Digital Media: Sign Production and the Turn of Experience

I. The Flooding of Signs and the Transfer of Meaning and Value

(i) Thing · Medium · Sign · Value

McLuhan said that the medium is the extension of the body, that the medium is the message. In fact, this still underestimates the role of the medium. The medium is the carrier of the sign; its change at the same time changes the structure of the sign and the mode of the sign, changes the relation-mode between human and world, and thereby changes the human world and the human being's own mode of existence and structure of experience. The birth of language is an important mark of the birth of the human. The appearance of writing and print culture further fostered human reflexivity, effectively advanced the human process of rationalization, split apart the human senses, strengthened the capacity for thought and the sense of history, and made scientific and historical knowledge rapidly produced and accumulated. Electronic media then repaired the fusion of the human senses. The appearance of digital media in particular is epoch-making: it will comprehensively renew human existence and the human world, reorganize time and space, reshape the sense of space-time, and change cultural practice. The significance of digital media for humanity is incalculable.

Cognitive semiotics holds that the sign is first of all the "relation-mode" between human and world, the human being's way of grasping the world; this is the experience that humanity, and indeed organisms, have sedimented through long survival activity, thereby forming different types of relation, which we call the "modeling system." Corresponding to "modeling activity," "sign-activity" stresses the mode of existence of the sign as an object of consciousness, foregrounding the formal features and meaning of the sign—for example, bodily behavior, sound-image, and writing, as well as other formalized physical objects. All these media embody human experience in particular sign-forms and harbor the relation-mode and interpretive mode between human and world; therefore humanity can not only use the various signs to grasp the world but also use them to state the world and create the world.

The development of media technology not only brings changes in the modes of sign production and transmission but directly influences the relation-mode and interpretive mode between human and world, and the human modes of perception and sensation. "All sciences (or technosciences) are made by human beings and, directly or indirectly, imply bodily behavior, perception, and practice." Especially when a medium undergoes a major transformation, it necessarily changes the mode of interpersonal relations, the order of social organization, and the relation between human and world; it not only extends the human body and senses but reshapes human sensation, changing human experience and the human world.

Modeling activity and sign-activity are but different facets of the same activity-process: modeling stresses the experiential construction and the experiential types of the activity-process, while the sign refers to the form of this activity and its interpretation. The two are closely linked and interdependent, yet differ in emphasis. On one hand, modeling activity as a type of experience—whether behavior modeling, language modeling, or other symbolic modeling—is an experiential type sedimented in the course of carrying out structured, formalized behavior, language, and other signs; it is founded on structured, formalized activity. And sign-activity with a particular form must, in turn, rely on the experiential type (the modeling system) in order to be effectively carried out and for meaning to be generated. On the other hand, the human relates to and grasps the world through modeling activity—a patterned, habituated experiential process; although the human world has already been constructed by the human experiential mode (modeling activity), it appears as a habituated, naturalized world, even regarded as the "world as it is in itself." Different from this, sign-activity tends to stress that humanity interprets meaning and conveys information by means of sign-forms, or reshapes the world by endowing material objects with particular sign-forms. This is no longer a passive sensing and grasping of the world but a transformation into an active reshaping of the world, gradually prompting the world to change according to human will and sign-form, and re-endowing material carriers with new meaning and value. It is in this sense that human cultural activity is truly the sign-activity that creates meaning. Yet because this material world reshaped by sign-activity is bound up and intertwined with human everyday-life activity, the world reshaped by signs is often submerged in the everyday-life world.

In this state, what the sign refers to and interprets is only the world of "things," and the experiential types projected onto things; and although the sign condenses the complex relations and plural experience between human and thing, it first of all embodies the usefulness of the thing—for the human deals directly with the thing through behavior from the very start, having an intimate connection with it, and the relation of benefit and harm is the most basic relation of survival activity; therefore the meaning and value of the thing that the sign refers to and interprets is chiefly the thing's utility. The sign itself then becomes an appendage attached to the thing; it is "seen through," "foreshortened" (Gadamer), embodied merely as the outward form of the thing, and the meaning of the form itself has already been made unconscious, the sign degenerating into an empty concept and distinguishing mark of the thing. The instability of the sign's reference also determines the dual character of the relation between thing and sign: it is at once a useful article participating in the constitution of the real world, and an artwork leading the appreciator into the aesthetic world of artistic signs.

Only when sign-activity continually strengthens the formal features of the sign, turns the sign's reference from the thing to the sign itself, stresses the presence of the sign, leads the human to turn attention to the sign-form, foregrounds the meaning and value of the sign-form itself, splits the sign from the material world, suspends the material world, and views the sign anew with fresh eyes—only then does a defamiliarized sign-world become isolated from the material world and emerge independently from that material background. When the sign-world is able to evoke the human's deep unconscious experience, this world not only harbors human experience and overflows with the radiance of life but lets the human deeply experience the abundance of life and the true meaning of existence, and experience the profound inner content of the sign-form; this world then appears as the aesthetic world of literature and art. At the same time, the identity of the thing too undergoes a transformation: it loses its ontological status and is demoted to the material carrier of the sign, demoted to a medium. The change in the sign's reference determines the transformation of the thing; it is the ground that turns the thing into a medium, devalues the thing, and lets the sign enjoy its own value. In this process we see the splitting and migration of the meaning and value of sign-activity from its material carrier. Hence whatever becomes the carrier of sign and meaning is a medium.

Of course, the sign's reference to the "thing" and the sign's self-reference are not mutually incompatible; the two often stand in a relation of conversion. Architecture, plazas, streetscapes, and the like, for instance—their character often depends on the way people view them: when people are drawn by their appearance, that is, when the sign refers to the form itself and displays the style and meaning of the form, they become art available for appreciation, and the thing becomes the medium of artistic expression; whereas when people move about within them all day, taking them as places of work and life, and have become inured to the sign-form, the sign's reference turns again to the thing itself, embodied as the thing's usefulness, and the sign too degenerates into an empty mark.

(ii) The Society of the Spectacle: The Transfer of the Sign's Meaning and Value

The meaning and value of the sign come from the interpretation and experience of the sign. McLuhan held: "Value is not an attribute inherent in the artwork; value lies in the power of art to cultivate perception." Not only is the artwork so; the meaning and value of any article depend on the perception, experience, and interpretation of the thing, and the perception, experience, and interpretation of the thing are themselves the process of the thing's symbolization, generated within the relation the sign establishes, its meaning and value inscribed on the sign-form.

For early societies, the sign's meaning and value both referred to the thing and transcended the thing, thereby endowing the thing with sanctity and producing a world in which all things had spirit. Industrial civilization thoroughly changed this situation and dispelled the aura of the sign. In the process of commodity exchange, the sign-form is attached to the material carrier; whether in the production or consumption of the thing, its sign-meaning and value refer directly to the thing itself, are an interpretation of the thing and an experience of its production or consumption, and are chiefly displayed as the thing's usefulness, this value being fixed or distorted in the process of exchange. As post-industrial society's material production grew ever more abundant and commodity exchange highly developed, the sign-form appreciated in value, and its meaning and value began to detach from and overflow the material carrier; meaning and value gradually deviated from the production or use of the thing, leaving the thing itself. The appearance of brands and advertising especially changed the meaning and value of the sign rapidly. Brand and advertisement are merely signs of empty form; here the sign performs of itself, runs rampant, and the thing is absent. What people interpret and experience is purely the sign-form, not the thing itself. The sign that has lost its material carrier loses its thing-ground for meaning and value, and so becomes arbitrary and willful. From then on, the sign's meaning can be repeatedly and arbitrarily interpreted, value too migrates from material carrier to sign-form, the thing's own meaning and value wither all the more, and the sign no longer proclaims the usefulness of the material carrier but detaches from the thing and begins to flaunt itself, letting itself glitter with eye-catching brilliance.

The birth of electronic media rapidly advanced sign production and transmission. Because the sign cast off its material carrier, and because the sign's meaning and value surged, the sign proliferated without end, even covering over the material world. The splitting and migration of the meaning and value of sign-activity from the thing necessarily lead to a mutation in the mode of production and have produced what Guy Debord calls the "society of the spectacle" and what Baudrillard calls the "hyperreal."

The splitting and migration of the meaning and value of sign-activity from the thing infinitely raised the sign's own "price," producing a distortion and aberration of meaning and value, to the point of belittling and effacing the original meaning and value of the material carrier. This resembles the state Feuerbach called "the sign surpassing the thing"—only here it is no longer the sign of religion but the sign of the commodity, and ultimately the sign of capital. People no longer deal directly with things but are keen to deal with signs; even the human being itself loses its true meaning and value, appearing as the meaning and value of external decorative signs (dress, makeup, demeanor, and so on). The sign separates from the thing, to the point that the world of things retains only an "appearance," and reality becomes the "society of the spectacle." The sign is no longer the representation of reality but becomes the dominant force that arbitrarily manipulates everything.

This is the necessary logic of the development of capital. As social productivity rose ever higher, products grew ever more abundant and exceeded the necessities of survival, the pressure of survival basically vanished, the age of scarcity passed, and the relation of production and consumption was inverted: it is no longer production that determines consumption but, conversely, consumption that determines production. This is a major shift; the overproduction of commodities cannot but provoke fiercer competition and waste of things. The usefulness of the commodity has lost its importance, while the meaning of the sign itself has leapt into the prominent position, sign-value transcending and even replacing the use-value of the thing. Without the clamoring form of the sign, the thing can only be silent; it is submerged in the ocean of commodities, loses its trace, loses its real existence. Only by exaggeratedly manifesting its own meaning and value through the sign, by catching the eye, can the thing's existence be established and victory in competition be assured; and only by continually renewing the sign-form and its meaning and value can the waste of things be produced, reinjecting impetus into production. The sign symbolizes a way of life and taste and is an important means of identity-recognition. The renewal and succession of sign-fashion stimulate human desire for consumption and become an extremely powerful engine of the consumer society. This is the ideological discipline of the sign, the covert manipulation behind which capital operates. In the past, human alienation was chiefly embodied in the social division of labor, which led to human "fragmentation" (Schiller), to the one-sided development of human nature and "alienation" (Marx) or "one-dimensionality" (Marcuse); whereas the "spectacle" occupies all time and space, including leisure. It is precisely here that power's comprehensive manipulation of the human through signs is embodied, the more cunning and more powerful ideological manipulation behind the sign. The "spectacle," with its glamorous figure, entices people to throw themselves willingly into its embrace, to accept its favor and its caress, to accept discipline. Debord says: "When economic necessity is replaced by the necessity of boundless development, the satisfaction of primary human needs (now scarcely met) can only be replaced by a ceaseless fabrication of pseudo-needs, all of which are ultimately reduced to the single pseudo-need of maintaining the rule of the autonomous economy. But to the extent that it emerges from the social unconscious on which it unknowingly depends, the autonomous economy loses all connection with real need." The nature of capital is to pursue endless appreciation; even when the actual condition of production has already met people's necessary survival needs, capital still pursues boundless economic growth. The only route is to devalue the necessary use-value of the product, to raise infinitely the illusory value of the sign-form, to substitute the pseudo-value of the sign for the value of the thing itself, to manufacture pseudo-needs with ever-renewed, ostentatious sign-forms, and finally to replace the thing itself with a fabrication (the sign), making the thing lose its connection with real human need and making the human lose the capacity to face the thing and the material world directly. The continually breeding advertisements and images constitute the society of the spectacle, leading and shaping human desire, changing the human and his way of life; so it is no longer that the spectacle comes from everyday life, nor that the spectacle adorns everyday life, but that everyday life imitates the spectacle, the spectacle shapes everyday life, and everyday life itself becomes the spectacle.

(iii) Sign Production and the New Elite of the "Age of Simulation"

Debord held that in the age of simulation the commodity's exchange-value had turned from use-value to sign-value. In Simulacra and Simulation, Baudrillard further divided sign production into four successive stages: the simulacrum is the reflection of a basic reality; the simulacrum masks and perverts a basic reality; the simulacrum masks the absence of a basic reality; the simulacrum bears no relation to any reality whatever—it is its own image. In this process the sign evolves from the initial expression of a sacred order, step by step, into an order that no longer reflects any reality-appearance but exists only in the order of simulation. Sign production loses the connection between copy and original; it no longer needs reality as its model but is the mutual simulation and proliferation of signs themselves, thereby inaugurating an age of image and simulation. The sign has degenerated into the production of simulacra without origin or reality; it neither copies nor refers to reality but replaces the real with the sign. "The artificial entanglement of signs with real elements inseparably" constitutes the "hyperreal" and the "age of simulation."

"The age of simulation thus begins comprehensively, through the interchangeability of terms once contradictory or dialectically opposed. … All those great humanist criteria of value, the whole civilization of moral, aesthetic, and practical judgment, vanish within our system of images and signs. Everything becomes undecidable—this is the characteristic effect of the rule of the code, which everywhere settles in neutralization and arbitrariness." If mechanical-reproduction technology once effectively changed the mode of artistic production and transmission, both promoting the popularization and massification of art that Benjamin spoke of and producing the "integration" Adorno attacked—yet this was still only a gradual historical process—then the change brought by electronic media is swift: it has, in an unprecedented way and at an unprecedented speed, shaken the entire standard of civilization and changed the humanist tradition. The order of the sign arbitrarily replaced the order of nature and the inherent order of society, subverted the order of traditional culture, and dealt a huge shock to human survival, cultural, and artistic activity. Although the order of nature and the order of society originally could not do without sign-construction, this sign-construction itself came from human experience and was rooted in human nature; once the sign leaves the thing and is arbitrarily manipulated by capital, sign-construction departs both from the thing and from human experience and human nature.

On the basis of Debord's "society of the spectacle," Baudrillard further proposed a "political economy of the sign." He set out four different value-logics for the "ideology of need": the functional logic of use-value, the economic logic of exchange-value, the differential logic of sign-value, and the logic of symbolic exchange. Since the sign left the thing and came to enjoy its own meaning and value, its meaning and value swelled without limit; it usurped the right to interpret the commodity, excluded the thing's own use-value, and used the differential character of the sign to manifest a particular way of life, distinguish the user's status and identity, and carry out a new identity-recognition. From then on, the experience of the commodity is no longer the thing's utility but the ostentation of its sign; even the sign's own value dissolves into the circulation process in which sign and sign mutually distinguish and refer to one another. When commodity exchange degenerates into sign exchange, when the sign enters an unrestricted circulation process, the value of the sign no longer even depends on its own formal features and aesthetic quality but on the difference of the sign, on the logical order between sign and sign set up by human contrivance (by capital). And this is a covert manipulation of power: it uses the differential logic of the sign to establish a system of distinction, masking with surface consumer equality the naked class difference originally founded on the relation of capital ownership. "Within the code there is hidden a rigorous social logic, though it is never spoken; … it can be reconstructed and manipulated according to the particular logic of each social position." The sign has been authorized by cultural capital with the power to use differential logic to confirm status and identity; the sign becomes the new elite that manipulates social ideology.

(iv) Digital Media and "Multiple Realities"

Since the 1980s, with the rapid development of digital media and internet technology, the modes of sign production and transmission have been thoroughly changed, and thereby human life and cultural practice. Poster made a periodization by media form: the first media age is the period dominated by the broadcast model, in which information producers are very few and information consumers many; the second media age broke the limitedness of information producers and the one-way nature of transmission, completely changing the modes of information production and transmission and the mode of interpersonal interaction, within which digital media and the internet are the chief factors driving change. Digital culture began to permeate every aspect of everyday life, powerfully driving the transition from industrial society to information society, and the sign thereby gained an unprecedented flourishing. Electronic media once limited mass participation in sign production and transmission with a high technical threshold; digital media removed this threshold, made operation extremely simple, and let ordinary people participate—so long as one has a terminal (computer, phone, or tablet), one can directly carry out sign production and transmission. Digital media produced the pluralization and dispersion of information producers, the intelligentization and massification of information processing, and the interactivity of transmission channels. Digital media took in countless sign producers and transmitters who, regardless of time and place, status, identity, race, gender, or level of knowledge, can all participate in the production, transmission, and interaction of information, producing an age of sign-carnival with a clamor of many voices. "The second media age has great power to construct a simulational culture. The degree of the media's intervention in culture has become so intense that the things intervened upon cannot even pretend to be unaffected. The media tend to change the very things they treat, changing the identity between originals and referentiality, so that, in this sense, culture becomes increasingly simulational. In the second media age, 'reality' becomes multiple."

This world reconstructed by signs is a world in which the virtual and the real are mixed and lose their boundaries, an infinitely multiple world, and reality thereby loses its stability; while the virtual world offers the human an occasion full of temptation and brand-new experience. The human who moves between the virtual and the real not only loses the determinacy of identity, but personality and subjectivity too suffer the threat of deconstruction. Human identity and subjectivity are gradually constructed in real social interaction, established in discursive exchange and dialogue. In the process of interaction and dialogue, the human both acquires social conventions (role-norms) and constructs self-subjectivity in mutual distinction from and self-identification with others; whereas the fictional world follows another set of interactive rules, a set of pleasure-rules, life-rules—that is, the rule of no-rule. Leaving real society, leaving face-to-face interpersonal interaction and dialogue, the human necessarily loses the basis for constructing identity and subjectivity. On one hand, the multiple world widens the human's space of existence and endows modes of existence with diversity, bringing more opportunities for development; on the other, it often produces blurred roles and a split, multiple personality, producing an individual lacking self-management—a "non-subject" hard put to make its own choices and bear social responsibility.

"The presence of the sign makes the absence of reality possible. Writing, print, electronic, and digital media, each in its own distinctive way, have, to the greatest degree, expanded humanity's capacity to imagine, represent, and communicate the possible world and the real world. The presence of the medium makes possible not only the absence of reality and the absence of the transmitter, but the simultaneous absence of reality and transmitter." Every revolutionary development of communication technology greatly changes the relation between human and world, between human and human, and changes the human itself. When the presence and circulation of the sign replace the presence of human and reality, determinacy dissolves. Relative to traditional sign production and the concentration and control of the power of transmission, digital media and the internet broke the various old monopolies. People once optimistically predicted that digital media and the internet would bring humanity critical thinking, initiative, reason, democracy, a higher degree of freedom, globalization, and cultural pluralism. In fact, any technology is two-sided: on one hand, new technology will indeed release many positive potentials; on the other, it equally contains hidden worries—irrationality, benightedness, and stronger manipulation and cultural conflict. Digital media and the internet leave humanity facing an age that changes swiftly and is full of more uncertainty.

II. Media Revolution and the Turn of Experience

(i) Different "Encounters" in the "Multiple Worlds"

Commenting on the "para-social interaction" proposed by Horton and Wohl, Don Handelman held that the problem with this theory is that there is no so-called "ultimate reality," because our world is always already eroded and covered by all manner of signs and images; in fact reality has become a "multiple world." Therefore the standard for distinguishing "para-social interaction" from "face-to-face interaction," founded on the distinction between ultimate reality and virtual reality, loses its basis. He suggested adopting Goffman's concept of the "encounter," holding that one may use the "virtual encounter" to describe the interaction between viewer and television medium. Television is a kind of "cool medium": the scanning mode its screen uses contains a great deal of blank, encouraging the viewer to unfold imagination and make a creative response. The viewer's gaze is as if tactile, possessing the capacity to "penetrate" the television screen, reorganizing the television image, breaking the boundary between real and virtual, creating the depth of reality, and fully mobilizing the viewer's inner sociality to open a dialogue with the screen, letting him enjoy a high degree of participation. The screen not only opens its embrace fully to the viewer but influences his behavior and strengthens his capacity to reorganize the self. Handelman therefore says: "In my view, the basic assumption of 'encounter' theory is that the human being has the capacity for interaction within all these domains of existence; whether intra-personal communication or virtual communication, its interactivity is in no way inferior to face-to-face interaction. … Therefore the contact between viewer and television screen is a 'genuine' interactive act, because the viewer not only actively participates in the construction of the image but responds to the whole process through intra-personal interaction."

Although Horton and Wohl's theory does have defects, and we can indeed hardly draw a sharp line between ultimate reality and the virtual, people's response to virtual interaction still differs from face-to-face real interaction, and one cannot, like Handelman, simply equate them. Facing the television screen, the viewer does need to mobilize forms of intra-personal interaction to respond to the virtual interaction, so as to reconstruct and understand the television image; but virtual interaction does not compel the viewer to make an actual behavioral response according to the requirements of face-to-face interaction. Toward the television he watches, the viewer holds a double attitude: he both enters into the screen, fuses with the image, and mobilizes forms of intra-personal interaction to become a deep participant in the television; and stands aloof from the image, carrying out no real bodily behavior, becoming a bystander detached from the screen. He is always in a marginal state and a transitional space. It is precisely this double attitude that distinguishes virtual interaction from real face-to-face interaction: although it expands the viewer's understanding of interpersonal interaction and broadens his social horizon, it does not realize real embodied interaction; it does not, as face-to-face interaction does, impose on both parties an unavoidable contextual pressure, still less let the viewer fully internalize social conventions. This is a "virtual encounter" of importantly different nature. This is precisely why some child television viewers become "little adults": in watching television, they have already broken the boundary of age, stepped into the living space of adults to spy out secrets and unfold interaction, yet still lack truly effective socialization.

Discussing how to establish interpersonal relations, Georg Simmel pointed out that almost no one can, from the angle of the instinct for security, naturally and exactly know the limits of an individual's psychic character. Although the bodily domains of individuals can be mutually distinguished, the inner domain of an individual cannot be clearly distinguished from others. Establishing the individual's inner domain requires an actual process of interaction. "In our familiar relations, we mark out a very definite zone for ourselves by gradually expanding rights and responsibilities, by understanding others and being understood by them, and by examining our power and our emotional responses." Real interpersonal interaction is founded on marking out the self's domain and understanding mutual relations, whereas virtual interaction precisely exempts both parties from rights and responsibilities, and so makes the participant unable to clearly establish the self's domain and unable truly to achieve socialization. Virtual interaction must be combined with real face-to-face interaction, must be converted into actual behavioral construction or intra-personal interaction, and must become a supplement to real interaction, before it can help a person grow and mature.

(ii) The "Disembedding" Function of Digital Media

Discussing the role of money in driving the process of modernization, Giddens proposed an important concept: "disembedding." Giddens held: "By disembedding I mean the 'lifting out' of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space." Money, as a symbol of agreed value, a readily circulating "general equivalent," can connect the present with the later, the present with the absent, and therefore makes possible transactions separated by time and space, lets transactions be lifted out of concrete environments, and thus becomes an effective tool of time-space extension. It is precisely money's disembedding function that effectively changed the relations between human and thing, and between human and human. It liberated peasants from their relation of attachment to the land, letting them obtain grain and other living materials even after leaving the land. It is precisely this transformation that made the gathering of cities possible, made the division of labor rapidly expand, and powerfully advanced modernization. The relation of human and thing changed, the relation of human and human changed; the human is no longer permanently bound to his native soil, no longer imprisoned in the narrow, cramped society of acquaintances—he begins to enter the crowd of strangers in the city, to engage in all manner of labor, and to play utterly different roles. A wholly new social relation and social order are constructed, gestating new productive forces. Without money's disembedding function, there would be no birth of the city, no division of labor and role-playing in the true sense, and so no possibility of the modern industrial worker and the modern intellectual. At the same time, the intimate emotional bonds between human and human were severed, replaced by a simple, abstract relation of digits and a relation of interests.

Compared with money, digital media and the internet have a far more powerful disembedding function. If money set out from the economy (commodity exchange) and then gradually permeated other social domains, driving change within each domain and in their mutual relations, then digital media at the same time brings different regions and different domains into the digital empire, establishing a wholly new universal connection. "In this extremely brief span of time, the third media-form change—with these technological renewals as a powerful catalyst—has already brought profound influence to almost everyone, society, and culture. Humanity's very conceptions of distance, time, and reality have changed drastically because of the new media-forms that have just appeared and spread across the whole world." The medium, as a "patterned compulsion," intervenes in the relations among human and human, human and thing, human and world, and forcibly changes the various connections with its own pattern. In the newly constructed relation-mode, the information the human obtains grows geometrically, information exchange becomes more convenient, the horizon broadens, sign-experience becomes ever richer and more varied, and the human comes to possess a "new basis for having a world." At the same time, time is mercilessly compressed, even tending to zero, the sense of history gradually drains away, cultural tradition suffers rupture, and intergenerational succession becomes ever more frequent; space, meanwhile, expands without limit, and because of the absence of the body, emotion is diluted and thinned. When the sign loses its thing-ground, when face-to-face interaction is invaded by digital media, the various kinds of direct experience are necessarily weakened. This is manifested not only in the process of commodity exchange but in all domains: everyone lives in his own network kingdom, and the relations of human and thing, human and human, are "abstracted" by digital media. Whether the human's firsthand experience of social life or his closeness to nature, both are gradually eroded by the virtual sign-world. By Mead's view, the individual's identity is constructed in the process of social interaction and becomes the basis sustaining the everyday-life world; so when face-to-face exchange and interaction decrease and the sense of identity weakens, the bond sustaining the everyday-life world slackens. Just as money's disembedding function drove huge changes in social relations and order and prompted the isolation of the human, digital media will necessarily, with a still grander force, comprehensively change social relations and construct a new social order.

(iii) Digital Media and the Turn of Experience

The powerful disembedding function of digital media offers the human the possibility of slipping out of reality. This is not to say that the over-produced signs of digital media and the virtual world it constructs wholly replace reality, but that this virtual world forcefully squeezes reality and permeates it, manipulating reality with another set of sign-rules. It does indeed greatly open up another dimension of existence and offer a brand-new experience, yet it cannot but affect firsthand, deep experience of real society. Digital media's permeation and traversal between the fictional and the real let those addicted to the virtual world satisfy almost any actual material need by means of the network world, without thereby hindering their normal survival. For those shut-ins, that younger generation grown up in the company of mobile phones, the virtual world has an extraordinary magic surpassing everything. "With the internet, anything of interest usually requires only a click. To pass judgment on all the interesting things in the universe and exchange views with the like-minded, so as to combat boredom, has become the main content of life. Such a life produces what we call the postmodern self—a self with no determinate content or continuity, only the constant taking-on of new roles." Although in the virtual sign-world we can play various roles, enjoy different identities, freely convert among them without constraint, and continually construct new relations and experience new experiences, in fact real social interaction no longer exists. This is interaction in which the real body is absent, and so it is no longer bound by social conventions and role-norms. Even video communication is merely "disembodied telepresence." The rich experience and social norms originally acquired in face-to-face social activity become an encumbrance in virtual interaction and are set aside. The human process of socialization is severely affected: on one hand, shut-ins are drawn by the virtual world and indulge in it, their willingness to participate in direct social interaction diluted and their capacity for social interaction weakened; on the other hand, the weakening of the willingness and capacity for social interaction in turn makes them fear deep participation in society, choosing to wallow in the virtual world and unable to extricate themselves. This is the vicious circle of the self-imprisonment of shut-ins. What the virtual world grants us is an unconstrained, illusory experience, while the social experience extremely important to humanity begins to drain away and shrink.

Virtualization has an important influence on the family. Hjarvard points out: "On one hand, all this means the growing importance of the institution of home and family, which lets us access and participate in other institutions. On the other hand, home and family change accordingly, because although family members reside at home, they belong spiritually wholly to other institutions. Thus the virtualization of institutions means the family loses part of its capacity to regulate the behavior of family members, which is transferred instead to the social individual to decide which institution he or she participates in and to adjust behavior accordingly. This also means the institutional context is no longer defined by the physical address where it is located but becomes increasingly a matter decided by the individual." The enormous attractiveness of digital media has changed the once most stable family organization and its members. Although they spend more time at home, the members in fact live in their own virtual sign-worlds, ever more spiritually distant; the kinship-emotion among members has grown cold, and behavioral norms have weakened. This change exists equally among social members. While digital media effectively expanded everyone's world, increased the convenience of mutual connection, and enlarged the scope and occasion of interaction, it at the same time made the substantive content of this long-distance connection relatively impoverished, changed the way social members relate to one another, and lost the experience produced by real face-to-face interaction. Hjarvard calls such network sociality "weak social ties." The diversification and convenience of network connection, and the dilution of kinship and affection, continually erode the traditional family and have become one cause of the soaring divorce rate among the young.

The virtual sign-world is a world without the need to bear concrete responsibility and risk; the player who indulges in it for long is apt gradually to weaken his self-moral consciousness and sense of responsibility. Moral consciousness and the sense of responsibility are constructed in long-term social relations; they fit social convention and together maintain a particular social relation and order. The absence of social context and social convention necessarily leads to a distortion of the moral sense and the sense of responsibility. On one hand, cyberspace is full of moral rhetoric, which can brew enormous network force, form the pressure of opinion, and drive the solution of social problems; on the other hand, this morality is apt to change in flavor: it is no longer a moral conviction the self uses for self-discipline but moral speech directed at others, and because it is detached from concrete social context, concrete interpersonal relations, and the individual's unique situation, this morality worn on the lips can be raised to a harsh degree, carrying out moral condemnation, moral mobbing, and moral kidnapping of others, and morality may well degenerate into a pseudo-morality. The network establishes a virtual "tribal society," just as McLuhan said: "Tribal society is morally extremely severe; it will mercilessly destroy or expel those who violate tribal values." Whereas in real life the human often degenerates into an illusory self lacking a sense of responsibility and self-discipline, yet self-centered and lonely. The virtual world is a carnivalesque plaza where repressed desire swells, passion is vented, pseudo-morality grows ever more rampant, and reason alone begins to take its leave.

Dreyfus held: "When we enter electronic space and give up the self that has emotion and intuition, joys and sorrows, and substance, to pursue an extraordinary freedom humanity has never had, then we may at the same time lose some critical experiences: the sense of the levels and relevance of things, the experience of success and failure, and the sense that lets us experience a grasp of the existence of things. Moreover, we may try to bypass the risks of real existence and thereby lose those feelings that give our lives meaning." Such firsthand feelings are ever-present in the real world; ultimately, it is our body that participates in the world in person and endows things and life with meaning. Losing the presence of the body, and with the absence of behavior modeling, our experience not only becomes pale and incomplete, but all experience, having lost its ground, becomes adrift. Our feeling of the self and our experience of the meaning of life will also cease to exist. Even knowledge, lacking the support of experience, loses validity and even becomes unintelligible, becoming scattered linguistic fragments with no firsthand relation to the self. So Dreyfus says: "If we manage to make ourselves live in the network world, we will lose face-to-face conversation, the verbal promise, and the power of memory that, in Plato's eyes, cannot be replaced by writing. We will lose the only reliable way to find relevant information, the capacity to acquire skills, the sense of reality, and the possibility of living a meaningful life—the last three being the basic elements of being human. In fact, if we lose these, there will be nothing else that can make up for it; this is very clear." The network's "weak social ties" do not abolish real relations; the boundary between virtual world and real world has become blurred, so that those addicted to the network, when they return to reality and are "re-secularized," often weaken the habit of consciously fulfilling social convention, even encountering difficulties in real social interaction. Cyberspace seems to grant the human a paradoxical disposition: it both fosters the human's participation and the wholeness of the senses, and makes the human lonely and estranged from real society. But in the long run, this predicament is only a transitional phenomenon in the interval of social-order adjustment; it will finally lead to the revision and reconstruction of existing social convention and to the change and reorganization of social order. Especially when digital technology has changed the real basis of survival, when the inherent social order can no longer fit digital culture, order and convention necessarily undergo fundamental adjustment, and the network generation will, on the contrary, become the experimenter and pioneer of social change.

III. Digital Media and the Fate of Humanity

(i) Self-Selection and Power Manipulation

The dispersion of information terminals brought by digital media does indeed give the individual the freedom to select, participate, and express opinions; but its interactivity in turn makes possible powerful control through big data. For most ordinary people, one cannot but face an immense quantity of information mixing true and false, and so loses the autonomy of selection; yet as soon as one begins to select, big data has already recorded it and immediately delivers similar information according to one's preference, accommodating and surrounding one with information of the same kind, solidifying one's tastes, building for one an "information cocoon," and drawing one to throw oneself actively into the order established by sign-differentiation, covertly carrying out control. "Ordinary people are controlled not only by the labor needs of survival but by the need to exchange sign-differences. The individual gains his own identity from the angle of others, its primary source being not the type of his work but the signs and meanings he displays and consumes." Free selection and participation are converted into fixed "feeding." To be sure, resistance to control still exists in the midst of this; but whoever masters big data enjoys the final say. The individual's yearning for freedom can only be confined within the space others have demarcated; all his autonomous selections have already been pre-designed selections and become the phantom of self-deception and self-satisfaction. Between big data and the netizen's selection there is a process of mutual adjustment: big data grasps the netizen's selection-preference and in turn cultivates the tastes of various netizens, manufacturing online information-consumption communities and forcibly bringing them into the differential order of signs.

Fashion is a sign-force that manipulates the masses. The human is a dual animal: he both gains universality through imitation, bringing peace to the spirit, and pursues change to establish particularity, producing dynamism; the human thus stands in a tension relation between universality and particularity. Fashion is founded on the human being's dual character; it combines the pursuit of individual differentiation with social conformity. "Fashion is the imitation of a given pattern; it satisfies the need for social adaptation: it leads the individual onto the road everyone is traveling, providing a universal rule that turns individual behavior into a model. But at the same time it satisfies the demand for difference, change, and individualization." To Simmel's notion of the human's "duality," we may add a deeper point: this duality is rooted in the duality of human sign-activity. All human sign-activity is founded on behavior modeling and language modeling; behavior modeling pursues fusion and identity, while language modeling pursues distinction—that is, the establishment of difference. It is precisely these two that together constitute the human's duality and become the inner impetus of sign-innovation. Fashion makes full use of just this sign-nature of the human. Digital media has effectively accelerated the succession of fashion. Digital media brings great convenience to the production, transmission, and manipulation of signs: it can easily use stars and celebrities to make advertisements producing novel sign-styles; and at the same time, through the network, it rapidly diffuses styles in an overwhelming way, creating contextual pressure, arousing universal imitation, and continually manufacturing fashion and driving its succession, thereby realizing the aim of manipulating the masses. Digital media makes fashion more short-lived and its succession more frequent, and lets capital gain greater profit. Fashion uses external sign-difference to mask and replace the human being's individual difference, thereby distorting true unique individuality. For fashion, value no longer belongs to the human himself, nor resides in the aesthetic features of the sign, but lies in the order of the artificially constructed sign-system, in the position of a particular sign within this order. This is precisely the means by which power manipulates fashion: by constructing or reconstructing the sign-order to endow a particular sign with value or to devalue it. Digital media is at once a liberation of the human and a manipulation and enslavement of the human.

In real society, the human cannot but first be a producer, laying on this basis the foundation for his survival and consumption; whereas in the network world of the consumer age, the participant is chiefly a consumer of signs and information—even when transmitting signs and information, he is still a covertly controlled consumer. As a real male producer, his self-imagination and self-definition are a robust physique, wisdom, and capacity, by which he fulfills his responsibility and at the same time shapes his values and aesthetic outlook. Male sculpture therefore is often suffused with strength. Likewise, "in the great classic works, we see the robust beauty, the beauty of strength, the masculine beauty of the male body." The consumer society, however, changed the imagination and definition of the male; he is repositioned by consumer fashion. Especially when the over-production and over-consumption of signs disturb the human's self-determinacy and make the human a fragment drifting with the current, it inevitably lets young males shed the traditional producer-image and become sign-consumers, and even sink into being a consumer commodity themselves—a consumer commodity that pleases others by appearance alone. He begins to give up responsibility, to chase fashion, and to be infatuated with the mirror-image jointly projected by adolescent boys and girls. When capital, through big data, grasps this information, it consciously packages, induces, and reinforces it, and the "effeminate male" (niangpao) is refined into shape within this mirror-image sign. He loses the life experience of stepping into society to become a producer, loses too the wish to become a real producer, and is intoxicated by the mirror-narcissism of sign-consumption and by the common adoration of adolescent boys and girls. The transformation from the "cool man" and "handsome fellow" to the "effeminate male" fully reflects the sign-manipulating power of digital media. Thus the traditional role-formation of the male gradually fades, and the likes and indulgence of "fans" become the orientation that sweeps along the behavior and personality of adolescents—an infantilizing, de-gendering orientation, arising from a heteronomous guidance that distorts the trajectory of the natural development of human nature.

The "effeminate male" is both a darling gestated by consumer culture and itself a fashionable "consumer commodity," a fashionized image lacking individuality and adored by fans. Mark Poster points out that in consumer culture "the point is that what becomes the object of consumption is the signifier itself, not the product; the object of consumption gains power and charm because it is structured into a code. This code can be deciphered only by the logic of semiotics, not by the logic of capital." In fact, the "effeminate male" has degenerated into a sign-"signifier" of consumer culture; he has lost the male essence of being a producer and exercises charm and enjoys privilege merely by his sign-signifier, by his external appearance. "The body is a simulated model, so deeply that beneath its appearance no 'real' body can be found at all; we ourselves have already become signs." Gender difference vanishes in the play of bodily signs, submerged by fashion.

(ii) The "Metaverse," the "Cyborg," and the Fate of Humanity

Since Neal Stephenson's science-fiction novel Snow Crash proposed the "metaverse," the concept has gained wide dissemination and recognition. Some define it as "a virtual space parallel to the real world yet independent of it, an online virtual world that maps the real world, an increasingly real digital virtual world." If literature and art long ago created an imaginary world for humanity, an illusory sign-space, then the appearance of digital media made the creation of virtual space take a qualitative leap, offering humanity a brand-new means of creation. If the virtual world of literature and art often offered a subsidiary world to real life, becoming a spiritual home for the rest and solace of the soul, then the digital virtual world is itself a virtual space of life, a digitized, symbolized space of existence richer and more attractive than the real world, even to the point of trapping people so deeply that they can no longer leave the digital virtual world (the metaverse).

On one hand, the internet supported by digital media constructs a virtual sign-world for humanity and continually expands it; on the other, using "digital twin" and blockchain, it constructs the "Internet of Things" on the basis of the internet, so as to establish a link between the virtual world and the real world, making the two worlds a mutually corresponding, mutually complementary, interactive space, in which operation in the virtual world is directly converted into manipulation of the real world. The human's material needs can all be obtained through behavior in the virtual world—only the final material exchange is completed in the real material world. Humanity seems to have successfully realized a migration, beginning to work, produce, consume, take leisure, and socialize in the virtual world, truly dwelling and living within the metaverse.

Thus we may discover that multiple relations unfold between human and world: the human grasps the material world by means of symbolic modeling, or reshapes the material world according to a sign-pattern, and this material world becomes the human's dwelling place of existence, where the human deals with the material world and obtains material resources from it—this we regard as the real world. But when the world the human shapes according to a sign-pattern is no longer used to satisfy material need but becomes a spiritual home, a spiritual world parallel to the real world, its materiality recedes to a secondary position, demoted to a medium carrying and transmitting signs and meanings; the human no longer deals directly with things but turns to deal with signs, and the meaning of the sign becomes the human's chief pursuit, so that the sign-world splits from the real material world—this world is regarded as a virtual world constructed by signs, and literature and art lodge in this sign-constructed virtual world. The development of digital technology further replaced the materiality of the medium with abstract digits, which not only makes the virtual sign-world freed from the material medium lighter and more expansive but also provides the condition for re-linking the virtual world and the real world. The digit is the "common denominator" of the virtual sign-world and the real material world, and it is precisely the digital-media-based Internet of Things that re-bridges sign-world and material-world, virtual world and real world. The human can finally no longer live directly in the material world but live chiefly in the digitized sign-world, dealing with signs and dealing with digits, while at the same time manipulating the material world and satisfying his own material needs. If in the past the virtual world and the real world split, producing two utterly different states of existence, then the Internet of Things changed this state of splitting and offers humanity another brand-new mode of existence, the virtual world becoming the chief space for the human's work, rest, socializing, and all activities of life and survival. At this point we should further delimit the "metaverse": only when the virtual world constructed by digital media becomes not merely the dwelling place of games, film and television, and other literature and art, not merely the maker of illusory spectacle, but the space of the human's everyday-life activity and interpersonal interaction—becomes digitized existence—does the virtual world truly become the metaverse. Digitization, digital-twin technology, and blockchain are therefore the necessary conditions for generating the metaverse virtual world.

The boundary between virtual world and real world gradually collapses, the expansion of the virtual world increasingly squeezes the real world, and people seem ever more inclined to live in the virtual world; the virtual world's influence on the human's mode of existence and mode of behavior also becomes ever more marked, both improving the organizational structure of physical space-time and changing everyday interpersonal interaction and the exchange of human and thing. "The new medium always integrates itself into everyday life, disturbing the existing mode of organizing space-time and producing new rhythms and spaces." Digital media infinitely extends the human body and senses, makes the original scales of space-time lose their validity, and dissolves the traditional experience of space-time. It not only shapes the human's sense of space-time, but space-time itself has undergone reorganization; the problems of "simultaneity" and globalization, as well as cultural conflict, have begun to receive unprecedented attention. The human seems to have slipped out of the prison of the flesh and to soar at will through the vast, illusory universe.

In the metaverse, the human no longer holds his original status and identity; he begins to live and socialize as an "avatar." This is a brand-new beginning unconstrained by the original nation, class, or identity, and provides the possibility of constructing free, equal social relations. Relative to the real world, the virtual world, although it has already set certain rules, is still a world relatively lacking in order, which both harbors danger and at the same time provides a most ideal space for establishing a new order. The metaverse will plan a new scheme for human existence. But the privatization of digital assets, and the difference in digital skill and literacy, foreshadow that a new inequality still latently threatens humanity.

When digital media crosses the boundary between the virtual sign-world and the real material world, whoever possesses the database in fact controls both the virtual and the real worlds. Whether the database is commonly owned, shared, and managed, or possessed solely by power, determines the character of the two worlds and the fate of humanity. In an age of highly developed digital technology, while the human strengthens his capacity to control things, he can hardly avoid falling into the fate of being controlled. The "cyborg" of human-machine interaction especially—its appearance already foreshadows the mutual fusion and inseparability of the biological and the digital. By means of digital technology, human and machine achieve seamless docking, and the boundary begins to dissolve. "The inhuman power of technology has entered the interior of the human body." Human and machine mutually generate each other; the human is machinizing, the machine is anthropomorphizing. Almost all human skills can be replaced by the machine; the human's biological capacity and intelligence achieve a comprehensive breakthrough, beginning to extend and expand without end, and can use digital algorithms to develop infinite creativity, turning all manner of "impossibilities" into "possibilities." The human is letting himself ascend into an "omnipotent god": on one hand, the human seems to become all-capable, his every sensation and every desire instantly detectable, his desire satisfied even before he himself has clearly become conscious of it; on the other hand, he has at the same time handed himself over to digital media—he will become naked and transparent, having wholly surrendered his independence and subjectivity, and his sensations and desires too will become measurable, manipulable, and producible. Any control over things necessarily reacts back upon the controller himself. Although independence and subjectivity are a cultural construct, once independence and subjectivity are lost, freedom, equality, and democracy will all evaporate into a groundless, meaningless mist, and the human himself will be turned into an "object," an "implement" of indeterminate meaning.

When humanity enjoys the capacity to use digital media to manipulate everything, this means he hands over his all to digital technology, and the human's all too will be reduced to the manipulable. While the human pursues freedom without end, he also surrenders his own freedom, locks freedom in a cage, and finally loses true freedom; while pursuing the becoming of an "omnipotent god," he also degenerates into a "non-human," degenerates into a machine in the full sense. Digital technology will surely become the focus of the struggle for control, and with the technological difference brought by human-machine combination, it will more severely manufacture new inequality between human and human. The network hides and effaces traditional differences of race, class, and gender; at the same time, the renewal of technology inevitably and artificially produces new group and individual differences and brands the human with the distinct mark of different technological grades. Technology itself will become the sign of hierarchical distinction.

When the boundary between human and machine begins to dissolve, when artificial intelligence draws ever closer to, even replaces and surpasses, human intelligence, the question of the relation between the human himself and the "non-human" is posed anew, sharply calling anthropocentrism into question. It strips away the human's complacent arrogance, exposes the illusion of the "quintessence of the universe, the paragon of all things," repositions the human's place in the world, and rethinks "what the human is." Artificial intelligence forces the human to lay down his self-aggrandizing status and begin to fill in the gulfs between human and animal, human and machine, and remove the relation of inequality. "Whatever the future posthuman may mean, it marks the end of the age in which humanity regarded itself as the rational privileged one in a dominant position over the whole globe." "The computerized neural network can play the role of meaning-generator and result-evaluator; at least in principle, we are rapidly approaching this point in practice."

However, the fusion of human and machine and the appearance of artificial intelligence do not thereby deny the difference between human and machine; rather, taking this as an occasion, they rethink the human himself and his positioning. In fact, what digital technology and artificial intelligence extend, replace, and surpass can only be the human's skill, can only be unconscious experience, can only be behavior-language. Although it can learn, translate, transmit, and use language, seeming to "understand" human language, and can carry out actions according to human linguistic instructions, answer and converse using language, it is still only a digital algorithm, a digitally encoded behavior-language; it cannot, as the human does, "understand" the rich connotation of linguistic concepts and construct the human spirit in the true sense. The single algorithm of artificial intelligence also cannot replace the two-dimensional tension structure of the primary signs, cannot replace the variability and randomness of human intelligence with the precision of digital algorithms. If humanity over-relies on digital technology, if digitized existence becomes almost the sole mode of human survival, the human spirit will necessarily wither day by day; while realizing a new fusion of the senses, it can hardly avoid the weakening of human reason and the capacity for reflection, and the human may regress to a primitive state. Whether this is humanity's blessing or leads humanity to disaster—does it hint at the end of the human?

Digital technology and artificial intelligence have effectively strengthened the human's skill, foregrounded anew the importance of behavior-language, adjusted the relation between behavior-language and speech-act, between the sensory and the rational, endowed the human with a stronger sense of fusion and a broader sympathy, and provided new possibilities for human existence. It is precisely this adjustment that throws the question of "the essence of the human" into sharp relief. This is not to strip away the importance of human reason but to demand that reason give up its position of authority, give up the pursuit of power, and view all things with tolerance and humility, view the sensory with tolerance and humility. We ought to hold all things in awe, hold all sensory life in awe, change the relation between human and all things, and treat all things well. We should not take technology as an omnipotent deity, nor, like Heidegger, take technology as the human's opposite, but should regard digital media and artificial intelligence as an extension of the human body and organs, as a constituent part of human capacity, as a medium between human and world; it constructs a new universe for the human and also changes the human's mode and quality of existence, changes the human himself. The only things to be guarded against are the dogmatism of reason and power's monopoly of digital media—to guard against the use of digital technology to manipulate humanity itself. Digital technology (including all other technology) is a double-edged sword; the fate of humanity ultimately still depends on humanity itself.