This essay by Rob Horning introduced to me to Benjamin’s distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis described here in an extract from Martin Jay’s book on Adorno:
In a now celebrated distinction, Benjamin had divided experience into Erfahrung, the integration of events into the memory, of collective and personal traditions, and Erlebnis, the isolation of events from any such meaningful context, communal or individual. Exemplified by the erosion of the storyteller’s ability to weave a coherent tale because of the replacement of narrative by disconnected information in our daily lives, Erfahrung had been steadily supplanted by the meaningless incoherence of Erlebnis in the culturally impoverished world of late capitalism.
The experience of being overwhelmed by the abundance of social platforms clearly generates Erlebnis e.g. the endless succession of engrossing short videos collated into a sequence based on eerily reliable expectations of what will grip you, with no connection between them other than observable patterns of your tastes and the impulse to win the attention of a viewer.
Which makes it extremely interesting how these platforms have also generated extreme trajectories of Erfahrung in the form of conspiracy cultures. The mechanism driving this is baking: “a collective, knowledge-making activity built on the affordances of social media designed to construct specific facts and theories”. Marwick and Partin observe a fascinating parallel between baking and the literacies in fan cultures, with regards to notions like canon.
Do these represent two distinct tendencies on social platforms or is the relationship more intimate than that? Does the generation of Erlebnis lead to a renewed lust for Erfahrung which takes a particularly strange form through the social dynamics which obtain within and across platforms?
Mark Carrigan 