On how God became pocket-sized: digital machination's challenge to active nihilism

Abstract

This thesis examines how digital technology has created an individualized environment of understanding which threatens genuine value creation in an individual and collective. Whereas television, through machination of information mediums in the 1960s, created a hyperreality of understanding at the macro level, society, digital technology operates on the micro level, the individual. The development and use of digital technology, such as social media or online entertainment content, has created an understanding in users which appears to be active nihilism, but is in actuality passive nihilism, and perhaps even creating Digital Last Men.