FCJ-173 Being and Media: digital ontology after the event of the end of media

Justin Clemens University of Melbourne Adam Nash RMIT University Everything is Digital Today, everything is digital and the digital is everything. Surely such a totalising, yet reductive, assertion can’t be right, even if we accepted that it had any sense? What about rocks and stones and trees? The great eighteenth-century literary critic Dr Johnson famously responded to Bishop Berkeley’s idealist, ‘immaterialist’ philosophy broached in A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding by kicking a boulder and declaring “I refute it thus!” (Boswell, 238). Such a naturalist rejoinder has found its contemporary avatars in the field of media studies under a variety of names, ranging from Bruno Latour and Actor-Network-Theory [1] to Luciano Floridi’s philosophy of information (Latour, 2007; Floridi, 2014). Despite their manifest, manifold differences, what unites such projects is their commitment to fundamentally naturalistic redescriptions of the complex interactions of trans-human agents. They are directed at displacing ‘the human’ from the […]