Søren Kierkegaard wrote that “only when the sense of association in society is no longer strong enough to give life to concrete realities is the Press able to create that abstraction ‘the Public,’ consisting of unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation…”9 Under the influence of this notion, each of us begins to view himself as a representative of something more general. We bring this “representativeness” to our encounters with others. This flattens out relationships and makes them more abstract.
