Choice or Disparation? Theorising the Social in Social Media Systems

Neal Thomas

doi:10.16997/wpcc.211

Abstract

For millions of people around the world, social media systems now represent a central, material-semiotic mode of relation. At the level of algorithmic technique, their vision of the social is primarily achieved through the capture of, and interactive feedback upon choice and decision, made between information-objects as they are retrieved and circulated in communication. Choosing to befriend someone and not someone else, to linger over one product instead of another, or to select some search result over those above or below it, are all moments that differentiate a collective significance on these platforms. How might new materialist thinking intervene? The paper wonders whether current technical schemas for social media, which understand choice as an epistemic relation, might be fruitfully reconceived in terms of a prior ontological relation. Borrowing conceptual vocabulary from the philosopher Gilbert Simondon, the paper asks: how might we understand information as a differential effect of the distributed potential for becoming?

Highlights

Whether to mobilize around some issue or event, perform personal identity or put a friendly face on an institution, tens of millions of people around the world have enthusiastically adopted social media
Conceptualizing the mode of this relation, we might say that the software services offer a primarily communicative-epistemic lens on the world, in that they are premised on intersubjective expression as it can promote the pragmatic discovery and recovery of knowledge and information
Simondon believed that the relational difference of choice might be inverted: to becomes less a principle of signification as information ‘about’ reality —where a dominating subject presides over a neutral object, engaged in its interactive control—and more a compositional principle of signification as invention, with individuation once again thought of as an excess

Summary

RESEARCH ARTICLE

For millions of people around the world, social media systems represent a central, material-semiotic mode of relation. At the level of algorithmic technique, their vision of the social is primarily achieved through the capture of, and interactive feedback upon choice and decision, made between information-objects as they are retrieved and circulated in communication. Choosing to befriend someone and not someone else, to linger over one product instead of another, or to select some search result over those above or below it, are all moments that differentiate a collective significance on these platforms. The paper wonders whether current technical schemas for social media, which understand choice as an epistemic relation, might be fruitfully reconceived in terms of a prior ontological relation. Borrowing conceptual vocabulary from the philosopher Gilbert Simondon, the paper asks: how might we understand information as a differential effect of the distributed potential for becoming?

Introduction

Findings

Master of the art of politics