The digital medium is a medium of presence. Its temporality is the immediate present. Digital communication is distinguished by the fact that information is produced, transmitted, and received without intermediaries. More and more, interfaces are being eliminated. Mediation and representation are viewed as a lack of transparency and inefficiency—as temporal and informational congestion.
Radio, a classic mass medium that works electronically, admits only unilateral communication. Its amphitheatrical structure blocks interaction. Its radioactive emissions have no back radiation, as it were. They emanate in one direction alone. Those who receive its message are condemned to passivity. In contrast, the Internet demonstrates a wholly different topology. It is unlike the amphitheater, which has a center of emission representing an institution of power.
Today, we are no longer just receivers and consumers of information; we generate and broadcast it. No longer content to consume information passively, we wish to produce and communicate it ourselves—actively. We are consumers and producers in one. This double role is increasing the quantity of information on an enormous scale. The digital medium does not simply provide windows for passive watching. It also offers doors through which we relay the information that we generate. Windows on a computer are windows with doors; they communicate with other windows without intermediary spaces or authorities. Digital windows open not onto a public space but onto other windows. This sets digital media apart from mass media such as radio or television. In fact, media such as blogs, Twitter, and Facebook demediate communication. Today’s society of opinion and information is based on such demediatized communication. Everyone is producing and transmitting information. Because of the demediatization of communication, journalists—elite “opinion makers,” indeed, the erstwhile priests of opinion—now seem increasingly anachronistic and superfluous. The digital medium is in the course of abolishing all priestly classes. General demediatization is putting an end to the era of representation. Instead, everyone wants to be present personally and directly—to present his or her opinion without a middleman. Representation is giving way to presence, or copresentation.
The mounting pressure for demediatization is affecting politics, too. This spells trouble for representative democracy. Political representatives no longer serve as transmitters so much as they count as barriers. Accordingly, the pressure for demediatization finds expression as the call for more participation and transparency. Germany’s Pirate Party owed its initial success to this development. The mounting compulsion for presence that the digital medium generates is threatening the very principle of representation in general.
Often, representation serves as a filter. This has altogether salutary effects. By operating selectively, it enables the exclusive. For instance, when publishers offer discerning titles, they promote cultural and intellectual refinement. They cultivate language. Journalists may even risk their lives to conduct a thorough investigation and produce a qualified report. In contrast, demediatization entails massification in many domains. Language and culture flatten out and become vulgar. In an interview, the bestselling author Bella Andre observes that she has no trouble cranking out books; nor does she need to convince an agent first: “I can write the exact book my readers want. I am my readership.”1 There is no substantial difference between “I am my readership” and “I am my votership.” But “I am my votership” heralds the end of the politician in the strong sense—that is, politicians who insist on a standpoint and, instead of walking in line with constituents, walk ahead of them with a vision. The future, as the time of the political, is disappearing.
As strategic action, politics demands power of information—sovereignty over its production and distribution. Accordingly, it cannot do without closed spaces where information is held back on purpose. The political—in other words, strategic communication—calls for confidentiality. If everything is made public at once, politics necessarily grows short of breath and becomes short-term; issues thin out into idle talk. Total transparency imposes a temporality on political communication that makes slow, long-term planning impossible. It becomes impossible to let things ripen. The future is not the temporality of transparency. Transparency is ruled by presence and the present tense.
Under the dictate of transparency, dissonant opinions or unusual ideas are not voiced in the first place. Hardly anything is ventured. The imperative of transparency produces a strong compulsion to conform. Like constant video surveillance, it gives rise to the feeling of being watched. Therein lies its panoptic effect. Ultimately, it comes to a Gleichschaltung of communication, the repetition of the same:
Constant media observation has made it impossible for us [politicians] ever to discuss provocative or unpopular topics and positions openly in a confidential setting. You always have to count on somebody passing it on to the press.2
The author Dirk von Gehlen, author of Eine neue Version ist verfügbar (New Version Available), claims to be making writing itself transparent. Yet what would wholly transparent writing really mean? For Peter Handke, writing is a lonesome expedition. It sets out for the unknown, where no one has gone before. In this, it is like taking action [Handeln] or thinking, in the strong sense of the word. Thought, for Heidegger, means setting out alone, off the beaten track. The “beat of … [the] wing” of Eros touches him “every time” he “take[s] a substantial step and venture[s] onto untrodden paths.”3 In fact, the call to make writing transparent amounts to abolishing it. Writing is an exclusive activity. In contrast, collective and transparent writing is merely additive; it has no capacity to bring forth the wholly other—the singular. Transparent writing simply brings information together. The way of the digital is addition. The demand for transparency is reaching far beyond a call for participation or freedom of information. It heralds a paradigm shift. The demand for transparency represents a normative claim insofar as it declares what is and has to be. It defines Being in a new manner.
In an interview, Michel Butor recently remarked that literature is facing an intellectual crisis, too: “We’re not just living in an economic crisis. We’re also living in a literary crisis. European literature is threatened. What we’re now experiencing in Europe is a crisis of the spirit.”4 When asked how to recognize the crisis, he replied: “For the last ten or twenty years, almost nothing has been happening in literature. There’s a tide of publications but an intellectual standstill. The reason is a crisis of communication. The new means of communication are remarkable, but they cause tremendous noise.” The medium of thinking is quiet. Clearly, digital communication is destroying quiet and calm. Addition—which generates communicative noise—does not follow the way of spirit.