Continuing on with profound changes that digital media brings to our civilization, Han introduces the notion of demediatization. “The digital medium is a medium of presence. Its temporality is the immediate present.” Digital media can come from anywhere: today anyone can produce it just as consume it. This was not true in the world of newsprint, radio or TV. “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.” A “priestly class” is anyone who has an expertise in a field and has a public profile: journalists and politicians are two examples. In other words, social media is designed to allow everyone to give their opinion without the representation of the middleman: “Representation is giving way to presence, or copresentation.”
This has an effect in politics. There are parties and individuals advocating for elected representatives to vote as e-polls of their constituents demand – issue by issue. Digital media makes this very easily possible. Often this is portrayed as an advancement of democracy – and in the sense of direct democracy of any issue, it is. However, what is lost is the representation by elected officials who study issues and their implications as part of their job. “Often, representation serves as a filter….By operating selectively, it enables the exclusive….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 [strategic communication], is disappearing.”
Transparency, which is often considered a good thing in politics, can sometimes be taken too far; it can become destructive to politics. “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…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.” Transparency is good when it calls for more participation by having open processes and when it calls for a freedom of information, however today the demand for transparency “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 most regular face to face interactions most communication is physical non-verbal: body language and intonations. “The digital medium strips communication of tactility and physicality.” However, “[t]he deficiency and convenience of digital communication are leading us to avoid direct contact with real people. Increasingly, we avoid contact with the real, in general. Digital media are making our real counterparts fade more and more. Accordingly, digital communication is becoming more and more bodiless and faceless. Digitality radically restructures the Lacanian triad of real, imaginary, and symbolic. It dismantles the real and totalizes the imaginary.” This, therefore, offers us one more avenue to avoid or tame the real so it does not traumatize us. “As a digital reflector, the smartphone serves to renew the mirror stage after infancy. It opens up a narcissistic space—a sphere of the imaginary—in which one encloses oneself. The other does not speak via the smartphone.”
Apps, the smartphone, and things like iPads “protect” you from doing anything that could hurt your devices – they are very intuitive because they are simple, fool proof, and are very limited. Thus expectations are low and any one can “get it”. They are all very positive, short term, and short sighted – because they are in effect preventing the Other from entering your perception. “The smartphone like the digital in general, undermines our ability to encounter and work with negativity.”
The gaze is something else missing in the modern world. Unlike a face to face, when we Skype we cannot be mutually looking at the eyes of our conversation partner. The modern gaze of the other has become voyeuristic and anonymous. Where in the past the gaze was almost always two sided or when both ways, now it is one sided: we watch without being watched. “Camera optics alone are not responsible for the fact that we are staring past each other. Rather, it points to a fundamentally missing gaze—that is, to the missing other. The digital medium is taking us farther and farther away from the other.” It is taking us farther and farther from the possibility of negativity, the unexpected, the dangerous, or in short that which makes life worth living.
“The gaze also represents a central category in Jacques Lacan’s theory of the image: ‘certainly, in the picture, something of the gaze is always manifested.’ The gaze is the other within the image: it is what looks at, captivates, and fascinates me….But now, the mounting narcissification of perception is making the gaze, the other, disappear.”
Next, Han echoes Susan Sontag’s point that pictures, and especially incessant picture taking, represent a human need for stability. Pictures and images in today’s digital society are an attempt to lock down reality. Additionally, with all the power to photoshop, copy, and edit digital images we make images into consumable commodities. This works first against the need for stability of reality but is helpful for overcoming the real by adjusting reality to better fit our imaginary. “Images that have been made consumable have been tamed. Such domestication makes their inherent madness—the displacement that defines them—disappear. In this fashion, they are stripped of their truth….Today, we do not enlist religion so much as technologies of optimization in order to confront the reality of bodies, time, death, and so on. The digital medium is defactifying the world.”
In past descriptions of the future, work has been nearly eliminated due to machines that do everything for us and replaced with leisure and play. Today work and play have been inverted. The part that past futurists got right was the move away from manual labour and from the past’s perspective we virtually only play now. We can now spend our lives pointing and clicking with our finger and then things just seem to happen. We work with our fingers not our hands. This, however, is not work or action in the traditional sense. “The ‘handless, fingering human being’ of the future—Homo digitalis—will not be a man of action. ‘Manual atrophy’ amounts to the inability to handle anything at all. Handling things and working with them presuppose something that resists. Action must overcome resistance inasmuch as it pits what is new or other against the standing order. Action is animated by negation: the pro it sets forth is also a contra. But now, our society of positivity is steering clear of everything that offers resistance. In so doing, it is doing away with actions. In their stead, only varying conditions of the same prevail.” Please note the double meanings of several words in the last quote.
Today’s digital work and action is closer to play because there is no resistance, the “action” happens within the limits of the system—so political action is a mere political play. However, the tasks that need to be done now need to be done all the time. In the past the big machines could not be moved and so work and leisure were separate. Today, we take our digital work devices everywhere with us. So work is done anytime and leisure time has disappeared. Digital technology induces a compulsion such that even in our so called leisure time we need to appear busy moving our fingers on the screen.