Class and Exploitation on the Internet
Christian Fuchs
The term social media has been established to characterize World Wide Web platforms such as social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and microblogs. Such platforms are among the most accessed websites in the world and include Facebook, You-Tube, Wikipedia, Blogger, Twitter, LinkedIn, and WordPress. All online platforms and media are social in the sense of providing information that is a result of social relations. The notion of sociality underlying the now frequently employed term social media is based on concepts such as communication, community, cooperation, collaboration, and sharing. All too often, the term is used without diferentiation or grounding in social theory.
This chapter challenges techno-optimistic versions of social media analysis by pointing out its limits. First, the notion of a participatory Internet is questioned by conducting an analysis of the political economy of selected corporate social media platforms. Next, an alternative theorization of social media that is based on Marx’s class theory is ofered. Finally, some thoughts about the need for an alternative Internet are presented.
Critical Internet studies is an emerging field of research. Trebor Scholz’s conference The Internet as Playground and Factory has shown how important critical thinking about the contemporary Internet is and that there is a huge interest in critical political economy and theory relating to the Internet. Today, we are experiencing times of capitalist crisis, and it is no surprise that critical studies and critical political economy are celebrating a comeback after decades of post-modern, culturalist, and neoliberal domination of academia. Questions relating to class, labor, exploitation, alienation, and ideology have become paramount. The critical analysis of social media requires a critique of both ideology and exploitation. It also calls for practical proposals. Trebor Scholz (2008) has stressed that “the suggestion of sudden newness of social media is aimed at potential investors” and that web 2.0 is therefore primarily a marketing ideology. Jodi Dean argues that the Internet and other forms of communication in “communicative capitalism [are] rooted in communication without communicability” (Dean 2004: 281). Dean suggests that the Internet becomes a technological fetish that advances postpolitics. Mark Andrejecvic (2002: 239) speaks of “the interactive capability of new media to exploit the work of being watched.” He argues that “accounts of exploitation do not necessarily denigrate the activities or the meanings they may have for those who participate in them rather than the social relations that underwrite expropriation and alienation” (Andrejevic 2011: 283). These and other contributions are characteristic of the emergence of the field of critical Internet studies.<sup>1</sup>
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