A new book by Byung-Chul Han (The Crisis of Narration) has come out. I'm leaving some impressive passages here as a post.
Digital platforms are positioned at the zero-point of story. They are not story media but information media. They operate not narratively but additively. The information grasped here cannot be condensed into a single story.
To the question, "How do you create or edit life events on your Facebook profile?", the answer goes: "Click on Information, then click on Important Events on the left."
Life events are treated as mere information. No long story is woven from them. They are simply listed, connected by conjunctions, without narrative context. The narrative consolidation of events does not occur. On digital platforms, "reflective narration" and the condensation of a lived life are not at all possible, nor are they demanded.
Even the technical apparatus of digital platforms does not allow time-intensive, narrative practice (Praxis). Human memory is selective. That is precisely the difference from data recording.
While digital storage operates additively and cumulatively, human memory operates narratively. A story is based on the selection and connection of events. That is, it proceeds selectively. The path of narration is narrow. Only selected events are mobilized into the story.
Stories, or remembered lives, inevitably contain gaps in between. Digital platforms, by contrast, are interested in seamless documentation of life. The less is told, the more data and information are generated.
On digital platforms, data is more valuable than stories. Narrative reflection is not demanded. If digital platforms allow a story format, the design will make stories database-compatible to generate as much data as possible. As a result, the story format too will be forced into an additive form. "Stories" are constructed as carriers of information.
This makes stories, quite literally, disappear. The technical apparatus of digital platforms is used for the documentation of the entirety of life. That is, it converts life itself, in its entirety, into data records.
Memory is a narrative practice that always connects events anew and creates webs of relations. The tsunami of information destroys narrative inwardness. De-narrativized memory is like a "junk shop," a "warehouse densely filled with all kinds of completely disorderly, poorly preserved pictures and old, worn-out symbols." The objects in this junk shop form a disordered, chaotic heap. This heap is the opposite figure of narration. Events condense into a story only when they are piled up in a particular way. In a heap of data or a heap of information, this story is missing. They become not "narrative" but "cumulative."
A story is the opposite of information in that it has a beginning and an end. A story is characterized by completeness. That is, it is a closing form. "There is a fundamental difference between the two: stories aim at conclusion, completion, ending, while information is essentially always partial, incomplete, and fragmentary."
In a world without limits there is no mystery, no magic. Limits, processes, and thresholds unfold mystery.
A story is a play of light and shadow, of the visible and the invisible, of the near and the far. Transparency abolishes this dialectical tension that underlies every story. The digital de-mystification of the world goes far beyond the scientific de-mystification that Max Weber once brought about through rationalization via science. Today's de-mystification is brought about by the informationalization of the world. Transparency is the new formula bringing about today's de-mystification. Transparency de-mystifies by dissolving the world into data and information.
The writer Paul Virilio mentions in one interview a science-fiction short story dealing with the invention of a tiny camera. According to him, this camera is so small and light that it can be carried even by a snowflake. They mix this camera in massive quantities into artificial snow and scatter it from an airplane. People only think it is snowing. But in reality the world is being covered in cameras. In that way the world becomes completely transparent. Nothing can be hidden.
