A Crisis of Presence: On-line Culture and Being in the World

This paper is a discussion about presence and its relationship to ethical and moral behaviour. In particular, it problematises the notion of presence within a contemporary culture in which social life is increasingly lived and experienced through networked digital communication technologies alongside the physical presence of co-present bodies. Using the work of Heidegger, Levinas, Bauman and Turkle (among others), it is suggested that the increasing use of these technologies and our increasing presence in on-line environments challenges our tendencies to ground moral and ethical behaviours in face-to-face or materially co-present contexts. Instead, the mediated presences we can achieve amplify our cultural tendency to objectify the social world and weaken our sense of moral and ethical responsibility to others. In that sense, an important disjuncture exists between the largely liminal space of on-line interactions and the ethical sensibilities of material presence which, as these two spheres become more intensely integrated, has potential consequences for the future of an ethical social world and a civil society. The examples are used of on-line suicides, trolling and cyberbullying to illustrate these ethical disjunctures.