and reversibility, he poses the question of whether the subject of virtual choice is best understood in one context or the other.

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