“Respect forms the foundation of the public, or civil, sphere,” says Byung-Chul Han, which is why “when the former weakens, the latter collapses.”

The decline of civil society and a mounting lack of respect are mutually conditioning. Among other things, civil society requires respectfully looking away from what is private. Taking distance is what constitutes the public sphere. Today, however, a complete lack of distance is made public. Let’s call it a matter of stance: Without distance, it is impossible to be in good standing. Understanding also requires a distanced perspective. Across the board, digital communication is abolishing distance and distances. Digital mediality works to the detriment of respect. In contrast, isolating and setting apart—as in the adyton of ancient greek temples [the space closed to the outside]—generates admiration and reverence.¹

Two things derive from this fragment: first, the abolition of distance and, consequently, of respect is not unique to digital media. It is a trend that has been a long time in the making. The previous iteration of the media establishment had already been effective at obliterating distances; in fact, the digital milieu has only elaborated and reinforced the television and the radio’s dwindling respect for privacy. However, the so-called traditional media, although they considerably reduce distances, were media in the strict sense of the term—that is they were a space between two extremes (sender-medium-receiver). Digital media, rather than a medium, are a threshold, a zone of indistinction in which we all are simultaneously senders and receivers. Throughout this chapter we will see how traditional media has been reduced to a threshold that bears all the traits of the terrible place.

On the other hand, Han argues that “when distance proves lacking, the public and the private become confused.” Since the public and the private correspond to the images of the inner and the outer at the social level, this confusion, as we saw through the work of J.G. Ballard, implies an inversion between the inside and the outside that takes place in the figure the celebrity (4.4, 4.5, 4.8, 4.10). In turn, this indistinction of the outer, consensual “reality,” and the inner, individual “subjectivity,” leads to an inevitable confusion between reality and fiction. Ballard’s vision of the outside world as “the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality” (4.7) is an accurate picture of our current media landscape, a locus terriblis that, like any threshold, is neither outside nor inside us.

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1. Han, In the Swarm, 1-2 ↩︎