Abstract
At the core of this paper is a psychosocial inquiry into the Marxist concept of alienation and its applications to the field of digital labour. Following a brief review of different theoretical works on alienation, it looks into its recent conceptualisations and applications to the study of online social networking sites. Finally, the authors offer suggestions on how to extend and render more complex these recent approaches through in-depth analyses of Facebook posts that exemplify how alienation is experienced, articulated, and expressed online. For this perspective, the article draws on Rahel Jaeggi’s (2005) reassessment of alienation, as well as the depth-hermeneutic method of “scenic understanding” developed by Alfred Lorenzer (e.g. 1970; 1986).
Highlights
In his 2011 article “Surveillance and Alienation in the Online Economy”, Mark Andrejevic makes the following observation apropos alienation and the specific form that the concept takes on in online social networking practices.Each form of intentional user-generated content—a blog post, a Facebook update, a Tweet, is redoubled in the form of ‘cybernetic commodities’ (Mosco 1989). [...] [W]hile they are created by users, they are not controlled by users, who have little choice over how and when this data is generated and little say in how it is used
The field of digital labour studies has seen an immense rise in popularity; in the past years research has tackled the relationship between users and forms of unpaid or paid digital practices that produce exchange and use value (Terranova 2000; Kücklich 2005; Mosco and McKercher 2007; Burston, Dyer-Witheford and Hearn, 2010, Manzerolle 2010, Comor 2010, Dyer-Witheford 2010; Kang and McAllister 2011; Fuchs 2010, 2012a; Fuchs and Sevignani 2013; Scholz 2013)
This thesis—the existence of an inverse-proportional relation between exploitation and alienation—is summed up in the title of his paper, “How Less Alienation Creates More Exploitation?” While we find the overall direction of this argument thought provoking, Fisher’s simple equation of de-alienation with such suspiciously affirmative categories as “self-expression, authenticity, and relations with others” appears highly problematic. “[I]n order to be de-alienated,” Fisher writes, “users must communicate and socialize: they must establish social networks, share information, talk to their friends and read their posts, follow and be followed
Summary
In his 2011 article “Surveillance and Alienation in the Online Economy”, Mark Andrejevic makes the following observation apropos alienation and the specific form that the concept takes on in online social networking practices. To the extent that this information can be used to predict and influence user behaviour it is an activity that returns to users in an unrecognizable form as a means of fulfilling the imperatives of others (Andrejevic 2011, 286, our emphasis) This is an extremely fertile point of departure for thinking about the uses of the concept of alienation in the online sphere. Since our aim in this paper is to contribute to the discussion of alienation within the study of digital labour from a psychoanalytically oriented perspective, Andrejevic’s observations here are highly suggestive He creates a scenario in which alienation arises not on the basis of the users’ symbolic production on a given corporate platform; rather, he presents the feeding back of the produced and double-used data as a decisive part in the dynamics of alienation. The main part of this article will consist of our exemplary analyses of online alienation
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