[D66] In the Swarm

[A.O.]

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In the Swarm 
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*Paperback* | *$13.95 Trade* | *£9.50* | 104 pp. | 4.5 x 7 in | April 
2017 | ISBN: 9780262533362
*eBook* | *$10.95 Trade* | March 2017 | ISBN: 9780262339261
*
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<https://www.altmetric.com/details.php?domain=mitpress.mit.edu&citation_id=16271818>

Digital Prospects
By Byung-Chul Han <https://mitpress.mit.edu/authors/byung-chul-han>
Translated by Erik Butler <https://mitpress.mit.edu/authors/erik-butler>


    Overview

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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