Communication is one of the most significant forces in building society and shaping cultures. Today we live in the digital age, following the communication revolution that changed the world. Unsurprisingly, it carries with it many moral questions we must face.
The Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han is perhaps one of today’s most widely read contemporary thinkers—or is beginning to be read by many—especially in the English-speaking world after dozens of his works were translated from German. His philosophy critiques our current situation in continuity with the long tradition of social criticism. For this reflection, I chose his book The Transparency Society as the text through which to approach the topic of communication in the digital era.It is a rather short book for its genre. Only 95 pages, more typical of popular nonfiction or even poetry than of philosophy or sociology. But its content is dense, filled with sharp reflections on contemporary society, especially the culture produced by the paradigmatic shift in social communication. We could sum up the text with a few key words: transparency, information, acceleration, positive society, control.
Main Ideas in The Transparency Society
In the epigraph of the book, Han cites Peter Handke:
“I live from what others do not know about me.”
This line aptly summarizes the entire treatise: the central argument is the disappearance of secrecy in the face of advances in modern social communication.
Han writes:
“The positive society avoids every form of the play of negativity, for it hinders communication … the negativity of refusal cannot be economically valorized.”
He describes our world as a positive society where the negative is hidden, because the sensation of positivity—the affirmation we receive from others—is what draws us to social media. Studies show that what keeps users engaged is the platforms’ ability to trigger serotonin release in the body, and the time we spend online translates into profit for Big Tech. Hence the proliferation of the “like” button and the algorithm that learns our tastes to show us more of what we enjoy while the “dislike” button is often hidden or disappearing (as in YouTube’s case).
Han observes:
“In the positive society, in which things—now turned into commodities—must be displayed in order to be, their cultural value disappears in favor of their exhibition value.”
He condemns the violence of exposure: the culture bred by the positive society. Everything must be displayed online, to the point that some will say, “One cannot truly exist without a Facebook or Instagram profile.”Behind this lies the idea of transparency: nothing remains intimate; everything is exposed. Yet transparency does not necessarily mean truth. We present ourselves online, but we can edit our image before displaying it. Thus, the human face is reduced to a façade dissolved into its exhibition value—turned into a commodity, the opposite of Levinas’ “Face of the Other,” which opens onto transcendence. Han therefore claims that transparency opposes transcendence. Moreover, each subject becomes his or her own advertising object.
The Pornographic Society and the Loss of Mystery
This transparency society is marked by an obsession with evidence. Nothing is left in the “black hole” around which desire condenses. Paradoxically, Han argues, the transparency of our digital social space is not an ally of pleasure. He defines pleasure as that which enjoys secrecy, the veil and concealment that heighten delight. Transparency, by contrast, eliminates pleasure because it is incompatible with secrecy.
Han therefore characterizes the transparency society as a “pornographic society” in the sense that everything is exposed and nothing is left to the imagination. Beauty is degraded by unnecessary exhibition:
“The sublime, which [Walter] Benjamin opposes to beautiful appearance, lacks all exhibition value. In fact, exhibition destroys the sublimity of the creature.”
Following Roland Barthes, Han sees here what Barthes saw in photography: the element of studium—belonging to the realm of “liking” rather than “loving.” He goes further:“Today all media images are more or less pornographic. By virtue of their complacency, they lack all punctum, all semiotic intensity. They have nothing that could wound or pierce. They are, at most, the object of a like.”
Acceleration and the Erosion of Ritual
This pornographic society of transparency is further propelled by the acceleration driven by modern media. What is celebrated is hyperactivity, hyper-production, and hyper-communication. To save time and fuel this acceleration, rituals are despised:
“The transparency society eliminates all rituals and ceremonies insofar as these cannot be made operational, for they impede the acceleration of the cycles of information, communication, and production.”
Han laments the loss of the theatrical in favor of the intimate in communication. The theatrical entails distance and thus carries signs and ritual forms, whereas the intimacy he refers to is the kind of exposure that dispenses with the need for meaning:
“The world today is no longer a theater in which actions and feelings are performed and interpreted, but a market in which intimacies are displayed, sold, and consumed.”
This is evident on social media, where the algorithm learns our tastes and feeds them back to us, so that we encounter only ourselves and the like-minded thus creating an echo chamber, a bubble where we see only what we want to see.
The Digital Panopticon and the Masked Society
The rise of information and the acceleration of communication are indispensable to modern life, yet not unambiguously good. Alongside more information and faster communication, appearances abound—“simulacra that no longer represent any being.” The great paradox of the transparency society is that it is also a society of masks.
“The digital wind of communication and information penetrates everything and makes it transparent … Yet the digital network as a medium of transparency is subject to no moral imperative.”
Today Big Tech has become a supranational power with control over our innermost selves yet the danger is that it is subject to no higher authority; even the individuals who run these companies do not have full control over what the digital world dictates.
Following Jeremy Bentham, Han sees in digital communication a new panopticon—but unlike Bentham’s prison panopticon, the digital panopticon functions without any perspectival optics. In Bentham’s model, prisoners were aware of the guard’s gaze and were isolated from one another; in the digital panopticon of the transparency society, we believe we are free and remain intensely connected and communicative with one another. Each becomes the other’s guard. As Han puts it:
“The achievement-subject exploits itself. The exploiter is at the same time the exploited.”
All this brings us to the heart of Han’s argument: modern communication has produced today’s situation—the transparency society—where the secret is despised in favor of the public, while the intimate becomes a commodity in a marketplace where we ourselves are both seller and buyer. A panoptic reality without awareness of itself.
Personal Reflection
All of this, in my view, is very important, and Han is certainly right in many of his arguments. We have already witnessed the worst that our hyper-connected world can produce: fake news, pro-CCP vloggers, the rise of ISIS and other terrorist groups, and so forth.
Artificial intelligence’s capacity to learn our preferences is convenient for finding what we want to see or buy, yet it also risks reinforcing our most extreme opinions—turning them into dogmatic “truths” for many.
However, what Han seems to overlook is that today’s digital social communication does not only generate these negatives; it has also produced many positive developments that our ancestors could only dream of.
Social communication itself is neutral. It is a human tool, like a pencil or a sword: both can serve to work and to build life, but both can also wound or kill. This is what perhaps any critical philosopher of today’s society, like Han, may forget—not that they reject it, but that by focusing so much on the negative, the positive remains in the shadows.
Thus, I find Han’s argument valid, truly thought-provoking, and deserving of our reflection on our present reality—yet it lacks the balance of recognizing what is good.
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