On an intersubjective and objective level, alienation on Facebook means on the economic level the exploitation of users’ digital labour that generates a data commodity and thereby value and the loss of control over how their data is used. On the political level, objective and intersubjective alienation refers to the existence of a surveillance-industrial complex, in which Facebook and other communications companies collaborate, as Edward Snowden has shown, with state institutions such as the police and secret services in order to make a large amount of online communications visible to the state, which threatens liberal freedoms and shatters liberalism’s promises. On the cultural level, objective and intersubjective alienation means that attention and online visibility that enable meaning-making are asymmetrically distributed so that everyday users are at a disadvantage and celebrities and powerful organisations at an advantage.
The Internet, Social Media and Axel Honneth’s Interpretation of Georg Lukács’ Theory
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