Use:Marie Wocher - Annotation Jodi Dean at Unlike Us

There is no such thing as society or the Social

Jodi Dean argues that we take the social part in society for granted. But what does the social mean? She introduced 3 different understandings of the social and gives a prospect how the associated Social media to each of these understandings would look like. All three understandings are based in the idea of neoliberalism:

1 Neoliberal stance on society In the Neoliberal stance Jodi Dean claims that society as a collective doesn't exist. Men and women exist as individuals, also families exist, but there is no community. Everyone is responsible for himself, everybody against everybody. The army is a prime example for summarise a non-social institution: the individual has the authority to determine if he wants to be part of this construct (in this case the army) or not. The compatible Social Media Dean summarises with three words: competition, alliance, procreation. It is a model that is characterised by a high level of individualism and comparability. In this model of Social Media people will check out and monitor each other. Everyone is looking after number one. People will try to find out who is the best match in personal life and in career.

2 Actor-network-Social Media His Social Media Model is based on the Actor-network theory of Bruno Latour. The Actor-Network theory is a socio-scientific theory of Latour, who focuses on the consequences of science and technology for the human society. His theory not only consider, like most of social theories, what occurs between human beings, but the Actor-network theory (ANT) also describes the relationship between human and technology. Human and technology form actor-networks. These actor-networks are cooperations of human, technology, organisations, rules and infrastructures. The networks have the aim to build stable structures of knowledge, communication and action. All actors, therefore humans, machines, media and artefacts are all and equally able to influence the relationships and the conduct of all actors within the network. The Wikipedia page of the Social Media Model explains Latour's theory on the hand of the model of a university. The interaction of a university includes students, teachers and their ideas and thoughts as well as black boards, pens and computer. Together all these things, no matter of materiality or intangible, form a network named university.

This model of Social media would promote the fun factor. A central goal is to find new ways of interaction. It would be about developing new software to keep the Social Media playful. This Social Media wouldn't be, in contrast to the neoliberal-social media, that profit orientated.

3 Radical Democracy Model The third model that is presented by Jodi Dean underlies the book "Hegemony and socialist Strategy" by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Muffe. The book consists of a hegemony- and a democracy theoretical part. In the first part they develop the hegemony theory of Antonio Gramscis and in the second part they draft the project of a radical and plural democracy. The radical democratic social media would be a place where you will be in trouble constantly. This place would change everlasting and reconstruct again and again. The members of the radical social media would be in constantly riot. It will result in coalitions and alliances.

"If society doesn't exist, one would expect Social Media to match all these views" The Social Media we have looks like the Social Media we would expect. Because the Social Media we know correlates exactly these three understandings.

Centralisation critique Dean says, that if Social Media is the result of joint efforts, then she believes that all arguments against centralisation and for more individual control, privacy, autonomy are completely unfounded. Not centralisation and privacy is the problem. But dispersion, multiplication of messages and decentralisation is the problem. Dispersion is the problem since decentralisation causes dilution and fragmentation of labour. Here Jodi Dean gives an example of Cloud Workers at IBM. The Cloud working principle is based on the fact that more and more people are hired for ever smaller jobs. So called Cloud workers can work from everywhere in the world, no one is bound to a workplace anymore, not even to only one specific country or company.

Jodi Dean argues, the more distribution takes place, the more likely, that centralisation arise. On the same time she appeals: don't weaken the power of people by resolution and distribution. Because the bigger a network is, the stronger its members. That people centralise in Social Media, Dean sees as the desire of everybody to become a part of the whole. Something that is bigger than oneself. Dean argues that connection is a direct reaction to the unsteady labour market. In Social Media, people produce for others all the time, these products could be emotions or all kinds of content. They are produced by a productive force, that araised from our common effort.

Dean ands with this: Treating centralisation as the problem distracts attention from the real issues: property and ownership, the fact that Twitter and Facebook are not ours. To the question of what we can do about that, she answers: "overthrow capitalism and move away from privacy concerns that keep people chained in individual units."