Name: In the Swarm: Digital Prospects (Untimely Meditations)
Price: 14.06 GBP
Availability: InStock
Author: Han Byung-Chul
ISBN: 9780262533362

portada In the Swarm: Digital Prospects (Untimely Meditations)

Type

Physical Book

Author

Byung-Chul Han

Publisher

The Mit Press

Language

English

Pages

104

Format

Paperback

ISBN13

9780262533362

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In the Swarm: Digital Prospects (Untimely Meditations)

Synopsis "In the Swarm: Digital Prospects (Untimely Meditations)"

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.

Byung-Chul Han

(Author)

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Byung-Chul Han (Seúl, Corea del Sur, 1959) estudió Filosofía en la Universidad de Friburgo y Literatura alemana y Teología en la Universidad de Múnich. En 1994 se doctoró por la primera de dichas universidades con una tesis sobre Martin Heidegger. Tras su habilitación dio clases de filosofía en la universidad de Basilea, desde 2010 fue profesor de filosofía y teoría de los medios en la Escuela Superior de Diseño de Karlsruhe y desde 2012 es profesor de Filosofía y Estudios culturales en la Universidad de las Artes de Berlín. Es autor de más de una decena de títulos, la mayoría de los cuales se han traducido al castellano en Herder Editorial.

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