EAN: 9780262533362

IN THE SWARM - BYUNG-CHUL HAN KARTONIERT (TB)

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.

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