8. Nothing in Practice: Entanglements of Sartre’s Nothingness and Social Media Practice

Annie Kurz’s chapter draws from a combination of postphenomenology and Sartrean phenomenology to analyse how social media technologies shape our subjectivity. Her focus is on how our self-understanding changes as a result of the ways we manifest ourselves online, and specifically in the profiles we (need to) make in order to become visible on social media platforms. She uses Sartre’s notion of “nothingness” to indicate that self-understanding always implies a relationship to something that one is not. Elaborating on this notion, she indicates that one particular form of not-self, namely one’s online presence, has become key in self-development due to the ubiquity of social media. To capture this dimension of social media use, she introduces the absence relation; a human-technology relation that is explanatory for how many individuals or professions rely on social media even when not directly using it. Recognizing this aspect of social media use enables us to question the extent to which many aspect of our (professional) lives should be reliant on manifesting oneself in an online environment.