Words: Adam Sudewo

Image caption: Distant feelings. Always there, never attainable.

9 July

“ The spectatorship of sensing allows one to feel closeness without genuine engagement. It presents a form of intimacy that does not require presence, conversation, or shared experiences...This kind of closeness blurs the line between knowing and imagining.”

Adam Sudewo

“Am I in love? – yes, since I am waiting. The other one never waits. Sometimes I want to play the part of the one who doesn't wait; I try to busy myself elsewhere, to arrive late; but I always lose at this game. Whatever I do, I find myself there, with nothing to do, punctual, even ahead of time. The lover's fatal identity is precisely this: I am the one who waits.”

—Roland Barthes,  A Lover’s Discourse


Roland Barthes once wrote that a person in love is “someone who waits” (Barthes 1978: 39–40). They struggle to occupy themselves in other spaces, so they remain trapped there, in the waiting room: doing nothing amid uncertainty and absence. In the digital space, waiting no longer carries a specific emotional weight, but rather becomes an atmosphere that is constantly studied and interpreted, something that is slowly becoming a new affective infrastructure. It flickers in the disappearing typing indicator before a message arrives, in the ritual of checking who’s viewed a story, in revisited old conversations late at night, or in the strange intimacy of recognising someone through an uploaded song, both within and beyond the “muck of language” (Barthes 1978: 99).

In this sense, waiting becomes a way to understand one another through acts of sensing: unfolding in patterns of appearance and disappearance, pauses, repetitions, silences, and emotional traces creeping along social platforms (“the platform”). It centers on how users sense the presence of others through fragments circulating on the platform, without ever gaining full access to their experiences. Throughout this interface, every distinct experience begins to settle into the same emotional rhythm. It teaches users to understand intimacy, sorrow, and even political violence through uniform structures of visibility and affect. If Barthes spoke of this in relation to a body falling in love, then social media expands this condition into a broader collective experience.

What makes waiting so central to Barthes’s observations on love is not merely that one desires a specific presence, but because one lives in the uncertainty shaped by absence. One does not know whether one is loved, thought of by others, or even loved in the same way one loves others. Connection becomes a scattered signal within the waiting room. An empty space that cannot be filled by any certain knowledge. In that space, time feels as though it is slowing down; various possibilities seem to split into other possibilities, and every sign that appears takes on a weight of meaning far greater than itself. This also occurs in the digital waiting room, where individuals are forced to grapple with the uncertainty of scattered signs. Waiting, in this context, means surrendering oneself to every possibility carried by the signs and the frozen passage of time.


As Geert Lovink said in a personal interview I conducted:

The 24/7 distraction is in full swing. There’s no clue how to stop swiping. None of them leads to anything. There are always more videos to watch… and messages to read and respond to. You try to keep up but fail
(Lovink 2025).

Thus, the platform has become a bustling space that leaves little room for pause. Consequently, waiting under the shadow of uncertainty has become a permanent feature of the affective atmosphere of digital life. When certainty is absent, humans begin to rely on the scattered signs around them. The person whose presence is longed for may never fully materialise within this uncertainty. What remains are only memories, images, gestures, or fragments of that person. What emerges is an imaginary universe of connection, suspended as an unanswered question. A universe that can only be approached through the work of reading and reinterpreting the elements that shape it. Without any possibility of making it fully one's own.

Social media, which was initially appreciated for its ability to bridge distances and connect people from the farthest corners of the world, on the other hand, ceaselessly produces and distributes signs on a massive scale. Signs that can now be counted, measured, sorted, and compared. A person’s presence no longer appears merely as an impression left in memory, but as a sequence of numbers, indicators, and notifications that constantly update themselves. In such a space, attention becomes visible, while intimacy is increasingly rendered through observable forms of visibility. Activity indicators, view counts, online status, the sequence of a story, or other features contribute to generating new traces that constantly invite interpretation: inviting an endless proliferation of interpretations about what intimacy means today.

Thus, the platform does not entirely eliminate the uncertainty that accompanies human connection. Rather, it multiplies the material used to interpret that uncertainty. Every new feature introduces a new sign; every new sign opens up new possibilities for interpretation. As a result, digital life is increasingly less defined by direct communication and increasingly more defined by the activities of reading, interpreting, and connecting scattered fragments.

Social media platforms not only multiply the material through which uncertainty is interpreted, it also quietly redefines what it means to understand another person. To understand, in the platform’s logic, means to read measurable, visible, quantifiable signs. Such a definition is anything but neutral. At this point, the platform sidelines other forms of understanding that leave no trace, produce no data, and cannot be registered by algorithms.

Just like waiting, the reading of signs in digital space has also become a permanent condition that is difficult to stop. This relates to the workings of the platform regime, which constantly requires the user’s undivided attention so that it can continue to circulate within its own loop. Through this attention, the platform succeeds in keeping users in a never-ending affective state. Users remain caught in a continuous orbit around signs, drawn back by exhausted emotional currents. “Sadness and neighbouring mental states are responses to the relentless assault on users’ attention spans” (Lovink 2025). Real conversations are reduced to a leaking dam of attention, manifesting as subconscious memories of doom scrolling, stalking, lurking, and other ceaseless digital activities. This leaves humans stranded on a threshold of intimacy, a thin line between connection and disconnection.

The abundance of signs produced by platforms ultimately reshapes the boundaries of human connection in its most fundamental form. At this point, platform-mediated intimacy gradually shifts into what I call the “spectatorship of sensing”, a state in which users feel increasingly close to the lives of others through constant exposure to traces of their existence, yet this closeness is not always accompanied by deeper understanding. What is available is not the experience itself, but rather the representations circulating around it. Consequently, social relationships are increasingly built upon impressions, assumptions, and partial interpretations of lives that, at their core, remain fundamentally inaccessible.

The spectatorship of sensing allows one to feel closeness without genuine engagement. It presents a form of intimacy that does not require presence, conversation, or shared experiences. One can follow the rhythm of another's life, track shifts in their mood, and even feel a sense of loss when they disappear from the screen, without ever truly becoming part of their life. This kind of closeness blurs the line between knowing and imagining.

Furthermore, what distinguishes spectatorship of sensing from empathy is that the sense of closeness it generates always leaves a distinct void. This points to a platform mechanism that flattens the diverse ways feelings circulate between people. The platform standardises signs that can be read by almost everyone. The stories we see, the messages we read, or the songs we upload shape our feelings toward someone who leaves a digital footprint. And because digital traces never truly disappear, spectatorship of sensing also never truly ends. It continues to haunt and knock on every door of the digital space whenever we, whether consciously or not, enter it. We can sense something about a person even if they have never appeared in our lived reality, simply because the platform continuously presents the remnants of their existence to us through these signs.

By this point, the digital space transforms how we communicate through observation and interpretation to make sense of absence itself. For example, we can discern whether someone is heartbroken, burned out, in love, lonely, or experiencing other emotions without having to interact with them face-to-face. Through observing someone’s online activities, we can construct a universe of understanding regarding ex-lovers, crushes, mutuals, creators, and online friends within the shifting affective landscape in our own minds. The digital space turns each of us into spectators of others’ emotional lives through the residues of memory and lingering signs, which are embedded in absence.

However, on a platform, absence often does not manifest in the same way for everyone. Some losses are granted space, while others remain unseen, constrained by algorithms and virality. Such differences in visibility are certainly not a coincidence that can be practically addressed by digital strategies. Platforms shape not only what we know, but also what we are capable of feeling. What appears in a feed, what is reposted, or even what vanishes quickly, is the result of the power structures and interests driving the platform. In this sense, the platform is an infrastructure of perception that defines the boundaries of what can be collectively felt.

In “Decolonial AestheSis: Colonial Wounds/Decolonial Healings,” Walter Mignolo (2013) writes: “Modern aesthetics have played a key role in configuring a canon, a normativity that enabled the disdain and rejection of other forms of aesthetic practices, or, more precisely, other forms of aestheSis, of sensing and perceiving”. What is striking about this text is that Mignolo does not merely address the issue of aesthetic taste. He expands the scope to consider how certain systems can determine how we perceive what is deemed legitimate, and what must be excluded. For this reason, Mignolo (2013) tends to speak of “world-sensing” rather than “world-vision”, since vision, which has long been prioritised by the history of Western epistemology, actually has often displaced affect and other sensory ways of knowing and sensing.

Today’s digital platforms operate in the same way. They indirectly configure regimes of normativity by determining what content appears, what is repeated, and what is deemed worthy of attention. They disseminate this content to users, who unconsciously consume it repeatedly. The difference between platforms and established aesthetic systems, perhaps, lies solely in how platforms do not present themselves as legitimate canons. They more closely resemble a dynamic infrastructure that appears neutral and open to all. Yet, precisely because of this, the hierarchies of sensing produced by platforms are difficult to recognise and challenge outright.

As Lovink puts it, platforms operate “like the air we breathe” (Lovink 2025). They have become inseparable from how we live, embodied within space and time without us ever realising their presence. The most powerful and determinative infrastructure is the one whose presence is the least visible. Thus, if the way we perceive the world is already largely shaped before we even recognise it, the question that arises is: what will happen if intimacy, sorrow, and political violence begin to be experienced through the same infrastructure?

Furthermore, the platform, due to its ability to shape infrastructure that appears neutral, is gradually becoming a sort of collective sensorium of our world today. Evoking Marshall McLuhan’s (1964) concept of the technological sensorium, the platform operates shared sensory system through which it can determine and curate what kinds of experiences are permitted to appear and be felt by its users. Within this shifting, flickering collective sensorium, genocide, war, heartbreak content,  creative work’s meme, ads for the latest hotels and coffee shops, all collide simultaneously in a single swipe of the screen. Rather than producing identical experiences, platforms standardise the ways users encounter and engage with them. The central issue of digital life does not lie in the loss of the ability to feel, but in the increasingly narrow range of ways available to feel. Platforms expand the range of experiences we can witness, but at the same time standardise the forms of engagement we can have with those experiences. Everything on the platform must submit to a regime of platform features that shapes users' embodied experience as they scroll, view, share, or simply pass by content in an identical manner.

Consequently, the constant flow of crisis-related content in the digital space is difficult to process politically because the platform’s infrastructure does not provide a way to experience it differently. Indeed, varied experiences are presented in this space, yet the regime of perception operating within it remains uniform. Crises presented as spectacles will continue to be absorbed and folded back into the platform's endless stream, without disruption, without any distinct weight compared to other content. At this point, the limits of spectatorship of sensing become unmistakably clear. We can sense everything, yet find it increasingly difficult to sense anything differently, drawn into the sensorium of the capitalist platform.

We currently live in an era where connectivity seems to be facilitated solely by platforms. They allow us to know more about others even when separated by millions of miles, within the promise of a universal humanism. Yet, at the same time, in other parts of the world, war, genocide, land dispossession, loneliness, and alienation seem to be never-ending. This raises new questions that may continue to weigh on each of our minds: why does this abundance of sensing not automatically create a world of mutual understanding?

We, perhaps, too often experience, know, and are exposed to others’ experiences through platform infrastructure. By presenting so many things at once, which can only be experienced in the same way, we struggle to distinguish what is urgent, requires action, or calls for collective solidarity, and what can simply be overlooked. Information pours endlessly from our fingertips each day. It leaves us drowning in structural exhaustion without clear navigation or a way out. Every door in the digital space is an emergency exit.

Thus, the spectatorship of sensing does not stop at romantic and interpersonal issues. It is a political condition in which the same logic also shapes how we experience war, genocide, disasters, and even political crises. The digital subject becomes a permanent witness to the lives of others, observing from a distance. Our failure to understand others does not stem from a lack of information, but rather from the fact that our relationship with the world is increasingly mediated by our position as spectators of others’ experiences.

By the time this essay is finished, Barthes may still be waiting in his grave, saying: “I am the one who waits” (Barthes 1978: 39–40). He waits amidst a scarcity of signs, when uncertainty arises from the absence of information. We are still waiting too, but under different conditions. We wait amidst an abundance of signs. We know what someone posts, what they like, what they listen to, what is happening in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, or within our own social circles. History records that humans live amidst so many traces of others’ lives. Yet this abundance does not automatically make the world easier to understand. On the contrary, the more we are able to sense, the harder it becomes to determine how each experience should be situated.

Understanding remains a fragile thing, always lagging a few steps behind what we manage to see and feel in the waiting room.

References

Barthes, R. (1978). A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. Hill and Wang.

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill.

Lovink, G. (2025, April 5). Sad by design – Interview with Geert Lovink by Adam Sudewo. Network Cultures. https://networkcultures.org/geert/2025/04/05/sad-by-design-interview-with-geert-lovink-by-adam-sudewo/

Mignolo, W. (2013). Decolonial aestheSis: Colonial wounds/decolonial healings. Social Text Periscope. https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/decolonial-aesthesis-colonial-woundsdecolonial-healings/