Balancing the digital world
Social media platforms are a growing part of everyday life, and their presence is as natural as all other things in this world. But, Facebook was created in 2004, Twitter in 2006, and Instagram in 2010. It only takes two decades to find a world without these platforms. What are the implications of this change?
One way to frame the impact can be found in "The Human Condition" by Hannah Arendt, a book written in 1958 that offers valuable frameworks, and especially the concepts of “Action“ and a “Private and Public Realm” are relevant to understand society today.
Action
Action is the activity that happens when free (wo)men come together. Action, in short, unfolds like this: It happens through speech - speech is a way to persuade - agreement is determined by equals.
An example is a discussion among peers, where there is a disagreement, persuasion between different people, and ultimately an agreement. This can be illustrated as three nodes(people) who are interdependent(speech). When one person speaks, it influences the others, who then, in turn, decide what they want to say.
But action is not bounded to one discussion among three people. It is, instead, an interdependent web of relationships between everyone. And the graph is much bigger and more complex.
As in the discussion, when one person speaks, it influences what the other people will say in the discussion. But it also influences what they, in turn, will say to other people after the discussion.
As a result, every time someone speaks it starts a never-ending chain-reaction that propagates through the web because it influences one person that will influence a new one and so on. The web, then, becomes a continuous dynamic of all these chain-reactions.
Digital platforms as the Public realm
The digital platforms have become the new public realm. The platforms offer a place where one can be seen and heard by others in a way that has never been possible before.
The web of relationships, which we discussed earlier, has traditionally been geographically bounded. A web could, for instance, primarily be defined by the borders of a city or a small town, and what was said on one side of the world did not affect the other side very much. As digital platforms have connected people from all around the world, all the webs have been connected together into one unified web. Or, in better fashion:
One Web to rule them all, One Web to find them, One Web to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.
In a discussion, when one person speaks, the others become listeners. If everyone speaks at once, there is no discussion, so there has to be a balance. This balance is zero-sum in nature, where, if one person speaks, it also implies that everyone else will not. In a small discussion, it can be easy to find a good balance, but when there are many participants this becomes a challenging task.
The digital platforms are analogous to a big discussion among everybody. On the one hand, when one person speaks, there is the potential that everyone listens, but on the other hand, we find the implication that no one else is speaking(or being heard). The potential to be amplified has never been greater, but the risk of not being heard is also part of the package.
At the extreme, being completely silenced can be described like this:
"To live an entirely private life means above all to be deprived of things essential to truly human life: to be deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an "objective" relationship with them that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things, to be deprived of the possibility of achieving something more permanent than life itself. .. private man does not appear, and therefore it is as though he did not exist. Whatever he does remains without significance and consequence to others, and what matters to him is without interest to other people."
New private realm
The most intuitive division between the public and private realm is digital versus physical, where everything not happening on the digital platforms can be thought of as the private realm.
The problem with this division is that the line is much more blurry. We use digital platforms to plan our physical lives, and we map our physical lives into digital platforms. For instance, digital platforms can be accessed from almost everywhere in the physical world. So that being alone in one’s own room, which traditionally would have been something very private, can also be the scene into the whole world.
Another way to frame the division can be internal versus external. When one answers the question “Who am I?” the answer can tend towards the internal and own ideas of oneself, or towards the external and what others perceive. This can be related to the realms, where the private realm represents the internal, and the public realm the external.
In this view, the private realm can be thought of as a “dark and hidden side of the public realm” and without it, one “loses the quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense” Using a simple metaphor, if one only lives in the public realm, everything is displayed so that there is no hidden part of the iceberg.
Outro
It is possible, and interesting, to think of the current world in terms of a private and a public realm. They are equally important, and in isolation, they lose much of their meaning. Why appear in the public realm if there is nothing more to display than everyone already knows about you? Why build a deep sense of oneself if no one else will experience it? The answer, and the most important takeaway, is that we need “Both”.