Religija ir kultūra ISSN 1822-4539 eISSN 1822-4571
2020, vol. 26–27, p. 8–18 DOI: https://doi.org/10.15388/Relig.2020.01
Rokas Vaičiulis
Vilniaus universiteto Filosofijos institutas
Vilnius University, Institute of Philosophy
Universiteto g. 9/1, LT-01513
r.vaiciulis@protonmail.com
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-1114-577X
Abstract. The phenomenology of sociality responds to the dilemma of other minds by presuming the primordially intersubjective and embodied nature of intentional communicative acts. I propose, then, to consider the phenomenology of digital sociality as the field of research dedicated to investigate the specificity of the nature of intersubjectivity and embodiment constituted by digital communication media. By dividing the discussed variety of descriptive phenomenological accounts regarding digitally mediated embodied relationships (including Shanyang Zhao, Lucy Osler and Dan Zahavi, Rebecca A. Hardesty and Ben Sheredos and others) into the trajectories of extension (digitally mediated communication as the eidetic variation of generally embodied communicative acts) and pluralism (epistemology as well as ontology and socially normative practices intrinsic to the specific digital communication platform) I aim to demonstrate the topical tendencies and explanatory strategies that are developed in the attempts to deliver digital communication platform-sensitive phenomenological descriptions, often with the help of Alfred Schutz’s and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concepts.
Keywords: digital sociality, embodied perception, lifeworld, Merleau-Ponty, Schutz.
Santrauka. Socialumą svarstanti fenomenologija kitų sąmonių problemą sprendžia priimdama nuostatą, jog intencionalūs komunikacijos aktai yra pirmapradiškai intersubjektyvūs ir įkūnyti. Skaitmeninį socialumą siūlau traktuoti kaip tyrimo lauką, skirtą nagrinėti specifines intersubjektyvumo ir įkūnytumo formas, įsteigtas skaitmeninės komunikacijos medijų. Deskriptyvios fenomenologijos požiūriai, analizuojantys skaitmeniškai įtarpintus įkūnytus santykius (Shanyang Zhao, Lucy Osler, Danas Zahavi, Rebecca A. Hardesty ir Benas Sheredos ir kt.), padalinami į dvi kryptis: ekstensijos kryptį (skaitmeniškai medijuota komunikacija kaip bendrų įkūnytų komunikacijos aktų eidetinė variacija) ir pliuralistinę kryptį (specifinei skaitmeninės komunikacijos platformai būdinga epistemologija bei ontologija ir socialiai normatyvinės praktikos). Tokiu būdu siekiu parodyti temines tendencijas ir aiškinamąsias strategijas, skirtas plėtoti skaitmeninės komunikacijos platformoms specifinius fenomenologinius aprašus, neretai atsispiriančius nuo Alfredo Schutzo ir Maurice’o Merleau-Ponty sąvokų.
Pagrindiniai žodžiai: skaitmeninis socialumas, įkūnytas suvokimas, gyvenamasis pasaulis, Merleau-Ponty, Schutz.
Received: 1/6/2023. Accepted: 16/6/23
Copyright © 2024 Rokas Vaičiulis. Published by Vilnius University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
As Lucy Osler and Dan Zahavi (2022) have indicated, especially in the light of the COVID-19 global pandemic surge – when the mass lockdown measures were imposed to prevent the rapid spread of the virus and socialization was on a large scale transferred to online digital media – such a reconfiguration of the shapes of social experience and culture by digital communication platforms has reinvigorated theoretical interest in the nature of digital sociality and sociality in general.
Take for example, Viktor Berger’s phenomenological study of online spaces (Berger 2020), Gesa Lindemann’s and David Schünemann’s survey on the role of presence in digital communication (Lindemann, Schünemann 2020), Lucy Osler’s considerations of empathy in online social interactions (Osler 2021) or Lucy Osler’s and Dan Zahavi’s article explicitly dedicated to the discussion of online sociality during and after COVID-19 (Osler, Zahavi 2022). Such are the indicators of the attentiveness to the problematic that I broadly refer to as digital sociality. For the phenomenology of digital sociality, then, the issue is the very nature of the experience of sociality or more specifically – the identification of the new epistemological perspectives and methodological developments within the notion of sociality in the light of increased use and reliance on digital technologies.
Suppose we follow Osler and Zahavi when they portray the recent phenomenological debates on digital technological mediation as accounts responding to the question of “whether technologically mediated sociality can or should replace non-mediated sociality” (Osler, Zahavi 2022). The study, then, would examine what are one’s commitments to particular methodological order and epistemological framework for surveying digital communication media. Therefore, in this paper I would like to delineate two theoretical tendencies that appear to be implicated among the variety of the accounts on digitally mediated communication: I title the first as the perspective of extension and the second as the perspective of plurality. By extensive perspective I designate the assumption that the forms and contents of digital communication are conceptualized as substitutes or supplements of the “originary” physical social interactions. Meanwhile the pluralist perspective proposes to treat digital communication as belonging to a form of its distinctive, non-extensive kind: not only the quality of experience but ontology or social normativity considered according to its multifunctionality or the ontological multitude.
Before heading to the two outlined perspectives, several points should be noted about the term “digital sociality”. While the general term of sociality implies an allocentric rather than an egocentric experience, a shared experiential condition that is constituted by more than one individual consciousness, the semantic meaning of the predicate “digital” is less clear, especially for the field of phenomenology. Is digital media simply synonymous with technological media? My suggestion is to specify digitality as a subcategory of technological mediation, according to two criteria: (1) its particular mode of givenness, and (2) its epistemic immanence with the everyday world.
1. The first feature of the digital technological media is the feature of technological media in general: the mode of mediated immediacy under which the experience of mediation is rendered as phenomenally transparent and cohesive – an assumption that is shared by a great majority of diverse accounts (Zhao 2015; Schultze 2010; Ferro 2022; Berger 2020; Hardesty, Sheredos 2019; Lindemann, Schünemann 2020; Osler, Zahavi 2022; Osler 2021). However, Ossi I. Ollinaho or Victor Berger, for example, underscore that each mediated mode of givenness has its own character of experience, that there is no “neutral medium” (Ollinaho 2018; Berger 2020). The digital (online, virtual, augmented, etc.) component in the act of technological mediation is therefore conceptually specific.
Proceeding this direction, then, requires us to address the technological qualities which are not prevalent in non-digital “old media” such as the telegraph, landline telephone, radio, or television. One predominant characteristic of the “new media” is the active agency provided by the design of the medium (e.g., online social networks, MMORPGs, instant messaging, video calling, virtual/augmented realities): the user must operatively interact with the medium, be active in it, externalize their intentional contents in order to achieve immediate feedback (Ollinaho 2018; Zhao 2015), unlike in radio or television. Moreover, Ulrike Schultze, Lucy Osler, or Rebecca A. Hardesty and Ben Sheredos put great emphasis on the possibility of having a mediated visual and auditory “face-to-face” relationship or an embodied social encounter through customizable avatars (Schultze 2010; Osler 2021; Hardesty, Sheredos 2019). Schultze discusses in depth the phenomenality of digital mediation by distinguishing the dimensions of immersivity (sensorial, psychological) and attentiveness (its foci, loci, and senses) and how they come to shape “virtual identities” (Schultze 2010). Osler and Zahavi sum up the entire topic of digitality as a field of platform-specific descriptions. For them, then, online social media are treated not only as vehicles for telematic exchanges between the offline contacts but also as a milieu which creates independent online social circles and its respective forms of sociality (Osler, Zahavi 2022) – the form of sociality Zhao names as the encounter of “intimate strangers” (Zhao 2015). Alternatively, Hardesty and Sheredos discuss the digitally specific forms of intimacy and cooperation achieved through the interfaces of the platforms (social media, virtual game worlds) (Hardesty, Sheredos 2019). Additionally, some accounts approach digital commingling through the lens of embodied presence (Lindemann, Schünemann 2020; Zhao 2015; Berger 2020), here treating presence as a consciousness of one’s body as socially existing and acting “distinct from a prefigured, external world” (Schultze 2010). Schultze proposes the notions of “hyperpresence” (the sense of intensified feeling of presence in digital social environment, in comparison to physical social environment) and “eternal presence” (the sense that an avatar exists in the digital world even when we are not logged in and the avatar controls are beyond our perceptual access) (Schultze 2010). There is, then, a specific mode of space-time and a specific kind of identity based on our intersubjective digital presence.
2. By epistemic immanence I refer to the common discourse within phenomenology which approaches the spheres of the “real” and virtual world as belonging to a categorial continuum, rather than a categorial hierarchy. In other words, the categorial dissolution and intermeshing of “IRL” and “URL” into one experiential plane is understood as the consequence of the transformative impact the digital technologies (online social media, augmented reality, virtual avatars, etc.) has had on the physically immediate social reality. While Ferro draws between the “analog” and “digital” environments by listing the augmented/hybrid environments as having physical operative dimensions and contrasting them with the affordances of on-screen or virtual environments (Ferro 2022), others go on claiming that for phenomenology, the lived body and the digital screen are now “merged” and that the clear separation between the physical and digital environment is no longer tenable (Lindemann, Schünemann 2020). Ollinaho or Osler proclaim that it is precisely on the basis of everyday life experience that the categories are turned immanent to each other (Ollinaho 2018; Osler 2021).
While it is possible to refute the predicate of “digital” and instead frame the issue as a general problematic of technological mediation or mediation itself, it is likewise reasonable to frame “digitality” as a sui generis thematic field of research. Our scope here is more tendential, rather than strictly conceptual concern. The methodological direction of “digital sociality” is then shifted from the purely conceptual dilemmas and instead focused on the rubric of phenomenological descriptions used to trace the descriptions of platform-sensitive modes of givenness, ontologies and norms and the corresponding forms of social exchange.
The extensionist premise is based on the assumption that digitally mediated experiences are to be treated as epistemic substitutes of / supplements to the physical setting in which the “originary” social encounter is situated. Under this precondition the most pertinent question is the question of embodiment. The epistemological issue that arises in this view concerns the very fact of our digital communication: if the digital media furnishes us with the telematic vehicles that allow one to experientially relate to the person on the other end of the line across any geographical distance and consequently permit fluent, interactive communication between the two – how should the very mode of “digitally mediated immediacy” be explained in phenomenological terms, if the mode is given in a seemingly “disembodied” state? The question shall be formulated as such: What are the conditions of possibility of digitally mediated embodiment?
Two prominent approaches exist within this problematic: (1) one is concerned with digitally mediated embodiment as a dimension of the lived body, (2) the second regards embodiment as a dimension of embodied presence. Furthermore, the lived body approach seems to rely on the terms borrowed from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodied perception, while the embodied presence approach seems to acquire its concepts from Schutz’s social phenomenology.
1. Let us start with the concept of lived body and its relation to digital media. If we are to assume that the communicative acts are constituted as lived, embodied experiences and that we are socializing with conscious subjects on the other end of the line, not “senseless” texts, sounds or images, then how should the social experiences be accounted for in phenomenological terms? If digital media on its grounds transforms the very phenomenal nature of sociality, then, we should hypothesize that the phenomenal nature of the lived body is transformed, too.
Indeed, so is the case, according to Osler, as the author proposes to revise the notion of the lived body as it is the principal constituent of social acts, i.e., empathy. Broadly speaking, empathy in the phenomenological vocabulary designates the “fundamental way in which we experience others and their experiences”, or more particularly – “the way that others’ experiences can be directly perceptually available to me through their expressive behavior” (Osler 2021; cf. Fuchs 2014; Zahavi 2001). Empathy is, therefore, the intentional relation which is not reflexively directed to the acts of consciousness the very subject experiences (egocentricity), but is instead directed to the intersubjective experiences, the modes of relating to the other individuals’ experiences (allocentricity). Empathy occurs through perceptual pairing (Paarung), the act of indication of the other person entering one’s field of perception: I, the conscious subject, recognize the other individual situated in front of me as a conscious subject, too, since I/we judge that both of us have a live body that provides every conscious subject the very possibility of originary structure (Husserl 1960: 112–113). Hence, my perception of them and their perception of me is constituted not simply as a knowledge of particular bodily or facial expressions but as the originary condition of allocentrically shared knowledge, as the mode of co-perception. For someone to be intersubjectively considered as an embodied subject, one must therefore possess a lived body and be recognized by another lived body. As Osler observes, such a dynamic which emphasizes the bodily component is usually interlinked with the fact of physical face-to-face interaction (Osler 2021).
The conceptual dilemma becomes apparent in the case of digital communication – which is principally not embedded in a shared physical space and needs not be a face-to-face contact. The crux of the problem is then discovered in the tacit presupposition that the notion of empathy is restrictive, predicated on the expressivity of the physical body. Osler here recalls the classical phenomenological distinction between the objective body (Körper) and the subjective body (Leib), where Körper refers to empirically quantifiable dimensions of the body and Leib denotes the center of intentional agency and proprioceptive and kinesthetic experience (Osler 2021; Merleau-Ponty 2012: 151). If Körper is merely the physical / objectifiable body and not the expressive / lived body, then Leib, the subjective body, Osler concedes, ought to be reinterpreted in order to explain the phenomenon of “empathy at a distance” (Osler 2021). If it is the field of expression and not the physicality of the body which constitutes sociality as such, then we have no difficulty with phenomenologically describing the contact we have with a smiling or crying person on the video call as a digitally mediated embodied relationship.
In Osler’s reading of Merleau-Ponty, for him, the technological devices precisely are the devices of embodiment, of prosthesis – an artificially “organic” extension of the field of expression. Osler reiterates Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the blind man:
The blind man’s cane has ceased to be an object for him, it is no longer perceived for itself; rather, the cane’s furthest point is transformed into a sensitive zone, it increases the scope and the radius of the act of touching and has become analogous to a gaze (Merleau-Ponty 2012: 144).
Such is Osler’s reasoning why “the lived body extends beyond skin and bone” and why online social interactions are to be considered as acts of empathy – as digitally mediated acts which belong to the same field of expression as the physical face-to-face ones do. Moreover, Osler suggests treating the field of expression as not restricted to visual perception, this way extending the argument to cases such as instant messaging.
2. Shanyang Zhao’s embodied presence approach is aimed at addressing the spatiotemporality of digital communication – what the author calls telecopresence. Telecopresence is a mode of reciprocal social interaction which is constituted not as a face-to-face but as “face-to-device” relation. The requirement for telecopresence is the reciprocal feedback warranted by electronic communication technologies, regardless of the geographical distance between the communicators: even when the subjects are “outside the range of each other’s direct perceptual experiences”, they “remain within reach of each other’s mediated senses extended by certain electronic communications, such as telephones” (Zhao 2015). A telephone or a smartphone needs not to be considered as “digital”; Zhao here has the term “intimate strangers” or “contemporary consociates” – a term much more characteristic of solely digital sociality. Together with its respective technological, experiential dimensions (media-based multilaterality, face-to-device “re-embodied” contact, extended interaction span), a new kind of sociality is established, specific to the digital milieu – an “online-only anonymous sphere”, which is ideally a community of individuals who have never met each other in person: “true telecopresent acquaintances interact with one another exclusively on the Internet” (Zhao 2015). Because is it possible to sustain recurrent interaction for an extended duration due to the archival design of the digital platforms and online database servers, anonymous individuals are capable of “producing intimate mutual knowledge” – “mutual biographical disclosures” – this way not only synchronizing their passive syntheses of implicit embodied consciousness, but also synchronizing their explicit “common subjective meaning contexts”, “merging” their biographies (ibid.): instant messaging chat threads (on platforms such as Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat or Telegram), social network forums and virtual communities (such as Reddit or Discord), social media posts and their comment sections (such as X/Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok) are examples of how common subjective meaning contexts are built.
Zhao’s internet-specific “contemporary consociates” sociality argument is set up in reference to Alfred Schutz’s division of the spheres of social reality into two different variants of social spatiotemporality: consociates and contemporaries. Schutz delineates the realm of consociates as a “we-relationship”, a “same world of directly experienced social reality” (Schutz 1967: 142): the realm of consociates is constituted through their common subjective meaning context due to a “synchronism of two streams of consciousness” (Schutz 1967: 102) that live in close corporeal proximity and share lifelong biographical concerns. Meanwhile the realm of contemporaries is a “they-relationship”, anonymous, “defined exhaustively by their functions”, a sociality constituted through objective meaning contexts – the standardized knowledge of “ideal types” (Schutz 1967: 185–187). While the “here and now” consociates imply physical “copresence” and the “then and there” contemporaries imply physical “non-copresence”, the “there and now” consociated contemporaries imply “telecopresence” – a community of time, but not a community of space (Zhao 2015).
The pluralist perspective is distinguished from the extensionist perspective as its scope rests not on the analysis of the forms of extended embodied modalities which are anchored in the same immanent reality – instead, some pluralist accounts are centered on the consideration of multiplied selfhoods the same individual can possess, the multiplicity of realities individuals can be situated in (Berger 2020; Hardesty, Sheredos 2019), while other accounts address a facet of a different kind – the multifunctionality of the digital technologies that constitute the non-substitutive modes of sociality (Osler, Zahavi 2022). In short, pluralism accepts a different ontological commitment or meta-normative framework in regards to extensionism. Following the pluralist premise, we are not just involved with describing the conditions of possibility of one or another digital media, instead we must also specify the ontological or normative modality to which the conditions of possibility apply.
My suggestion is to divide this perspective into two sorts: (1) one is directed at the diversity of the lifeworlds (or selfhoods) generated by digital communication technologies, a trajectory most relevant in the discussion of MMORPGs and virtual worlds, (2) the other stresses the diversity of uses of digital communication technologies. While the multiple lifeworld approach is greatly influenced by Alfred Schutz’s concepts, the multifunctionality approach does not seem to explicitly rely on any particular philosophical school.
1. The pluralist reading of Schutzian concepts differs from Zhao’s reading of Schutz: the difference is both in the objective of the reading and the points of highlight in Schutz’s philosophical corpus. While Zhao emphasizes how the biography of reciprocally interacting individuals can be seamlessly modulated by digital and non-digital forms of embodied presence (by reinterpreting the notions of consociates and contemporaries), Hardesty and Sheredos, alternate to Zhao, investigate how the digital social interactions are constituted and practiced by focusing not on face-to-face and face-to-device but ludic avatar-to-avatar exchanges (by reworking the Schutzian notions of paramount reality and finite provinces of meaning). Guided by the perspective of Game Studies, Hardesty and Sheredos proceed to examine under what conditions is the epistemology of multiple selfhoods tenable: if, following Johan Huizinga’s prospect of “play” and the notion of “magic circle” (cf. Huizinga 1950: 1–27), the lifeworld of the “magic circle” is constituted by its own spatiotemporality, rules and their semantic meanings and values and it subsequently leads not to the acquisition of a fictional social role among the game but rather forges of a new kind of selfhood and identity (Hardesty, Sheredos 2019; cf. Pearce, Artemesia 2011), then what is the phenomenological nature of this lifeworld?
As already hinted by Schutz’s concepts of paramount reality and finite provinces of meaning (cf. Schutz 1962: 222–233), the premise that there is more than one lifeworld, is founded on the particular regionalization and stylization of experience: despite there being the fundamental corporeal and pragmatic reality of the everyday “here and now” lifeworld (paramount reality), dream worlds, science, art, fantasy worlds, online virtual game worlds – any phenomenal reality that holds the character of an “enclosed world” and has its specific “cognitive style” (finite province of meaning) – are no less real than the “zone of primary relevance”, as long as the structure of experience is “cohesive” and “harmonious” (Berger 2020; Hardesty, Sheredos 2019). The many online video game-worlds hold “equal potential for experienced “reality””:
We endorse a multiplicity of lived social worlds: the one everyday life-world, and many virtual life-worlds […] we seek to preserve players’ experience of the distinct nature of gameworlds, rather than treating them as new annexes of the (everyday) life-world; […] we propose to pluralize the concept of the life-world to accommodate this (Hardesty, Sheredos 2019).
According to them, then, the pluralized lifeworld is at odds with the perspective of indistinguishably blurred boundaries between the “finite provinces of meaning” and the “paramount reality”, whereby the digital media merely extends and intermeshes with the non-digital reality: on the contrary, there are independent realities, and the digital reality is one of them. In Schutz’s own terms, the “enclaved” realities are rendered according to a characteristic mode of givenness, thus, for each self-referential reality to be constituted, six requirements must be fulfilled: (i) a typified immersed intentional consciousness, (ii) a suspension of doubt (epokhē) regarding the mediation of reality, (iii) a spontaneity for carrying out projects, (iv) a specific self-experience, (v) a specific form of sociality, (vi) a specific time-perspective (Schutz 1962: 230–231; cf. Berger 2020). Without getting into every detail, the key is the conceptual demonstration of how the application of Schutzian criteria for an online virtual game-world as one lifeworld among many is made available. Therefore, as long as the servers of an online video game (e.g. World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, Old School RuneScape, Ultima Online, Fornite, Roblox) or virtual world (e.g. Second Life, IMVU) are operating in order (e.g. Old School RuneScape, World of Warcraft), according to the Schutzian phenomenological criteria they can be legibly considered as one of many online digital worlds, having their own forms of subjectivity and identity (customizable avatars), their own forms of sociality (avatar-to-avatar interaction), their own environments and internal rules that persist and endure.
Here another incompatibility arises between Zhao’s and Hardesty’s and Sheredos’ accounts of digital sociality: contrary to Zhao’s contemporary consociates thesis, Hardesty and Sheredos propose to understand the sociality among the online virtual game-worlds as intra-ludic consociates while the sociality among in-game and outer-game individuals is constituted as a realm of trans-ludic contemporaries (Hardesty, Sheredos 2019). “Ludic”, a predicate relating to play and spontaneity, thus, designates whether the form of sociality is between the in-game digitally mediated avatars (“intra-ludic”) who virtually share their space-time and common projects (“consociates”) or between the digital and non-digital individuals (“trans-ludic”) who exist in the same epoch but live in different lifeworlds (“contemporaries”). Unlike Zhao, the authors draw this distinction not according to the conditions of embodied presence but according to the possibility of plural lifeworlds and cohesive intersubjective investments.
2. On a different note, Olser and Zahavi tackle multifunctionality in the context of digital communication technologies and their transformative consequences to perceptual access and forms of sociality. While their premises regarding perceptual access and forms of sociality are much closer to the extensionist perspective, as they do not discuss the multiplicity of lifeworlds or selfhoods, they are stringent to emphasize the thesis that digital sociality consists more than the exchanged information throughout the online platforms: it is not only due to the technological design of the online digital platforms, but also due to the socially implicated normative practices under which the notion of “contemporary consociates” is deduced, they claim. In other words, the “contemporary consociates” form of sociality – the individuals who are fully anonymous to each other yet are able to “merge their biographies” thanks to internet social platforms – is not only the result of the transformations of embodied perception and presence but also the result of common intersubjective normative ascriptions to the mode of use of a respective platform. “Just as there is no standard form of offline sociality there is no standard form of online sociality” (Osler, Zahavi 2022).
Therefore, the subsequent amplification / compression of the embodied field of expression by the digital communication platforms, according to Osler and Zahavi, should be examined beyond the presupposition that the function of platforms is substitutionary to face-to-face communication. This allows us to reframe the relational nature of digital technologies: instead of being related to “primary zones of reference” as “extensions” that operate as communicative “reductions” or “hyper-intensifiers”, the plurifunctional relational account is instead oriented at the description of the context of the platform-based social encounter, its style and purpose.
By rejecting the offline vs. online framework, our analysis shifts from asking whether online sociality could feasibly replace offline sociality, to asking when a particular style of sociality is more or less appropriate or fitting based on the context and the people involved (ibid.).
The term digital sociality, likewise the perspectives of extension and pluralism, are not to be considered as conclusive or doctrinal distinctions: rather, they are identifications of the overlapping descriptive tendencies between a diversity of typologies, methodological approaches, epistemological and/or ontological assumptions within the phenomenological research done on digital communication technologies. Moreover, while the examined tendencies are derived from this particular field of research, the concepts deployed to explain the respective perspectives (lived body, lifeworld, multifunctionality, etc.) are not restricted to this particular field of research, what instead our study demonstrates is how the clusters of concepts derived from Schutz and Merleau-Ponty can be reinterpreted and applied to new, non-classical regions of descriptive phenomenological research.
I propose to break down the array of different positions among this field of research into two orientations that differ in their explanatory strategies: while extensionism is primarily concerned with the epistemology of digitally mediated embodied relationships and views the phenomenology of digital sociality as immanent to everyday lifeworld (Osler, Zhao), pluralism, on the other hand, may ignore the explanatory priority of epistemology of embodiment and instead focus on the ontology of multiple lifeworlds and the forms of sociality within the digital milieu which are differentiated from the everyday lifeworld (Berger, Hardesty and Sheredos) or alternatively study the multiplicity of uses of respective digital communication media (Osler and Zahavi).
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