Amanda Lagerkvist (Uppsala universitet ja Helsingin yliopiston tutkijakollegium):
The Wildness of Human(e) Communication: Perspectives from Existential Media Studies
The world has gone wild. As we speak chaos agents are pushing it into ever-more feral and violent calamities. Autocratic leaders and their acolytes have also themselves been looting the language of brokenness, the wild and the uncertain. In pitching their products as “disruptive technology,” tech bros prophesize wildly about the AI apocalypse, and attract new investments in a technology that is posited as maker, destroyer and saviour of worlds. Despite this spiralling of the disorderly, I will in this talk suggest a reckoning with wildness (cf. Halberstam 2020) for media theory in what I call the “digital limit situation” (Lagerkvist 2020, 2022) of heightened uncertainties, hegemonic AI imaginaries and a crisis for human(e) communication. The (digital) limit situation is elusive; it is by definition without a lexicon, and it is defined by communicative breakdown. The problem, I suggest, is: How do we speak at all in the limit situation? By expanding on the German existential philosopher Karl Jaspers’ (1932/1970) philosophy of communication and his philosophical anthropology of being human in the limit situations of life (of crisis, conflict, guilt, death, love and birth) – those critical junctures when we come up against the limits of what we can say, know or control – I stress that these are moments in life that may be transformative, if we seize them. Unearthing these wild, even feral, dimensions of communication, I suggest is a move that is in tune with, and may thus help us address, the globe’s poly-crisis as a crisis of communication. This will (perhaps provocatively) require an “un-knowing” of communication which means a defamiliarization, by enacting wildness as opposed to the implied orderliness of both ‘rational discourse’ and algorithmically produced ‘exact language’. Here I will conclude by consulting Jaspers and his friend Hannah Arendt about how to rebuild a broken world through existential communication by offering a productive wildness in short, stressing that it is in fact an inherent resource in human(e) communication.
- Amanda Lagerkvist is full professor of media and communication studies, PI of the Uppsala Hub for Digital Existence, researcher at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Research on Religion and Society at Uppsala University and Core Fellow at HCAS, The University of Helsinki (2025/26). As Wallenberg Academy Fellow (2014-2018) she founded the field of existential media studies. Her work has spanned the existential dimensions of digital memories, death online and lifeworlds of biometrics. She currently explores intersections of data, disability and selfhood; and the ambivalent AI imaginary and its relationship to both futures and endings. In her monograph, Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation (OUP, 2022) she introduces Karl Jaspers’ existential philosophy of limit situations for media theory. She is currently under contract for her new book Dismedia: Technologies of the Extraordinary Selfwith The University of Michigan Press. Find out more: Uppsala Hub for Digital Existence
Kristine Ask (Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet ja Vaasan yliopisto):
“Only vibes” on TikTok? layering information for emotional expression in algorithmic media
“Only vibes” has emerged as a vernacular shorthand for online content that is organized primarily around aesthetic, rhythm, and feeling. In this type of content, narrative is toned down or absent, and mood becomes the central expressive mode. It signals a disposition of lightness and invites audiences to encounter media as an ambient, affective experiences rather than stories or facts to interpret.
Using TikTok as a point of departure, this keynote examines how algorithmic media and neo‑oral communicative practices contribute to the rise of what Fendt (2025) terms a vibocracy: a cultural formation characterized by affective resonance, performative legitimacy, and unstable epistemic frames.
In this environment, affect becomes a central mode of knowing, with atmosphere and resonance often take precedence over explanation and argument. However, rather than interpreting this affect‑forward style as signaling the end of information‑based discourse, the keynote investigates how emotionally charged media relies on informationally dense multimodal compositions where gestures, sounds, filters, editing rhythms, and memetic references are layered on top of each other into compact units of meaning. These compositions rely on tacit, distributed knowledge and shared cultural repertoires that circulate rapidly within algorithmically mediated attention economies.
Drawing attention to the sociotechnical underpinnings of the vibocracy, the keynote also examines TikTok’s algorithmic sorting mechanisms, video‑editing tools, mobile camera affordances, and memetic organizational patterns as co-producing cultural change. Together with the platform’s goal of “inspiring creativity and bringing joy”, they frame certain affective orientations as desirable, marketable, and socially legible. Together they show how emergent forms of communicating and collective meaning‑making take place in digital publics.