Is Communication Still Possible Amid the Reign of “Incommunication”?

Abstract

The article analyzes the possibility of an anthropology of communication by looking at the categories of technique, social networks, hyper-connection, emptiness and isolation. In doing so, the authors seek to address the question of communication as expressed in contemporary man’s understanding of himself and his connection to the world. Undoubtedly, the technique indicates man’s place in society, the artifact of artifacts that shapes, in the external world, the multi-faceted knowledge of the mind, accompanied always by communication as possibility. Therefore, it serves the disposition, the connection between elements and the design of a congruent system of symbols that turns the world into one without a center. Now, it is an immense network of isolated individuals, of fractured messages within an uprooted society where there is a danger of becoming lost in the abundance of data circulating through the network or being eliminated in its virtual trash. We communicate only with short computer messages, as opposed to talking directly to one other. Here, the hermeneutic circumlocution of understanding is suppressed by the requirement of brevity. There is no time for that; in other words, no time for understanding in and of itself.