A prominent German thinker argues that--contrary to "Twitter
Revolution" cheerleading--digital communication is destroying political
discourse and political action.
The shitstorm represents an authentic phenomenon of digital
communication.
--from In the Swarm
Digital communication and social media have taken over our lives. In
this contrarian reflection on digitized life, Byung-Chul Han counters
the cheerleaders for Twitter revolutions and Facebook activism by
arguing that digital communication is in fact responsible for the
disintegration of community and public space and is slowly eroding any
possibility for real political action and meaningful political
discourse. In the predigital, analog era, by the time an angry letter to
the editor had been composed, mailed, and received, the immediate
agitation had passed. Today, digital communication enables
instantaneous, impulsive reaction, meant to express and stir up outrage
on the spot. "The shitstorm," writes Han, "represents an authentic
phenomenon of digital communication."
Meanwhile, the public, the senders and receivers of these communications
have become a digital swarm--not a mass, or a crowd, or Negri and
Hardt's antiquated notion of a "multitude," but a set of isolated
individuals incapable of forming a "we," incapable of calling dominant
power relations into question, incapable of formulating a future because
of an obsession with the present. The digital swarm is a fragmented
entity that can focus on individual persons only in order to make them
an object of scandal.
Han, one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, describes
a society in which information has overrun thought, in which the same
algorithms are employed by Facebook, the stock market, and the
intelligence services. Democracy is under threat because digital
communication has made freedom and control indistinguishable. Big
Brother has been succeeded by Big Data.
