The Antidote To Digital Disconnectivity

Community requires ritual and narrative.

 
The paradoxes of the information age make the mind swim. The more we are informed, the more we are disoriented. The more we connect, the more we are divided. The more new content there is to consume, the less we are ever satisfied. The faster the network speed, the shorter our attention span becomes.

We need a philosopher to sort it all out. Fortunately, such a thinker for our times has arrived on the scene: Byung-Chul Han, author of such penetrating meditations on digital society as “The Burnout Society” and “The Disappearance of Rituals.”

“Bits of information provide neither meaning nor orientation,” Han observes in an interview with Noema this week. “They do not congeal into a narrative. They are purely additive. From a certain point onwards, they no longer inform — they deform.”

The way information now courses through society is also corrosive.

“Digital communication redirects the flows of communication. Information is spread without forming a public sphere,” the South Korea-born German philosopher says. “It is produced in private spaces and distributed to private spaces. The web does not create a public.” On the contrary: “The informatization of reality leads to its atomization — separated spheres of what is thought to be true.” Instead of the basis for a common narrative, truth becomes a subjective projection of those isolated from each other.

He goes on: “This has highly deleterious consequences for the democratic process. Social media intensify this kind of communication without community. You cannot forge a public sphere out of influencers and followers.”

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Πηγή: noemamag.com