Our digitally enforced lifeworld is an existential and ambivalent terrain. Questions concerning digital technologies are thus questions about human existence. This theoretical essay employs key concepts from existential philosophy to envision an existential media analysis that accounts for the thrownness of digital human existence. Tracing our digital thrownness to four emergent fields of inquiry, that relate to classic themes (death, time, being there, and being-in-and-with-the-world), it encircles both mundane connectivity and the extraordinary limit-situations (online) when our human vulnerability is principally felt and our security is shaken. In place of a savvy user, this article posits the "exister" as the principal subject in media studies and inhabitant of the digital ecology-a stumbling, hurting, and relational human being, who navigates within limits and among interruptions through the torrents of our digital existence, in search for meaning and existential security.

In this article, we show how the abstract city -media representations of city panoramas and the factual physical silhouette standing in for the city itself in the distance -is constituted as an emotive geography and how the production of such vistas is a political project, whose aim is to activate a future gaze. Through analysing two cities -Montreal in 1967 and contemporary Shanghai -we demonstrate how the mediatized production of urban panoramas sustains a sense of futurity through two (overlapping) forms: the conjunctional and the hyperrepresentational. We argue that together these panoramas invite an emotive future gaze which, through the combination of practical enactment, haptic movement in the city and political vision, constitutes an ideological force of modern urbanism. By introducing the conceptual framework of encapsulation/decapsulation, we propose a way of deepening the understanding of the symbolic and emotional negotiations involved in the production of spectacular city landscapes.By the end of the 1920s . . . corporate aspiration and the symbolisation of power had in popular perception been mythologised by an invocation of the city as a silhouette, the city as theatrical façade, the city viewed from across the river. Thus cosmeticised, it was this perception of urban society, ironically, that was invoked to sell every imaginable product, not the least of which was urban life itself. (Taylor, 1992: 34) Ever since the 1920s, New York City as sign and vista has, according to William R. Taylor, been commercially exploited as countless interests have cashed in on its image, ultimately in order to brand urbanism itself (Tallack, 2005). New York and its skyline became the symbolic blue print for the modern city and represented 'the future', throughout the world. Creating imaginative and persuasive views across waters of monumental structures, continues to this day to be extremely important within modernization projects and urban planning strategies, and constitutes a vital feature of urban visual cultures in need of close scholarly attention (see, e.g., Boyer, 1994). Through their power to capture the hearts and minds and, indeed, bodies, of media consumers, day dreamers, visitors and dwellers in urban spaces, media representations of city panoramas -and the factual physical silhouette turned into an abstraction, standing in for the city itself in the distance -are powerful economical and political forces in their own right. In this article, we show how such distanced sights in cities are constituted as emotive geographies (Tuan, 1993;Sartre, 2004Sartre, [1940), and how, as the city turns into a visual sign, the production of such (in our media age, increasingly global) vistas is a political project, whose aim is to activate a future gaze.Debates on 'the city of the future' or 'the future of the city' have recurred within urban theory, planning and geography for decades (Rodwin, 1960;Banham, 1976;Rowe and Koetter, 1984;Gold, 1985;Robins and Hepworth, 1988;Read et al., 2005). Our argument is ...

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In an era that celebrates instantaneity and hyper-connectivity, compulsions of networked individualism coexist with technological obsolescence, amounting to a sense of fragmentation and a heightened tension between remembering and forgetting. This article argues, however, that in our era of absolute presence, a netlore of the infinite is emerging, precisely in and through our digital memory practices. This is visible in the ubiquitous meaning-making practices of for instance personal digital archiving through the urges for self-perpetuation; it is evident at sites where the self may be saved for posterity; it is discernible in the technospiritual practices of directly speaking to the dead on digital memorials, as well as in the tendency among some users to regard the Internet itself as a manifestation of eternity, "heaven" and the sacred. This article shows that by approaching digital memory cultures existentially, and by attending to the complexities of digital time, we may gain insights into important and paradoxical aspects of our existential terrains of connectivity. This makes possible an exploration into how people navigate and create meaning in the digital memory ecology-in seeking to ground a sense of the eternal in the ephemeral.