Understanding Social Media Use as Alienation: A Review and Critique

Abstract

The opportunities social media provide for agential expressions of subjectivity and experiential learning, relative to social media's role in reproducing digital-era capitalism, are the subject of keen debate. There is now a burgeoning academic literature which suggests that social media users are, to a greater or lesser degree, alienated by the activities of mega-corporations like Google and Facebook. Within this literature two broad perspectives are clearly identifiable. The first insists that social media platforms strongly alienate their users. To the extent that critical media scholars who advance this proposition are preoccupied with ideological hegemony, their work emblematises the idealist tendency of (old) media theorists that Dallas W. Smythe criticises. Contributors to the second perspective posit a trade-off between social media user alienation and exploitation. Not only is this idea inherently problematical, it does not go far enough towards resetting the analysis of social media back onto a materialist track. This article seeks to do just that.

Behind the veils of discourse: Analysing the connection between discourse and exploitation on the ‘social’ internet

“…So, what makes the free labourer submit to the forces of digital capitalism? Reveley (2013: 87) and Beverungen et al (2015: 480) have asked why the user of ‘social’ media continues to use the platform, if it is exploited and alienated. Being exploited gives the exploited some power over the exploiter (Wright 1994: 11), as the exploiter needs the exploited.…”

Queering alienation in digital media

“…James Reveley (2013) argues that rather than focusing on objective alienation -the alienation of the worker from work processes and products -studies of Internet economics tend to focus on the subjective alienation of 'species-being' -the alienation of the worker from themselves. Reveley's assessment of this tendency in the field is that it draws focus from the materialist aspects of alienation that he sees as the important aspects of Smythe's argument, instead emphasising, or often assuming, the development of a capitalist identity as a necessary corollary of commercial media consumption.…”

“…The concept of alienation as an effect of the dynamics of capitalist private property relations has significant utility for understanding the ways in which users' online activity is made strange and comes to act upon them, for instance in the form of personalisation algorithms or as an object of state policing (Jarrett, 2014). Alienation also has critical force when it is used to trace the more material consequences of reproducing consumer behaviour (Reveley, 2013). What is required though is to mobilise the concept without assuming the a priori and universal existence of an autonomous subject who articulates self in private spaces; without drawing on 'speciesbeing.…”

Alienation: The critique that refuses to disappear

“…Kellner (2005) has argued that understood dialectically, digital technologies, which arouse responses ranging from 'technophobia' to 'technophilia', foster new forms of alienation, but can also provide new realms of agency and meaning. Entering debates as to whether computers and cellphones (iPods, videogames) foster withdrawal from social life or more social connections, Hassan (2003) raises questions as to whether the growing use of internet-based news and information leads to a degradation of political literacy with people likely to agree with what they have read or heard most recently, losing the capacity for independent, critical thought (see, too : Coeckelbergh, 2012;Reveley, 2013;Zhu and Zhou, 2013). If one-dimensional thought (Marcuse, 1964) is developing, it undoubtedly leads to voter inertia with people sharing few common values and/or social ties based on religion, community or work, as Durkheim feared a century ago.…”