Non-alienated subjectivity means self-realising activity, active citizenship and general intellectuality. General intellect means not just a high level of general education and intellectual engagement, but also moral intelligibility so that humans provide recognition of each other. Humans can feel non-alienated in alienated social conditions: an employee may, for example, love his/her job and feel it’s a form of self-realisation and therefore accept that the company owners get richer and richer from the many hours of unpaid overtime in the company and the long working hours that damage his/her social life outside professional life. In such a situation, economic self-realisation can come along with social alienation in the realm of culture and everyday life that expresses itself for example in a lack of friendships, family life, sexual satisfaction, etc. Another example is that active citizens can feel happy in fostering a racist right-wing extremist political agenda that aims to harm immigrants. They feel emotionally non-alienated at the political level, but advance an alienated political system. Honneth argues in this context that social recognition can ‘just as well be sought in small militaristic groups, whose code of honor is dominated by the practice of violence, as it can be in the public arenas of a democratic society (Honneth 2007a, 77). Struggles for appropriated social systems must take into account the fact that humans are only truly at home in society when they feel individually satisfied and exist under intersubjective and objective conditions that are commonly controlled and benefit all. This can require disrespect for structures and practices that foster disrespect and respect for those that disrespect disrespect.
Given these basic reflections on alienation, the question arises how this concepts matters for the critical analysis of mediated communication.
5.5. The Media, Alienation and Morality
I want to discuss the question how alienation relates to the media with a specific example, namely Facebook. Facebook is the world’s most widely used social networking site and Internet platforms. It enables registered users to share and comment on content with their network of contacts. It is an expression of the blurring of the boundaries between the public and the private, the home and the workplace, work time and leisure time, labour and leisure, production and consumption (Fuchs 2015, chapter 8): Facebook brings together activities and contacts from such diferent realms on the same profiles, which enables users to observe people not just in the social roles they are familiar with them, but also other ones. It is however mistaken to see Facebook as a communications company: it does not sell communication or access to communication, but user data and targeted advert space. Facebook is one of the world’s largest advertising agencies.
The Internet, Social Media and Axel Honneth’s Interpretation of Georg Lukács’ Theory
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