{"id":36417,"date":"2026-10-08T08:44:25","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T06:44:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/educationalevidence.com\/?p=36417"},"modified":"2026-10-08T08:44:47","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T06:44:47","slug":"the-present-in-the-age-of-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/educationalevidence.com\/en\/the-present-in-the-age-of-social-media\/","title":{"rendered":"The present in the age of social media"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gerd Altmann<\/a> –\u00a0Pixabay <\/a>\/\u00a0https:\/\/pixabay.com\/es\/users\/geralt-9301\/<\/p>\n

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License Creative Commons <\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Alfonso A. Gracia G\u00f3mez<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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I confess that for some time now I have felt a terrible reluctance to talk about matters considered to be \u201ccurrent affairs\u201d<\/strong>. We live in a kind of publishing frenzy in which everyone feels called upon \u2013 and even obliged \u2013 to express an opinion on topics<\/em> very different from those traditionally discussed. The fear of death, the transience of life, the spirituality of love, and so on have given way to a series of topics of discussion which, unlike those of old, no longer possess a transcendent quality, a meaning that seeks to go \u201cbeyond\u201d their present-day expression and might reach into the intimate realm of what is specifically and distinctively human.<\/p>\n

On the contrary, partly because of the compulsive<\/em> character that social media<\/strong> impose on our relationship with the news, the news seems to be imbued with a kind of \u201cchronicler\u2019s spirit\u201d<\/strong> which, in my view, has stripped much of the lustre from everything that is said, discussed and commented upon. There is no shortage of those who, in this situation, proclaim that we are living in a kind of \u201cgolden age of journalism\u201d; yet we know that, by its own inertia, journalism can do nothing but flatten what is diverse and level out what is different, in pursuit of a version of events supposedly capable of concealing and overriding the facts themselves (Gracia G\u00f3mez, 2024).<\/p>\n

The obsession with the present<\/strong> thus impoverishes the present itself, turning it into its own point of reference and thereby concealing its possible external references, \u201ctranscendent\u201d in the broadest sense, inherited from an entire tradition that we dismiss with proud haste (precisely because we no longer consider its contributions sufficiently \u201ccurrent\u201d). The result is an ontological condition that even has medical, more specifically neurological, implications. I do not know which group of researchers has recently \u201cdemonstrated\u201d that the memory<\/em> of most of the population has been greatly impoverished since the Covid crisis of 2020. Why? Because, owing to the rise of social media as the dominant form of communication, most of us live in a kind of continuous<\/strong> present<\/strong> in which we almost instantly forget what we say as well as what we read or hear. This had already been theorised under the name of the \u201cGoogle effect\u201d: that is, the tendency to forget anything that can be found again easily and quickly on the Internet (Sparrow et al.<\/em>, 2011).<\/p>\n

Although this may seem paradoxical (or perhaps precisely because of that), this is a situation once cherished by more than one philosopher in the post-structuralist tradition. I am thinking of Gilles Deleuze<\/strong>\u2019s The<\/em> Logic of Sense<\/em>, in which he contrasts two radically different ways of understanding temporality: Chronos and Aion<\/strong>. The first refers to the traditional or, for that very reason, \u201cchronological\u201d conception: the temporality of past-present-future, in which the present \u2013 as the author argues \u2013 exists only derivatively in relation to that which transcends it, namely its meaning. By contrast, the second conception of time, which Deleuze identifies with the Hellenistic god Aion (or Aeon, the god of eternity), reverses the transcendent subordination characteristic of chronological time and foregrounds the continuity of the present<\/em>, understood as the manifestation of a flow that has neither beginning nor end:<\/p>\n

This present of the Aion representing the instant is not at all like the vast and deep present of Chronos: it is the present without thickness, the present of the actor, dancer, or mime- the pure perverse “moment. ” It is the present of the pure operation, not of the incorporation. It is not the present of subversion or actualization, but that of the counter-actualization, which keeps the former from overturning the latter, and the latter from being confused with the former, and which comes to duplicate the lining (redoubler la doublure). (Deleuze, 2005: 168).<\/p>\n

This reciprocal relationship between eternity and the instant<\/strong> represents the clearest influence of Nietzsche<\/strong>\u2019s philosophy on Deleuze\u2019s work. Nietzsche, however, was grounded in a physical-ontological conception of Heraclitean descent. In it, struggle or opposition, and even contradiction, function as a space opening onto a being that seems to exist only at the very edge of its finitude: \u201cThese paths contradict each other; they collide head-on: \u2013and here, at this gateway, is where they meet. The name of the gateway is written above: \u2018Instant\u2019\u201d (Nietzsche, 2009: 230). Deleuze, by contrast, turns this instant into a \u201cbecoming\u201d that is no longer conflictual but \u201cpure\u201d, and thus into a kind of haven of peace, capable of overcoming contradictions not through a Hegelian Aufhebung<\/em>, but through the very inertia of the logical play of paradoxes, which, in the case of temporality, reveals the impossibility of grasping that in which one de facto<\/em> finds oneself; in other words, the continuous present that is the Deleuzian Aion \u201cevades the present\u201d, insofar as it is not \u201cwhat is\u201d, not a Parmenidean present, but precisely that which \u201cis not\u201d: its possibilities, its options for being, which are revealed only in the specific \u201cnon-being\u201d of the present, that is, in its past and future:<\/p>\n

[\u2026] This is the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present. Insofar as it eludes the present, becoming does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before<\/p>\n

and after, or of past and future. It pertains to the essence of becoming to move and to pull in both directions at once: Alice does not grow without shrinking, and vice versa. Good sense affirms that in all things there is a determinable sense or direction (sens); but paradox is the affirmation of both senses or directions at the same time. \u00a0(Deleuze, 2005: 1).<\/p>\n

This is why, in the Deleuzian formulation, Chronos is identified with the opposite extreme: with that \u201cdeterminable sense\u201d which apparently \u201cdevours\u201d its children (the \u201cevents\u201d, that \u201cpure becoming\u201d) for the sake of a vicarious existence and, therefore, an apparently inauthentic, even illegitimate one. In this context, everything that is current would be condemned to being understood as mere \u201cact<\/em>ualisation\u201d, that is, as the act of bringing the eternal into our everyday lives<\/strong>, incorporating into our day-to-day existence that which belongs to every human being \u2013 indeed, to every way of being in the world, simply by virtue of existing \u2013 beyond and at the expense of the concrete circumstances that determine this or that existence.<\/p>\n

To put it simply, Chronos consists, for Deleuze, in the way we actually tend to understand all those events that have some kind of meaning for us, that is, which fit within some kind of historical framework: they are subordinated to the reference point that gives them meaning; hence we tend to approve of the use of the guillotine by the French revolutionaries while demonising the Stalinist gulags<\/em>. This explains why Deleuze referred above to the chrono-logical as \u201cvast and profound\u201d, because it in fact consists of a kind of \u201cdensity\u201d or \u201cthickness\u201d, like that of a fabric, whose surface is only apparently flat, only apparently superficial. Conditioned by a meaning that transcends it, the chronological present necessarily refers back to a past, but here there is no longer any room for paradox, let alone contradiction: for this is a past that is memory in action, which \u201ccondemns\u201d the future as an uncertain possibility, while at the same time limiting it through what-has-already-been. The current and the possible are thus interrelated according to the rules Aristotle<\/strong> established to explain motion in his Metaf\u00edsica<\/em>:<\/p>\n

[\u2026] matter is \u201cpotentiality\u201d, that is, potentiality in the sense that it is capable of taking on or receiving form [\u2026]. Form, by contrast, is configured as the act or actualisation of that capacity. The compound or combination of matter and form, considered as such, will preferably be act; but if considered in terms of its form, it will simply be act or entelechy<\/em>, while if contemplated in its materiality it will instead be a mixture of potentiality and act. Consequently, all things that possess matter always possess, insofar as they are such, a greater or lesser degree of potentiality (Reale, 1992: 59\u201360).<\/p>\n

By contrast, the pure present that is the Deleuzian Aion translates into a compulsive drive that cannot break free from what circumstances label \u201ccurrent\u201d. And in practice this has dramatic consequences, some of them contrary to what Deleuze might have expected: for in his conception, human beings, as the subjects of communication and desire that we are, are reduced to \u201cwhat happens\u201d in a sense that is far removed from the \u201copening of possibilities\u201d that the concept of \u201cbecoming\u201d was intended to capture. In the actuality of what happens, any possible transcendence capable of giving it meaning disappears, and with it our memory and even subjectivity itself become \u201ceclipsed\u201d by the veil of an irresolvable suspicion and, consequently, by a question that cannot be \u201cactualised\u201d.<\/p>\n

Read carefully: it is no longer the case that, as Deleuze intended, past and future overlap in this concept of becoming understood as a continuous present. Quite differently, the continuous present of social media places us in a pure Aion devoid of density, in which our stories appear, at most, as failed eruptions or collapses: \u201credoubler la doublure\u201d, as Deleuze puts it, without ever forming any kind of narrative. Images overlap, replace and exchange one another\u2026 without ever forming a story or, above all, even aspiring to be reflected within a properly extra-temporal framework of meaning (insofar as it is transcendent). In short, what is missing is what Ray Bradbury<\/strong>, in his sadly \u201ccurrent\u201d Fahrenheit 451<\/em>, called \u201ctexture\u201d:<\/p>\n

Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail [\u2026] (Bradbury, 2006: 81).<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is the greatest paradox into which our present has fallen, alongside and probably despite Deleuze\u2019s theoretical claims: in pure Aion, one can speak only of a rigidly Parmenidean \u201cwhat is\u201d, which ends up taking away the space belonging both to \u201cwhat has been\u201d and to \u201cwhat is wanted\u201d. We have thus lost our taste for the \u201ctexture\u201d<\/strong> that, according to Bradbury, is characteristic of the literary, absorbed by the beguiling frenzy of social media (Gracia G\u00f3mez, 2022), which \u201credeems\u201d us from the meaning and guilt, as Nietzsche might have put it, concomitant with the human longing for transcendence.<\/p>\n

However, this \u201credemption of the present\u201d comes at a price: being trapped in a mere abstract continuity<\/strong> which, as Deleuze proposed, is pure potentiality and therefore pure Aristotelian d\u00fdnamis<\/em>, which ultimately amounts to saying that it lacks any en\u00e9rgeia<\/em> (act), since it has forbidden itself any kind of actualisation on the grounds that it is limiting and thus reproduces itself in a tedious flow that is timeless (anachronistic) as well as sterile and eternally self-mimetic, like a true digital aut\u00f3maton<\/em> in which the compulsive takes hold of the subject until complete exhaustion. \u201cIt is not the present of subversion\u201d, Deleuze said (supra<\/em>). That is what \u201ccurrent affairs\u201d have become for us: a sterile desert of indifference in which \u201creactions\u201d compulsively feed on one another without ever producing any kind of meaning, purpose or space for subjectivity, reflection or thought.<\/p>\n

\n
Bibliography:<\/strong><\/h6>\n

Bradbury, Ray (2006): Fahrenheit 451<\/em>. Almer\u00eda: Ediciones Perdidas.<\/p>\n

Gracia G\u00f3mez, Alfonso A. (2022): \u201cPosverdad y propaganda en Fahrenheit 451 de Ray Bradbury: sobre la constituci\u00f3n \u2018informativa\u2019 de un sujeto manipulable\u201d, Badebec<\/em>, vol. 1, no. 22, 1\u201321. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.35305\/b.v11i22.537.<\/p>\n

Gracia G\u00f3mez, Alfonso A. (2024): \u201cInformaci\u00f3n para moldear la mente de las masas: el monismo propagand\u00edstico de Edward L. Bernays\u201d, Agora<\/em>, vol. 43, no. 1, 1\u201317. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.15304\/ag.43.1.8790.<\/p>\n

Deleuze, Gilles (2005): L\u00f3gica del sentido<\/em>, Barcelona: Paid\u00f3s.<\/p>\n

Nietzsche, Friedrich (2009): As\u00ed habl\u00f3 Zaratustra<\/em>, Madrid: Alianza.<\/p>\n

Reale, Giovanni (1992): Introducci\u00f3n a Arist\u00f3teles<\/em>, Barcelona: Herder.<\/p>\n

Sparrow, Betsy et al.<\/em> (2011): \u201cGoogle Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips\u201d, Science<\/em>, Vol. 333, Issue 6043, pp. 776\u2013778.<\/p>\n

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Source:\u00a0educational EVIDENCE<\/strong><\/p>\n

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