-OpEd-
BUENOS AIRES — The digital universe is upending the very nature of interpersonal communication. In this omnipresent world, the other is stripped of their deepest otherness. Here, the other has stopped being a presence that is ethically challenging to me; it has become instead a ghostly vision that appears and disappears, at my convenience, on various screens.
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Ultimately technology is transforming, at an exponential rate, the fruitful subjectivity of relationships into a spectrum of superficial connections between parties that view each other as disposable objects. This is a world that gives free rein to the controlling urges lurking in every individual.
Thus, digital communication eliminates negativity, an intrinsic part of any encounter with another being. This is best exemplified by video calls in which the other’s gaze is always displaced, no matter how much we shift our heads and change our posture. It seems we can never look into the other’s eyes on a screen. Yet this technical impossibility reflects a deeper ontological impossibility: that of truly encountering otherness in a digital space designed solely for absolute transparency.
Opaque algorithms
Social media has inevitably perfected this “phantasmagoric” process of turning others into ghosts. Their presence is reduced to a set of reactions, likes and comments, though always in the strict parameters pre-set by the platform.
In this way, there is no encounter but only confirmation, and no dialogue but rather multiplied monologues. All this is because the society of transparency removes opaqueness, which is where the different — the truly “other” — could take refuge and find shelter.
A society hooked on performance and returns, desperately needs this phantasmagoria.
In online dating, the new form of connection based on absolute availability, the other becomes, in fact and literally, a ghost to be summoned or vanished with a simple, trivial swipe of the finger.
Seduction, which traditionally always implied the tension of a close encounter with otherness, is now reduced to a dismal compatibility algorithm devoid of all mystery. This means desire is no longer directed toward a specific and existing other, but toward a technologically optimized profile with a list of desirable characteristics that never fully coincide with the other’s reality.
Zones of unavailability
Yet, despite the painful nature of all this, a society hooked on performance and returns, desperately needs this phantasmagoria. Why? Because a real other, with their unyielding hiddenness, demands and vulnerabilities, would be an obstacle to this need for constant production.
Given this scenario, a break with the logic of permanent availability might be all the more necessary, to recover the other in their radical otherness. It is not about renouncing technology and its multiple possibilities, but introducing within it spaces of negativity, and zones of unavailability, where the other can appear as a presence that challenges me, or a face demanding some form of response as the thinker Emmanuel Levinas observes.
In this way, technological developments could be designed not to remove, but preserve, distance with the other. Instead of making the other perfectly transparent, they could respect their constitutive opaqueness. Because only in this tension between closeness and distance, between availability and resistance, can the other stop being a mere shadow, and once more become a shining presence.
