Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie 2018/1: Digitalisierung

Most of the processes subsumed under »digitalization« have in common that they permit switching and simultaneity of sender and recipient roles over a broad range of communications. Preeminently, such communications provide and process information. However, the progress of digitalization in modern lifeworlds is not primarily driven by the development of digital technology. Digital technology is but the appropriate medium for enabling the exchange of the respective formats of information. Its thrust is embedded in a cumulative history of translation of analogue world-relations into such formats of information and, moreover, the progressive transformation of reality in data-structures that can be digitally mapped and controlled. Such structures are attractive because they render our access to and handling of reality more secure and more predictable. Yet they also engender increasing helplessness and discontentment at the boundaries of the digitally controllable world.

Referring to MacOS’s »swoosh« as the signal of a successfully sent E-Mail the paper looks into the contribution of cultural values to communication with invisible machines. This contribution can be assessed within the context of Talcott Parsons’ action theory which addresses culture as one of four functional aspects of any one action (L), the other three being adaptation to physical, material, and technical environment (A), reference to the goal-attainment of both organism and personality (G), and the integration into, and differentiation from, other action (I). The swoosh signals an »infrathin«, i.e. fleeting, connection of black boxes like machine, body, consciousness, and society being interrelated orthogonally. A culture develops, which momentarily leaves open the question whether or what controls whom or what, even though the calculi of computation themselves are becoming ever more incomputable

The digitally generated worlds of the virtual are not antagonistic to the usual reality, but increasingly develop into homologous alternatives within ordinary reality. The use of technopractices such as virtual reality and communication with algorithm-based virtual entities, which are more and more turning into a (proto-)social element of our society, not only makes the contingency of our world apparent, but also allows us to observe the reflexivity of our own observation of this contingency. Hence, acting and experiencing in virtual worlds and with virtual communication partners does not necessarily imply a loss of reality, but on the contrary, it may bring us multifarious enrichments of reality. However, the cultural process of digitalization also brings in its wake a new narcissistic insult to mankind: Reflected by self-learning machines that reproduce human intelligence to an unimagined degree, we painfully learn that the human self is always merely socially formatted and can operate only within the confines, and by the standards, of habituation and socialization

This article analyzes a developmental tendency of the digital economy, namely the increasingly perspicuous personalization of marketable goods and services. Pro-files of user preferences relevant to consumption, calculated from innumerable traces left in digital space, engender unprecedented ways of addressing potential buyers anticipatorily. Such ways cater to desires of recognition on consumers; and they simulate a benevolent authority shepherding the individual

Digitalization as a transformative process of cultural change is increasingly affecting the culture of healing. In particular within the disciplinary field of psychology, options of online-psychotherapy, e.g. for persons suffering from depression, prominently attest to this trend. The putative attractiveness of internet-based forms of therapy is fueled partly by commercial interests of the health-industry, partly by an unreflected enthusiasm for technical progress. The attractiveness of internet-based therapy has a cultural background that can best be understood in terms of a second phase of postmodernity. From a psychoanalytic angle there are massive reasons justifying a skeptical attitude towards options of online-psychotherapy. The present article provides a coherent articulation of these reasons

Digital media transform social options of access with regard to producers, recipients, and literary works of art themselves. New labels for new roles such as »prosumers « and »wreaders« attest to this. The »blogger« provides another interesting new social figure of literary authorship. Here, some old desiderata of Dadaism appear to find a belated realization. On the one hand, many web 2.0 formats of authorship amplify and widen the freedom of literary productivity while at the same time subjecting such production to a periodic schedule. In comparison to the received practices of authors and recipients many digital-cultural forms of narrating engender innovative metalepses (and also their sublation). Writing in the net for internet-publics enables the deliberate dissolution of the received autobiographical pact with the reader according to which the author’s genuine name authenticates the author’s writing. On the other hand, the digital-cultural potential of dissolving the autobiographical pact stimulates scandals of debunking and unmasking and makes questions of author-identity an issue of permanent contestation. Digital-cultural conditions of communication amplify both: the hideand- seek of authorship as well as the thwarting of this game by recipients who delight in playing detective. In effect, pace Foucault’s and Barthes’ postulates of the death of the author, the personality and biography of the author once again tend to become objects of high intrinsic value

The history of the human face is the history of its social coding and the media- conditions of its appearance. The best way to explain the »selfie«-practices of today’s digital culture is to understand such practices as both participative and commercialized cultural techniques that allow their users to fashion their selves in ways they consider relevant for their identities as individuals. Whereas they may put their image of themselves front stage with their selfies, such images for being socially shared have to match determinate role-expectations, body-norms and ideals of beauty. Against this backdrop, collectively shared repertoires of images of normalized subjectivity have developed and leave their mark on the culture of digital communication. In the critical and reflexive discourses that surround the exigencies of auto-medial self-thematization we find reactions that are critical of self-representation as such, and we find strategies of de-subjectification with reflexive awareness of their media conditions. Both strands of critical reactions however remain ambivalent as reactions of protest. The final part of the present article focuses on inter-discourses, in particular discourses that construe the phenomenon of selfies thoroughly as an expression of juvenile narcissism. The author shows how this commonly accepted reading which has precedents in the history of pictorial art reproduces resentment against women and tends to stylize adolescent persons into a homogenous »generation« lost in self-love

This article develops the hypothesis that the intensified self-portraying and self-exhibition so characteristic of many of today’s social-media practices do not correlate with intensified self-reflection but, on the contrary, indicate a tendency towards self-loss. However, it would be wrong-headed to blame the social networks for distracting from real life. Rather, it is the loss of reality in the real life of contemporary life-worlds that renders social networks an enticing narcissistic way out of an existential horror vacui manifesting itself in new ways within digital culture. In diagnostic terms we can speak of a cultural change towards a posthuman narration of the self. Three vectors of this posthuman narration of the self are distinguished: From word to number, from mechanism to automatism, and from option to obligation