Big data analytics tends to forget about class and domination. Its fetishism of quantification sees society as a thing constituted by large quantities of data and disregards the social qualities that make up society. Big data analytics is what Lukács describes as a “fetishistic science” that disregards “contradiction and antagonism” (HCC, 10) and the totality.
Big data analytics is certainly a major trend in research and academia. Its digital positivism has, however, been challenged by approaches such as critical digital and social media studies, critical digital sociology, and critical digital humanities (Fuchs 2017; Lupton 2015; Berry and Fagerjord 2017).
3.5 Conclusion
We can summarise this chapter’s key results:
• In HCC, Lukács conceives of society based on a dialectic of subject and object that avoids the pitfalls of voluntarist spontaneism and mechanist fatalism. In later works, he clarified the mediating role of language and communication in the dialectic of subject and object: communication is the mediating process in the dialectic of subject of object that produces and reproduces social relations. There is a dialectic of work and communication (communication at work, the work of communication);
• Lukács shows in HCC that the reification of consciousness has objective foundations in capitalism’s commodity structures and forms an element of ideologies that justify capitalism by naturalising structures and practices of domination. In contemporary capitalism, social media have become a medium of communication, where reified thought is communicated and challenged. Especially the communication of right-wing authoritarian ideologies and its elements of strong leadership, nationalism, the friend-enemy-schema, and militarism is prevalent on corporate social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube;
• Cultural and media labour constitutes a new form of reification: by fostering creativity and self-determined labour, it appears as and creates an aura of nonalienated labour that deflects attention from the fact that such labour is often highly insecure and precarious;
• Private ownership/profit-orientation, advertising, and ideology operate in new ways in the realm of social media and on the Internet, which results in the colonisation of the online public sphere by the interests of corporations, celebrities, and political elites;
Chapter Three | History and Class Consciousness 2.0
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Conclusion