As usual. -.-' .. Cramming the prep for my study group (UX psychology) presentation. One chapter of this presentation is "group polarization."
Maybe because my head was full of cramming anxiety,,, while reading Byung-Chul Han's new book? I suddenly had an "ah!" moment.
Let me leave a few lines on the subway home — some of the book's content that triggered that thought, plus a few useless lol TMI thoughts..
According to the data-ists, not only the rupture of the public sphere but also the staggering volume of information and the sudden surge in the complexity of the information society render the ideal of communicative action obsolete. "Twenty-first-century society is too complex, and thanks to information technology, this complexity is made too vividly visible as it truly is. [...] The volume of information to be processed has become vast enough to exceed individuals' 'bounded rationality.' Thus, in everyday life, human-to-human communication has shrunk severely — to the point where the premises Arendt and Habermas assumed can hardly be met in reality. [...] In today's society, citizens can no longer believe that a common ground for debate exists. If such a ground existed, a debate could begin. Citizens can no longer even assume that they participate in this debate as members of the same community. The public sphere that Arendt and Habermas held up as an ideal was never realized in the first place."
(omitted)
If we look at the meta-level cause of today's crisis of communicative action, the disappearance of the other stands out. The disappearance of the other means the end of discourse. That disappearance strips communicative rationality from opinion. The expulsion of the other reinforces the self-propagandistic compulsion to inject one's own view into oneself. This self-doctrine-injection produces autistic information bubbles, and those bubbles make communicative action difficult. The greater the compulsion to self-promote, the more discursive space is replaced by echo chambers (Echokammer). Inside an echo chamber, I listen, above all, to my own words.
Discourse presupposes separating one's own views from one's own identity. Those who lack this discursive capacity cling combatively to their opinions. Because if they don't, their identity is put at risk. For this reason, attempts to detach them from their own beliefs are bound to fail. They accept no one's words and simply do not listen. But discourse is the practice of listening. The crisis of democracy is primarily a crisis of listening.
According to Eli Pariser, the personalization of networks through algorithms destroys public space. "Next-generation internet filters look at what you seem to like — what activities you've done online in the past, or what things or people you've liked — and draw various conclusions from that. Prediction machines are constantly building and refining theories about your personality and predicting what you'll do and want next. Through the cooperation of these machines, a unique information universe is created that corresponds to each of us — I call this universe a filter bubble — and the way we arrive at ideas and information is fundamentally transformed. The longer I roam inside the internet, the more my filter bubble fills with information I like and that reinforces my beliefs. I only see views that don't contradict my own view of the world. Other information is filtered out. Thus the filter bubble traps me in a perpetual 'I-loop' (Ich-Schleife)."
Eli Pariser sees network personalization as threatening democracy itself. According to Pariser, the foundation and raison d'etre of democracy are social topics lying outside an individual's immediate interests. But the personalization of the internet makes our lifeworlds and range of experience ever smaller and more constrained. Thus that personalization causes the rupture of the democratic public sphere. "Inside the filter bubble, the public space — the zone where common problems are recognized and dealt with — becomes, in a word, more trivial."
Filter-bubble theory has a decisive weakness in that it blames the shrinking range of experience in the information society solely on the algorithmic personalization of networks. Contrary to Pariser's view, the rupture of the public sphere is not a purely technical problem. The personalization of search results and newsfeeds plays only a minor role in that rupture. Self-doctrine-injection and self-promotion already occur offline.
As the atomization and narcissification of society deepen, we lose the ability to hear the voice of the other. And we lose empathy. Today everyone worships the self. Everyone performs and produces themselves. It is not the algorithmic personalization of networks but the disappearance of the other, the absence of the capacity to listen, that is the cause of the crisis facing democracy.
A discursive situation that strives for communication and understanding does not operate without premises and context. Rather, it is surrounded by a zone composed of culturally self-evident things or socially acquired practices. That zone pre-reflectively regulates communicative action.
— from The Rule of Information (Gimm-Young, by Byung-Chul Han)
In effect, the multiverse is right now.
Everyone seems to be in the same time, but in fact we find it hard to locate common ground with each other. Same school, same classroom, same company, even the same home — yet no shared common background.
And it's gradually shrinking.
They lump "MZ" together and talk about them, but in practice even that rigorously? distinguishes M from Z.
From different backgrounds,
each one, present in the same time and same space, admits to being a stranger. Through that admission we distinguish self from other, and we come to feel skepticism about our everyday relationships.
I find myself thinking: maybe each of our attitudes, individually, is pouring out and making up today's schools, companies, commute subways, Gwanghwamun Plaza — each constituting its own multiverse.
We live on the vast planet called Earth, but we live on the smartphone in our hand — which, compared to the universe, is like a quantum.
Long-distance encounters can transcend continents, from horse to car to airplane, remote, metaverse — but we share a time where it's impossible even to make eye contact with someone passing right in front of our eyes.
Just as Dragon Ball's teleportation has become possible via smartphones — the person doesn't literally move, like in a picture — and as the Avengers' multiverse, too, though in a different form, we already live at a distance that's the same as a multiverse..
