{"id":9702,"date":"2022-09-15T18:33:43","date_gmt":"2022-09-15T15:33:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/?p=9702"},"modified":"2022-09-15T18:33:45","modified_gmt":"2022-09-15T15:33:45","slug":"constant-networking-constant-manipulation-all-the-worlds-a-stage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.liberalglobe.com\/?p=9702","title":{"rendered":"Constant Networking-Constant Manipulation: All the World’s a Stage"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It has acquired characteristics of banality, sometimes indicative of the impossibility of understanding modern forms of communication, commenting on the phenomenon of people coexisting in public space while simultaneously fixated on their mobile screen and the parallel digital public sphere of social media. The highlight, perhaps, of this trend is the image of people who, in a bar, cafe, restaurant, the places that haunted the perception of modernity (and its cinematic universe) as meeting places, do not look for eyes to cross, but look at dating applications in their cell phone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Obviously, human communication has always been materially mediated \u2013 what else is the very concept of correspondence after all? \u2013 and anyway human contact is never completely “direct”, as psychoanalysis has shown us, since it is charged with fantasy and libidinous tensions, projections and symbolic substitutions, but we can admit that the modern version of digital mediation gives another dimension to this trend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Compulsive narcissism<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same goes for the obligatory social media narcissism, all too familiar these days considering the sheer volume of vacation photos that fill our timelines. It is true that people were taking photographs many years ago and these photographs were never just private memories (although there was a time when the amount of photographs one could have was in itself an indication of social status), but also a kind of response to a model of aesthetics. Sure, too, the impulse to not just live a beautiful moment but to publicize it predates digital technologies, but social media shapes a universe of constant symbolic accountability for how much fun we have, how in love we are, how much we care or rage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it may have been Shakespeare who said that “all the world’s a stage”, suggesting the fact that human existence is also a constant performance of roles, but we are now indeed in the “society of the spectacle”, first thought by Guy Debord, but no longer in the sense of the dominance of the image that invades our lives from all sides. We are in the age where we are the spectacle, within a constantly interactive screen. Accepting at the same time the idiosyncratic digital voluntarism entailed by modern forms of constant digital surveillance.<\/p>\n\n\n

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But if we see these developments simply as a relationship between our lives and technology we risk overlooking critical aspects. These developments are not neutral, nor are they simple extensions of technological innovations. The dominance of the internet in our lives, or rather a certain version of it, which is now even moving to the next level of networking and algorithmic regulation of our lives, that of the “internet of things”, is not unrelated to the way in which a certain model of capitalist accumulation that includes: the constant expansion of 24\/7 transactions and services, which translates into the removal of the separation of work time and rest time leading to the enormous pressure for constant readiness to respond to tasks that first made imperative and the “right in disconnection”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The continuous growth of the financial sector, which in turn depends to a large extent on the continuous operation of computer systems and networks capable of managing a huge volume of transactions in “real time”. The upgrading of the economic importance of “intangible” symbolic marketable goods, including those that make eminently “public” practices of modernity such as music or cinema, affairs of our private screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And of course the very operation of the “digital universe”, from social media and all sorts of “platforms” to search engines as a huge economic field (just look at the financial figures of the respective companies), which basically exploits it trades data from all supposedly non-market social practices, behaviours, reactions, our very gaze, not to mention the constant exhortation to become ‘content producers’, from videos on platforms like Tik Tok to ‘amateur’ pornographic videos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Obviously, in all of this there is a counterargument that at the same time this digital infrastructure has been exploited in particularly inventive ways by large movements that have led to social explosions sometimes and major upheavals. That allowed the fastest possible disclosure of cases of state violence and arbitrariness. That facilitates the immediacy of solidarity, sometimes the feeling of a real global community. But I very much fear that the algorithmic manipulation side is stronger, and so is the actual isolation behind the ‘networking’ facade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The revolution will not have a live stream<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Several years ago Jill Scott-Hiron warned that “The Revolution Won’t Be Televised” (The Revolution Won’t Be Televised) to show that any process of social transformation cannot be confined to the confines of the spectacle and requires people who will not be viewers, but they will have to bear the risk and cost of engaging in a real material conflict that will go beyond symbolism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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