This dissertation focuses on the embodied and radically material nature of human existence in our increasingly electronic age. I use existential phenomenology to examine the ways in which the Internet has re-constituted many of our personal and social experiences, including our sexual experiences, by creating a network of sexual sociability online that indicates both public revelations of once solitary sexual pleasures and the body's participation in creating new media cultures. In doing so, I initiate a conversation between information studies, sexuality studies, technology studies, and media studies to improve on the many quantitative and cognitive modes of description of our "information seeking behavior" by emphasizing the ways in which our bodies, in addition to conscious, reflective thought, engage in the process of searching and browsing online.

These kinds of encounters with technology do not adhere easily to scientific, behaviorist, and positivist modes of description that have long dominated studies of information-seeking and human-computer interaction. I show that computer technologies and their attendant networks of communication (including televisual, audiovisual, cinematic, and photographic) are part of our lives and help constitute our embodied existence in ways that are socially pervasive and profoundly personal. They are never merely used, never merely instrumental. It is, therefore, not an extravagance to say that encounters with the objective phenomena of computer technologies transform us as embodied subjects and alter our subjectivity.