Digital Embodiment: Active Extension and Passive Constitution

The goal of this paper is to outline how digital technologies can be understood as existential media by analyzing how they shape embodiment. This requires examining the relationship between three terms, namely “digital,” “technology,” and “embodiment.” My intent is to show how these three terms can be understood from a phenomenological perspective, as well as to flesh out the relationship(s) between them. The paper is structured as follows: First, I discuss the digital from both a hermeneutic and an ontological perspective. Second, I explain some key concepts in postphenomenology that guidemy analysis of embodiment in relation to the digital. Then, I show how digital technologies shape one’s experience of being embodied on two levels: the first level is that of active extension: digital technologies enable one to extend into the digital sphere through the development of particular novel habits. The second level is that of passive constitution: digital technologies create digital objects of people that others can observe and interact with, and these observations and interactions feed back into embodied experience. In conclusion, I suggest that understanding embodiment in relation to the digital implies to understand the interaction between the two levels identified above.