Home-Being: Creating Dwelling in the Digital Age

This thesis explores the interrelation between the experience of creation and inhabitation in the context of dwellers’ experience of home renovation with social media. Contributing to the contemporary discussion about media–life entanglement in our digitally saturated world, I draw on Heidegger’s (1951/1971b) notions of building and dwelling, and his assertion that “to build is in itself already to dwell” (p. 144) by considering it from a participatory perspective. Through a phenomenological ethnography of renovation diaries and home accounts of dwellers – who create both their palpable house as well as a place on Instagram – I explore the meanings of this entanglement between experiences of creation and inhabitation for enabling a sense of nearness and dwelling in the digital age. Thus, I consider how the modern separation between the role of the user and the producer is challenged in the experience of the dweller-creator, which brings together objectivity and subjectivity, work and home, professionalism and amateurism and experiences of creation and inhabitation into correspondence through a caring active engagement. Exploring the practice of home creation with digital media as something that goes beyond the creation of content on and for social media platforms, I suggest the concept of creation-in-theworld to consider the role of media in functioning as a gathering force that can bring people nearer to others, to the material world and to themselves. Thus, in an era that is often perceived as a deterministic drifting in an open and undifferentiated flow of digital information, this thesis posits that media, when used as part of practices of creation-in-the-world, can contribute to people’s sense of dwelling and the constitution of responsive places by enhancing the relation between experiences of creation and inhabitation. This approach holds that building and dwelling are never finished but are rather ever-evolving experiences that are inherently part of our existence, and our relatedness to the world and others in a specific place and time.