Comprehensive knowledge or a return to obscurantism? The role of privacy in digital communication

Abstract

This paper proposes a reflection on the consequences that a desire for comprehensive information brings to the imagination through the digitalization of social communication. The interactive potential of social networks would create a virtual fragmentation of power and subvert secularly established order. The democratic ideal of transparency would find an ally in the technical facility of access to data banks in a way to make the right to public information more concrete. In a world wherein shadows appear to have been eliminated, our critical attention is called upon to examine issues on imaginary, mystery and privacy in the face to the circulation of information in digital communications during the Brazilian presidential elections in 2018. To do so, we start from the heuristics affiliated to the General Theory of Imaginary (DURAND) and use the philosophical methodology (FOLSCHEID & WUNENBURGER), seeking the paradoxes of the problem, working with the opposition between the doctrines and exploring the different senses within the same notion. It is concluded that the communication practices in the context of the Brazilian elections in 2018 present traces of myth survival at the expense of a degenerative process in which historical characteristics such as the rupture with duration, totemism and millennialism are transposed to historical time. Interpersonal communication contradicts the alleged illumination of the universal availability of information on the internet, constituting protective shadow zones in which ideas that would normally suffer immediate opposition grow and are strengthened before they are institutionalized.