The Absent ‘Thing’ and the Value of Distance – Social media through an Arendtian lens

Abstract

The discourse around social media has gone through several dramatic twists and turns; from the early techno-optimism that envisioned a brave new borderless Agora accessible to all, to dystopian vistas of a chaotic “post-truth” political landscape of mutual distrust, hatred, and conspiracy theories. I will here attempt to combine Mueller and D’Ambrosio’s notion of “profilicity” with Arendt’s critique of “the social” and suggest that there are some problems specific to how we interact on social media that justifies skepticism regarding the new digital media as an arena for political activism and public debate.

Keywords

• arendt
• social media
• conformism
• profilicity
• public realm
• second-order observation