On the Social Media Ideology

“The slogan “You are what you share” (Charles Leadbeater) expresses the transformation of the autonomous unit of the self into an outgoing entity that is constantly reproducing its social capital through the transmission of value (data) to others.”

“Social networking is much more than just a dominant discourse. We need to go beyond text and images and include its software, interfaces, and networks that depend on a technical infrastructure consisting of offices and their consultants and cleaners, cables and data centers, working in close concert with the movements and habits of the connected billions.”

“From digital humanities to data science we see a shift in network-oriented inquiry from Whether and Why, What and Who, to (merely) How. From a sociality of causes to a sociality of net effects. A new generation of humanistic researchers is lured into the “big data” trap, and kept busy capturing user behavior whilst producing seductive eye candy for an image-hungry audience (and vice versa).”

“Without noticing, we have arrived at a new, yet unnamed, stage: the hegemonic era of social media platforms as ideology.”

“It is a crucial time for critical theory to reclaim lost territory and bring on exactly this: a shift from the quantitative to the qualitative, uncomputable impacts of this ubiquitous formatting of the social.”

“A starting point for reading social media as ideology would be Wendy Chun’s 2004 essay on the idea of “software” as ideology.”

“The “Californian ideology” as defined in 1995 by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron helped us trace the motives underlying the internet back to their Cold War roots (and the ambivalent hippie culture).”

“Fred Turner’s 2006 classic From Counterculture to Cyberculture did much the same. But the historical perspective is not much use if it cannot explain social media’s contemporary and persistent success since the 1990s.”

“What remains particularly unexplained is the apparent paradox between the hyper-individualized subject and the herd mentality of the social.”

“One function of ideology as defined by Louis Althusser is recognition, the (in)famous interpellation of the subject that is being called upon.”

“We can apply this and speak of the process of becoming-user. This is the unnoticed part of the social media saga. Before we enter the social media sphere, everyone first fills out a profile and choses a username and password in order to create an account. Minutes later, you’re part of the game and you start sharing, creating, playing, as if it has always been like that. The profile is the a priori part and the profiling and targeted advertising cannot operate without it. The platforms present themselves as self-evident. They just are—facilitating our feature-rich lives. Everyone that counts is there. It is through the gate of the profile that we become its subject.”

“For Althusser, we live inside ideology in this way—the formula applies in particular to social media in which subjects are addressed as users who do not exist without a profile.”

“It is justified to use this slightly authoritarian, hermetic concept of ideology because of the highly centralized top-down structure of social media architecture in this age of platform capitalism, which leaves zero space for users to reprogram their communication spaces.”

“So in what way does Louis Althusser need updating?”

“Four decades after the Althusser era, we do not associate ideology with the state in the same way he and his followers did. To qualify Facebook and Google as falling within the Althusserian definition of “ideological state apparatus” sounds odd, if not exotic. In this era of late neoliberalism and right-wing populism, ideology is associated with the market, not with the state, which has withdrawn into the role of merely securing the market.”

“But lest we forget, it was ideology theory itself that contributed to the “crisis of marxism.” It led the way in opening up marxism to issues thrust to the fore by the student movement, the rise of feminism, and other “new social movements,” and also highlighted the stagnation and bankruptcy of the Soviet Union. The growing interest in media and “cultural studies” did the rest.”

“The so-called “patchwork of minorities,” non-applying themselves to the new normal, were left literally to their own devices, without an overarching political framework, let alone organization (or antagonism). Within a decade, two of the defining centripetal forces of Marxist theory as ideology critique lost their dominance: State and Party.”

“Treating social media as ideology means observing how it binds together media, culture, and identity into an ever-growing cultural performance (and related “cultural studies”) of gender, lifestyle, fashion, brands, celebrity, and news from radio, television, magazines, and the web—all of this imbricated with the entrepreneurial values of venture capital and start-up culture, with their underside of declining livelihoods and growing inequality.”

“Wendy Chun wrote her 2004 essay on software as ideology in the golden 2.0 era of the web, when software was coming to be considered synonymous with—and confused with—PCs and laptops. She wrote: “Software is a functional analogue to ideology. In a formal sense computers understood as comprising software and hardware are ideology machines.””

“She noted that software “fulfills almost every formal definition of ideology we have, from ideology as false consciousness to Louis Althusser’s definition of ideology as a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence.’””

“In an age of installed, micro-perceptual effects and streamed programming, ideology does not merely refer to an abstract sphere where the battle of ideas is being fought. Think more in line with a Spinozan sense of embodiment—from the repetitive strains of Tinder swiping, to text neck, to the hunched-over-laptop syndrome.”

“What is crusted as orthodoxy in Althusser needs some adaptation and updating, not only in terms of a class analysis. But it is still remarkable how smoothly an Althusserian ideology framework fits today’s world, as Chun proves:

Software, or perhaps more precisely operating systems, offer us an imaginary relationship to our hardware: they do not represent transistors but rather desktops and recycling bins. Software produces users. Without operating system (OS) there would be no access to hardware; without OS no actions, no practices, and thus no user. Each OS, through its advertisements, interpellates a “user”: calls it and offers it a name or image with which to identify.”

“In the age of social media we seem to confess less what we think. It’s considered too risky, too private. We share what we do, and see, in a staged manner. Yes, we share judgments and opinions, but no thoughts. Our Self is too busy for that, always on the move, flexible, open, sporty, sexy, and always ready to connect and express.”

““What are you doing?” said Twitter’s original phrase. The question marks the material roots of social media. Social media platforms have never asked “What are you thinking?” Or dreaming, for that matter. Twentieth-century libraries are full of novels, diaries, comic strips, and films in which people expressed what are were thinking.”

“With 24/7 social visibility, apparatus and application become one in the body. This is a reversal of Marshall McLuhan’s Extensions of Man—we are now witnessing an Inversion of Man.”

“Once technology entangles our senses and gets under our skin, distance collapses and we no longer have any sense that we are bridging distances. With Jean Baudrillard we could speak of an implosion of the social into the hand-held device in which an unprecedented accumulation of storage capacity, computational power, software, and social capital is crystallized.”

“Things get right in our face, our ears, steered by our autonomous finger tips. This is what Michel Serres admires so much in the navigational plasticity of the mobile generation, the smoothness of its gestures, symbolized in the speed of the thumb, sending updates in seconds, mastering mini-conversations, grasping the mood of a global tribe in an instant.”

“To stay within the French realm of references: social media as the apparatus of sexy and sporty “active acting” makes it a perfect vehicle for the literature of despair epitomized by Michel Houellebecq’s messy body(-politics).”

“Social media’s imaginary community that we stumble into (and leave behind the moment we log out) is not fake. The platform is not a simulacrum of the social. Social media do not “mask” the real. Neither the software nor the interface of social media are ironic, multilayered, or complex. In that sense, social media are no longer (or not yet) postmodern. The paradoxes at work here are not playful. The applications do not appear to us as absurd, let alone Dada. They are self-evident, functional, even slightly boring. What attracts us is the social, the never-ending flow, and not the performativity of the interfaces themselves. (Performativity seems to be the main draw of virtual realty, now in its second hype cycle, twenty-five years after its first).”

“Networks are not merely arenas of competition among rival social forces. This is a far too idealized point of view. If only. What fails here is the “staging” element. Platforms are not stages; they bring together and synthesize (multimedia) data, yes, but what is lacking here is the (curatorial) element of human labor. That’s why there is no media in social media.”

“The platforms operate because of their software, automated procedures, algorithms, and filters, not because of their large staff of editors and designers. Their lack of employees is what makes current debates in terms of racism, anti-Semitism, and jihadism so timely, as social media platforms are currently forced by politicians to employ editors who will have to do the all-too-human monitoring work (filtering out ancient ideologies that refuse to disappear).”

“Whereas gadgets such as smartphones and cameras have a (hyped-up and thus limited) fetish quality, the social network as such fails to have such a status. The network has an ecological status, comparable to Sloterdijk’s theory of the spheres. It surrounds us like air; it’s a Lebenswelt, a (filter) bubble, comparable to the medieval worldview or imagined Mars colonies.”

“Today’s cosmology consists of layers made of dating apps, soccer portals, software forums, and porn sites woven together by search engines, news sites, and social media.”

“As in the case of air, it will become quite a task to prove its existence, but once ideology shows its ugly side, therapy works through the unconscious, paradoxes start to fall apart, and the ideology unravels.”

“Going back to 2004, Wendy Chun was occupied with the issue of metaphors when taking software seriously as a new kind of social realism: “Software and ideology fit each other perfectly because both try to map the material effects of the immaterial and to posit the immaterial through visible cues. Through this process the immaterial emerges as a commodity, as something in its own right.””

“The details seem less interesting to deal with: “Users know very well that their folders and desktops are not really folders and desktops, but they treat them as if they were—by referring to them as folders and as desktops. This logic is, according to Slavoj Žižek, crucial to ideology.” Is it useful to also note that the Facebook category of “friends” has become a similar metaphor. We can surely say the same of the Facebook “news feed.””

“So, what will happen when the audience becomes too much to deal with? More important than deconstructing surface appearances is, in Chun’s words, to argue that “ideology persists in one’s actions rather than in one’s beliefs.”

“The illusion of ideology exists not at the level of knowledge but rather at the level of doing.” Here, the rhetoric of “interactivity” obfuscates more than it reveals about the way users negotiate interfaces; since the computational and control mechanisms of interfaces are hidden, users cannot technically “interact” with them directly enough to understand them.”

“The like economy “behind” our smart devices is a particularly relevant social media example. What, for instance, will happen when we reveal that we have never believed in our own likes? That we never liked you in the first place?”

“Let’s appraise the bots and the like economy for what they are: key features of platform capitalism aimed at capturing value behind the backs of their users.”

“Social media are a matter of neither taste nor lifestyle, in the sense of “consumer choice.” They are our technological mode of the social.”

“In the previous century we would never have regarded writing letters or making a telephone call as matters of taste. They were “cultural techniques,” massive flows of symbolic exchange. Soon after its initial emergence , social media transformed from a hype and online service into essential infrastructure, just like letters and telegrams and the telephone used to be.”

“It is precisely at this juncture of “becoming infrastructure” that we (re)open the ideology file.”