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<div class="field-item odd"> Digital Prospects </div>
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<div class="mitpressbook-contributor-Array">By <span
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<h2 class="pane-title">Overview</h2>
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<p>The shitstorm represents an authentic
phenomenon of digital communication.<br>
—from <i>In the Swarm</i><br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.</p>
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