Digital communication and social media have taken over our lives. In this contrasting reflection on digital life, Byung-Chul Han
joins forces with revolutionaries by arguing that digital communication is actually responsible for the disintegration ...
Digital communication and social media have taken over our lives. In this contrasting reflection on digital life, Byung-Chul Han
joins forces with revolutionaries by arguing that digital communication is actually responsible for the disintegration of society and public space, slowly destroying any possibility for real and meaningful political action. Twitter and Facebook activities counter. Political discourse in the pre-digital and analog era was an immediate tumult when an angry letter to the editor was composed, posted, and received. Today, digital communication enables immediate and impulsive reactions that are meant to express and provoke anger on the spot. "The occasional storm represents a valid phenomenon of digital communication," Han writes.
Meanwhile, people, the senders, and receivers of these communications have become a digital group—not a mass, or a crowd, or Negri and Hart's old notion of a "crowd," but a collection of isolated individuals capable of forming "we " are not. Unable to question dominant power relations, unable to formulate the future because of an obsession with the present. The digital crowd is a fragmented entity that can focus on specific individuals to make them a subject of scandal.
Hahn, one of Europe's most widely read philosophers today, describes a society in which information trumps thought, where similar algorithms are used by Facebook, the stock market, and information services. Democracy is under threat because digital communication has made freedom and control indistinguishable. Big data has replaced big brother.
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