The Digital Nexus

Raphael Foshay, Raphael Foshay

• Publisher: AU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781771991315
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Scienze della comunicazione

Over half a century ago, in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Marshall McLuhan noted that the overlap of traditional print and new electronic media like radio and television produced widespread upheaval in personal and public life:

Even without collision, such co-existence of technologies and awareness brings trauma and tension to every living person. Our most ordinary and conventional attitudes seem suddenly twisted into gargoyles and grotesques. Familiar institutions and associations seem at times menacing and malignant. These multiple transformations, which are the normal consequence of introducing new media into any society whatever, need special study.

The trauma and tension in the daily lives of citizens as described here by McLuhan was only intensified by the arrival of digital media and the Web in the following decades. The rapidly evolving digital realm held a powerful promise for creative and constructive good—a promise so alluring that much of the inquiry into this new environment focused on its potential rather than its profound impact on every sphere of civic, commercial, and private life. The totalizing scope of the combined effects of computerization and the worldwide network are the subject of the essays in The Digital Nexus, a volume that responds to McLuhan's request for a "special study" of the tsunami-like transformation of the communication landscape.These critical excursions provide analysis of and insight into the way new media technologies change the workings of social engagement for personal expression, social interaction, and political engagement. The contributors investigate the terms and conditions under which our digital society is unfolding and provide compelling arguments for the need to develop an accurate grasp of the architecture of the Web and the challenges that ubiquitous connectivity undoubtedly delivers to both public and private life.

With contributions by Ian Angus, Maria Bakardjieva, Daryl Campbell, Sharone Daniel, Andrew Feenberg, Raphael Foshay, Carolyn Guertin, David J. Gunkel, Bob Hanke, Leslie Lindballe, Mark McCutcheon, Roman Onufrijchuk, Josipa G. Petruni?, Peter J. Smith, Lorna Stefanick, and Karen Wall.

Part One

Digital Theory

1 The Internet in Question

Andrew Feenberg

The purpose of this chapter is to affirm the democratic potential of the Internet. Affirmation is called for by the context of contemporary critical theory, in which the Internet figures increasingly as the problem rather than the solution to the crisis of democracy. This marks a change from early optimistic assessments that still inspire a diminishing band of commentators. But mainstream academic opinion has turned against what is now considered “hype,” the exaggerated expectation that the Internet would contribute to the democratization of society.

I take the criticisms of the Internet seriously; however, I also note a certain exaggeration that makes me wonder about the motives behind the vehemence with which they are sometimes offered.

The critiques do bring important aspects of the Internet to light. We have had enough experience with it by now to realize that it is a mixed phenomenon unlikely to fulfil the promise of democratic transformation it inspired in the early years. The critics have hit on some of the reasons for its limited and contradictory impacts. I will argue, however, that their evaluation is one-sided. They focus exclusively on the Internet’s most problematic aspects and underestimate important accomplishments. An analysis of the Internet as a technology in its formative stage, before it has achieved a standard configuration, offers a more comprehensive view. I will show that the political and social contradictions of the Internet are reflected in its technological features, which do not resolve into a coherent whole.

The first half of this chapter discusses two important critiques of the Internet and argues that they mistake aspects of the technology for the whole. The latter half introduces methodological considerations and applies the method to the Internet.

TWO CRITIQUES

Critiques of the Internet from the standpoint of political economy and cultural theory have merit, and I have chosen to respond here to Christian Fuchs and Jodi Dean, articulate champions of counter-hype who skillfully deflate the myth of the Internet as a revolutionary technology.

Fuchs has written an innovative Marxist analysis of the Internet, combining the theories of free immaterial labour and the “multitude” with audience commodity theory (Fuchs 2010). He argues that advanced capitalism is an information society in which the production of knowledge has become essential to the reproduction of capital. Marx claimed that the productive power of knowledge increases with the development of society. As a collective product knowledge is essentially social, but under capitalism it is privately appropriated. Like the common lands divided up and expropriated at the origins of capitalism, knowledge belongs to an ideal commons divided up and exploited by advanced capital. In Hegelian terms, Fuchs writes, the existence of knowledge (under capitalism) contradicts its essence (as social.) Fuchs concludes, “With the rise of informational capitalism, the exploitation of the commons has become a central process of capital accumulation” (Fuchs, 2010: 190).

If capitalism is an information society, the knowledge producers constitute an exploited class. They include many workers in industry and government, students and researchers in universities, and also those whose “immaterial labour” contributes to social reproduction, such as house workers and many types of service workers. Fuchs follows Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in emphasizing the significance of immaterial goods. These include communicative and affective goods as well as knowledge (in the usual sense of formally constituted bodies of information). Since all these goods are produced in the commons through communication and sharing, their appropriation by capital represents a “colonization” of an increasingly important sector of society. And since knowledge flows from these multiple sources, the industrial proletariat is no longer the only or indeed the principal exploited class. Fuchs adopts Hardt and Negri’s term “multitude” to refer to this complex new underclass.

This brings us to the crux of Fuchs’s argument about new media. The commons now includes those Internet sites where individuals communicate and thereby contribute to the sum of knowledge. The production of user-generated content becomes the occasion for profit-making activity on the part of the companies that provide the popular web platforms, but the users are paid nothing for their efforts. The unique structure of the Internet enables this new form of knowledge production and also supports the exploitation of the free labour of the producers. Since exploitation is measured as a ratio between wages and the value of the products produced, the rate of this new form of exploitation is virtually infinite!

Fuchs draws on Dallas Smythe’s audience commodity theory to explain how companies realize profits from free labour on the Internet. Smythe argued that in selling advertising time, media companies were in effect marketing commodified audiences. Smythe’s argument was based on his analysis of television, the dominant medium at the time he wrote. Fuchs claims that social networking platforms such as Facebook operate in a similar way, accumulating users and selling them as an audience to advertisers. But now the exploitation has intensified, since the audience no longer attends to a content produced by the corporations that exploit it, but produces its own content and freely offers it up to attract the audience the corporations commodify and sell. Thus the activity of Internet users “does not signify a democratization of the media toward a participatory or democratic system, but the total commodification of human creativity” (Fuchs, 2010: 192).

The broadening of the notion of exploited class suggested by Hardt and Negri and its application to users of the Internet responds to the actual fragmentation of struggles in advanced capitalism. Fuchs wants to construct a counter-hegemony based on a theme unifying these struggles. They can potentially converge around resistance to the colonization of the commons and the exploitation of the knowledge produced by the multitude. Whatever the nature of the exploited group, it contributes to the production of alien wealth. Together, they can resist capitalism as did the proletariat at an earlier stage. The theory cannot unite them, of course, but it can indicate the lines along which unity might be possible under the right conditions. Fuchs makes a powerful case for this strategy.

Although Fuchs has identified important aspects of the Internet, his argument has weaknesses. The Internet is truly the site of new forms of production and exploitation, as he shows. But his evaluation is surprisingly reductive. He appears to define the Internet by the exploitation of free labour and the commodification of its products. Whatever the content of the communications, the simple fact that corporations profit from it determines its essence. He writes, “the contemporary Internet is a class-structured space that is dominated by corporations that use this medium for capital accumulation and advertising” (2011: 310). It is obvious that user activity is profitable for corporations, but it is less obvious that this is the most important thing one can say about it.

Indeed, Fuchs himself appears to recognize this in later articles and books that argue for what he calls a “dialectical” understanding of the Internet as a class-conflicted and not merely a class-structured space (2014a). He argues that he intends this dialectical view in his writings on the political economy of the Internet, but focuses there on only its corporate aspect. He then opposes an alternative nonprofit Internet to the existing one in which corporations play a large role. Thus he writes that “commercial social media do not constitute a public sphere and a participatory web. . . . Social media are mainly commercial and mundane spaces—politics are the exception to the rule” (2014b: 60–61). As a result he seems to leave an opening for the widely influential reductive interpretation of the Internet he appears to hold in his writings on political economy. In any case, Fuchs’s dialectical interpretation is useful, and I will later underpin it with an analysis of the technological basis of the dialectic.

In the writings under consideration here, Fuchs overlooks a significant difference between capitalist production and production on the Internet. This has to do with the relation of capitalist form and content in the two cases. When capitalists appropriated the original commons by fencing it in and expelling the peasants, they transformed the land itself, submitting it to entirely new usages. The essence of capitalism here is thus not just commodification but the transformations that resources undergo as they are commodified. At a later stage labour was submitted to a similar transformation. Capitalism reorganized the labour process to generate abstract labour: labour that can be quantified and controlled to produce profit. Marx calls this “real subsumption.” The content, in the sense of what workers do at work, was penetrated by the commodity form.

As applied to television, the audience commodity theory of mass media resonates with Marx’s theory of commodification at two levels because audience attention can be packaged and sold, and also because the content toward which that attention is directed is rationalized and controlled. Only the first happens on Facebook or Google. It is true that corporations find ways to commodify the knowledge commons. But the commons is not reduced to a productive resource for capital, as was the land appropriated by capital at an earlier stage. The economic aspect of the new commons is parasitic on an independent content, a wide range of meanings and activities that persist even after the imposition of the commodity form. The content that users produce for their mutual entertainment and enlightenment is commodified in the same way that telephone conversations are commodified by telephone companies operating as common carriers. The users’ conversations are not controlled in a labour process managed by the telephone companies or by social networking sites. The metaphoric link between factory labour and Internet “labour” breaks down.

Capitalism profits from many activities that are not labour, and communication on the Internet is just one of them. A sunny beach invites tourists who spend money in hotels and restaurants, but the tourists cannot be said to work for capital when they sunbathe on the beach. The university creates business opportunities for sandwich shops in the neighbourhood of the campus, but classrooms are not sites of free labour for the shopkeepers. Babies offer a business opportunity for diaper makers without performing free labour for the diaper company. The incidental character of the profitable activity associated with each of these situations prevents reduction to their economic function. Similarly, information provided by users is not work producing surplus value.

Another problem with Fuchs’s political economy of the Internet is that he takes off from earlier media theories of television, as in his reference to audience commodity theory. He is right that audiences on the Internet self-assemble and are commodified and sold to advertisers. But the analogy between television and the Internet ignores an important difference between them: the audience commodity theory was proposed once television had achieved its standard form, but the Internet is still in flux.

Television, as a technical achievement, had the potential to serve a multitude of functions. It could have had wide applications for local broadcasting and could have incorporated interaction in combination with the telephone. Perhaps a generation of technical work on such systems would have produced a sophisticated and effective medium for education, culture, and political enlightenment. But the sad history of television charts its reduction to the narrow entertainment and news functions presupposed by the audience commodity theory (Williams, 1974). There is no corresponding history of the Internet, at least not yet. Explaining the Internet with a combination of the television analogy and the theory of free labour forecloses the future of the technology.

At this point in its development, the analogy that seems most relevant to the Internet is not television but a public space such as the sidewalk. Social interaction on the Internet is not primarily labour but exactly what it seems, that is, social interaction. Although production undoubtedly goes on, the economics are not those of labour under capitalism. Capitalists take advantage of the Internet, as do the owners of buildings who rent space along a busy street where people chat with each other and shop. Advertisers are like store owners who pay rent for a good location. Data-mining user contributions enhances the value of the rental property by enabling targeted advertising. What is commodified thereby is what is effectively rented: space on web pages and, through it, audience attention. The users and their contributions are exploited to be sure, but only in the usual common-sense meaning of the term, not in accordance with Marxist value theory.

Fuchs often appears to dismiss the democratic implications of the Internet because of its economic function, but the human significance of online interaction persists despite its place in the capitalist economy. The contributions of Internet users cannot be reduced to their economic function any more than can conversations on the sidewalk. Whether those contributions have a democratic value requires further analysis of their actual content in their context.

This is what Jodi Dean attempts in her cultural critique of the Internet (Dean, 2005; 2010). Let’s consider her argument against Guy Debord’s claim that reciprocal communication has an emancipatory potential that mass communication lacks (2010: 108–13). Debord was the founder and leader of the Situationist International and the author of a critical classic of the 1960s, The Society of the Spectacle. He had a dystopian view of advanced capitalism very similar to the position of such Frankfurt School theorists as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. Roughly summarized, they argued that a technocratic-capitalist elite dominates a subordinated population held in thrall by the mass media and consumerism. The introjection of system requirements makes coercive suppression unnecessary for the most part because the manipulated individuals reproduce the system spontaneously. This relation of voluntary subservience differs from traditional forms in that it is based not on moral conscience but on a libidinal attachment to the rewards of conformity.

According to Debord, breaking out of this syndrome requires dramatic exemplary acts by a small minority of dissenters able to deconstruct the virtual chains binding the mass. He hoped that provocation from the margins would become a catalyst for the breakdown of the system. The French May Events of 1968 could be interpreted as a confirmation of this approach, and in fact the Situationist critique of mass society did play an inspirational role in the movement. Similar actions by the New Left in the United States were less effective but succeeded in breaking the iron grip of 1950s conformism. We still benefit from that breakthrough today.

Dean complains that in emphasizing the top-down nature of advanced capitalism, exemplified in the mass media, Debord idealizes the potential of bottom-up activity to disrupt the system. But in fact, she argues, we now have the bottom-up alternative to the mass media Debord dreamed of. It is called the Internet and, far from disrupting advanced capitalism, it reproduces it ever more effectively. Free communication on the Internet has not had the emancipatory effects foreseen by those like Debord who criticized the centralized, one-way communicative structure of the mass media. She argues that we have entered a new stage of “communicative capitalism” that renders older theories such as Debord’s obsolete.

Dean argues that far from defeating the dystopian vision of a totally administered society, most communication on the Internet reinforces it. The Internet erases the all-important gap between meaning and reality. The distinction between symbol and thing, fantasy and fact, is essential to the possibility of both truth and resistance. On the Internet the distinction disappears and with it the authority of any particular meaning collapses. The disruptive feature of the Internet is the ease with which users externalize their own discourse and multiply alternative sources of information. No longer committed to anything, the user is unreal to him- or herself. No longer persuaded by anything, the user cannot leave the cocoon of the derealized self. Reflexivity, which the Enlightenment identified with the autonomous individual, here renders the individuals helpless before the power of the system. This is in fact the hysteria of reflexivity, a bottomless pit of second thoughts, which destroys the “symbolic efficiency” essential to belief and action.

Dean relates these aspects of life in cyberspace to a strange phenomenon unforeseen by the early prophets of a society liberated by communication on computer networks. This is the enormous flood of useless contributions sent out by Internet users who neither expect nor receive any meaningful response from the imaginary public they address. This is indeed puzzling. At first one posts messages on Facebook in the expectation of a reply, but gradually it becomes clear that no reply is forthcoming—and eventually, that none is necessary. The systematic lack of serious content and responsiveness undermines the emancipatory implications of communicative freedom. Sending trivial messages out into the void of cyberspace is not the true reciprocal communication about matters of substance imagined by those like Debord or Habermas who identified participation with democracy. Under these new conditions participation has no emancipatory effects.

To explain this phenomenon, Dean deploys the categories of Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Computational Turn and the Digital Network
• PART I • DIGITAL THEORY
• PART II • DIGITAL CULTURE
• PART III • DIGITAL POLITICS
• Afterword
• Appendix: Do Machines Have Rights? Ethics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
• List of Contributors
• Footnotes