ABSTRACT

The turn of the twenty-first century has been called “the Digital Age,” and not without reason. In (post-)industrial nations, most young adults between the ages of 18 and 22 cannot remember a time when computers, cell phones, and the Web were not common features of their cultural landscape.Today we have profoundly intimate relationships not just through these newer digital technologies, but with them as well. Because we use digital technologies both to communicate and to represent ourselves across time and across space, we express our agency through those technologies; at times, we may even experience our Facebook profiles or our smartphones as parts of ourselves.The way we interpret these subjective experiences has social and political consequences, however, and it is those consequences that we seek to interrogate in this chapter. We begin with a quick overview of the sociological understanding of subjectivity and two

of its key elements: embodiment and the social conditions of subjectification.We argue that contemporary subjects are embodied simultaneously by organic flesh and by digital prostheses, while, at the same time, contemporary society maintains a conceptual boundary between “the online” and “the offline” that artificially separates and devalues digitally mediated experiences. Because we collectively cling to the online/offline binary, the online aspects both of ourselves and of our being in the world are consequently diminished and discounted. The culturally dominant tendency to see “online” and “offline” as categories that are separate, opposed, and even zero-sum is what Nathan Jurgenson (2011, 2012a) terms digital dualism, and it leads us to erroneously identify digital technologies themselves as the primary causal agents behind what are, in fact, complex social problems. In our final section, we use so-called “cyberbullying” as an example of how digital dualist

frames fail to capture the ways that subjects experience being in our present socio-technological milieu. We argue that the impact of “cyberbullying” violence stems not from the (purported) malignant exceptionality of the online, but from the very unexceptional continuity of the subject’s experience across both online and offline interaction. At best, digital dualist frames obscure the causal mechanisms behind instances of “cyberbullying”; at worst, digital dualist frames may work to potentiate those mechanisms and magnify their harms. For these reasons, we develop the concept of augmented subjectivity as an alternative framework for interpreting our subjective experience of being in the world.The augmented subjectivity framework

is grounded in two key assumptions: (1) that the categories “online” and “offline” are coproduced, and (2) that contemporary subjects experience both “the online” and “the offline” as one single, unified reality.