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.