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02 Aug 08
Michel Bauwenshow the production of non-antagonistic social relations has become central to economic production and social control.
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05 Jun 08
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23 May 08
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17 May 08
katarina peovicsocial networking platforms are already anti-social; designed to derive profit from friendship; based on weak ties; political differentiation of friend or enemy (facebook or hatebook)
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they display contradictory tendencies (both connecting and disconnecting socialities
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the emphasis in these notes is to draw attention to how the production of non-antagonistic social relations has become central to economic production and social control
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Personal information (ID and consumer preferences) is voluntarily submitted and can then be accessed by agencies reflecting pervasive viral marketing techniques, hegemonic corporate ownership and capitalistic economic principles – all designed to derive profit from friendship
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the social relation is based on weak ties (as opposed to the relatively strong ties of peer production for instance
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'The social web facilitates an unprecedented level of social sharing, but it does so mostly through the vehicle of proprietary platforms
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In such ways, the social relation is produced in restrictive form.
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the management of life itself
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whether you are a friend or not
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manifestation of ideology in itself
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connectivity remains a security threat
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Carl Schmitt's notion of enmity (in The Concept of the Political, of 1927), the political differentiation of friend or enemy
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is not simply a method that proposes a reversal of one thing with another but a deeper and more reflexive engagement.
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these notes are arranged as a series of speculations that examine the paradoxical nature of the terms in common use: 'the social' (making particular reference to Bruno Latour's Reassembling the Social)
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and 'networking' (with reference to Ned Rossiter's Organized Networks);
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moving to the antithetical term of 'notworking' to shift attention to social relations that are unfriendly in character.
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The suggestion is that without the identification of antagonisms that underpin sociality, politics simply cannot be engaged.
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The use of the term 'social' has become commonplace and somewhat emptied of meaning especially where communications technologies are concerned.
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'socius' meaning 'someone following someone else'
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Latour
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As a consequence of expansions in science and technology, he claims that a problem arises, such that the 'social seems to be diluted everywhere and yet nowhere in particular'
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his is the 'actor-network' that describes not a source of action but a 'moving target of a vast array of entities swarming toward it'
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Correspondingly, counter positions need to take advantage of the vulnerabilities in networks by exploiting power differentials that exist in the system (as argued by Galloway and Thacker, for instance). What is required is more detail on network topologies and how power is organised.
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the term 'network' has become so pervasive that it in danger of losing its meaning or of over-determining its effects.
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nework represents a key organisational principle for understanding contemporary politics, society and life in genera
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emergent 'organized networks' are horizontal, collaborative and distributed in character offering a distinct social dynamic and new forms of agency appropriate to networks (based the movement and flow between multiple agencies).
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The potential to transform social relations is somewhat demonstrated in the dynamics of social networking technologies.
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'The tendency to describe networks in terms of horizontality results in the occlusion of the "political", which consists of antagonisms that underpin sociality. It is technically and socially incorrect to assume that hierarchical and centralizing architectures and practices are absent from network cultures.' (p.36)
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The plurality of nodes in networks does not guarantee a more inherent democratic order,
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centralised ownership and control where the web platform itself mediates relations (unlike peer to peer file sharing for instance).
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Crucially, the software and the knowledge to shape it, is no longer stored locally on the user's hard drive but through the browser interface (and in this sense amateur production does become a pressing issue of lack of access to the means of production).
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ew management techniques tend to stress horizontal rather than hierarchical organisational structures
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As with the discussion of network control, this in itself is a technique of power that Maurizio Lazzarato takes to be more totalitarian than the production line, as it involves the willing subjectivity of the worker in the process
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raw material" of immaterial labor is subjectivity and the "ideological" environment in which this subjectivity lives and reproduces
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The production of subjectivity ceases to be only an instrument of social control
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to construct the consumer/communicator – and to construct it as "active". [...
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The quote reflects the operations of social networking sites where social relations are produced as friendly rather than antagonistic.
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'tends not to sell any product at all to the consumer, but rather sells the consumer to the product'
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new forms of control over subjectivity
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The worker-user voluntarily generates themselves as complicit with the user-generated content they produce
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the networked computer has become like a factory, and has redefined social practices and relations.
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This is the 'social factory' in which work is no longer confined by the walls of the factory, and is more dispersed, intellectual, immaterial and communicative.
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The dislocation of class antagonism in the social factory is close to what Marx referred to as 'real subsumption', to conceptualise the way that exploitation is dispersed and subsumed into the wider social realm. Consequently, the control of communications, and the labour related to communications, have become the key sites of antagonism.
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Furthermore, as labour time has become more difficult to measure and is less distinct from time outside work, much of it now practised as 'nonwork', outside of traditional production processes - 'notworking' as opposed to networking.
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it is work itself that needs to be transformed and made more autonomous according to Negri,
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refusal to work by notworking.
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But is simply refusing to use certain social networking sites effective refusal?
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but the challenge is to make this into a more strategic political issue by identifying what Latour describes as redefining the 'well-assembled collective' (p.161).
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This is a socio-technical issue required better assembled collectives of people and machines.
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There is need to identify the invisible architecture of the network and its protocols locked down by proprietary interests in order to make it more open, participatory and more public.
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Rossiter
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peer production offers an obvious example of the opportunity to explore the limits of democracy
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A peer to peer system in this respect might be considered 'post-capitalist' in the production of a social relation based on sharing and the common good.
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A similar point is made by Virno, in A Grammar of the Multitude, when he argues for a political space in which 'the many' tend to common affairs
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to transform server-client relations into peer-to-peer relations
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the rise of social networking as we know it with its participatory ethic has been largely stolen from free software developmen
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However, social networking demonstrates underlying contradictions: antithetically standing for relations that reflect the dynamics of network architectures and contestational politics.
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work and nonwork related to social networking software clearly invoke antagonistic not friendly relations.
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Angela Mitropoulos refers to as the 'softwar',
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is that without the identification of antagonisms that underpin sociality, politics simply cannot be engaged.
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Geoff Cox
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16 May 08
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