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Community without community in digital culture

This book is an attempt to analyse one of the core beliefs of our ‘digital culture’, that digital networks encourage greater connectivity, collaboration, communication, community and participation. This can be seen in the discourse surrounding Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, peer-to-peer networks or open source software practices, or about related phenomena such as ‘relational aesthetics’. The book suggests that such phenomena suggest an urgent nostalgia for a sense of community that we believe we have lost. Against the prevailing presumptions that new technologies involve greater contact, relationality and community, Community without Community in Digital Culture proposes that they exemplify the gap inherent in touch, the ‘inconceivable, small, “infinitesimal difference”’ that separates us from each other in time and space. In this, such technologies are part of the history of the death of God, the loss of an overarching metaphysical framework which would bind us together in some form of relation or communion. Far from producing new kinds of community and relationality, these technologies effect non-relations, and non-communities, community without community. To look at these issues the book engages with the work of thinkers such as Aristotle, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Catherine Malabou, and Quentin Meillassoux, as well as artists such as On Kawara, JODI and others involved in new media art. Thus the book is a contribution to the debate about the nature and meaning of community in our digital age.