Social Media and the Hermeneutics of Participation in the Digital Culture

Abstract

The pervasive social media and the mobile technologies today, with their features of connectivity, interactivity, participatory, and user-productivity, have provided us new ways of relating with one another and with the world. The participatory culture that social media have helped form stirs up new forms of political participation, economic production, and sociality. However, this also brings about fresh anxieties, tension, and conflict of interests. Critics doubt the optimism and ask whether the goods that social media brings in fact just screen the real negative effects upon our individual character and the social order; thus, their call for a critical theory of the digital culture. In that light, this paper studies the structure of participation in and with social media as part of the hermeneutic phenomenon. Concerned with the status of human understanding, philosophical hermeneutics presents a concept of participation that is integral in the notion of understanding as conversation. The paper also highlights the contrasts between the manipulative tendency of the technical reason and the involved and deliberative character of human practice (praxis). Philosophical hermeneutics, then, as practical philosophy, combats the notion of understanding and participation that is dominated by instrumental and techOscar R. Diamante University of Santo Tomas