NOTES

PREFACE

  1.   In the subway in Hong Kong the following audio loop can be heard on the escalators: “Please hold the hand rail. Don’t keep your eyes only on the mobile phone!” The police in Lausanne alarm pedestrians with a video that warns them about the fatal consequences of texting in the middle of traffic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-FZI13o1K0.

  2.   Johann Adam Bergk, Die Kunst, Bücher zu lesen [The art of reading books] (Jena: Hempel, 1799), 86.

  3.   An example of the new philosophy of world affirmation is the vitalist, orgiastic scientific and social theory of the French sociologist Michael Maffesoli. Another is the antihermeneutical concept of presence culture put forward by the German cultural studies professor Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Both implicitly or explicitly reject the duty imposed by critical theory to improve oneself and the world. It is no surprise that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, also takes a positive view of the situation and, at the same time, praises his own enterprise as a means of further improvement: “While headlines often focus on what’s wrong, in many ways the world is getting better. Health is improving. Poverty is shrinking. Knowledge is growing. People are connecting. Technological progress in every field means your life should be dramatically better than ours today.” Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, “A Letter to Our Daughter,” December 1, 2015, http://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-letter-to-our-daughter/10153375081581634.

  4.   Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Charles Taylor and Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 72–73.

  5.   “I shall call an apparatus [dispositif] literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions or discourses of living beings.” Georgio Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?” in “What Is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Petadella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 14. The concept of the dispositif (translated in the title of the book as “apparatus”) was invented by the French philosopher Michel Foucault as the term for a network of discourses, institutions, laws, practices, and mechanisms for the regulation of phenomena (sexuality, normality, truth, power) and for the formation, administration, and control of subjects. When it comes to social networks, it makes sense to differentiate between technical and social dispositifs as they interact with the software or, alternatively, with the network’s users. The technical dispositif of Facebook includes the quantifiability of reception and interaction in the form of likes and shares, the possibility of lateral connections through links and tags, and the personalized filtering of designated “news.” The social dispositif includes the imperative to share and connect; the trend toward positive, euphemistic announcements; and the laws of attentional economy, which, for example, lead to likes being given out above all for postings that are easy to understand (visual) rather than complicated or complex (verbal).

  6.   For phenomena like Facebook or MySpace, Orkut, QQ, and Weibo, the concept “social network” has gained acceptance; occasionally, the definition is given more specificity, as “online social network” or “social network site” (SNS). It might be objected that these are actually frameworks and that the millions of users of such a platform are creating a network only in an emphatically metaphorical sense. It is in this very sense that Mark Zuckerberg talks about Facebook as “our community” instead of “our communities,” the same way citizens of a state are imagined, despite the diversity of their concrete groupings, as one community (or at least society). In the present analysis, this communal aspect of Facebook is regarded as a technical (and social) bracket for communities or networks at the micro level. Where this essay occasionally uses the term “digital media” instead of social networks, it is in order to include forms of interaction such as Google, Wikipedia, Skype, Dropbox, etc.

  7.   Georgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?” in “What Is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays, 45: “The ones who can call themselves contemporary are only those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century, and so manage to get a glimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity.” It is in this sense, and with reference to Agamben’s essay, that Koepenick employs the concept of “unconditional contemporaneity”; see Lutz Koepenick, On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 3.

  8.   William Davis, “Mark Zuckerberg and the End of Language,” Atlantic, September 11, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/silicon-valley-telepathy-wearables/404641: “The boom in affective computing and wearables … is driven by the promise of access to ‘real’ emotions and ‘real’ desires, accompanied by ways of transmitting these via non-verbal codes.” Zuckerberg’s prediction can also be found here. On “mathematicised thinking” and the cybernetic paradigm, see Dieter Mersch, Ordo ab chao—Order from Noise (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2013), 47.

  9.   Similarly: “While rational concepts seek unity, ‘reductio ad unum’ (Comte), intuition, embracing what is multiple, allows us to comprehend the diverse.” Michel Maffesoli, “Erotic Knowledge,” Secessio 1, no. 2 (Fall 2012), http://secessio.com/vol-1-no-2/erotic-knowledge.

1. STRANGER FRIENDS

  1.   Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1977).

  2.   See also Sherry Turkle, “Identität in virtueller Realität. Multi User Dungeons als Identity Workshops” [Identity in virtual reality: Multiuser dungeons as identity workshops], in Kursbuch Internet. Anschlüsse an Wirtschaft und Politik, Wissenschaft und Kultur [Kursbuch new media: Trends in economy and politics, science and culture], ed. Stefan Bollmann and Christiane Heibach (Mannheim: Bollmann, 1996), 315–31. In 2003, Jenny Sunden invented the phrase “typing oneself into being” for the construction of the subject in virtual space. Jenny Sunden, Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual Embodiment (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), 3. Theater and the masks that are associated with it offer obvious metaphors for virtual space, with the masks standing in for “our true self.” See Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959); Brenda Laurel, Computers as Theater, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Addison-Wesley Professional, 2013). For a philosophical consideration of the play of identity in Second Life, see Marya Schechtman, “The Story of My (Second) Life: Virtual Worlds and Narrative Identity,” Philosophy & Technology 25, no. 3 (2012): 329–43.

  3.   Mark Zuckerberg, speaking at the Y Combinator Startup School in Stanford, CA, on October 20, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bJi7k-y1Lo.

  4.   Danah Boyd, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 46.

  5.   “We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary,” writes Zadie Smith in her description of David Fincher’s film The Social Network. “Yet what kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn’t it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?” Zadie Smith, “Generation Why,” New York Times Book Review, November 25, 2010, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/11/25/generation-why.

  6.   Robin Dunbar, How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Zuckerberg at the Y Combinator Startup School.

  7.   Aleida Assmann, “Hier bin ich, wo bist du? Einsamkeit im Kommunikationszeitalter” [Here I am, where are you? Loneliness in the age of communication], Mittelweg 36, no. 1 (2011): 15, 22.

  8.   The reference is to Immanuel Kant’s concept of “disinterested pleasure” (interessenloses Wohlgefallen) as the criterion of aesthetic pleasure.—Trans.

  9.   That global linkage is at least part of what social networks claim for themselves is already demonstrated by the name of the first social network, sixdegrees.com, created in 1997. The name is a play on the idea that every human being in the world is connected to every other human being by a chain of acquaintances that have no more than “six degrees of separation.” On Facebook’s mission of general linking, see also Peace.Facebook.com, which contains information about Facebook friendships between groups that are traditional enemies, and the following comment by Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg: “Is it harder to shoot at someone who you’ve connected to personally? Yeah. Is it harder to hate when you’ve seen pictures of that person’s kids? We think the answer is yes.” Dan Fletcher, “How Facebook Is Redefining Privacy,” Time, May 20, 2010, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1990798,00.html. Zuckerberg offered a variation on this statement on September 26, 2015, in the context of a UN meeting: “A ‘like’ or a post won’t stop a tank or a bullet, but when people are connected, we have a chance to build a common global community with a shared understanding.” http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/tech-news-technology/mark-zuckerberg-calls-for-universal-internet-access-at-un-summit.

10.   Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Werke, Auswahl in vier Bänden [Works: Selection in four volumes], ed. Otto Braun and Johannes Bauer (Leipzig: F. Eckdart, 1913), 4. The following quotation is from the same source, 3–4.

11.   The speaker is Ulrich, referring to Diotima’s salon, in Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities, trans. Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (New York: Knopf, 1995), 186.

12.   Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (New York: Penguin, 2011), describes information filtering by the algorithms in search engines and social networks such as Facebook as “filter bubbles” and “you-loops” of autopropaganda. Ethan Zuckerman’s argument is relatively critical but focuses on the filtering that is done by users themselves. Ethan Zuckerman, Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (New York: Norton, 2013).

13.   Seventy-three percent of social network users seldom or never agree with the political postings of their friends. Lee Raine and Aaron Smith, “Social Networking Sites and Politics,” PEW Reports (March 12, 2012), http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media/Files/Reports/2012/PIP_SNS_and_politics.pdf.

14.   Heinz Buddemeier, “Was wird im CyberSpace aus den sozialen Beziehungen?” [What becomes of social relations in cyberspace?], in CyberSpace. Virtual Reality, Fortschritt und Gefahr einer innovativen Technik [Cyperspace: Virtual reality, progress, and danger of an innovative technology], ed. Horst F. Wedde (Stuttgart: Urachhaus, 1996), 51.

15.   Roger Scruton, “Hiding Behind the Screen,” New Atlantis, Summer 2010. On future relations with robots, see Sherry Turkle: Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

16.   Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2003), xii. Long before Bauman, Lasch made a similar observation: “Our society … has made deep and lasting friendships, love affairs, and marriages increasingly difficult to achieve.” Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in the Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1979), 30. Latour noted the mutually limiting and reinforcing nature of society and technology: Bruno Latour, “Technology Is Society Made Durable,” Sociological Review 38, no. 1 (1990): 103–31.

17.   Friedrich Schiller, “Die Bürgschaft” (1798), in Sämtliche Werke (Munich: Hanser, 1980), 1:352–56.

18.   Benjamin Grosser’s art project “Facebook Demetricator” does not count either friends or likes: “No longer is the focus on how many friends you have or on how much they like your status, but on who they are and what they said.” http://bengrosser.com/projects/facebook-demetricator.

19.   For “experience your life,” see Gerhard Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft. Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart [The experience society: Cultural sociology of the present] (Frankfurt: Campus, 1992), 58–59. For “narrate yourself,” see Dieter Thomä, Erzähle dich selbst. Lebensgeschichte als philosophisches Problem [Narrate yourself: Life history as a philosophical problem] (München: C. H. Beck, 1998).

20.   Jean M. Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before (New York: Free Press, 2006). The relation between depression and social networks is noted in various studies. Examples include Hui-Tzu Chou and Nicholas Edge, “ ‘They Are Happier and Having Better Lives Than I Am’: The Impact of Using Facebook on Perceptions of Others’ Lives,” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 15, no. 2 (2012): 117–21; and Ethan Kross et al., “Facebook Use Predicts Declines in Subjective Well-Being in Young Adults,” PloS ONE 8, August 14, 2013, http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0069841. On manipulated self-description as mnemotic self-betrayal, see Günter Burkart, “When Privacy Goes Public: New Media and the Transformation of the Culture of Confession,” in Modern Privacy, Shifting Boundaries, New Forms, ed. Harry Blatterer, Pauline Johnson, and Maria R. Markus, 23–38 (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2010): “It will become harder for individuals to discern what is their (and their communicating partners’) ‘real’ self and what is their ‘ideal’ image they want to present” (35). See also Sarah Knapton, “Lying on Facebook Profiles Can Implant False Memories, Experts Warn,” Telegraph, December 29, 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/11315319/Lying-on-Facebook-profiles-can-implant-false-memories-experts-warn.html.

21.   Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle (New York: Random House, 2013) gives an exaggerated portrayal of the transparency philosophy of an internet giant called Circle—a mixture of Google and Facebook. The novel (and 2017 movie adaptation) sees itself as the 1984 of the twenty-first century, tearing the mask off the utopia of total transparency and revealing its true face as the dystopia of total surveillance. For Zuckerberg’s self-congratulatory praise of the glass architecture of Facebook’s headquarters, see www.facebook.com/zuck/videos/10102367711349271. For a discussion of sharing as a “euphemism for selling and commodifying data,” see the chapter on Facebook in Christian Fuchs, ed., Social Media: A Critical Introduction (London: Sage, 2014), 153–78, esp. 172.

22.   Manfred Schneider, Transparenztraum [Transparency dream] (Berlin: Matthes und Seitz, 2013). See also Benjamin’s praise for “glass-culture,” in, among other places, Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” in Selected Writings: vol. 2, part 2: 1931–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 734. Among the protagonists of “artistic self-surveillance” is Jennifer Ringley, who from 1996 to 2003, on the website JenniCam, used the camera to make the events in her dorm room and apartment publicly accessible; also Josh Harris, who among other projects published his life with his partner in much the same way. There is a documentary film on Harris by Ondi Timoner titled We Live in Public (2009).

23.   Peter Singer, “Visible Man: Ethics in a World Without Secrets,” Harper’s, August 2011, http://harpers.org/archive/2011/08/visible-man. See also Christian Heller, Post-Privacy: Prima leben ohne Privatsphäre [Post-privacy: Living just fine without a private sphere] (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011). The argument can be found even before the World Wide Web and September 11, in Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 322.

24.   Meyrowitz: No Sense of Place, 311. In the final chapter, “Whither ‘1984,’ ” Meyrowitz concludes that radio and TV undermine the pyramid model, which has a few people observing and controlling the broad masses. The reduction of privacy has often been welcomed since then, as a defensive measure against the secrecy of bank accounts and business and income reporting, which in principle protects the rich from social control and public outrage.

25.   The new pertinence of old concepts is reflected in the work of Staples, who in 1997 still wrote, “There is no ‘Big Brother,’ we are him.” William G. Staples, The Culture of Surveillance: Discipline and Social Control in the United States (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 129. In a later book, however, he again operates with the concept of Big Brother, in the form of the state, which co-opts diverse private enterprises (“tiny brothers”) for the business of surveillance. William G. Staples, Everyday Surveillance: Vigilance and Visibility in Postmodern Life (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).

26.   Ramón Reichert, “Einführung” [Introduction], in Big Data. Analysen zum digitalen Wandel von Wissen, Macht und Ökonomie [Big Data: Analyses of the digital transformation of knowledge, power, and economy], ed. Ramón Reichert (Bielefeld: transcript, 2014), 10. Pertinent to a systematic approach to research from the perspective of critical theory are Fuchs, ed., Social Media; and David M. Berry, Critical Theory and the Digital (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). For research on specific topics, see also Martin Kuhn, Federal Dataveillance: Implications for Constitutional Privacy Protections (New York: LFB Scholarly Publications, 2007); Christian Fuchs et al., eds., Internet and Surveillance: The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media (New York: Routledge, 2012); and Oliver Leistert and Theo Röhle, eds., Generation Facebook: Über das Leben im Social Net [Generation Facebook: On life in the social net] (Bielefeld: transcript, 2011). Trebor Scholz, ed., Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory (New York: Routledge, 2013), examines the production of a new class of underpaid day workers in the form of crowdsourcers on the fringes of the political economy of the social media. Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), sheds light on the materiality of the digital, quite literally in the form of the production of the necessary minerals and their ecological fate after the end of the devices’ useful life.

27.   On binarizing mathematized communication, see Dieter Mersch, Ordo ab chao—Order from Noise (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2013), 47. It should be noted that cybernetic governmentalism is being advanced as a quasi “popular movement” since the controlling knowledge that it develops is largely provided “from below” in the form of voluntary information about individuals on social networks or as measurement of the self in the context of the Quantified Self movement. It should also be noted that the regime of measurement is, naturally, ideological: The pressure to optimize that is implied and is already betrayed in the name of the app OptimizeMe (meanwhile terminologically optimized to Optimized) aims at the production of “neo-liberal, responsibilized subjectivities” along with the justified fear that the imperative of self-responsibility is ultimately leading to the neoliberal individualization of health services. See Jennifer R. Whitson, “Gaming the Quantified Self,” Surveillance and Society 11, no. 1/2 (2013): 173; and Melanie Swan, “ ‘Health 2050,’ The Realization of Personalized Medicine Through Crowdsourcing, the Quantified Self, and the Participatory Biocitizen,” Journal of Personalized Medicine 2 (2012): 93–118.

28.   For Adorno’s verdict on amusement, see the chapter “Culture Industry, Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). The comparison with people who are sick is found in Rancière’s critique of critical theory, where, in his discussion of the psychology of social critique, he makes the point that “doctors,” in order to feel that they themselves are healthy, need “patients” and endlessly reproduce them. Jacques Rancière, “The Misadventures of Critical Thought,” in The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (Brooklyn: Verso, 2009), 47. It is not surprising that the application of critical theory to the digital media repeats the accusation of affirmation and in the process disapproves, for example, of Facebook’s “like” button as “[wanting] to spread an affirmative atmosphere.” Fuchs, ed., Social Media, 160.

29.   Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations, and Business (New York: Knopf, 2013), 3–4. Mark Zuckerberg declared in October 2010, in an interview with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, “People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that’s evolved over time. We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.” Bobbie Johnson, “Privacy No Longer a Social Norm, Says Facebook Founder,” Guardian, January 11, 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jan/11/facebook-privacy.

30.   “Needed are the formation and composition of future and alternative systems, using civil society movements, public encryption, the democratisation of cryptography, megaleaks and the education of citizens about these systems.” Berry, Critical Theory and the Digital, 147. On the hope for acts of resistance such as Quit Facebook Day (www.quitfacebookday.com), Web 2.0 Suicide Machine (www.suicidemachine.org), and the nonprofit network diaspora (https://diasporafoundation.org) as a “socialist Internet project”; see Fuchs, ed., Social Media, 173–174. The following quotes on “capitalist company” and the “advertising and economic surveillance machine” are also found there (164, 167).

31.   Anders Albrechtslund and Lynsey Dubbeld, “The Plays and Arts of Surveillance: Studying Surveillance as Entertainment,” Surveillance & Society 3, no. 2/3 (2005): 216–21; Torin Monahan, “Surveillance as Cultural Practice,” Sociological Quarterly 52 (2011): 495–508.

32.   Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (New York: Verso, 1993), 17. Gumbrecht confirms this observation about flight into the act of photographing in the present (“many tourists today do not really know how to react in the real presence of those monuments that, to see live, they have often invested serious amounts of money”) but, like Agamben, confines himself to the simple observation. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture, trans. Henry Erik Butler (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 17–18. On forms of perception at rock concerts, see http://blog.funkyozzi.com/2011/07/how-to-choose-smart-phone-at-concert.html.

33.   Cited in Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 53.

34.   The “betrayal” increases with the sheer quantity of images to which we are seduced by digital photography. “The extreme shortening of storage times coupled with simultaneous expansion to near-infinite storage capacity have not led to the past being forgotten; rather, the facility of enjoying the present is its victim. There’s no time for that anymore.” Siegfried Zielinski, [… After the Media]: News from the Slow-Fading Twentieth Century, trans. Gloria Custance (Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2013), 244. The social network for today’s “slide show” is naturally not only Facebook but also and above all Instagram, which since April 2012 has belonged to Facebook.

35.   Pfaller’s theory of delegated enjoyment, inspired by Jacques Lacan, would be more plausible if it included other chief witnesses beside the video recorder that “watches” for us the films we never get around to and the copy machine that “reads” for us the academic essay we never study. Robert Pfaller, “The Work of Art That Observes Itself,” in Interpassivity: The Aesthetics of Delegated Enjoyment, ed. Robert Pfaller (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), 49–84.

36.   For a link between the disappearing capacity for experience among modern humans and their lack of concern for privacy, see Wendy Brown, “ ‘The Subject of Privacy’: A Comment on Moira Gatens,” in Privacies: Philosophical Evaluations, ed. Beate Rössler (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 140: “If we are subjects increasingly incapable of experience in the Benjaminian and Agambenian sense, might this incapacity be a key to understand our own complicity in an order increasingly indifferent to distinctions between public and private space, and hence private and public experience?” With this brief, unfortunately not further developed comment, the problem of privacy is approached from the perspective of a historical and cultural context rather than as a question of the governmental, normative production of the subject. Agamben, in his essay, refers to Benjamin’s “Experience and Poverty.”

37.   There is no simple way, in English, to mark the difference between German’s two words for experience: Erfahrung refers to experience gathered over time, with exposure to different events and realities, and implies the acquisition of understanding; Erlebnis contains the root of the word “to live” and applies to individual experiences. The editors of Benjamin’s Selected Writings define the difference as follows: “Benjamin draws … on the distinction, developed in the essay ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’ between the ‘isolated experience’ [Erlebnis] and the traditional, cohesive, and cumulative experience [Erfahrung].” Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 198n68. In the following, Erfahrung is generally rendered as “experience” or “long-term experience” and Erlebnis as “lived experience.” In some instances, the terms are differentiated by the use of additional modifiers.—Trans.

38.   Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 183 (translation modified).

39.   Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2: 1931–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 734.

40.   What is described here is the bustling communication on social media, which adheres to a different logic than, say, exclusive sharing (for example, via WhatsApp) with a particular person, who may be expecting the message and who then naturally reacts differently to a photograph (from the faraway city, from a museum) than friends on the network.

41.   Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (New York: Penguin, 2013), 4. See also Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age (London: Pluto, 2001), 119, who notes, “The moment, or instant, is ephemeral, superficial and intense.”

42.   This perspective contradicts the positive view of “digital memory items” that José van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 48, had expressed, when she called them “networked objects, constructed in the commonality of the World Wide Web in constant interaction with other people.” Jacob Silverman offers an account that comes close to my redemptive view of sharing: “Taking photographs gives you something to do; it means that you no longer have to be idle.… Living in the moment means trying to capture and possess it.” Silverman’s presentation of the obsession with photography can be read as a radical delegation of experience: “This kind of cultural practice is no more clearly on display than during a night out with twentysomethings. The evening becomes partitioned into opportunities for photo taking: getting dressed, friends arriving, a taxi ride, arriving at the bar, running into more friends, encountering funny graffiti in the bathroom, drunk street food, the stranger vomiting on the street, the taxi home, maybe a shot of the clock before bed. A story is told here, sure, but more precisely, life is documented, its reality confirmed by being spliced into shareable data. Now everyone knows how much fun you had and offers their approval, and you can return to it to see what you forgot in that boozy haze.” Jacob Silverman, “ ‘Pics or It Didn’t Happen’—The Mantra of the Instagram Era: How Sharing Our Every Moment on Social Media Became the New Living,” Guardian, February 26, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/26/pics-or-it-didnt-happen-mantra-instagram-era-facebook-twitter. It does not require a lot of insight to look beyond the argument of narcissistic self-representation and see, in the obsession with capturing experiences photographically that is described here, a profound melancholy vis-à-vis the impending pastness of the present—a prospective nostalgia that, instead of an individual really living “in the moment” and letting it pass by lightheartedly, actually makes that individual the victim of the ineluctable transience of life—a memento mori that exceeds the nostalgia Sontag ascribes to photography, since it does not refer to “another person’s (or thing’s) mortality” but to that of the photographer herself. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 1973), 11.

43.   That Facebook actualizes and radicalizes this aspect is at the heart of the present argument, which is indirectly supported by the mashup in a scene from the TV series Mad Men, in which Don Draper’s proposal for the Kodak carousel is transformed into a Facebook timeline (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Th20mR8UI). Facebook’s photo app Moments, which is advertised with the slogan “Get the photos you didn’t take,” is a kind of retrieval of moments in advance of the camera, at least of one’s own camera, because it uses facial recognition and automatic assignment of names to make it possible to collect the photos others have taken of you. What from the perspective described here could be understood as a recovery of the experienced moment is, in the eyes of the data protectors (who protested against this app in the summer of 2015 in Europe), naturally only one more step in the all-encompassing loss of privacy.

44.   To an extent, the perspective presented here refers back to Christopher Lasch’s view, according to which the culture of narcissism of the 1970s and 1980s is not an expression of egoism and selfishness but “a culture of survivalism.” “Narcissism signifies a loss of selfhood, not self-assertion. It refers to a self threatened with disintegration and by a sense of inner emptiness. Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York: Norton, 1984), 57. However, the justification for inner emptiness is now found not in the “doomsday mentality” (93) of the Cold War period and ecological apocalypse but in the lack of prospects and meaning accorded to the individual’s own existence. What must be survived—or, as Lasch says, “coped with” —is less the threat to life (which, in actuality, has not been ecologically or politically diminished) than its banality. On the betrayal of the present in the interest of the future, compare Zielinski: “Yet to already be the subject of a past event in the instant that something happens is tantamount to abolishing the present. The present becomes merely an extremely short effect for the future.” Zielinski, [… After the Media], 244.

45.   On the evidence of a lack of need for solitude, see William Deresiewicz, “The End of Solitude,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2009, http://chronicle.com/article/The-End-of-Solitude/3708. On the joys of solitude, compare Turkle, Alone Together, 27. On social networks as a “distraction from the torture of now-time,” see Geert Lovink, Ippolita, and Ned Rossiter, “The Digital Given: 10 Web 2.0 Theses,” Fibreculture Journal 14 (2009), http://fourteen.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-096-the-digital-given-10-web-2–0-theses.

46.   Max Picard, The World of Silence, trans. Stanley Godman (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952). For the warning about “Radioitis,” see Friedrich Pütz, “Die richtige Diät des Hörers” [The proper diet for the listener] (1927), in Medientheorie. 1888–1933. Texte und Kommentare [Media theory, 1888–1933: Texts and commentaries], ed. Albert Kümmel and Petra Löffler (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002), 275. On September 27, 2015, in a speech to bishops in Pennsylvania, Pope Francis complained that social media inhibit the creation of real relationships and make people lonely. “Social bonds are a mere means for satisfaction of my needs.… I would dare say that at the root of so many contemporary situations is a kind of radical loneliness that so many people live in today. Running after the latest fad, a like, accumulating followers on any of the social networks. And we human beings get caught up in what contemporary society has to offer: loneliness with fear of commitment.” http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-09/28/pope-francis-social-media-causes-loneliness. The Wired release also contains the video clip with the English translation that is given here. Francis’s predecessor, Pope Benedict, in his message to the Forty-Sixth World Communication Day, May 20, 2012, “Silence and Word: Path of Evangelization,” had already problematized the internet as a danger for “that silence which becomes contemplation, which introduces us into God’s silence.” http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/messages/communications/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20120124_46th-world-communications-day.html.

47.   Blaise Pascal, Pensées no. 139, in Opuscules et pensées (Paris: Hachette, 1897).

48.   Gilles Deleuze, “Mediators,” in Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 129.

49.   Picard, The World of Silence, 221. Long before the neologism “produser” (from producer and user), Michael Joyce came up with the concept of the “wreader,” from reader and writer, which was symptomatic of the then popular celebration of the liberation of the reader from domination by the author, which was criticized at the time but has meanwhile turned out to be the incapacity to engage in concentrated reading or listening. Michael Joyce, “Nonce Upon Some Times: Rereading Hypertext Fiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 43, no. 3 (1997): 579–97.

50.   Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “Flight to Arras,” in Airman’s Odyssey, trans. Lewis Galantière (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942), 346–47.

51.   Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, “Versuch einer Theorie des geselligen Betragens” [Attempt at a theory of social behavior], in Monologen: Eine Neujahrsgabe [Monologues: A New Year’s gift] (Berlin: Holzinger, 2016).

52.   Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, trans. Martin Greenberg (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992, 1998), part 1, verses 1718–20.

53.   Goethe, Faust, part 2, verse 4936.

54.   Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, The Education of the Human Race (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1858). Immanuel Kant conceived the Enlightenment project in his 1784 essay “Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment” as “man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage.” In this connection, he speaks in the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (1797) of a “duty of man toward himself.” Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ ” trans. H. B. Nisbet (London: Penguin, 2013); Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

55.   Ludwig Tieck, William Lovell, trans. Douglas Robertson (2009), part 4, book 6, no. 11, William to Rosa (29).

56.   Bloch, in this sense, sees in Goethe’s Faust “the highest example of utopian man.” Ernest Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 1012. The reference is thanks to Bruno Hillebrand’s study Ästhetik des Augenblicks. Der Dichter als Überwinder der Zeit—von Goethe bis heute [Aesthetic of the moment: The poet as victor over time—from Goethe to the present] (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999).

57.   On the fateful triumph of homo faber, who transforms mankind into “the compulsive executor of his capacity,” see Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age, trans. Hans Jonas and David Herr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 142. Similarly, Nancy refers to the changed nature of man’s desire for conquest as “no longer the domination by the ‘bourgeois’ but by the machine they had served” and calls for exiting from a teleology that has “its own ends, indifferent to the existence of the world and of all its beings.” Jean-Luc Nancy, After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 7, 12.

58.   On the end of grand narratives (grands récits), see Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). On the end of history (which by no means signifies the end of historical events or social problems) in the mode of liberal democracy, which reveals and surmounts all cultural differences as phenomena derived from different phases of historical development, see Francis Fukuyama: The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon, 1993).

59.   Zygmunt Bauman, “From Pilgrim to Tourist—or a Short History of Identity,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), 24. On the analogy of the raftsmen and the sailors, see Bauman, Liquid Life (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2005), 20.

60.   Zygmunt Bauman, “Privacy, Secrecy, Intimacy, Human Bonds, Utopia—and Other Collateral Casualties of Liquid Modernity,” in Modern Privacy: Shifting Boundaries, New Forms, ed. Harry Blatterer, Pauline Johnson, and Maria R. Markus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 19–20.

61.   Nathan Jurgenson, “The Facebook Eye,” Atlantic, January 12, 2012, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/the-facebook-eye/251377.

62.   Bauman comments: “Unlike the utopias of yore, the hunters’ utopia does not offer a meaning to life—whether genuine or fraudulent. It only helps to chase the question of life’s meaning away from the mind of living. Having reshaped the course of life into an unending series of self-focused pursuits and with each episode lived through as an overture to the next, it offers no occasion for reflection about the direction and the sense of it at all.” Also of note is Bauman’s comment on “the end of time as history” and the ironically presumed utopian status of the hunter society: “Strange, unorthodox utopia it is—but utopia all the same, as it promises the same unattainable prize all utopias brandished, namely the ultimate and radical solution to human problems past, present and future, and the ultimate and radical cure for the sorrows and pains of the human condition.” Baumann, “Privacy,” 22, 21.

63.   Tiqqun, Theory of Bloom, trans. Robert Hurley (London: LBC, 2012), 44, 63.

64.   Tiqqun, Theory of Bloom, 16, 19, 59, 21, 79, 65.

65.   Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Polity, 2009), 104.

66.   Tiqqun, Theory of Bloom, 105.

67.   Jean-Luc Nancy, Die herausgeforderte Gemeinschaft [The challenged community], trans. (German) Esther von der Osten (Berlin: Diaphanes, 2007), 28. The essay appeared as the foreword to the Italian edition of Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community.—Trans.

68.   Zielinski, [… After the Media], 249.

69.   Alexander Pschera, 800 Millionen. Eine Apologie der sozialen Medien [800 million: An apologia for social media] (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2011), 43, 62, 45. “The network, as ‘social,’ provides a speakable universal language and offers the human community new possibilities for understanding and rapprochement regarding the utopian project toward whose realization we, as social beings, are continuously striving” (24). Lovink, taking the opposing view, speaks of a “culture of ‘detached engagement’ ” that lacks socially and politically relevant goals and concepts. Geert Lovink, Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012), 2. His accusation of time wasting—“the networks without cause are time eaters, and we’re only being sucked deeper into the social cave without knowing what to look for”—elicits a cryptic but definitive response from Pschera, who writes (without mentioning Lovink), “those who accuse the social media of ornamentalizing are only making a taboo of their potential to tunnel under things” (61). The following quotations are from pages 65 and 66.

70.   On phatic communication on social networks, see Miller: “Communication has been subordinated to the role of the simple maintenance of ever expanding networks and the notion of a connected presence.” Vincent Miller, “New Media, Networking, and Phatic Culture,” Convergence 14 (2008): 398. The notion of a communication utopia without actual things that are communicated also links to Agamben, who characterizes children’s experience of linguistic capacity as “experience of language as such, in its pure auto-reference,” as experience “of the pure fact that one speaks, that language exists.” Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (New York: Verso, 1993), 6.

71.   As an example, see part V, “There is much metaphysics in thinking of nothing,” in Caeiro’s poetry collection O Guardador de Rebanhos. Eduardo Caeiro and Fernando Pessoa, The Keeper of Sheep, trans. Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown (Bronx, NY: Sheep Meadow, 1997).

72.   Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 79, 117. The critique of meaning culture occurs both previous and parallel to Gumbrecht’s intervention on various other discursive fronts. In this connection, the following texts are also of interest: Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966); Jochen Hörisch, Wut des Verstehens: Zur Kritik der Hermeneutik [The rage of understanding: Toward a critique of hermeneutics] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988); Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993); Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetic, trans. Saskya Iris Jain (New York: Routledge, 2004). I discuss the connections and difference of these positions in my study Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), from which some of the ideas presented here are derived.

73.   Gumbrecht, Production of Presence, 145, 138. For a further illustration of Gumbrecht’s fatalistic view of history, which dismisses “historical thinking” and presents time as an “agent of change” and the future as an “open horizon of possibilities,” see Gumbrecht, Our Broad Present, 14.

74.   Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2006), 25.

75.   Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 186. What is at stake here is not experience as an epistemological problem in the sense of Immanuel Kant, or the further transformation of his categories of cognition into factors based on social schemata, but differing levels of intensity in perception of the world. For the present discussion of experience, this perspective is determinative, with a central role assigned to media-specific dispositions (the significance of the newspaper as addressed by Gumbrecht, the function of photography as addressed by Agamben, and various discussions of hyper-reading in the internet).

76.   Gumbrecht, In 1926, 187.

77.   Gumbrecht, In 1926, 188. The Egon Erwin Kisch quotation is taken from his Hetzjagd durch die Zeit [Feverish hunt through time] (Berlin: Universum Bücherei, 1926). Kisch’s collection of reportage Der rasende Reporter [The raging reporter] appeared in 1925.

78.   See Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). The term “cool,” here, is used in a way that implies coldness and not mere stylistic sophistication.—Trans.

79.   Kurt Pinthus, “Masculine Literature” (1929), in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 519.

80.   Ernst Jünger on photography, cited by Lethen, Cool Conduct, 148.

81.   Bertolt Brecht, Bertolt Brecht on Film and Radio, ed. and trans. Marc Silberman (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 144; Jean Baudrillard, Photographies 1985–1998 [exhibition catalog], ed. Peter Weibel, trans. Susanne Baumann et al. (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1999), 24–25, 28. The understanding of photography as a cold medium, as presented here, differs from Marshall McLuhan’s distinction between cold and hot media based on their sensual quality and wealth of detail, according to which photography is a hot medium because (unlike “cold” caricature) it is rich in optical detail. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 22–23.

82.   Baudrillard, Photographies 1985–1998, 24, 22.

83.   Béla Balász, Early Film Theory: Visible Man and the Spirit of Film, trans. Rodney Livingstone (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 157.

84.   Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 315–16.

85.   Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 801. Shortly after this remark, Benjamin defines leisure as “an early form of distraction or amusement” (804, m4, 1).

86.   Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” 734.

87.   Benjamin, “Experience,” 3.

88.   Benjamin, Arcades Project, 473 (N9a, 1) (translation modified).

89.   Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 390 (translation modified). The dialectical image is “an image that emerges suddenly, in a flash,” and shows the past not the way it supposedly “actually was” but in its hidden constellation and relation to the present. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 473 (N9, 7). On Benjamin’s critique of historicism’s purportedly “objective” history writing, which in Benjamin’s eyes basically conformed to the perspective of the ruling class as “the strongest narcotic of the century” (463; N3, 4), see his “Fragmente zur Sprachphilosophie und Erkenntniskritik” [Fragments on language philosophy and epistemology], in Kairos. Schriften zur Philosophie, ed. Ralf Konersmann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2007), 75.

90.   Ralf Konersmann, “Nachwort. Walter Benjamins philosophische Kairologie” [Afterword: Walter Benjamin’s philosophical kairology], in Kairos. Schriften zur Philosophie, 334. The trick in Benjamin’s argument is the implication of a kind of “depth” photography that puts the optical unconscious to historico-philosophical use, as details that were drowned in the flow of events, but that the photograph, by bringing time to a halt and magnifying the event, makes conscious again. In this sense, Benjamin can also speak of an “intentionless truth” (of the object itself). This fundamentally metaphysical impulse makes it possible to escape “spiritless” life by means of a new “grand” plan. It simultaneously runs the risk of replacing the old certainties by new, politically justified ones. On the critique of the metaphysical presuppositions of thought in Benjamin, see Karl Heinz Bohrer, Der Abschied: Theorie der Trauer: Baudelaire, Goethe, Nietzsche, Benjamin [The parting: Theory of mourning: Baudelaire, Goethe, Nietzsche, Benjamin] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996).

91.   Tiqqun, Theory of Bloom, 37, 38.

92.   Siegfried Kracauer, The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, trans. Quintin Hoar (London: Verso, 1998), 88.

93.   Benjamin, “Central Park,” 183.

94.   Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” 734.

95.   There have been repeated calls for deceleration from academics. See, for example, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age (London: Pluto, 2001), which ends with a chapter on “The Pleasures of Slow Time”; Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering, trans. Daniel Steuer (New York: Polity, 2017); Hartmut Rosa, Acceleration and Alienation: Toward a Critical Theory of Late Modern Temporality (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2010); and Lutz Koepnick, On Slowness: Toward an Aesthetic of the Contemporary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Popular science books on the subject include Karlheinz Geissler’s Lob der Pause. Von der Vielfalt der Zeiten und der Poesie des Augenblicks [Praise of pauses. On the diversity of times and the poetry of the moment] (Munich: Oekom, 2012); Eduard Kaiser, Trost der Langeweile: Die Entdeckung menschlicher Lebensformen in digitalen Welten [The consolation of boredom: The discovery of human life forms in digital worlds] (Rüegger, 2014); and Pico Iyer, The Art of Stillness—Adventures in Going Nowhere (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). There are films, for example, Florian Opitz’s Speed—Auf der Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit [Speed—In search of lost time] (2012), along with various other variations on the concept of slowness: slow TV, which, in the tradition of Andy Warhol’s Sleep, presents banal everyday events in unabbreviated form (the 134-hour journey of a ship from Bergen, Norway, to Kirkenes, in June 2011, which was shown in its entirety on Norwegian television); slow publishing (the British magazine Delayed Gratification, which reports on events that occurred at least three months earlier); or slow food. An example of a voluntary attempt to resist the lure of social media was the only partly successful attempt of a group of fifteen-year-olds in London, early in 2015, to stay off of social media for a week. As the group’s report details, some of them eventually got around to reading books, while others didn’t know what to do with the time that had been freed up: http://www.bbc.co.uk/schoolreport/31942696.

2. AUTOMATIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  1.   Arguments like these actually get published. Kucklick notes that in the United States every day more than 16 billion words are published on Facebook alone, something completely unprecedented in history, since until the end of the twentieth century few people wrote for private reasons. Christoph Kucklick, Die granulare Gesellschaft: Wie das Digitale unsere Wirklichkeit auflöst [Granular Society: How the digital dissolves our reality] (Berlin: Ullstein, 2014), 229–30. His overhasty conclusion: “If it is correct that writing serves self-knowledge, then we are experiencing an intensification of sensibilities in regard to ourselves” (231).

  2.   Nancy K. Miller, “The Entangled Self: Genre Bondage in the Age of the Memoir,” PMLA 122, no. 2 (2007): 545.

  3.   Shanyang Zhao, Sherry Grassmuck, and Jason Martin, “Identity Construction on Facebook: Digital Empowerment in Anchored Relationships,” Computers in Human Behavior 24, no. 5 (2008): 1816–36. As van Dijck remarks, “ ‘liking’ has turned into a provoked automated gesture that yields precious information about people’s desires and predilections.” José van Dijck, “ ‘You Have One Identity’: Performing the Self on Facebook and LinkedIn,” Media, Culture & Society 35, no. 2 (2013): 202.

  4.   In Germany many sites restrict the automatism of so-called social plug-ins via the double-click principle, which requires a first click to activate the link to Facebook, by which users consciously confirm the data transfer. However, even the double-click solution often allows the link to be permanently activated, whereas on non-German or non-European websites the link to Facebook is usually established without users’ knowledge.

  5.   Samuel Gibbs, “Facebook Tracks All Visitors, Breaching EU Law,” Guardian, March 31, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/mar/31/facebook-tracks-all-visitors-breaching-eu-law-report.

  6.   Hayden White, The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 6, 11, 8.

  7.   Adam Weishaupt presented his Geschichte der Vervollkommnung des menschlichen Geschlechts [History of the perfection of the human race], commencing in 1788, as a “history without years and names.” Cited by Reinhart Koselleck and Horst Günther, “Geschichte” [History], in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland [Basic historical concepts: Historical lexicon of political and social language in Germany], ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1975), 2:651. The “law of historical conservation of energy” was formulated by Johann Gottfried Herder in 1774: “As, now, since the creation of our earth no ray of sunlight has been lost on her, so also no fallen leaf of a tree, no wind-blown seed of a plant, no corpse of a rotting animal, much less an action of a living being, has remained without effect.” Herders Sämtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1877–1913), 14:236. Kant prominently issued the call for a historian who would discover a deeper “natural purpose in this idiotic course of things human” as the a priori of a philosophical chiliasmus. Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in On History, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 12.

  8.   Wilhelm von Humboldt, “On the Historian’s Task [1821],” History and Theory 6, no. 1 (1967): 58.

  9.   Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 18.

10.   Cited according to Koselleck and Günther, “Geschichte,” 663.

11.   Charles S. Peirce, Phänomen und Logik der Zeichen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), 65. The indexicality of photographs already does not apply to early art photography or to the politically or aesthetically motivated retouching of analog images. It has become thoroughly dubious given the possibilities for manipulation offered by digital photography. However, the indexical paradigm is quite suitable as a descriptive category for the normal case of private photos and as a metaphor for the discussion of “photographic writing” that we intend here. The critique of “daguerrotypical” realism as idolatry derives from the literary scholar Robert E. Prutz, 1856, in Deutsches Museum. Zeitschrift für Literatur, Kunst und öffentliches Leben [German museum: Journal for literature, art, and public life], cited by Ulf Eisele, “Empiristischer Realismus. Die epistemologische Problematik einer literarischen Konzeption” [Empiristical realism: The epistemological problematic of a literary conception], in Naturalismus, Fin de siècle, Expressionismus. 1890–1918 [Naturalism, fin de siècle, Expressionism: 1890–1918], ed. York-Gothart Mix (Munich: Hanser, 1996), 78, 76. This critique would be more applicable to naturalism (and even then only with regard to theoretical propositions) if the latter, under the impression of the then dominant theory of social determinism, were to replace the productive imagination of an author with an objective description (i.e., a kind of “nonmechanical” mechanical reproduction). See Wilhelm Bölsche, Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Poesie. Prolegomena einer realistischen Ästhetik [The natural-scientific foundations of poetry: Prolegomena to a realistic aesthetics] (Leipzig: Karl Reissner, 1887).

12.   Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 425. The following sentence reads: “Since what is significant is not reducible to either merely spatial or merely temporal terms, memory-images are at odds with photographic representation. From the latter’s perspective, memory-images appear to be fragments but only because photography does not encompass the meaning to which they refer and in relation to which they cease to be fragments. Similarly, from the perspective of memory, photography appears as a jumble that consists partly of garbage.”

13.   Baudrillard, Photographies 1985–1998 [exhibition catalog], ed. Peter Weibel, trans. Susanne Baumann et al. (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1999), 24–25.

14.   “The last image of a person is that person’s actual history.” Kracauer, “Photography,” 426. Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 3. Narration is understood here, in general terms, as the difference between an initial and an end state, with an at least chronological, if not causal order of events between the two poles. The description usually starts from the endpoint of the narrative (closed narration), unless the temporal position of the narrative is itself the endpoint (open narrative). As argued in this chapter, the narrower, verbal understanding of narrative dominates, in order to emphasize the contrast with a visual (and in principle less conscious) representation of reality.

15.   Jerome S. Bruner, “Past and Present as Narrative Constructions,” in Narration, Identity, and Historical Consciousness, ed. Jürgen Straub (New York: Berghahn, 2005), 26. Polkinghorne defines the function of narrative as follows: “Narrative is the cognitive process that gives meaning to temporal events by identifying them as parts of a plot.” Donald E. Polkinghorne, “Narrative and Self-Concept,” Journal of Narrative and Life History 1, no. 2/3 (1991): 136. See also Eakin: “When it comes to our identities, narrative is not merely about self, but is rather in some profound way a constituent part of self.” Paul John Eakin, Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 2. On autobiography not as reconstruction, but as construction of the self, see also Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” MLN 94, no. 5 (December 1979): 919–30.

16.   Hartmut Rosa, Weltbeziehungen im Zeitalter der Beschleunigung: Umrisse einer neuen Gesellschaftskritik [Relations to the world in the era of acceleration: Outlines of a new social critique] (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012), 225.

17.   Janis Forman, Storytelling in Business: The Authentic and Fluent Organization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 2013); Frederick W. Mayer, Narrative Politics: Stories and Collective Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Barbara Czarniawska, Narratives in Social Science Research (London: Sage, 2004); Bernd Kracke and Marc Ries, eds., Expanded Narration. Das Neue Erzählen [Expanded narration: The new story-telling] (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013); Hanna Meretoja, The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

18.   Lilie Chouliaraki, The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Posthumanitarianism (Malden, MA: Polity, 2013), 164. See 167 on the “increasing dispersion of the narrative structure of the news towards testimonial and participatory performances of witnessing” and the “logic of the news as a ‘database.’”

19.   In this context we should mention StoryCorps, a project founded in 2003 to encourage storytelling. In the tradition of oral history, it makes it possible for all kinds of people, one on one, to have a forty-minute-long conversation in a specially created StoryBooth installed in a public place. The conversations are recorded, given to the participants in the form of a CD, and (with their agreement) archived in the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress, where they are open to the public. Dave Isay, its founder, in a March 2015 TED talk entitled “Everyone Around You Has a Story the World Needs to Hear” (http://www.ted.com/talks/dave_isay_everyone_around_you_has_a_story_the_world_needs_to_hear), gave an impressive report on the meaning these conversations have for the self-understanding of the speakers. In his TED talk, Isay also promoted the StoryCorps app, which allows people to record conversations independently of the StoryBooths and StoryCorps staff; he hopes it will lead to 100,000 or more conversations per year. The result can be found on the StoryCorps website, which in May 2015 included approximately 57,000 interviews since 2003. In July 2017, “more than 65,000 interviews” were reported, which suggests an annual average of fewer than 5,000 interviews. The proposal to use a “national homework assignment” to encourage high-school students to engage in conversations with their grandparents or other important people in their lives could raise the number significantly. The question, admittedly, is whether StoryCorps is able to prompt such homework assignments and is able to succeed without them.

20.   Reichert notes: “To be entered into the format of the e-questionnaire, linear and narrative knowledge must be broken down into blocks of information. These rules, which are inherent in the form, establish the authority of the e-questionnaire.” The “authority” of forms as “hierarchical frames for relationality” lies between the questionnaire and the user as source of information. Ramón Reichert, Die Macht der Vielen. Über den neuen Kult der digitalen Vernetzung [The power of the many: On the new cult of digital networking] (Bielefeld: transcript, 2013), 60, 61. That the framework provided must be more politically correct than individual statements is shown by the #FatIsNotaFeeling petition that was launched in early 2015 against the emoticon “feeling fat,” which Facebook had offered as a status update. Facebook designers are not allowed to make something available just because Facebook users might want to write it. Since Facebook wishes to maintain the listing, which harmonizes nicely with the database, and since formulating an expression of emotion was not itself the bone of contention, “feeling ‘fat’ ” was replaced in March 2015, in response to the initiative of the Endangered Bodies Organization, by “feeling stuffed.”

21.   Page exemplifies the narrative sequences of “small stories” with the help of three status updates by a Facebook user named Cheryl: “Cheryl is a cake lover!” (May 20, 7:29 p.m.), “Cheryl is giving up the cake … as of tomorrow!!” (May 21, 9:21 p.m.), “Cheryl did not eat any cake today … result!!” (May 22, 6:10 p.m.). Ruth Page, “Reexamining Narrativity: Small Stories in Status Updates,” Text and Talk 30, no. 4 (2010): 433; 437 on the completion of plot lines by “friends. See also Reichert, Die Macht der Vielen: “The personal information, status updates and comments are … largely enumerative. They cite data, accumulate found information and only seldom offer coherent narratives” (61).

22.   Status updates like “Francis is in Starbucks” or “Joanna is at home” (Page, “Reexamining Narrativity,” 432–33) recall the uncommented listing of events that we saw in the Annals—“listings that are not themselves the event but only remind us of the latter: there, the passing of time; here, the existence of the reporter.” Page’s own findings that “recency is prized over retrospection” and that “these sequences are ‘mere successions of doings,’ rather than exhibiting the tightly knit, interdependent connections required of narrative sequences in its strictest sense” (440, 439) undermine her proposal to read the individual status updates, in light of Ricœur, as an “attempt to ‘make time human’ by selecting particular events as worthy of narration” (428). On “pointillist technique” instead of “linear connections between individual entries,” see 440; on “pointillist time,” see Zygmunt Bauman, “Privacy, Secrecy, Intimacy, Human Bonds, Utopia—and Other Collateral Casualties of Liquid Modernity,” in Modern Privacy: Shifting Boundaries, New Forms, ed. Harry Blatterer, Pauline Johnson, and Maria R. Markus (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 21. Facebook users, in Ricœur’s terms, do not approach the second level of mimesis—narrative configuration under the sign of “emplotment”—but remain, if at all, at the level of prefiguration, as a reporting and value-ascribing preconception of what may be taking place.

23.   These categories include, among others, “Connections” (links to pages that the person “liked”), “Events” (activities to which she or he was invited), “Wallposts” (postings by other people on the person’s bulletin board), “Shares” (all links posted on the bulletin board), “Pokes” (all nudges that have been sent or received), and “Friend Request” (invitations to “befriend” a person, with date and a note if it was refused). For details, see the website Europe Versus Facebook: http://europe-v-facebook.org/DE/Datenbestand/datenbestand.html.

24.   The welcome side effect, if indeed it is not the actual purpose, of algorithmic storytelling aids is disciplining Facebook’s users to be precise in describing their images, since only images with “proper” tags (“Eiffel Tower,” not “Iron Phallus”; “Hans Martin” rather than “a good friend”) can be accounted for by the service. The storyteller is the “filler” at the front end of the interface, who is present in order to provide more reliable data to the back end.

25.   William Davis, “Mark Zuckerberg and the End of Language,” Atlantic, September 11, 2015, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/09/silicon-valley-telepathy-wearables/404641. Compare the report by Stuart Dredge, “Facebook Boss Mark Zuckerberg Thinks Telepathy Tech Is on Its Way,” Guardian, July 1, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/01/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-telepathy-tech. On the future of Oculus Rift, see Zuckerberg’s Facebook page of March 25, 2014: http://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10101319050523971.

26.   The central motif behind the concept of unconscious sharing is without doubt the notion that it simultaneously produces important information for personalized marketing campaigns and “predictive shopping.” It is also true that Zuckerberg is also thinking of other domains when, in response to a question about Facebook’s future in journalism, he hopes to see “more immersive content like VR” on Facebook and compares this “rich content” favorably to “just text and photos.” The BBC’s slogan “We don’t just report a story, we live it” could thus turn out to be true in an unexpected and unwanted way, if eyewitnesses with immersive material about “developing stories” publicly challenge the laborious research of reporters. “Townhall Q&A,” July 1, 2015, on Zuckerberg’s Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102213601037571.

27.   Diverse screenshot apps and Snapchat Inc.’s possible access to the deleted photos quickly led to accusations of false advertising by the Federal Trade Commission, as shown by their press release of May 8, 2014: http://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/05/snapchat-settles-ftc-charges-promises-disappearing-messages-were. It is worth mentioning that the app, except for the photos, retains all (numerical) information about the communication that is taking place: to whom you send how many photos, who takes a screenshot of which image, and who has looked at the photos on My Story. A feature such as Snapstreak—a streak is created when friends share photos over three consecutive days but is destroyed if a day is missed—is an additional, artificial, game-like incentive to increase the use of Snapchat and hence the posting of pictures.

28.   “Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world”: narration as “cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events)”; the database as representation of the world, “as a list of items … it refuses to order,” and a “new way to structure our experience of ourselves and of the world.” Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 225. The paradigm shift indicated here already basically occurs when information is managed on the internet or personal computer, as soon as the filing of documents or access to them no longer occurs taxonomically, by means of a system of files and subfiles, but instead by keywords, via a search engine, through which the necessary inclusion and attribution of elements within a larger whole, which is also characteristic of the narrative model, is lost.

29.   Tarleton Gillespie, “The Relevance of Algorithms,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. T. Gillespie, P. J. Boczkowski, and K. A. Foot (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), 171.

30.   Manovich, The Language of New Media, 219. On the preference for photos, videos, and likes over text updates, see Jean-Sebastien B. Miousse, “How to Get Control on Facebook and How the Algorithms Work,” Science 2.0, October 19, 2010, http://www.science20.com/science_and_music_your_ears/blog/how_get_control_facebook_and_how_algorithms_work.

31.   The “nanopublication” (as a variant of the Semantic Web promoted by Berners-Lee) aims at a computer-friendly, quasi-numerical formalization and classification of statements. See the discussion of this question in my book Data Love: The Seduction and Betrayal of Digital Technologies (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 82–86.

32.   Michael Moorstedt, “Erscanne dich selbst!” [Scan yourself!], in Big Data. Das neue Versprechen der Allwissenheit [Big data: The new promise of universal knowledge], ed. Heinrich Geiselberger and Tobias Moorstedt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2013), 71.

33.   Wilhelm Schmid, “Fitness? Wellness? Gesundheit als Lebenskunst” [Fitness? Wellness? Health as the art of living], in Globalisierung im Alltag [Everyday globalization], ed. Peter Kemper and Ulrich Sonnenschein (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002), 214. Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1986).

34.   The reference to the inscription on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi goes back to the founding father of the Quantified Self movement: Gary Wolf, “Know Thyself: Tracking Every Facet of Life, from Sleep to Mood to Pain, 24/7/365,” Wired, July 17, 2009; Nicholas Felton, “Numerical Narratives,” lecture at the Department of Design, Media, Arts, UCLA, November 15, 2011, http://video.dma.ucla.edu/video/nicholas-felton-numerical-narratives/387. The concept “numerical narratives” was previously used in the context of bureaucratically organized information in health care. See Lester Coutinho, Suman Bisht, and Gauri Raje, “Numerical Narratives and Documentary Practices: Vaccines, Targets and Reports of Immunisation Programme,” Economic and Political Weekly 35, no. 8/9 (February 19–26, 2000): 656–66. Felton, who also developed the above-mentioned diary app “Reporter,” attracted the attention of various curators thanks to his statistical reporting on his life. He was included, for example, in the 2011 exhibition “Talk to Me,” at the New York Museum of Modern Art, and the exhibition “Virtual Identities,” at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. He also attracted the attention of Facebook, which ultimately hired him to design the Timeline.

35.   Nora Young, The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering the World Around Us (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2012), 87–88. The advertising for the athletic shoe Nike+ with a built-in pace tracker conveys a similar sense of self-encounter: “See all your activity in rich graphs and charts. Spot trends, get insights and discover things about yourself you never knew before.” http://nikeplus.nike.com/plus/what_is_fuel. For a different option of consolidation—the “mastery” of an individual’s “drift” in social dynamics through reintegration in narrative contexts—see Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: Norton, 1998).

36.   In light of all this, it seems premature (and rather due to the easily available pun) to characterize the “dataism” of the measurement model “digital Dadaism” —as “nihilism” —because, like Dadaism, it gets by without meaning, as Han suggests when he writes, “Data and numbers are additive, not narrative. Meaning, by contrast, relies on narration.” Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, trans. Erik Butler (New York: Verso Futures, 2017), 52. While the Dadaists responded to the “bankruptcy of ideas” and erosion of language during the First World War with a refusal of sense—for this explanation of Dadaist nonsense texts, see the entries of June 12 and 24, 1916, in Hugo Ball’s diary Flight Out of Time (Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary, ed. John Elderfield, trans. Ann Raimes [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996])—dataism, in an epistemologically comparable crisis situation, seeks meaning precisely in the numbers. This may be problematic from the vantage point of philosophy and narrative psychology, but it signals the opposite of nihilism, as the facticity of data responds to the crisis of narration. Deleuze, with an argument resembling that of the erstwhile Dadaists (“Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly penetrated by money …”), calls for “creating vacuoles of non-communication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.” Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming,” in Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 175. On the concept of dataism, see Steve Lohr, Data-ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, and Almost Everything Else (New York: Harper Business, 2015).

37.   Jill Walker-Rettberg, Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs, and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves (New York: Palgrave Pivot, 2014), 81, including comments on the “shift from human-generated to machine-generated self-representations” (76).

38.   Byung-Chul Han, The Scent of Time: A Philosophical Essay on the Art of Lingering, trans. Daniel Steuer (New York: Polity, 2017), 50, 51. On Gatterer’s remark, see note 10, above.

39.   Han, Scent of Time, 51, 53, 54, 11.

40.   Han, Scent of Time, 17. Han reminds us that the subject of the Enlightenment and modernity was “a free human being that projects itself toward the future. Time is not fate but projection” (15). Han’s perspective can be found earlier in Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age (London: Pluto, 2001), when Eriksen describes the “loss of time” (47) as a “Lego brick syndrome” (121). On living on toward “the fullnes [sic] of the ‘years of the Lord,’ ” see White, The Content of Form, 11. On the end of history from the perspective of the philosophy of history (according to which political events no longer change the basic structure of society), see Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon, 1993). Liu compares the entries in the annals that are cited by White with Twitter posts, as a form of factually oriented, non-narrative history writing: “Now is the order of the day. Now is history as it really is, with no was in view more extensive than—on a typical Web 2.0 screen—just a handful of entries ordered by most-recent at top.” Alan Liu, “Friending the Past: The Sense of History and Social Computing,” New Literary History 42, no. 1 (2011): 20.

41.   Han, Scent of Time, 46, VII.

42.   Siegfried Kracauer, “Those Who Wait,” in Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 129. See also “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces,” in the same collection, 323–28. The following quotes are drawn from “Those Who Wait,” 135–38. On metaphysical homelessness, see the section “Shelter for the Homeless,” in Kracauer’s The Salaried Masses: Duty and Distraction in Weimar Germany, trans. Quintin Hoar (London: Verso, 1998), 88–95.

43.   Siegfried Kracauer, “Boredom,” in Mass Ornament, 332, 334 (translation modified).

44.   Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), 46. Nietzsche’s encouragement of laziness is understandable in the context of various versions of the “praise of leisure,” which appeared both in early Romanticism, for example as the name of a chapter in Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinda (1799); and in heretical Marxism: Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, titled an essay “The Right to Be Lazy.” Also of interest in this context is Walter Benjamin’s praise of boredom in his essay “The Storyteller”: “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.” Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3: 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 149. Wittkower, in his essay “Boredom on Facebook,” starts by imagining boredom, with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, as an existential threat: “Being bored by something motivates a break, a change.… We shy away from this existential boredom.” Dylan E. Wittkower, “Boredom on Facebook,” in Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives, ed. Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2013), 183. But he understands Facebook—unlike the argument of this volume—not as an antidote but as the site of boredom: “One of the great successes of Facebook is the way in which it allows us to be bored together” (185). This counterintuitive conclusion is based on a sudden, unclear shift in argumentation from the concept of boredom as a lack of motivation and distraction to the notion of non-goal-directed activity, when “boredom” is suddenly welcomed as “ ‘hanging out’ and ‘quality time’ ” (184), “friendertainment” (185), or “leisure well but purposelessly spent” (187). With this interpretation of leisure, Wittkower properly celebrates Facebook (like Pschera’s apology on behalf of social media) as a means of nonintentional, phatic communication but blocks the insight toward which Kracauer’s and Nietzsche’s concepts of boredom are directed: that Facebook is anything but the place where a person “comes to himself.”

45.   Rosa, Weltbeziehungen, 224, 218. Rosa defines situational identity as the “self-understanding corresponding to the temporalized time of late modernity,” with which a person’s own life “is no longer experienced as a progressively unfolding (and plannable) project, but as open ‘play,’ or ‘drift,’ in which all identity predicates require a temporal index—‘at the moment, you are married to X’; or ‘are,’ at the moment, a graphic artist; or, at the time, voted for the Greens, etc.”

46.   Zygmunt Bauman: “From Pilgrim to Tourist—or a Short History of Identity,” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), 25.

47.   Galen Strawson, “Against Narrativity,” in The Self?, ed. Galen Strawson (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 65–86. See also Strawson’s concept of the “thin subject” in his book Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). An attractive addressee for Strawson’s intervention is the British moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who conceived of the “unity of a human life” as “unity of a narrative quest” (“Against Narrativity,” 71). Strawson also makes reference to Jerry Bruner, Marya Schechtmann, Paul Ricœur (“How, indeed, could a subject of action give an ethical character to his or her own life taken as a whole if this life were not gathered together in some way, and how could this occur if not, precisely, in the form of a narrative?” 71), and Charles Taylor (“a basic condition of making sense of ourselves is that we grasp our lives as a narrative,” 70).

48.   Strawson, “Against Narrativity,” 67. With the turn against Heidegger, Strawson moves the discussion back to its actual source, for the perspective of an internally structured consciousness based on the unity of past, present, and future is the foundation of phenomenology, from which Ricœur develops his philosophy of narrativity. Strawson, on the contrary, is closer to David Hume’s “bundle theory,” according to which the self is no more than a series of lived experiences. (Strawson published his research on this topic, which was conducted at approximately the same time as his essay, in 2011 under the title The Evident Connexion: Hume on Personal Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Kant had already opposed this association theory of consciousness by positing the synthesis of experiences in a unity of consciousness. Unsurprisingly, Strawson’s antinarrative stance has been greeted with skepticism and rejection by narrative psychologists. He received support for his doubt that a life experienced as coherent is in itself already ethical, arguing that National Socialism, among other things, decisively proved that narrative meaningfulness can be present without regard for ethical values and critical reflection. See Hanna Meretoja, “Narrative and Human Experience. Ontology, Epistemology, and Ethics,” New Literary History 45, no. 1 (Winter 2014), 102–103. Meretoja launches a serious objection to Strawson’s dichotomous opposition between diachronic and episodic types when she argues that individuals do not organize their experiences (or historical facts) narratively in retrospect, as Strawson’s epistemological definition of the narrative assumes, but already experience things narratively, according to the ontological definition of narrativity (96).

49.   Philippe Lejeune, “Autobiography and New Communication Tools,” in Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online, ed. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 247–58. Lejeune’s analysis of the present is reminiscent of Bauman’s: “We are losing our long-term connections, our rootedness in the past, and the ability to project ourselves into the future, all of which allowed us to construct a narrative identity. We are skating along swiftly in a present that annihilates the past and denies the future” (250).

50.   On the “authority of the form,” see also Reichert, Macht der Vielen, 61. McNeill characterizes the algorithms on Facebook as “shadow biographers, telling users about themselves while telling the site and its advertisers about the users.” “Agency,” she concludes, “seen as so key to the humanist subject, has been transferred to the software that reads and produces users. Where, indeed, do we end and Facebook begins?” Laurie McNeill, “There Is No ‘I’ in Network: Social Networking Sites and Posthuman Auto/Biography,” Biography 35, no. 1 (Winter 2012), 75, 79. The network friends also participate in writing one’s own Facebook biography to the extent that their likes lend weight to updates and in the timeline, for example, can bring them back to the present. The finding of posthuman, postactive writing on social networks speaks against the assumption that Facebook’s timeline interface might once again make narration, in spite of or perhaps in cooperation with the database, into a contemporary form of world and self-understanding. Also compare van Dijck (“You Have One Identity,” 204–207), where she observes that the chronological order of the entries and the possibility to delete selected postings hardly constitute narrative form and control, which also explains why employers are more interested in the Facebook accounts than the LinkedIn records of potential employees (212).

51.   “Perhaps personal narrative, then, to borrow Katherine Hayles’s description of humans, ‘has always been posthuman’ (291), a prospect that makes the apparently paradoxical a productive frame for rethinking how we craft and consume selves.” McNeill, “There Is No ‘I’ in Network,” 80. McNeill cites N. Katherine Hayles’s description of the relinquishment of human agency, in “distributed cognitive systems,” to “nonhuman actors” and draws on Lejeune’s concept of an autobiographical pact to propose the concept of a “posthuman pact” for Facebook’s “algorithmic autobiographies” (80, 75). The term “blackboxing” is drawn from an essay by Galloway that contains the phrase “blackboxing of the self.” Alexander R. Galloway, “Black Box, Black Bloc,” in Communication and Its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles, ed. Benjamin Noys (London: Minor Compositions, 2011), 237–52. The German translation of Galloway’s phrase (“ ‘Blackboxing’ des Selbst”) is even more suggestive, since it can be read to refer to the self as both subject and object of blackboxing—in the system of digital data streams, the self is subject to the creation of a profile that it neither knows nor controls, while at the same time it consciously submits to the software as an external autobiographer. Alexander R. Galloway, “Black Box, Schwarzer Bloc,” in Die technologische Bedingung. Beiträge zur Beschreibung der technischen Welt [The technological condition: Contributions to the description of the technical world], ed. Erich Hörl (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011), 273.

52.   Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 31, 32. On the reduction of reality by means of narrative ordering in literature as well as historiography, see the chapter “Writing and the Novel” (29–40). Barthes’s own “postmodern autobiography” (as Hayden White termed it), with its fragmentary and fictional tendencies, narrated in the third person and interspersed with various aspects and associations that have no evident connection, like a hypertext, follows from his critique. On “actual, inner” truth in Wilhelm von Humboldt, see “On the Historian’s Task [1821].”

53.   Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 182: “How could one tolerate a foreigner if one did not know one was a stranger to oneself?” The argument about greater objectivity was foreshadowed by Hayles’s discussion of the greater reliability of “distributed cognition” as compared to purely subjective perception and problem solving. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 288ff. Hayles’s argumentation refers to and contests Joseph Weizenbaum’s warning that machines could take control at some point: “The prospect of humans working in partnership with intelligent machines is not so much a usurpation of human right and responsibility as it is a further development in the construction of distributed cognition environments, a construction that has been ongoing for thousands of years” (289–90). Hayles further develops the notion of “distributed cognition” in her more recent essay on the “nonconscious cognition of intelligent devices,” as exemplified by the “smart house” and “self-driving car” but also by “evolutionary algorithms.” N. Katherine Hayles, “Cognition Everywhere: The Rise of the Cognitive Nonconscious and the Costs of Consciousness,” New Literary History 45, no. 2 (2014): 211, 202. Along with the advantages of the cognitive unconscious— “nonconscious cognition operates without the biases inherent in consciousness” (214)—Hayles also notes the risk of unconscious conditioning in the context of “affective capitalism” (212) but essentially remains more positively inclined than the representatives of the critical theory of digital media, who consider the externalization of self-representation to be loss of agency: “Elements of subjectivity, judgment and cognitive capacities are increasingly delegated to algorithms and prescribed to us through our devices, and there is clearly the danger of a lack of critical reflexivity or even critical thought in this new subject.” David M. Berry, Critical Theory and the Digital (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 11. Chapter 3 will explain why this loss of reflexivity should be understood more as a danger to social cohesiveness than as the overcoming of individual inadequacies. The epilogue will come back to Hayles’s perspective as a possible mode of operation in the future.

54.   Douglas Coupland, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 8.

3. DIGITAL NATION

  1.   Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 432, 433, 427 (translation modified).

  2.   Jean Baudrillard, Photographies 1985–1998 [exhibition catalog], ed. Peter Weibel, trans. Susanne Baumann et al. (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1999), 132.

  3.   Kracauer, “Photography,” 433; Baudrillard, Photographies, 25. The self-presentation of things is (merely) “apparent” in two senses. For one thing (this is an old debate), photographs are never wholly indexical, as Peirce (before Kracauer), or “uncoded,” as Barthes (after Kracauer), pointed out. For another, the cultural denotation and connotation of the photographs is evident precisely in illustrated magazines, as the frame within which the objects are displayed. Kracauer’s critique rests on an epistemological remark on the historical progression of consciousness “from substance and matter to the spiritual and the intellectual” (433), in other words, from entanglement in nature to conceptual, abstract thought. This process of emancipation is halted and reversed by photography, with which the “foundation of nature devoid of meaning” (434) regains ground, as the cognition encouraged by conceptual consciousness gets lost in the material evidence of the images. Later, Adorno and Horkheimer will discuss the “demythologization” and “rationalization” of language as a falling silent, holding that “the more words change from substantial carriers of meaning to signs devoid of qualities … the more purely and transparently they designate what they communicate” and that “the blindness and muteness of the data to which positivism reduces the world passes over to language itself, which is limited to registering those data.” Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 133–34. The “foundation of nature devoid of meaning” of photography and the “muteness” of positivism return in the model of data objectivity.

  4.   Bernard Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). Stiegler’s argument is that only deep attention, with its specific form of synapse generation, allows the transition to maturity. For the allusion to Arendt and Eichmann in the following sentence, see Christian Lotz, “Review of Bernard Stiegler, The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism, trans. Trevor Arthur (London: Bloomsburg Academic, 2014),” Marx & Philosophy: Review of Books 2015 (March 11, 2015), http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2015/1754.

  5.   Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, trans. Daniel Ross (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 5; Bernard Stiegler, The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit Against Industrial Populism, trans. Trevor Arthur (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 18. See also Bernard Stiegler, “Care,” in Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, ed. Thomas Cohen (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 1:104–20.

  6.   For a discussion of the “linguistic milieu” of “participation,” see Bernard Stiegler, “Memory,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 83–84. On the concept of “cognitive and affective proletarianization,” see Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, 30; on “technical memory” as “generalized proletarianization induced by the spread of hypomnesic technologies,” see 35. Kracauer’s concept of “spatial appearance” can also be applied, in a certain sense, to the presence of Facebook friends on a person’s own Facebook page. No longer do I describe my friends to third persons (although this also occurs, in the form of commentaries and likes); instead, the friends present themselves to these third persons as their posts become available to them on my page.

  7.   Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2011), 137, 122.

  8.   The immediate example of this perspective is Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (New York: Riverhead, 2005). But the real model is Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Era of its Technological Reproducibility,” in which Benjamin responded to his contemporaries’ common critique that cinema would destroy contemplation by arguing that the “intensified presence of mind” with which audiences responded to the “shock effect of the images” represented the very exercise of the apperceptive faculty that was required by the accelerated pace of life in an early-twentieth-century metropolis. Those who are familiar with Benjamin’s other writings will know that he was defending the new medium not only against its conservative critics but also against his own conviction.

  9.   Stiegler, “Memory,” 78. On the hope of “associated hypomnesic milieus of digital networks … insofar as they are cooperative and participative,” see 84. In this context, one should be wary of overly dichotomous views of the opposition sender : receiver or consumer : producer. Being a sender does not yet signify reflexivity (or conscious coding); the unending flow of status updates on the social network often differs from the unreflexive flow of images from the culture industry only when it is viewed from an actionistic perspective. The trick of the culture industry in the age of “communicative capitalism” is the continuation of distraction (from thinking) by means of interaction. The “We Media” of the Web 2.0 do not, in themselves, necessarily strengthen the opposition of an oppressed community to a social order that is being criticized. Often, instead, they may lead to a drowning of critique in the busyness of banal sociality.

10.   Stanley Aronowitz, “Looking Out: The Impact of Computers on the Lives of Professionals,” in Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers, ed. Myron C. Tuman (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 133. Bolter saw hypertext as “a vindication of postmodern literary theory.” Jay David Bolter, “Literature in the Electronic Writing Space,” in Literacy Online: The Promise (and Peril) of Reading and Writing with Computers, ed. Myron C. Tuman, (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 24; Landow (whose influential monograph Hypertext 2.0 already made the connection in its subtitle) saw the new technology as embodying the ideas of Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault. George P. Landow, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore, MD: Parallax, 1997), 91. For an extensive critique see my study Interfictions. Vom Schreiben im Netz [Interfictions: On writing on the net] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002).

11.   Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History, trans. Henry Hardy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 115–16; Ben Macintyre, “We Need a Dugout Canoe to Navigate the Net,” Times (London), January 28, 2010. The icon on the Firefox browser is naturally not a reference to Berlin but a stopgap, since the name that was originally chosen, Firebird, was already spoken for. Browsers, which, following Macintyre, could be seen as technical realizations of the fox, are actually ambivalent in their relation to Berlin’s distinction. The bird could serve as a symbol of openness and exploratory pleasure, while the compass of the Safari browser, with its orientation to a specific goal, is more reminiscent of the hedgehog.

12.   The writer Jean Paul, whose real name was Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, was a prolific and eccentric writer and a convinced democrat. He became one of the most popular authors of his era, and his works are known for their witticisms and ironic characters.—Trans.

13.   Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols., trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 295.

14.   Jean Paul, “Clavis Fichtiana,” in Werke, part 1, vol. 3, ed. Norbert Miller (Munich: Hanser, 1963), 1,028; Jean Paul, “Briefe und bevorstehender Lebenslauf” [Letters and forthcoming biography], in Werke, part 2, vol. 4, ed. Norbert Miller (Munich: Hanser, 1963), 1,022.

15.   In 1780, when he was only seventeen, under the title “Jeder Mensch ist sich selbst Masstab, wonach er alles äussere abmist” [Every human being is his own measure, by which he measures everything external], Jean Paul already described individual systems of thought and conceptuality not only as different from one another but as incompatible and untranslatable.

16.   Jean Paul, Levana; Or, the Doctrine of Education, trans. A. H. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1891).

17.   The reference to wit as a priest and the soul of wit is drawn from Jean Paul, “Vorschule der Aesthetik” [Introduction to aesthetics], in Werke, vol. 5, ed. Norbert Miller (Munich: Hanser, 1963), 173. Jean Paul calls for the “development of wit” in children because wit “by the pleasure of discovery … gives increased power of command over … ideas,” while normally “children are taught more ideas than command over those ideas” (Levana, 382–83). The following quotations on wit are found on pages 204 und 205.

18.   Jean Paul, Levana, 550. I discuss Jean Paul’s cosmopolitan information model in the context of Herder and Fichte in my essay “System und Witz—Jean Pauls Kosmopolitismus als Effekt des sprachphilosophischen Zweifels” [System and wit: Jean Paul’s cosmopolitanism as an effect of linguistic-philosophical doubt], in Kulturelle Grenzziehungen im Spiegel der Literaturen: Nationalimus, Regionalismus, Fundamentalismus [Drawing cultural boundaries in the mirror of literatures: Nationalism, regionalism, fundamentalism], ed. Horst Turk, Brigitte Schultze, and Roberto Simanowski (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1999), 170–92; and, with reference to new media, in my essay “Jean Pauls vergebliche Postmodernität” [Jean Paul’s futile postmodernity], in Jahrbuch der Jean Paul Gesellschaft [Yearbook of the Jean Paul Society] (2013), 61–73, from which the current line of argument is drawn.

19.   On the concept of cosmopedia, see Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, trans. Robert Bononno (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 1997). The Jean Paul obituary is from Ludwig Börne, “Denkrede auf Jean Paul” [Commemorative address for Jean Paul], ed. Karl Rauch (Bern: Franke, 1964), 6.

20.   Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Thinking for One’s Self,” in Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer, ed. and trans. T. Bailey Saunders (New York: A. L. Burt, 1902), 325.

21.   Johann Gottfried Herder, “Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität” [Letters for the advancement of Humanity], in Herders Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmann, 1883), 18:90–91.

22.   Jean Paul, Levana, 100 (fragment 1, chap. 16).

23.   Schopenhauer, “Thinking for One’s Self,” 323. As insightful as Schopenhauer’s warning may sound, in an era when knowledge is mainly gleaned from significantly shorter texts, it is already a lot if an individual actually musters the necessary intellectual effort and cognitive stamina to approach the mental cosmos of an entire book.

24.   Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 5, 6. The biblical metaphor Herder and Schopenhauer used to describe the confusion created by excessive media availability retained its power in descriptions of the “paradisiacal” beginnings of radio, when, for example, radio is portrayed, in a period of “Babylonian confusion,” as a “gigantic megaphone” bringing the “multiplicity, the mixture of voices and calls under its single, wave-saturated spell.” Comment of the director of the Silesian Radio, Fritz Walter Bischoff, in 1929, cited by Albert Kümmel, “Innere Stimmen. Die deutsche Radiodebatte” [Inner voices: The German radio debate], in Einführung in die Geschichte der Medien [Introduction to media history], ed. Albert Kümmel, Leander Scholz, and Eckhard Schuhmacher (Padeborn: UTB, 2004), 176–77.

25.   Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 7 (translation modified).

26.   Jean Paul, “Vorschule der Aesthetik,” 206. In the preface to his Biographische Belustigungen [Biographical amusements] (1795), in Werke, part 2, vol. 4, ed. Norbert Miller (Munich: Hanser, 1963), 355, Jean Paul contrasts attentive reading with the fleeting gaze he ascribes to “girls.” In the text, refractory readers hail Jean Paul before an imaginary court of law to compel him to stick to the matter at hand and in his future writing to avoid such excessive digressions. The following quotation is from Jean Paul, “Die Taschenbibliothek” [The pocket library], in Werke, part 2, vol. 3, ed. Norbert Miller (Munich: Hanser, 1963), 772.

27.   The concept of collective memory refers to the memory of a group of people. Like individual memory, it is formed from communicative memory (person-dependent, biographical, primarily orally transmitted recollections that do not go back further than three generations) and cultural memory (written, visual, and since the twentieth century also electronically stored cultural practices and mediated references to the past). The concept of cultural memory (kulturelles Gedächtnis) that is used in the following generally refers to groups; the concept of cultural recollection (kulturelle Erinnerung) usually refers to cultural memory. On the distinction between storage memory (as the collection of all transmitted materials) and functional memory (the dominant cultural memory), see Aleida Assmann, Memory and Political Change, trans. Linda Shortt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

28.   Wolfgang Ernst, “Das Archiv als Gedächtnisort” [The archive as a site of memory], in Archivologie. Theorien des Archivs in Theorie, Medien und Künsten [Archivology: Theories of the archive in theory, media and the arts], ed. Knut Ebeling and Stephan Günzel (Berlin: Kadmos, 2009), 168. Pierre Nora’s concept of the “lieu de mémoire,” where collective memory takes place and/or is transmitted, refers not only to places (geographical reference points, monuments, museums) but also to times (anniversaries), rituals, artworks, persons, and narratives.

29.   Kracauer, “Photography,” 61. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), part 4, para. 3.

30.   On the concept of exosocialization as the site of “production and reproduction of men outside local intimate units,” see Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 38; on the biography of the nation, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1996).

31.   Kracauer, “Photography,” 61.

32.   “The default value that is automatically realized if a person does not opt for something else and expends neither energy nor attention is now remembering, not forgetting.” Elena Esposito, “Die Formen des Web-Gedächtnisses. Medien und soziales Gedächtnis” [The forms of Web-memory: Media and social memory], in Formen und Funktionen sozialen Erinnerns. Sozial- und kulturwissenschaftliche Analysen [Forms and functions of social remembering: Social and cultural studies analyses], ed. René Lehmann, Florian Öchsner, and Gerd Sebald (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2013), 92.

33.   On the “obsession with the archive,” see Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 13; and the issue “The Storage Mania” of the journal Mediamatic 8, no. 1 (Summer 1994). On the “explosion of memory discourses” and “culture of memory,” see Andreas Huyssen, Present Past: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: University of California Press, 2003), 4, 15. The quotation on the shift “from present futures to present pasts” is found in the same volume, 11. The concept “musealization” (Musealisierung) was coined by Lübbe and refers to a form of compensation for the “loss of familiarity” that goes hand in hand with accelerated modernity. Hermann Lübbe, Im Zug der Zeit: Verkürzter Aufenthalt in der Gegenwart [In the course of time: Abbreviated stay in the present] (Berlin: Springer, 1992).

34.   Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 13. Nora distinguishes between history (as the neutral “representation of the past”) and memory (“a bond tying us to the eternal present … affective and magical”) (8). His conclusion corresponds to Postman’s regretful conclusion that narrative history has come to an end. Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage, 1992). Postman asks history teachers to become “histories teachers,” in other words, to show “how the religion, politics, geography, and economy of a people lead them to re-create their past along certain lines,” and he notes, “To teach the past simply as a chronicle of indisputable, fragmented, and concrete events is to replicate the bias of Technopoly, which largely denies our youth access to concepts and theories, and to provide them only with a stream of meaningless events” (191). For the “emphatic site of history” and “passionless archive,” see Ernst, “Das Archiv als Gedächtnisort,” 168.

35.   Friedrich Kittler’s 1985 book Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 [Writing systems] was translated into English as Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). For Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme were “the network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data” (369). For Nora, modern memory is “archival,” since it depends on material traces, direct recording, and the visual givens of the image: “What began as writing ends as high fidelity and tape recording. The less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs—hence the obsession with the archive that marks our age, attempting at once the complete conservation of the present as well as the total preservation of the past” (“Between Memory and History,” 13). The question is whether the new technologies of archiving are a reaction to the lost capacity to remember or its cause. On digital media, archiving is mostly automatic, a result of failure to delete, as personal e-mail archives demonstrate. On “self-musealization per video recorder,” see Huyssen, Present Past, 14.

36.   Wolfgang Ernst, Das Gesetz des Gedächtnisses. Medien und Archive am Ende (des 20. Jahrhunderts) [The law of memory: Media and archive at the end (of the twentieth century)] (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2007), 264, 282, 284, 278. Jochum notes that “The total recall that the Internet promised is … anything but the implementation, through data technology, of the ‘memory of humankind.’ Instead, we are looking at a global denial of memory. The place of scholarly communities or the interested publics working on cultural memory is taken by potential technical access to a global data network that offers information, not knowledge.” Uwe Jochum, “Die virtuelle Bibliothek” [The virtual library], in 7 Hügel, vol. 6: Wissen [Knowledge] [catalogue of the exhibition] (Berlin, 2000), 40; cited in Ernst, Das Gesetz des Gedächtnisses, 277.

37.   Elena Esposito, Soziales Vergessen. Formen und Medien des Gedächtnisses der Gesellschaft [Social forgetting: Forms and media of the memory of society] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002), 358. On “mass customization,” see 301. Also: “The static model of data storage is replaced by the dynamic model of data construction, which is gradually created based on the commands of the user: by the model that is realized on the internet by the search engines” (257).

38.   For this reason, Esposito (Soziales Vergessen, 318, 351) talks about an “autological model of memory,” which, via a feedback loop that is scarcely controllable, makes collective memory conform to the individual’s perspective.

39.   Ernst, Das Gesetz des Gedächtnisses, 264. This situation results, for Ernst, in the need for a new form of ideology critique, which is carried out, inter alia, in software studies, by interrogating the cultural factors in programming. Examples of collective memory that are made possible by the internet include Steven Spielberg’s Shoah project (http://sfi.usc.edu), which archives memories of Holocaust survivors in video form; the Vietnam Veterans Memorial The Virtual Wall, which recalls veterans of the Vietnam War through individually submitted visual and written material (http://www.virtualwall.org); or the Mukurtu software project for the digital archiving of the cultural heritage of indigenous communities (http://www.mukurtu.org). On the paradox of “long-distance nationalism,” see Benedict Anderson, “The New World Disorder,” New Left Review 193 (1993): 3–13; Benedict Anderson, “Long-Distance Nationalism: World Capitalism and the Rise of Identity Politics,” Wertheim Lecture, University of Amsterdam, 1992.

40.   Pierre Nora, “Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory,” Eurozine, April 19, 2002, http://www.eurozine.com/reasons-for-the-current-upsurge-in-memory.

41.   A note on the concept of culture, which will play a prominent role in the following discussion: Culture can be understood as civilization if it is given a qualifying, temporal turn, in the sense that we are (already) civilized instead of (still) uncultivated and uneducated. Or it can also be quantifiably and spatially qualified, to refer to systems of value and behavioral norms that create identification and demarcation. One conceptual consequence that derives from the latter approach is “multiculturalism,” whereas the “culture of forgetting” (or “hybrid culture”) tends to consider civilization, in a globalized, postmodern period, as no longer belonging exclusively to any one culture. This skepticism toward a single (universal) value system will be the subject of the following discussion of cosmopolitanism, which will not examine either the specificity of “new,” realpolitik-based cosmopolitanism or the possibly conflicting obligations that can arise even when value systems are not in doubt—for example, the decision whether to save a Jew from the Nazis if it endangers one’s own family.

42.   Nora, “Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory,” 7. Startwell offers an extensive critique of narrativity (with the accent on Alasdair MacIntyre’s ethic of narrativity): Crispin Startwell, End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), where he counterposes loose sequences of events and the haiku (“which is always devoted to bringing the moment home”) to narratives (17).

43.   Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 64, 39.

44.   Seyla Benhabib, Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 7.

45.   Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 8–9.

46.   Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Lessing’s Masonic Dialogues (Ernst und Falk), trans. Abraham Cohen (London: Baskerville, 1927), 46–47.

47.   Johann Gottlob Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, trans. R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull (Chicago: Open Court, 1922), 37.

48.   Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider, Human Rights and Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 1–2. See also Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals, trans. Richard Aldington (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2007), which, in 1927, called for humankind’s ascent from its national origins to a European and finally a universal identity (as an overcoming of historical-cultural contexts) and saw the betrayal of the intellectuals in their desire to be an abode for specific (cultural, political, religious) groupings, rather than for all.

49.   Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Charles Taylor and Amy Gutmann (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 44, 62. That Western individualism is not able to claim universality from another (Confucian) perspective was demonstrated by the discussion about “Asian values” in the 1990s and the “Bangkok Declaration” of 1993, as a relativization of the UN Charter of Human Rights.

50.   In this sense, Levy and Sznaider expressly oppose postmodern deconstruction and support the continuation of the modernist project (Human Rights and Memory, 7), and Deleuze warns, “in philosophy we’re coming back to eternal values, to the idea of the intellectual as custodian of eternal values.… These days it’s the rights of man that provide our eternal values. It’s the constitutional state and other notions everyone recognizes as very abstract. And it’s in the name of all this that thinking’s fettered, that any analysis in terms of movements is blocked.” Gilles Deleuze, “Mediators,” in Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 121–22.

51.   Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 79.

52.   Gotthold Ephrahim Lessing, Nathan the Wise, trans. Adolphus Reich (London: A. W. Bennett, 1860), 112.

53.   Christoph Türcke, “Die geheime Kraft des Rings” [The secret power of the ring], in Lessing. Nachruf auf einen Aufklärer. Sein Bild in der Presse der Jahre 1781, 1881 und 1981 [Lessing: Obituary of an Enlightenment man: His image in the press in years 1781, 1881, and 1981], ed. Klaus Bohnen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1982), 155. The following quotation is from the same source.

54.   Norbert Bolz, Das konsumistische Manifest [The consumerist manifesto] (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002), 14 (“pragmatic cosmopolitanism”), 16 (“immune system of world society”). The Nathan production referenced here was directed by Claus Peymann at the Berliner Ensemble in 2003. The comparison of tolerance and ideological pluralism (as “nonbinding commitment”) with the model of capitalist consumption has a tradition that reaches back well beyond Bolz und Türcke. See, for example, Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York: Norton, 1984), 38: “The pluralist conception of freedom rests on the same protean sense of the self that finds popular expression in such panaceas as ‘open marriage’ and ‘nonbinding commitments.’ Both originate in the culture of consumption.”

55.   Lessing, Nathan the Wise, 202.

56.   The contemporary critique of the concept of cosmopolitanism is a variation on Dajah’s opposition to Nathan’s “illoyal loyalty” to all humans, using the same descriptors and the example of Nathan, specifically in regard to Dajah, to question the inclusivity of his tolerance model. The critics argue that Nathan oppresses Dajah just as stubbornly as the Patriarch ignores Nathan, because Dajah cannot be integrated into his model of the religion of reason. See Wilfried Wilms, “The Universalist Spirit of Conflict: Lessing’s Political Enlightenment,” Monatshefte 94, no. 3 (2002): 309–10. On the pros and cons of cosmopolitanism, with an essay by Martha C. Nussbaum serving as an example, see Joshua Cohen, ed., For Love of Country (Boston: Beacon, 1996).

57.   On “cosmopolitanism from below,” based on the example of Mumbai, see Arjun Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (London: Verso, 2013), 198; and Homi K. Bhaba, “Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” in Text and Nation, ed. Laura Garcia-Morena and Peter C. Pfeiffer (London: Camden House, 1996), 191–207. On “cosmopolitanization” as “actually existing,” “banal” cosmopolitanism versus cosmopolitanism as a normative theory (of the Enlightenment, of intellectuals and politicians), see Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision, trans. Cioran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2006).

58.   The “segregation” of the internet and the self-reinforcing effect of its “echo chambers” were already identified by Cass R. Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0. Revenge of the Blogs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 149, 144; Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (New York: Penguin, 2011); and Ethan Zuckerman, Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (New York: Norton, 2013). See also the discussion in chapter 1.

59.   Vilém Flusser, “Wohnung Beziehen in der Heimatlosigkeit” [Making a home in homelessness], Du, Die Zeitschrift der Kultur 12 (1992): 14.

60.   That information is superior to noise in its capacity for differentiation is the core of Gregory Bateson’s famous definition of information as the difference (in relation to previous knowledge) that makes a difference (for future actions). Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 453.

61.   Flusser, “Wohnung Beziehen in der Heimatlosigkeit,” 14; Vilém Flusser, The Freedom of the Migrant: Objections to Nationalism, trans. Kenneth Kronenberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). Flusser’s euphoric grasp of the emblematic function of the migrant for contemporary society differs both from Giorgio Agamben’s problematization of the refugee as the homo sacer of the present and from Benedict Anderson’s diaspora or “long-distance nationalism.”

62.   Jon Katz, “Birth of a Digital Nation,” Wired, April 5, 1997, http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.04/netizen_pr.html.

63.   Mark Poster, “Digital Networks and Citizenship,” PMLA 117, no. 1 (January 2002): 100, 102.

64.   Milton Mueller, “Internet Nation?,” 2014, http://www.internetgovernance.org/2014/09/05/internet-nation.

65.   “Bitcoin has even shown that we can have a global, non-state currency through digital technology.” Mueller, “Internet Nation.” The Swiss firm Swatch and MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte tried in 1998 to create an internet time that would replace the system of 24 hours of 60 minutes and 60 seconds each with 1,000 beats of one minute and 26.4 seconds each, marked by the @ sign. Internet time was meant to have an existence independent of the normal time zones, so that it would be @500 in Berlin at the same time as in Hong Kong and Rio de Janeiro.

66.   Gerald Delanty, Community (London: Routledge, 2010), writes about “thin universalistic identity” and “thin” (virtual) communities, whose existence depends on making communication an “essential feature of belonging” (132, 137, 135).

67.   Arjun Appadurai, “Archive and Aspiration,” in Information Is Alive, ed. Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder (Rotterdam: V2, 2003), 17. On the WELL as a “thick virtual community,” see Delanty, Community, 141; and Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community: Surfing the Internet (New York: Minerva, 1995).

68.   Peter van Ham, “Europe’s Postmodern Identity: A Critical Appraisal,” in Global Society in Transition: An International Politics Reader, ed. Daniel N. Nelson and Laura J. Neack (New York: Kluwer Law International, 2002), 200. Van Ham’s argument is directed at Anthony Smith’s view that memory is central for identity formation and that therefore “existing ‘deep’ cultures” cannot be replaced by “a cosmopolitan ‘flat’ culture” (192).

69.   Ran Zwigenberg: Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). On the concept of the “unbounded universal ‘we’ ” see Levy and Sznaider, Human Rights and Memory, 1. The European Union, it is true, derives its motivation and founding precisely from the memory of the catastrophic events of European history. Weinrich, in this sense, makes note of an “ancient enmity” (Urfeindschaft) between morality and forgetting, which results in replacing order by contingency. Harald Weinrich, Gibt es eine Kunst des Vergessens? [Is there an art of forgetting?] (Basel: Schwabe, 1996), 48.

70.   Siegfried Zielinski, [… After the Media]: News from the Slow-Fading Twentieth Century, trans. Gloria Custance (Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2013), 244 (translation modified). Zielinski mentions the concept of “dis-membering” (Entinnern) only in passing and refers to Klaus Bartels, “Erinnern, Vergessen, Entinnern. Das Gedächtnis des Internet” [Recalling, forgetting, dis-membering: The memory of the internet], In Lab—Jahrbuch 2000 für Künste und Apparate [Lab—Yearbook 2000 for arts and apparatuses], ed. Thomas Hensel, Hans Ulrich Reck, and Siegfried Zielinski (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2000), 7–16. Bartels himself borrows the term from Wolfram Malte Fues: “Re-membering, Dis-membering: Fictionality and Hyperfictionality,” in The Poetics of Memory, ed. Thomas Wägenbauer (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1998), 391–98.

71.   Bartels, “Erinnern, Vergessen, Entinnern,” 12–13. Bartels explains the method of the Cistercians in the context of Janet Coleman, “Das Bleichen des Gedächtnisses. Hl. Bernhards monastische Mnemotechnik” [The bleaching of memory: St. Bernhard’s mnemotechnics], in Gedächtniskunst: Raum-Bild-Schrift. Studien zur Mnemotechnik [The art of memory: Space—image—script: Studies on mnemotechnics], ed. Anselm Haverkamp and Renate Lachmann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), 207–27. Bartels applies the concept of dis-membering to role-playing in internet chats, where the assumed role of a media icon (Jimmy Stewart or Katherine Hepburn, for example) is determined by the cultural schematics of the role itself. The conclusion seems to be overly hasty, since role-playing in chats is controlled by the individuals in question and remains limited in time. Nor does the concluding equivalence Bartels claims between dis-membering and the loss of any sure sense of reality in David Cronenberg’s science-fiction film eXistenZ support his thesis that “the WWW is not only not a memory, it ‘dis-members’ memory” (10).

72.   Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert Richardson and Anne O’Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), xxii.

73.   Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 12. See also Nancy, Being Singular Plural: “Being itself is given to us as meaning. Being does not have meaning. Being itself, the phenomenon of Being, is meaning that is, in turn, its own circulation—and we are this circulation. There is no meaning if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of Being” (2). The political reference point for Nancy’s model of community is the nationalist and ethnic conflicts and acts of violence of the 1990s; the philosophical reference point is Bataille, who, similarly, developed his idea of a community without (post-Christian) communio during the 1930s, at a time when communism and fascism appeared to offer the two great seductive and merciless versions of community.

74.   Nancy, Being Singular Plural, 87. Further: “It is not enough, then, to set idle chatter in opposition to the authenticity of the spoken word, understood as being replete with meaning. On the contrary, it is necessary to discern the conversation (and sustaining) of being-with as such within chatter: it is in ‘conversing,’ in the sense of discussion, that being-with ‘sustains itself,’ in the sense of the perseverance in Being.… In this conversation (and sustaining) of being-with, one must discern how language, at each moment, with each signification, from the highest to the lowest—right down to those ‘phatic,’ insignificant remarks (‘hello,’ ‘hi,’ ‘good’ …) which only sustain the conversation itself—exposes the with, exposes itself as the with, inscribes and ex-scribes itself in the with until it is exhausted, emptied of signification” (87). In this sense, Dallmayr notes, in regard to Nancy’s concept of community, “What is involved in this originary society is neither fusion nor exclusion, but a kind of ‘communication’ that is vastly different from a mere exchange of information or messages. In opposition to technical information theories (and also theories of communicative interactions), Nancy locates communication on a more primary level; that of the ‘sharing and … com-pearance (com-parution) of finitude.’ ” Fred Dallmayer, “An ‘Inoperative’ Global Community? Reflections on Nancy,” in On Jean-Luc Nancy: The Sense of Philosophy, ed. Darren Sheppard, Simon Sparks, and Colin Thomas (London: Routledge, 1997), 181. Dallmayer’s quotation from Nancy is from The Inoperative Community, 29.

75.   See Frank Vetere, Steve Howard, and Martin R. Gibbs, “Phatic Technologies: Sustaining Sociability Through Ubiquitous Computing,” in Proceedings of the CHI-Conference 2005, http://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/events/ubisoc2005/UbiSoc%202005%20submissions/12-Vetere-Frank.pdf; Victoria Wanga, John V. Tuckera, and Kevin Haines, “Phatic Technologies in Modern Society,” Technology in Society 33, no. 1 (2012): 84–93. On “disinterested interest” and “pan-sympathy” with a nod to Hume, see Abrol Fairweather and Jodi Halpen, “Do Status Updates Have Any Value?” in Facebook and Philosophy: What’s on Your Mind?, ed. Dylan E. Wittkower (Chicago: Open Court, 2010), 193, 195, 196. The authors also emphasize that the sympathy created by status updates does not automatically translate into morally significant empathy, for which a deeper encounter with the other would be necessary than is offered by the “ambient awareness” of status updates (198–99). We will come back to this difference.

76.   On “singular beings,” see Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 27; on the “ecstasy of sharing,” 25. Further, “Ecstasy … implies no effusion, and even less some form of effervescent illumination.” Rather, it should be understood as the “impossibility … of absolute immanence” (6). When Nancy later notes, in reference to Bataille’s concept of lovers, that “the sovereignty of the lovers is no doubt nothing other than the ecstasy of the instant, it does not produce a union, it is NOTHING—but this nothing itself is also, in its ‘consummation,’ a communion” (37), this passage recalls Pschera’s apologia for Facebook as a network that allows its users to be “lovers of the moment” who transcend purposefulness. Alexander Pschera, 800 Millionen. Eine Apologie der sozialen Medien [800 million: An apologia for social media] (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2011). On Nancy’s distancing from a community that “realizes itself as a work,” see 8.

77.   Nancy, Inoperative Community, 27. In a certain sense, Nancy’s model is close to Maffesoli’s concept of “emotional community,” which also has no other ground than that of communality but which relies strictly on loyalty and conformity. Michel Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes: The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society, trans. Don Smith (London: Sage, 1996). For concepts of inessential commonality and solidarity without closure after Nancy and in response to him, see Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); and Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Both conceive community as becoming and constant reworking rather than as identity and belonging. For an attempt to carry Nancy’s theory over into real contexts, see the chapter “Community of Dissensus” in Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), which operates with Nancy’s and Maurice Blanchot’s concept of a “community without identity” (185).

78.   Tiqqun, Theory of Bloom, trans. Robert Hurley (London: LBC, 2012), 44. Tiqqun identifies the overcoming of cultural concreteness as “rootless” (46), on the one hand, in the context of Karl Marx’s theory of exchange value, according to which the isolated individual, liberated from all traditional social relations of dependency, finds a social context only via the exchange value of labor and commodities. But at the same time, it also interprets this rootlessness, wholly in Nancy’s sense of insubstantial community, as the end of the “falsity of membership to a class, to a nation, to a milieu.… Only a radical alienation of the Common was able to hypostatize the originary Common in such a way that solitude, finitude, and exposure, that is, the only actual connection between men, also appears as the only possible connection between them” (54–55). Only the fact that they have been robbed of the content of life, accordingly, “qualifies” subjects as humans per se, who are free to connect with other (equally uprooted) “singularities,” to use Nancy’s term.

79.   Jean-Luc Nancy, “Of Struction,” Parrhesia 17 (2013), http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia17/parrhesia17_nancy.pdf. See also Erich Hörl, “Die künstliche Intelligenz des Sinns. Sinngeschichte und Technologie im Anschluss an Jean-Luc Nancy” [The artificial intelligence of sense: History of sense and technology following Jean-Luc Nancy], Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 2 (2010): 135. The concepts “technological shift of meaning” and “cybernetic subjectivity” are drawn from this essay (133) and its introduction (33).

80.   Katz, “Birth of a Digital Nation.” See also Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto “Is Connectivity a Human Right?” (http://www.facebook.com/isconnectivityahumanright; https://fbcdn- dragon-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash3/851575_2287942339372 24_51579300_n.pdf) and the call that was initiated in September 2015 with ONE #connecttheworld (http://connecttheworld.one.org), as well as Zuckerberg’s speech to the UN on September 26, 2015, on the significance of universal access to the internet for information, exchange of ideas, political participation, and job opportunities.

81.   Lee Raine and Aaron Smith, “Social Networking Sites and Politics,” PEW Reports, March 12, 2012, http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media/Files/Reports/2012/PIP_SNS_and_politics.pdf; Lisa Yuk-ming Leung, “Intimacy for ‘Deliberative Democracy’? The Role of ‘Friendship’ in the Participatory Use of Facebook for Activists in Hong Kong,” paper presented at the eighth annual conference of the Asian Studies Association of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Institute of Education, China, March 2013. On the internet as a “dialectical space,” see Christian Fuchs, Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies (London: Routledge, 2011), 291: “One should therefore better not speak of the contemporary web 2.0 as the ‘participatory web 2.0.’ but as the web of exploitation and exclusion.” Fuchs refers to Herbert Marcuse on the “repressive tolerance” of the “corporate web 2.0” as a device that affords maximal freedom of expression with minimal social effects due to a lack of visibility (276). See also his chapter “Alternative Media as Critical Media” (295–322). On internet networks as “commodification of freedom,” see Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 421.

82.   Hossein Derakhshan, “Das Internet, das wir bewahren müssen” [The internet that we need to preserve], Die Zeit Online, July 22, 2015, http://www.zeit.de/digital/internet/2015-07/social-media-blogger-iran-gefaengnis-internet. That the finding of banality is not (yet) accurate everywhere is demonstrated by news reports on political bloggers in China, Bangladesh, and elsewhere who are being arrested by state agencies and murdered by fundamentalist gangs.

83.   Hubert L. Dreyfus, On the Internet (London: Routledge, 2001), 73, 89, 102–3.

84.   Morozov compares and contrasts a person’s membership in Facebook groups like Saving-Darfur with nonparticipation in political committees at his own university. Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), 194. Dean criticizes the phenomenon of mere “registration of political statements on social media like MySpace and Facebook using Slavoj Žižek’s concept of “interpassivity,” as a wild actionism that despite its interactivity actually prevents activity. Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 31. A new form of half-hearted engagement is the German app Goodnity (http://goodnity.com), which finances “Adopt a Child” programs worldwide by having users answer marketing questions or look at advertising on their smartphone. The money raised by the app is sent to aid organizations. In this way, say the developers of the app, “doing good” is firmly anchored in the everyday. An unfriendly interpretation might read: social engagement by means of spending time in the service of consumer culture. It is, therefore, hardly surprising to find that two years later the app turned out to be a service for employers to improve their corporate culture. The opposite example is Anonymous, as a protest culture that also takes place on a person’s own screen but that has clearly been radicalized and politicized and also brings the protest (as “Operation Chanology,” against Scientology in early 2008 demonstrates) into the street.

85.   Dreyfus seems to wish for this sort of “liberation” from despair at the noncommital nature of things, without seeing it as particularly likely (On the Internet, 87).

86.   See, for instance, Matthias Alexander’s response to the survey “Weckruf: Studenten, was geht?” [Wake up, students, what’s going on here?] in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, on the mental condition of students, on July 17, 2014: “If they had an opponent it could keep them from blathering on” (http://www.faz.net/aktuell/beruf-chance/campus/weckruf-an-die-aktuelle-studentengeneration-13039149-p3.html).

87.   “Those who are bragging about their ethics and their humanity today are only waiting to persecute those they condemn by their criteria.” Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” in Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 2:92–93.

88.   For a critique of Nancy’s “philosophism” as an “attempt to think being-with from within philosophy alone” and as “underestimating the constitutive role of conflict and antagonism,” see Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou, and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 80, 81. As Marchart emphasizes, the “we” of every community comes from “a homogenizing construction out of the dispersed plurality of being,” with the necessary consequence that every concept of community will always need “some foundation” (81). In denying this constructing, “antagonistic” moment of the political, Marchart claims that Nancy was committing himself to a “depoliticized notion of the political” that replaces the “fundamentalism of the ground with the fundamentalism of no ground” (82).

89.   Hanna Meretoja, The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 207, 229. It is obvious that such self-critical metanarratives are fundamentally different from Lyotard’s (legitimating) metanarratives (or grand narrative), which give a totalizing (and reductionist) account of historical and cultural phenomena appealing to a universal truth. In the realm of cinematic narration, Meretoja’s counterpart would be Peter Greenaway, who declared, “I take no position. I believe that there are no more positions to take, no certainties, no facts. Many people find this very confusing in my films, they say you are hiding behind your irony.” Andreas Kilb, “Peter Greenaway oder Der Bauch des Kalligraphen” [Peter Greenaway or the belly of the calligrapher], in Die Postmoderne im Kino. Ein Reader [Postmodernism in the cinema: A reader], ed. Jürgen Felix (Marburg: Schüren, 2002), 235.

90.   Meretoja (The Narrative Turn, 212) cites the “ ‘weakened’ experience of truth” from Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 42. More pertinent is Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, trans. David Webb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), where he refers to both the “nihilistic vocation of hermeneutics” (chap. 1) and its “anti-metaphysical orientation” (27).

91.   Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, 40. Vattimo’s idea recalls Nancy in his suggestion that cosmopolitanism is profoundly postmodern and should be thought not (as in more recent approaches) as an extension of loyalty from neighborhood or nation to larger realms but instead as the overcoming of loyalty itself—beginning with a certain “disloyalty” toward oneself.

92.   Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper, 1962), 206. Vattimo, The Transparent Society, 9. In a way, the model of tolerance based on indifference recalls the cynic Diogenes of Sinope, whose cosmopolitanism (he was the first to use the term) resembled a mocking rejection of emotional connection to one’s own polis more than the emphatic relationship to the cosmos that later defined the Stoics’ concept of cosmopolitanism.

93.   This is the view expressed by Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision. It is evident that the concept of cosmopolitanism, in its parallelism to “weak thinking” and in the context of social networks, should not be conceived either as world citizenship beyond nation and region (often viewed as imperialistic and arrogant) or as a hybrid à la “rooted cosmopolitanism.” Rather, it should be understood as (self-critical) openness to the Other that is different from the polis, neighborhood, or “home” of the I—including the thought and value system of another Facebook user. It is worth noting, in the relevant debate, that precisely those writers who present this understanding of cosmopolitanism (as a “search for contrast rather than uniformity”) tend to refer to Berlin’s thought model of the fox. For example, Hannerz writes that “cosmopolitans should ideally be foxes rather than hedgehogs.” Ulf Hannerz, “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture,” Theory, Culture & Society 7 (1990): 239.

94.   “Community-based art” resembles social networks to the extent that it is also concerned less with comparing perspectives, positions, and interpretations than with the creation of social spaces that enable communication among an interactive “public.” The curator and art theoretician Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002), 44, cites Rirkrit Tiravanija’s cooking performances as paradigmatic for these “alternative forms of sociability” and “moments of constructed conviviality.” Leftist art theory criticizes the “shaky analogy between an open work and an inclusive society, as if a desultory form might evoke a democratic community, or a non-hierarchical installation predict an egalitarian world” that it finds at the heart of Bourriaud’s aesthetics. Hal Foster, “Chat Rooms,” in Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Claire Bishop (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 193. Commentators take offense, among other things, at the “feel-good position” adopted by Tiravanija: “In such a cozy situation, art … collapses into compensatory (and self-congratulatory) entertainment.” Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 79. Referring to political theory’s “concept of antagonism,” as developed in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). Bishop emphasizes that “a democratic society is one in which relations of conflict are sustained, not erased,” (66–67). Bishop favors a “relational antagonism” that does not claim social harmony but rather exposes the tensions that are repressed by the appearance of harmony (79). Naturally, “feel-good” get-togethers (a cooking project by Tiravanija, or Cyprien Gaillard’s 2011 “Recovery of Discovery” in the Berlin art project: a pyramid of beer bottles that the public was invited to deconstruct by drinking them) can also incorporate social-critical features, for example when the conversation turns to those who have been excluded from the party. Facebook, too, for all its rhetoric of togetherness, makes relational antagonism possible by creating space where opposing positions can clash. The core of the critique is the differing orientation: the intent to avoid conflict versus the attempt to make it productive. The core issue, for this tendency, is the difference in hermeneutical approach. Relational aesthetics does not aim to create a meaningful work and work-based interpretation; instead, it seeks to create a social situation and shared experience of that situation. The opposing position (which Bishop illustrates by drawing on interaction artists Santiago Sierra and Thomas Hirschhorn) aims at interpreting the created situation and resists understanding it at the level of a party: “The most important activity that an art work can provoke is the activity of thinking,” and “having reflections and critical thoughts is to get active.” Hirschhorn, cited in Bishop, Participation, 76–77. Surprisingly, Bishop locates the core meaning of Nancy’s community concept in its “counter-model to relational aesthetics” (68), and she includes passages from The Inoperative Community in her Participation reader. However, she does not explain there, or in her later book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), how Nancy’s model of a society with no substance can be mobilized against an artistic practice of superficial sociality. Baker is more clear in this regard, when, in reference to Nancy, he argues for an aesthetics that, in contrast to the “cynical aesthetics of immediate community,” thematizes the “break or fissure in social orders and social groups.” George Baker, “Beziehungen und Gegenbeziehungen. Ein offener Brief an Nicolas Bourriaud” [Relationships and counter-relationships: An open letter to Nicolas Bourriaud], in Contextualize: Zusammenhänge herstellen [Contextualize: Create contexts], ed. Yilmaz Dziewior (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 2003), 128. In my study Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), I explore the relationship of participatory art to reflection and interpretation, with reference to Bourriaud (122–57). A detailed analysis of the psychological and political parallels between participation art and participation culture would be a task for future research on Facebook.

AFTERWORD

  1.   Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” trans. Thomas Y. Levin, Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 432, 435, 436, 434 (translation modified).

  2.   Benjamin, however, seems to have been convinced of the good outcome of history’s game of chance when he praised the “men who have adopted the cause of the new and have founded it on insight and renunciation”: “In its buildings, pictures, and stories, mankind is preparing to outlive culture, if need be. And the main thing is that it does so with a laugh.” Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” in Selected Writings: vol. 2, part 2: 1931–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 732, 735. The following quotation on the “foundation of nature devoid of meaning” is from Kracauer, “Photography,” 434.

  3.   The concept of “distant reading,” promoted by Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013), means the algorithmic, keyword-oriented analysis of large numbers of texts, as distinguished from interpretation by means of close reading. Anderson proclaimed the end of theory in 2008, explaining that “with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.” Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008, http://www.wired.com/ science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory. Ramsay argues that algorithmic analyses do not have to end in the positivism of “objective” statements but can lead to new questions for research that may remain quite open to a multiperspectival interpretation. Stephen Ramsay, “Toward an Algorithmic Criticism,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 18, no. 2 (2003): 167–74. On the concept of an “ecology of collaborating,” Hayles remarks, “The humanities cannot continue to take the quest for meaning as an unquestioned premise for their ways of doing business.” N. Katherine Hayles, “Cognition Everywhere: The Rise of the Cognitive Nonconscious and the Costs of Consciousness,” New Literary History 45, no. 2 (2014): 217, 199. I discuss the relationship of the humanities to digital media extensively in my book Medien und Bildung [Media and literacy] (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2018). For my view on digital humanities, see Roberto Simanowski and Luciana Gattass, “Debates in the Digital Humanities Formerly Known as Humanities Computing,” electronic book review, March 5, 2017, http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/debated.

  4.   On “transformation of the human,” see Michael Hagner and Erich Hörl, eds., Die Transformation des Humanen. Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Kybernetik [The transformation of the human: Contributions to a cultural history of cybernetics] (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2008); on “nonconscious cognition” and “distributed cognition environments,” see Hayles, “Cognition Everywhere,” and N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

  5.   All quotations are from Erich Hörl’s lecture at MECS (Institute for Advanced Study on Media Cultures of computer Simulation), Lüneburg, July 2014: “Milieus der Modulation. Zur Aktualität von Gilbert Simondons spekulativer Ökologie” [Milieus of moderation: On the contemporary relevance of Gilbert Simondon’s speculative ecology], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GehfVn-MYJM, approx. 20 min. On the “fourth insult,” see Hagner and Hörl, eds., Die Transformation des Humanen, 10. The equivalency posed there between the cybernetic “insult” and Foucault’s “death of man” ignores the psychological difference between the insight that man is not the sovereign source of his thoughts (or the center of the universe) and the sovereign transfer of thinking to other actants. The latter is an insult, a “technological insult” (beyond the trivial insult of the power differential among humans, for example, between programmers, controllers, and objects of a surveillance technology) only as an accident, if a person underestimates the independent dynamics of a system that has been set in motion and loses control over the “spirits” he has summoned, as Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice did. Johannes Rohbeck, Technologische Urteilskraft—Zu einer Ethik technischen Handelns [Technological judgment: Toward an ethics of technical action] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993), 10. The following quotations on the “correction” of “cybernetics” are drawn from Hörl’s lecture.

  6.   On the quotation from Nancy, see chap. 3, note 74. The opposing perspectives that are proposed in German-language media studies on the subject of the current go-for-broke game can be distilled down to the dispute between Erich Hörl and Dieter Mersch, who negotiated their understandings of the technological present (on cybernetics, ecologies, and the rule of mathematics) in a conversation held on November 6, 2014, at the Berlin Akademie der Künste: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0Z3GjVXcFo. For Mersch, who, contradicting Hörl, traces the technological condition back to its mathematical foundation, the cybernetic disempowerment of humanity by no means contains a sly dialectics but only an “ ‘antihumanistic’ impulse” accompanied by a renunciation of sovereignty, of humankind’s hegemonic power over the objects of this world, and thus also over itself. As Mersch emphasizes, “We have, then, to do with alternative theaters of the social, in which technology occupies a place that is equal to, or enjoys equal rights alongside other cultural formations, without being dominated by goals or rules of engagement, which alone would seem to be adequate for ‘orders’ given by humankind.” Dieter Mersch, Ordo ab chao—Order from Noise (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2013), 17, 18. Precisely this loss of human dominance over humanity and the alternative regulation of the social are, it should be noted, the promise that would be to be realized from the opposite perspective on the new go-for-broke game’s technological constellation. A media studies expert with a literary background, it should be noted, is already made unhappy by taking the game of chance as a point of departure and naturally hopes that the solution of the problem (Nancy’s problem and all the problems of humankind) will be found in the model of the narrative, rather than in mathematics.

  7.   On right and left cybernetics, see Mersch, Ordo ab chao, 77–85.

EPILOGUE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

  1.   Mat Honan, “Why Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg Went All In on Live Video,” BuzzFeed, April 6, 2016, http://www.buzzfeed.com/mathonan/why-facebook-and-mark-zuckerberg-went-all-in-on-live-video?utm_term=.vh7baAPxeN#.cwkDwVNX37.

  2.   http://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10154544292806634.