In Person Event: Kierkegaard's Critique of Mass Media and Mass Society

Note this is an in person event. An online event is linked here. A prominent concern of present-day discourse among almost all groups and ideological persuasions is the corrupting effects of certain types of mass media. Thus one hears from various sides of the ideological landscape about how how Instagram and Facebook empty social presentation of meaning, how tiktok is rotting children's brains and attention spans, how the mainstream media propagandizes for the establishment, how mass distributed pornography leads to emotional dysfunction, reddit breeds mass murderers, and how anonymous users on Twitter/ X are spreading misinformation that leads to harmful social consequences. In recent years, we have heard about how LLM-style AIs have driven people to suicide or to insanity, and will lead to the death of academic standards. While one may have sympathy with some and perhaps nearly all these claims, it is equally difficult to determine in this welter of voices what is a serious concern and what is hysteria. In such a situation, it might be a good idea to step back and consider the very idea of corruption and in what sense media can be conceived as corrupting.
In this connection, one often assumes that such problems are unique to our age and that we live in completely unprecedented times. But in fact, the development of mass, reproducible media has been going on for a long time, and many of the central concerns that animate us today can be found in their characteristic incipient forms in earlier times. And because we often can get a clearer view of things if we can approach a window onto their evolution, we might do well to consider what great thinkers in the past have grappled with these issues at the point of their inception.
Perhaps one of the earliest and most sophisticated sustained critiques of mass media can be found in the writings of that remarkable Danish thinker, Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard's preoccupation with this problem emerged both out of bitter personal experience and out of a fundamental interest in the spiritual confusions and aspirations of 19th-century society.
On a personal level, Kierkegaard had the bad fortune to become an enemy of a local prestigious paper in Copenhagen, the Corsair, and the feud between him and this paper had permanent effects on his reputation and intellectual life. Intellectually its main effect was to focus his attention on the role of a growing cowardice and conformity that was emerging in middle class 19th century society And to identify one of its main causes in the degree to which society had become atomized and at the same time socialized by means of emerging forms of mass media that gave the illusion of community without any sense of personal responsibility. These forms of mass media give birth to the modern concept of the public, an anonymous mass of people, all afraid of each other's judgment, but also lacking any personal relationship or responsibility to each other.
Kierkegaard saw in this phenomenon of people identifying first and foremost with this imaginary social whole, called the public, a grisly wearing down of individual conscience, and a slow hollowing out of spiritual and intellectual life. Participating only in the anonymous mass of the public, individuals are concerned to conform to the dictates of this imaginary group. But since this group has no structure and no real character, these dictates change from day to day and lack any quality of consistency or inwardness. The result was an education in irresponsibility and a lack of integrity.
Much of our own anxieties about parasocial relationships, misinformation, credibility crisises, demoralization, and rabbit holes, find a mirror in these speculations, but because Kierkegaard was also among the most spiritual of Western philosophers, these anxieties are filtered into a fascinating vision of human nature and human destiny, of the human being as a creature whose destiny is to become an individual and who is caught in a net of a historical dialectic that one must throw off to become oneself.
In this Meetup, we will explore Kierkegaard's vision of the corrupting effects of mass media and mass society. Our two texts will be Kierkegaard's short essay, the Crowd is Untruth, and his longer analysis of the sicknesses of the age, taken from his book, The Two Ages.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LOkcqUgR0SWQJtmY7vFKGWovKm4JSNVs/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Wk3QQMIpO6zFEMMDbyoNRAO2vr2lHl_G/view?usp=sharing