Being-online-in-the-world: A response to the special issue, ‘Being Online’

Hats off to the editors and contributors of the special issue of Phenomenology & Practice, Being Online (vol. 8, no. 4). As a whole and in parts, this is a highly stimulating collection of articles on one of the single most important and challenging subjects of our times. It is also one about which the phenomenology of practice has much to say. Guest editors Norm Friesen and Stacey Irwin begin the issue with a reflection on questioning, the essence of which, as Gadamer (2000, p. 299) says, lies in opening up possibilities and keeping them open. Invoking Heidegger’s notion that “questioning builds a way” (1952, 1977, p. 3), the issue aims (and in my view succeeds), in opening different ways of thinking about the multiple ways of Being Online. This open invitation encompasses nothing less than the Internet, digitally mediated sociality and subjectivities with all the potentialities, actualities and ambiguities these phenomena imply. Proceeding from Heidegger’s wayfinding metaphor, the issue invites us to explore what Being Online means for being-in-the-world. With their attention to lived experience gained through the reflexive practice of epoche, phenomenologists are particularly well positioned for the kind of inquiry that moves beyond a functional, disembodied understanding of technology in order to situate it firmly in the lifeworld. This living world is one in which human beings cannot be taken as separate from the environments they inhabit and in which they are enveloped. Following the kind of relational ontology laid out Merleau-Ponty (2013), with its emphasis on the reversibility of energies between bodies and worlds (and by extension, tools and technologies), phenomenologists understand that existence is always already a dynamic co-existence. Bernhard Waldenfels is one such phenomenologist who proceeds from and radicalizes this position with the help of his former teacher Merleau-Ponty, as well as with Levinas and Husserl. It was wonderful to see his work, which is sadly limited in English, being highlighted by Friesen in his article, “Telepresence and Teleabsence: Phenomenology of the (In)visible Alien Online”, as well as his short yet comprehensive introduction, “Waldenfels’ Responsive Phenomenology of the Alien.”