{"id":9041,"date":"2012-03-22T13:56:10","date_gmt":"2012-03-22T17:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=9041"},"modified":"2012-05-01T16:30:59","modified_gmt":"2012-05-01T20:30:59","slug":"alienation-exploitation-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2012\/03\/22\/alienation-exploitation-social-media\/","title":{"rendered":"Alienation, Exploitation & Social Media"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I just published a piece<\/a> in a special issue of\u00a0American Behavioral Scientist<\/em><\/a>\u00a0on the topic of Prosumption and the Prosumer. The article will likely be of interest to many of Cyborgology blog readers. In it, I consider the applicability of Marx’s two main critiques of capitalism\u2014alienation and exploitation\u2014to social media. Though Marx was describing the materialist paradigm of factory production, it is useful to see how far these concepts can be stretched to account for the immaterial paradigm of digital prosumption, because, even if we observe weaknesses in how the concepts graft on to social media, these observations become a starting point for new kinds of theorizing.<\/p>\n

Additionally, I found it important to try to bring alienation into the conversation surrounding social media. Thus far, most Marxian analysis has focused solely on exploitation (many hyperbolically claiming that we have entered an era of hyper- or over-exploitation). I argue that exploitation has remained a constant between material and immaterial modes of production and that what is most remarkable is the fact that productivity occurs on social media with so little alienation.<\/p>\n

You can access the article on the publisher’s site<\/a> or as a .pdf<\/a> here.<\/p>\n

PJ Rey (@pjrey) is a sociologist at the University of Maryland working to describe how social media and other technology reflect and change our culture and the economy.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just published a piece in a special issue of\u00a0American Behavioral Scientist\u00a0on the topic of Prosumption and the Prosumer. The article will likely be of interest to many of Cyborgology blog readers. In it, I consider the applicability of Marx’s two main critiques of capitalism\u2014alienation and exploitation\u2014to social media. Though Marx was describing the materialist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":563,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[425,9968],"tags":[2281,16055,98,36,2704,3331,732],"class_list":["post-9041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links","category-reviews","tag-alienation","tag-american-behavioral-scientist","tag-capitalism","tag-economics","tag-exploitation","tag-prosumption","tag-social-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/563"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9041"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9790,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9041\/revisions\/9790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}