Annekathrin Kohout on Patterns of Communication on the Internet  Caught in the Feedback Loop

Annekathrin Kohout has written an extremely worthwhile book about communication on the internet. By the time they finish reading, all readers will feel a strong urge to reflect on their own communicative behaviour – both online and offline.

“Welcome to the culture of reaction!” With these words, cultural scholar Annekathrin Kohout welcomes her audience at the start of her book Hyperreaktiv (Hyperreactive) – and immediately offers herself as a knowledgeable guide for a tour through the sometimes adventurous world of modern internet culture. She is qualified to do so not only because of her academic background but also thanks to her own biography as a user.

Kohout describes how our engagement with social media has changed since its breakthrough in the early 2000s. She does so from the perspective of an observer who has witnessed each stage first-hand: from her own hope that a multiplicity of voices might democratise discourse, to the sometimes dystopian-seeming conditions of the digital present. Kohout skilfully weaves together the analytical and the anecdotal. Time and again she draws on her seemingly endless archive of screenshots, which she has collected over the years as evidence. Using vivid case studies, she shows in detail how new social dynamics and power structures emerge online, whose impact extends far beyond the sphere of the internet itself.

The answer is… what was the question again?

Annekathrin Kohout focuses on describing a digital culture of debate that appears largely unwilling to communicate. She coins the term “response without discourse” for a phenomenon widespread online: users of social media place their reactions strategically and show little to no interest in starting a constructive, nuanced conversation. Instead, the intentional staging of replies is primarily about reinforcing already fixed convictions and positioning oneself for maximum visibility. A clear and public positioning of one’s online persona – whether political, moral, or cultural – becomes extremely important in the hyperreactive environment of digital communication: users are constantly expected to comment on social issues and take a stance – often without being able to do so in a well-founded way.

Tellingly, the multi-layered cascades of reactions often receive more attention than the original content itself. Reactions thus take on the character of works in their own right – developing their own aesthetic, which varies depending on the platform.

Too much emotion

Kohout compellingly illustrates how visual languages emerge that can be used to systematically generate reinterpretations of content and thereby trigger emotionally charged reactions. The pernicious logic of social media algorithms – which favour posts that generate high levels of interaction – reinforces this further: increasingly, what counts online is not what is well-argued, but what resonates emotionally with recipients where they already stand.

This trend is strengthened by the fact that the digital sphere is a habitat in which mistrust thrives. A fundamental scepticism towards any form of media content is one of the standard tropes of modern online communication. Trust is usually placed in the content that confirms one’s existing worldview. Posts that conflict with that worldview can easily be dismissed as manipulated, without the need for further explanation. The danger is great that the increasing use of artificial intelligence will dramatically intensify this general crisis of trust.

A plea for ambivalence

At the end of her book, Annekathrin Kohout points to the difficulty of maintaining a nuanced perspective in the face of rapid technological change. It is all too easy to find oneself caught between the fronts of an intense digital culture war: fought between unbounded technological optimism and dystopian doom-mongering. Instead, the author argues that we should learn to endure ambivalence as a productive force. How well readers of Kohout’s perceptive nonfiction book succeed in doing so will depend on their willingness to critically examine their own online behaviour. Hyperreaktiv cannot offer universal rules of conduct – but it can encourage readers to look more closely at what lies behind each individual “like” or comment. A reflective approach to online communication is worthwhile in any case. The digital and the analogue world can no longer be separated – and many of the trends described spill directly into our “real” offline interactions.

April 2026