In the Swarm: Digital Prospects (Untimely Meditations #3)

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Synopsis
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 SwarmDigital 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.
Copyright:
2017

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
104 Pages
ISBN-13:
9780262339285
Related ISBNs:
9780262533362
Publisher:
MIT Press
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Nonfiction, Computers and Internet, Communication, Philosophy, Politics and Government
Reading Age:
18 and up
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.
Translator:
Erik Butler

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