Dilthey, Gadamer, and Facebook: Towards A New Hermeneutics of the Social Network

Abstract

This article offers a rereading of aspects of the twentieth-century German hermeneutic tradition, with a specific emphasis on Wilhelm Dilthey and Hans-Georg Gadamer. It aims to show how we could re-evaluate their work's relevance in relation to twenty-first-century cultures of online social networking, and with particular reference to Facebook. Dilthey's methodological conception of the human sciences finds, it argues, a contemporary instantiation in the increasingly unsettling possibilities of interpersonal ‘objectification’ and ‘identification’ within this virtual context. The article suggests, in turn, how Gadamer's dialogical hermeneutics could invite a fruitful rethinking of both the digitally mediated self and her social network.