Democracy and Remoteness: A Loss of Publicity in the Digital Ages?

In the digital sphere, users often find themselves in a situation described in Greek as idiotefsi (iota delta iota tau epsilon upsilon sigma eta). They behave as "idiots" (idiotes/iota delta iota tau epsilon sigma), which in Greek means a private person. In this new structure of participation, the paper focuses on remoteness, on communication in the physical absence of the communicating parties, to make the point that the remote mode challenges the traditional understanding of an assembly, whether an Agora or a Parliament or even a party session, and at the same time it challenges the constitutive myth of democracy. To illustrate this point, the paper uses Hannah Arendt's approach of the public realm and action, i. e. a theory of civic participation with a strong deliberative ideal, relying on "visibility" and "appearance".