Abstract

This paper contributes to discussions of authenticity and self-creation in the digital world by giving a critical ontological analysis of experience therein. Through Jean-Luc Nancy’s ontology, grounded in and critical of Martin Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein, it analyzes the ways in which the self emerges through its encounter with others in digital contexts. It brings Heideggerian and Nancian concepts pertaining to their understandings of the essential relationality of the human being alongside psychological and sociological work on online experience, showing that digital technologies do not so much radically alter the human experience as modulate already fundamental aspects of it. Ultimately, by arriving at Nancy’s ontological concept of touching, the possibility of an authentic self, arising through the use of digital technology, is critiqued as unobtainable, not because digital spaces specifically lack the ability to create authentic experience, but because all human experience finds itself between inauthenticity and authenticity. I am always only ever in the process, with others, of becoming an authentic self, a process I continue when I pick up my phone or open my computer. Thus, the “virtual,” digital world is not a replica or image of the “real,” physical one. It is itself a world in which I engage in the process of becoming myself—of reaching for an authentic self—with the other.