{"id":18701,"date":"2014-05-30T15:31:47","date_gmt":"2014-05-30T19:31:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=18701"},"modified":"2014-05-30T15:31:47","modified_gmt":"2014-05-30T19:31:47","slug":"social-media-because-neoliberalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2014\/05\/30\/social-media-because-neoliberalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Media, Because Neoliberalism?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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from the daily mail, take with appropriate grains of salt<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What sort of ideological context would make the emergence of social media, as we know it today, both possible and likely? What background ideals and institutions would motivate the development of what we now know as social media? In other words, what theory of society would help us understand why today looks like it does, why media technology and culture developed in the ways that they have, why, out of all the uncountable possibilities the internet offers, we have Facebook, Twitter, tumblr, and Instagram, and not something else?<\/p>\n


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There are two ways to approach these questions: the first way would be to trace the history of the development of technologies–see what sorts of material\/scientific advances happened when they did, and why (e.g., economic and regulatory reasons, etc.). That\u2019s not what I\u2019m interested in doing. My approach is not historical, but philosophical (duh): I want to know what kind of society would want<\/i> something like \u201csocial media\u201d as we know it. I want to see what set of background assumptions and ideas need to be present for what we now know as \u201csocial media\u201d to make sense.<\/p>\n

So, just to be clear: I\u2019m not presenting a historical or factual argument as to how and why this happened. I\u2019m trying to give a theory of the kind of society that would support such a development.<\/p>\n

I think Jacques Ranciere\u2019s account of neoliberalism (chapter 5 here<\/a>)–which he calls \u201cconsensus\u201d or \u201cpostdemocracy\u201d–is a plausible account of the kind of society that would want both the technological infrastructure and the cultural habits that encourage us to broadcast our thoughts, our images, our \u201clikes\u201d and \u201cfavorites.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Ranciere, what is distinctive about neoliberalism is that it eliminates the need for (and thus ideal of) representation. The idea of representation is, if you think about it, pretty central to classical democratic liberalism: I do not directly participate in the day-to-day government of my society, but I vote for someone to represent<\/i> my interests in governmental bodies. So, there\u2019s a difference between \u201cthe people\u201d and the people\u2019s representation, between how things really are and how we say they are, between reality and appearance. The de facto\/de jure distinction is another example of this gap between fact and its representation.<\/p>\n

Traditionally, we\u2019ve been able to make evident a gap between what the law says–e.g., \u201call men are created equal\u201d–and how society actually works, how that law is executed. The law may say \u201call men are created equal,\u201d but if we can provide evidence that both (a) a particular group of people are actually, in fact, \u00a0included in the category \u201call men,\u201d and (b) they are not, on the ground and in practice, treated with the equality that the law nominally entitles them, then we can show that there is an inconsistency between the law and its application, and make a case that this inconsistency must be remedied. Basically, it\u2019s a claim that the de jure and de facto state of affairs don\u2019t match up, and must be brought in line. This is how, for Ranciere, women\u2019s suffrage, civil rights, most of the social justice movements of the past have worked. These appeals for justice rely on a dualist metaphysics, one that posits an inconsistency between \u201chow things really are,\u201d on one hand, and \u201chow things appear\u201d on the other.<\/p>\n

Neoliberalism, according to Ranciere, collapses the de facto into the de jure–it eliminates the dualist metaphysics (the appearance\/reality dualism) and replaces it with a monist metaphysics: how things appear is how they actually are. There is no gap between appearance and reality, no \u201cinterval between law and fact\u201d (112), because what appears is a direct and comprehensive representation, or better, visualization,<\/i> of the facts of the world.<\/p>\n

This shift from representation to visualization (this way of putting it is mine, not Ranciere\u2019s) follows from a shift in the technologies or methods of governance. Words<\/i>, the conventional medium of law and of political debate, don\u2019t directly correspond to what they mean: they\u2019re signifiers that refer to and condense\/misrepresent an infinitely more complex signified. Data<\/i>, on the other hand, can present itself as identical to and coextensive with whatever phenomenon it expresses. Data is \u201cthe conjunction of science and the media\u201d which understands itself as \u201cexhaustively presenting the people and its parts and bringing the count of those parts in line with the image of the whole\u201d (103). Data isn\u2019t treated as a symbol or signifier of the facts, but as a measurement of the facts themselves.<\/p>\n

What Ranciere means by data is public opinion polling (writing in 1995, he might be thinking about Bill Clinton\u2019s reliance on public opinion polls<\/a>). Such polls are a method of \u201cscientific modeling and forecasting operating on an empirical population carved up exactly into its parts…the total distribution of the people into its parts and subparts\u201d (103). Public opinion polls assign everyone to a demographic, and then measure the distribution of opinions across demographics. 18-24, 25-39, 40-65, 65+ — a this seems like a comprehensive, all-inclusive metric: it includes everyone of voting age, which in the US is 18. And even if this isn\u2019t comprehensive and all-inclusive, all that needs to be done is to make more finely-grained categories: we can break age demographics down by gender, sexual orientation, geographic location, religion, education level, and on and on. Ever-advancing technology \u201cis supposed to liberate the new community as a multiplicity of local rationalities and ethnic, sexual, religious, cultural, or aesthetic minorities\u201d (104). Twitter, for example, supposedly gives voice and access to people who are otherwise closed out of corporate media. The law might be limited in its capacity and its application, but opinion is unlimited. [1]<\/p>\n

Ranciere argues that this conjunction of science & the media that I\u2019m calling \u201cdata\u201d co-opts and neutralizes the ability of minorities to challenge their exclusion from and marginalization in the law. He calls this \u201cstate mimesis of the political practice of litigation. Such a mimesis transforms the traditional argument that gives place to the show of democracy, the internal gap in equality, into a problem that is a matter for expert knowledge\u201d (109). What the law considers a problem of justice (unequal treatment before the rule of law), data considers a problem of knowledge–we just have to tweak the algorithm so that it works better. That\u2019s how I interpret Ranciere\u2019s claim that \u201cidentifying and dealing with the lack must then be substituted for the manifestation of wrong\u201d (107)–it\u2019s not that society is unequal, but that our algorithm isn\u2019t functioning as well as it should.<\/p>\n

The (supposed) advantage of \u201cdata\u201d is that it allows us to think that we\u2019ve solved all problems of justice, that we live in a post-racial, post-feminist, classless society, in a flat and perfectly meritocratic world. It looks like everyone is included, that everyone has a voice and that their voices count. From this perspective, the only injustices are making false claims about exclusion, marginalization, and oppression (e.g., calling out sexism gets interpreted as itself sexist).<\/p>\n

As Jason Rines (@badhumanist) pointed out in class this week, while Ranciere\u2019s talking about opinion polling, the \u201cscience + media\u201d complex has changed a lot in the 20 years since Ranciere wrote this. Instead of opinion polls, we have social media and communicative capitalism. What is social media but the exhaustive, increasingly fine-grained presentation of everyone\u2019s opinions, and opinions of others\u2019 opinions (\u201clikes,\u201d \u201cfavorites,\u201d \u201cshares\u201d)? On something like Twitter, it\u2019s not just that, a Ranciere describes, \u201cthe count of their speech [is] identical to their linguistic performance\u201d (102), but that linguistic performance is itself what is quantified. Social media is a tool for counting, quantifying, and tracking linguistic performance as such. It \u201creflect[s] the community\u2019s identity with itself as the law of their acting\u201d (112). This \u201claw of their acting\u201d would be like the algorithm that describes the pattern of behavior characteristic of all the subjects in X group. This law is identical with the performance because it (supposedly) describes and codifies performance. It\u2019s not a representation of their speech, but the very empirical, factual patterns their speech exhibits.<\/p>\n

Whereas classical contract theory says societies are legitimate because their members agree\/consent to the rules of that society, \u201cconsensus\u201d society argues that it is legitimate because its rules are merely formalizations of what people actually do already. Its rules are just the facts of everyday life expressed in data.<\/p>\n

So, a social order that stakes its claim for legitimacy on data, and in which quantifiable behavior counts, more or less, as political participation and enfranchisement, such a social order will be deeply invested in developing more ways for people to quantify their behavior, their \u2018opinion.\u2019<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not trying to make any causal claims here–I\u2019m not going so far as to say Ranciere tells us the causes for the development of social media. Rather, his theory of consensus or postdemocracy help us understand the kind of society that would support the developments in media technology that have given rise to what we now know as social media.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

[1] The limited nature of the law, in contrast to the unlimited nature of opinion, is fundamental to JS Mill\u2019s \u201cOn Liberty.\u201d This text is one of the key philosophical accounts of liberalism. Its distinction between law and opinion, as well as its emphasis on civil rather than individual liberty, may make it more neo-liberal than traditionally liberal.<\/p>\n

I want to thank my Theories of Neoliberalism class, especially Jason Rines (@badhumanist), Ashley Williams (@ash_bash23), Ryan Shullaw, and Lloyd Wymore, for the conversation and questions that resulted in this post. The class tumblr is available here<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

Robin is on Twitter as @doctaj.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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