User:Marie Wocher - Annotation Jodi Dean at Unlike Us

Social Media and Centralization

Dean says, that if Social Media is the result of joint efforts, then she believes that all arguments against centralization and for more individual control, privacy, autonomy are completely unfounded. Not centralization and privacy is the problem. But dispersion, multiplication of messages and decentralization is the problem. Dispersion is the problem since decentralization 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 centralization 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 centralize 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 raised from our common effort.

Is it right, like Dean says, that we contribute to the centralization in Social Media?

With the upcoming of Social Media, it became quite popular to use different nicknames and therefor to assume different identities. To be one person in analog life and to have different avatars in digital life. But having an urge to disguise oneself keep within limits now a days. Through the connecting of different cyber identities, all part identities become a complete identity again. This is what Facebook and Google are trying with connecting all their offerings (Facebook Like button). Before we had for every need a different Social Media. Now, everything is joined together, there is no need for a separation between your private and your professional life anymore, everything will merged together in Facebook or the Google search. That Social Network Media user don't make use of seven different avatars anymore is not because we are longing for more authenticity, but because the network enters our lives that much, that we don't distinguish between on- and offline and because of that we are longing for our "old" person within the network.

Dean says, that the Social Media we have looks like the Social Media we would expect?

Dean says that the Social Media we know correlates exactly the following three understandings.

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 summarize 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 summarizes with three words: competition, alliance, procreation. It is a model that is characterized 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

This 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, organizations, rules and infrastructures. The networks have the aim to build stable structures of knowledge, communication and action. All actors, therefore humans, machines, media and artifacts 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" but we are also other-directed by the, what Vito Campanelli describes as 'aesthetics of SM'

Vito Campanelli describes the user of Social Networking Sites as self-referential and monolingual. They speak one single language and therefor they supporting the web to "monolithic blocks of beliefs and desires". If everything develops within the context of a group (and that is what Social Media is about), it becomes very difficult to develop ideas that happen outside the group. Because then the group has to open up, what is not happening. It is actually quite contradictory that the technology, that should convey a feeling of participative and freedom causes contrary. The technology promotes the arise of monolingual blocks. The technology that should actually mobilize the user, puts them into predetermined flows. Instead of communicating through the technology you are constantly busy to subscribe to to ideas and images by means of a software, that makes this process very easy. We link people to our blog, reply 'attending' to an event invitation or following someone on twitter. Because of the easiness of theses processes, any critique falls silence. Every critique to that simplicity or to that process requires the analyzing of technology. Actually everybody is in state to use the technical tools to contradict but these two actions are totally out of any proportion. One the one hand you have an immense complex technology and on the other hand you have just one 'klick' to agree. So the right question, Campanelli asks is why should I do that, "if it is much easier to stay on an oases of happiness together with your 'friends'" (p. )

Campanelli describes SNM as a space for different opinions and discourse including disagreement and differences. To preserve this space there should be a technology that allow different opinions. But critical thoughts are only integrated to the technology if it is mainstream. Campanelli writes that critical thought must be trendy. Within Facebook it is cool to create a group that is against whaling, it is much more easy to be be against Bush than for him. And he rightly asks if we can see that as contradiction. Or is it not the case that we could see that as an earmarking of different users, who are thinking the same? Lazzaroto views it as concatenation of subjectivities, as connecting and disconnecting of flows.

Following the predetermined flow

If we see a picture in analog life, than we think about what we are seeing. We start associating. Our associations follow a sort of personal network, consisting of images that we 'saved'. A chain of associations will arise. In interactive media the media asks us to 'click' to a picture to see another. We can not follow our own chain of associations but are depending of a predetermined trajectory. The path we are following is predetermined through the internet. On the internet we read more broad, clicking from one highlighted link to another, without following the actual story. We are asked to follow pre programmed objectively existing associations. We "follow the trajectories of the New Media Designer" (Campanelli 91)

Maybe you have to see the path, we are taking on the web see as a restricted freedom. We have the possibilities but they only take place within which is designed for us. In Social Media we have approximately the same problem. SM exist to express ourselves but we only can express ourselves within the frame that is given by the particular SM. In Facebook we have the possibility to express our taste by showing our favorite movies and bands. But is is for example not possible to show what is your favorite radio show, because there is just no frame for radio shows. Probably that frame for radio shows is also not missing because we don't miss what is not shown. We just follow the mainstream. Campanelli explains this phenomenon by giving the picture of a bird in a flock. Finally the flock will choose which direction the bird will take. In Social Network Media our friends would be the flock. We will be determined by them because we are determined by the related content. We click the videos our friends are posting, visit the blog with the most followers and just have a look to the first search results of a search engine. Lovink summarizes this phenomenon with the sentence "I want to see what you see" and Campanelli goes a step further and says that this is "the final victory of the signifier of the signified"

Centralisation Critique

Smari McCarthy compares industrialization with the development of the Web. The industrialization leads into centralization and urbanization and we can see the same centralization within the Net. The danger is that this centralization is not controllable for the individual. The question would always be who exercise control. McCarthy says who controls Facebook, has the control about parts of the real life of seven percent of the world population. McCarthy think that this centralization is dangerous because for example regimes only had to attack only one single point. So I totally agree with Jodie, that treating centralization 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."