a) The Dialectic of the Subject and the Object
Human beings as subjects use social media technologies for creating, sharing and communicating information online and for engaging in collaborative work and the formation of communities. Through these subjective practices, they create and recreate an objective world: they objectify information that is stored on computers, servers, cloud storage devices, etc. and that is communicated to others. It thereby brings about new meanings and joint understandings and misunderstandings of the world. These objective changes of the world condition, i.e. enable and constrain, further human practices that are organised ofline, online and in converging social spaces. Social media are based on a dialectic of human practices and the social structures that these practices create and recreate so that structures condition practices and practices produce structures.
b) The Dialectic of the Individual and Society
In capitalism, individual use-value, i.e. the satisfaction of human needs, can mainly be achieved by purchasing commodities, which necessitates exchangevalue, money and the selling of one’s labour power. Individual satisfaction of needs can only be achieved by entering social relations of exchange and exploitation. Capitalism’s antagonism between use-value and exchange-value is an antagonism between individual needs and the social class relations. On corporate social media, the relationship of the individual and the social is highly antagonistic: social media exist only through social relationships that enable sharing, communication, collaboration, and community. But these social relations are today at the heart of the realisation of neoliberal performance principles that render social media platforms perfect tools for individual selfpresentation, individualistic competition, and the individual accumulation of reputation and contacts. It is no accident that ‘social’ media are called YouTube, MySpace and Facebook and not OurTube, CollectiveSpace and Groupbook. It is all about ‘you’ as an individual and not ‘us’ as a collective. The individualistic private property character of social media – the fact that user data is sold as a commodity to advertisers – is hidden behind social media’s social appearance: you do not pay for accessing Twitter, Facebook, Google or YouTube. The obtained use-value seems to be the immediate social experience these platforms enable. The commodity character of personal data does not become immediately apparent because there is no exchange of money for use-values that the user experiences. The commodity fetishism thereby becomes inverted (Fuchs 2014a, chapter 11): the social seems the immediate positive experience on social media, whereas the individualistic logic of money and the commodity remains hidden from the users.
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Critical Theory of Communication