“Some of my early hopes for social media, that it represented … some kind of renaissance for socialism in the western world, are starting to run dry.”
Marvelous post at twopointouch on the resemblance between social media and—gee, duh, hello—social control. Fools. There is no free lunch. Fools in several regards.
One, the Sharecropper model, as made popular by Alan Herrell—everything you post on Facebook is valuable, fools, and you are giving it away. It’s rather touching, in a way. Children at play, with many pretty toys, innocent of their role as fodder. As demographics. Ooh, let me post my family pictures, isn’t this fun! And be sure and send a “gift.” This Facebook application platform thing is the goldmine of goldmines.
And two, happy fools who by their very participation in carefully regulated “social” networks, become implicit citizens in the controlled world.
Josh’s point is that we somehow accept social media networks as empowering, democratic and all about spreading fresh ideas. The reverse may be the case: any given information about ourselves donates some portion of control to another party.
What does that really mean, in ways that might concern you?
The genius of the current model is that we are self-surveillant, of course. We willingly offer our identity, friends, thoughts and so-forth, to the all-seeing eyes of anyone who can be bothered to set up an appropriate search alert. We’re consequently a bit less likely to say or do things that fall outside the accepted models of political and corporate behaviour.
Ah, the nasty c-word again …
Foucault observed that over the period of that century, the exercise of power changed from explicitly keeping people down to encouraging people to express themselves (and then governing that) …
[His] ideas of power produced knowledge, produced information, produced pleasure – in the right directions. Creating knowledge, creating information is a form of surrender in this model.
Where is transgression, Delaney asks, and well he might. Everything you read and post on Twitter, Facebook and the majority of blogs has been pressed through the white, liberal sieve of democracy, which means that Web 2.0 and all that follows isn’t democratic at all, not one whit. Where is unrest, where is anyone not fitting the model (okay, with the exception of moi, and I simply can’t help it … )
Truth is, anyone who uses Foucault and Twitter in the same blog post title has already charmed my ass. But more importantly, there are freedoms at stake, here. There are reasons not to please the corporate status-quo, reasons we once knew and seem, in the interim, to have been forgotten. Seeing them come up again, lo these many non-hippie years later, well, it’s enough to give a person hope.
Not that I think it matters, not to most, because first you’ve got to know what’s at stake. Let’s dredge up the old word co-optation*. Yeah, I like that. Just like old times. You, fools, are being nibbled at bit by little social media bit.
Reblogged from Baldur Bjarneson’s Loud, one of the loveliest and most thought-provoking blogs extant.
* absorb, assimilate e.g., the students are co–opted by a system they serve even in their struggle against it
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Many thanks for your kind comments.
Once a marxist, always a marxist – at the bottom of your heart.
I came across the digital sharecropper thing through Nick Carr’s blog (http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/12/sharecropping_t.php) but delighted to be introduced to Alan Herrel’s work.
And yours. Hello!
Nick Carr, fucking fascinating: “MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing …
Yes! I see it, too, even with little history participating in Internet social media. Stepfordized sharecroppers everywhere now…so glad I found your refreshing post!