Critique, Social Media and the Information Society

Christian Fuchs, Marisol Sandoval, Christian Fuchs, Marisol Sandoval

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135019266
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Social Aspects in Computer Science
• Index: Computer Science

In times of global capitalist crisis we are witnessing a return of critique in the form of a surging interest in critical theories (such as the critical political economy of Karl Marx) and social rebellions as a reaction to the commodification and instrumentalization of everything. On one hand, there are overdrawn claims that social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc) have caused uproars in countries like Tunisia and Egypt. On the other hand, the question arises as to what actual role social media play in contemporary capitalism, crisis, rebellions, the strengthening of the commons, and the potential creation of participatory democracy. The commodification of everything has resulted also in a commodification of the communication commons, including Internet communication that is today largely commercial in character.

This book deals with the questions of what kind of society and what kind of Internet are desirable, how capitalism, power structures and social media are connected, how political struggles are connected to social media, what current developments of the Internet and society tell us about potential futures, how an alternative Internet can look like, and how a participatory, commons-based Internet and a co-operative, participatory, sustainable information society can be achieved.

1 Introduction

Critique, Social Media and the Information Society in the Age of Capitalist Crisis

Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval

1.1. Information Society?

This book presents contributions that analyse the societal dimension of the media critically. Although the contributions do not necessarily share the assumption that we live in an information society, they all express an interest in analysing media and information in their societal context, i.e. in relationship to the interaction of economy, politics and culture, and the power structures and patterns of stratification and inequalities that shape contemporary capitalist societies. There are many labels that one can use to describe contemporary society and many of them, such as capitalism, describe today’s society in a more critical manner than the notions of the information or knowledge society that have all too often been captured by dominant interests in order to advance neoliberal policies. Nonetheless it is true that media, knowledge work and information technologies play a certain role in many contemporary societies and that the notion of the information society should therefore not simply be rejected, but critically assessed. Information is one of several relevant dimensions of contemporary society. Just like we can say that we live in informational capitalism, we can also say that we live in finance capitalism, hyperindustrial capitalism, crisis capitalism, etc (Fuchs 2012a). Informational capitalism signifies the extent to which the contemporary global economy and society are information-and media-based. This degree varies and can be measured in various ways. To speak of this tendency as informational capitalism means to neither reject nor glorify the information society discourse and to acknowledge that the contemporary information economy is shaped by a contradiction between productive forces and relations of production: It is capitalist at the level of the relations of production and to a certain degree informational on the level of the productive forces (Fuchs 2012a).

In 1968, six years before the publication of Daniel Bell’s (1974) book The coming of post-industrial society that was path-breaking for the information society discourse (i.e. in a time before the high rise of the information society hypothesis), Theodor W. Adorno (1968/2003) gave an introductory keynote talk on the topic of “Late capitalism or industrial society?” at the annual meeting of the German Sociological Association. He said that the “fundamental question of the present structure of society” is “about the alternatives: late capitalism or industrial society”. It is about

whether the capitalist system still predominates according to its model, however modified, or whether the development of industry has rendered the concept of capitalism obsolete, together with the distinction between capitalist and noncapitalist states and even the critique of capitalism. In other words, the question is whether it is true that Marx is out of date.

(1968/2003, 111)

Adorno pointed out dichotomous answers to this question (either/or) “are themselves predicaments modelled on dilemmas taken from an unfree society” (1968/2003, 113).

Adorno gave an answer to the question that took into account the importance and relation of the productive forces and the relations of production in the capitalist mode of production:

In terms of critical, dialectical theory, I would like to propose as an initial, necessarily abstract answer that contemporary society undoubtedly is an industrial society according to the state of its forces of production. Industrial labor has everywhere become the model of society as such, regardless of the frontiers separating differing political systems. It has developed into a totality because methods modeled on those of industry are necessarily extended by the laws of economics to other realms of material production, administration, the sphere of distribution, and those that call themselves culture. In contrast, however, society is capitalist in its relations of production. People are still what they were in Marx’s analysis in the middle of the nineteenth century [ . . . ] Production takes place today, as then, for the sake of profit.

(1968/2003, 117)

Paraphrasing Adorno and transferring his question and answer to a time that is shaped by information society discourse, one can hypothesize that a fundamental question of the present structure of society is about the alternatives: capitalism or information society. In terms of critical, dialectical theory, we would like to propose as an initial, necessarily abstract answer that contemporary society is an information society according to the state of its forces of production. In contrast, however, contemporary society is capitalist in its relations of production. People are still what they were in Marx’s analysis in the middle of the nineteenth century. Production takes place today, as then, for the sake of profit and for achieving this end it to a certain extent makes use of knowledge and information technology in production.

Productive forces and relations of production are interlocking phenomena, they contain each other. The informational forces of production (knowledge labour, information technology, science, theoretical knowledge) and the capitalist class relations should not be seen as polar opposites and the discussion about the existence or non-existence of an information society should neither be reduced to the level of the productive forces nor to the level of the relations of production. The first reduction will result in the assumption that we live in a new society, the information society, the second reduction will result in the response that nothing has changed and we still live in a capitalist society. The informational forces of production (just like the non-informational ones) are mediated by class relations, which means that the establishment of information technologies (as part of the instruments of production) and knowledge work (which is characterized by a composition of labour, where mental and communicative features dominate over manual features) as features of economic production are strategies for advancing surplus value exploitation, the reduction of variable and constant capital. Capital thereby hopes to achieve higher profit rates. The idea that the notion of society can today solely be constructed by reference to the informational forces of production is an ideological illusion. The counterclaim that nothing has changed because we still live in a society dominated by capitalist class relations is an understandable reaction and a strategy of ideology critique. A dialectical analysis cannot leave out that there are certain changes taking place that are intended to support the deepening of the class structure, but also contain what Marx termed Keimformen (germ forms of an alternative society). That the development of the informational productive forces is itself contradictory and comes in conflict with the capitalist relations of production can be observed by phenomena such as file sharing on the Internet, the discussions about intellectual property rights, the emergence of pirate parties in the political landscape of advanced capitalist countries, or the popularity of free software (Fuchs 2008, 2009).

Marx predicted the emergence of informational productive forces as the result of the development of fixed capital, i.e. the increasing technical and organic composition of capital that is characterized by an increase of the role of technology in production at the expense of living labour power.

The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.

(Marx 1857/1858, 706)

Marx argued that by technological development “the entire production process” becomes “the technological application of science” (1857/1858, 699). The “transformation of the production process from the simple labour process into a scientific process [ . . . ] appears as a quality of fixed capital in contrast to living labour” (1857/1858, 700). So for Marx, the rise of informational productive forces was immanently connected to capital’s need for finding technical ways that allow accumulating more profits. That society has to a certain degree become informational is just like the discourse about this circumstance a result of the development of capitalism.

1.2 Social Media?

By using the term “social media” in the title of this book, we want to signify several things that are reflected in the contributions in this volume:

• All media stand in the context of society. Neglecting the analysis of the media together with society often results in deterministic, administrative research.
• Contemporary media on the one hand are, as the contributions in this book show, entangled in numerous forms with the commodity form and private property. On the other hand they also have certain potentials and germ forms of advancing the social character of production and ownership.
• Special consideration is given in this book to what are today often misleadingly called “social media”: blogs (e.g. Blogspot, Wordpress), social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), microblogs (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Weibo), wikis (e.g. Wikipedia, WikiLeaks), user-generated content and file sharing sites (e.g. YouTube, the Pirate Bay). This does not mean that we share the social media hype that mainly is aimed at attracting investors and often celebrates contemporary capitalist culture as participatory, democratic and creative without giving enough consideration to realities of precarity, exploitation, inequalities and power asymmetries. But it means that we think the analysis of the mentioned kind of media is important, should be taken seriously and conducted in a critical way that goes beyond hype and ideology.

What is social about social media? The discussions about these terms started when Tim O’Reilly (2005) introduced the term “web 2.0” in 2005. Although O’Reilly surely thinks that “web 2.0” denotes actual changes and says that the crucial fact about it is that users, as a collective intelligence, co-create the value of platforms like Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, or Craigslist in a “community of connected users” (O’Reilly and Battelle 2009, 1), he later admitted that the term was mainly created for identifying the need of new economic strategies of Internet companies after the “dot.com” crisis, in which the bursting of financial bubbles caused the collapse of many Internet companies. In a paper published five years after the creation of the term “web 2.0”, O’Reilly stated that this category was “a statement about the second coming of the Web after the dotcom bust” and that it was used at a conference that was“designed to restore confidence in an industry that had lost its way” (O’Reilly and Battelle 2009, 1). This is just another formulation for saying that “web 2.0” is a capitalist marketing ideology aimed at attracting venture capital investments for newly founded Internet companies.

Michael Mandiberg argues that the notion of “social media” has been associated with multiple concepts: “the corporate media favorite ‘user-generated content’, Henry Jenkin’s media-industries-focused ‘convergence culture’, Jay Rosen’s ‘the people formerly known as the audience’, the politically infused ‘participatory media’, Yochai Benkler’s process-oriented ‘peer-production’, and Tim O’Reilly’s computer-programming-oriented ‘Web 2.0’” (Mandiberg 2012, 2).

The question of if and how social the web is or has become, depends on a profoundly social theoretical question: What does it mean to be social? Are human beings always social or only if they interact with others? In sociological theory, there are different concepts of the social, such as Émile Durkheim’s social facts, Max Weber’s social action, Karl Marx’s notion of collaborative work (as also employed in the concept of computer-supported collaborative work—CSCW), or Ferdinand Tönnies’s notion of community (Fuchs 2010). Depending on which concept of sociality one employs, one gets different answers to the questions regarding if the web is social or not and if sociality is a new quality of the web or not. Community aspects of the web have certainly not started with Facebook, which was founded in 2004, but was already described as characteristic of 1980s bulletin board systems like The WELL. Collaborative work (e.g. the co-operative editing of articles performed on Wikipedia) is rather new as a dominant phenomenon on the world wide web (WWW), but not new in computing. The concept of CSCW became the subject of a conference series that identifies multiple dimensions of sociality (such as cognition, communication, and co-operation), based on which the continuities and discontinuities of the development of the Internet can be empirically studied. The first ACM Conference on CSCW was held in Austin, Texas, in December 1986. Neither is the wiki-concept new itself—the WikiWikiWeb was introduced by Ward Cunningham in 1984. All computing systems, and therefore all web applications and also all forms of media, can be considered as social because they store and transmit human knowledge that originates in social relations in society. They are objectifications of society and human social relations. Whenever a human uses a computing system or a medium (also if s/he is alone in a room), then s/he cognizes based on objectified knowledge that is the outcome of social relations. But not all computing systems and web applications support direct communication between humans, in which at least two humans mutually exchange symbols that are interpreted as being meaningful. Because Amazon mainly provides information about books and other goods one can buy, it is not primarily a tool of communication, but rather a tool of information, whereas Facebook has in-built communication features that are frequently used (mail system, walls for comments, forums, etc.).

The discussion shows that it is not a simple question to decide if and how social the WWW actually is. Therefore a social theory approach of clarifying the notion of “social media” can be advanced by identifying three social information processes that constitute three forms of sociality (Hofkirchner 2013):

• Cognition
• Communication
• Co-operation

According to this view, individuals have certain cognitive features that they use to interact with others so that shared spaces of interaction are created. In some cases, these spaces are used not just for communication, but for the co-production of novel qualities of overall social systems and for community-building. The three notions relate to different forms of sociality (Fuchs 2010): The notion of cognition is related to Emile Durkheim’s concept of social facts, the communication concept to Max Weber’s notions of social actions and social relations, the co-operation concept to the notions of communities and collaborative work. According to this model, media and online platforms (1) that primarily support cognition (e.g. the websites of newspapers) are social media, (2) that primarily support communication (e.g. e-mail) are social media, and (3) that primarily support community-building and collaborative work (e.g. Wikipedia, Facebook) are social media. This means that social media is a complex term and that there are different types of social media. Empirical studies show that the most recent development is that there is a certain increase of the importance of social media on the Internet (Fuchs 2010), which is especially due to the rise of social networking sites such as Facebook, wikis like Wikipedia, and microblogs such as Twitter and Weibo.

If one compares lists of the most accessed websites from 1995–2000 to 2006–present for certain countries or the world, the rise of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, Blogspot, Wordpr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• 1 Introduction Critique, Social Media and the Information Society in the Age of Capitalist Crisis
• I Critical Studies of the Information Society
• II Critical Internet- and Social Media-Studies
• III Critical Studies of Communication Labour
• List of Contributors