Corporate social media have a contradictory character: they enable users to easier stay and get in touch with others at the micro-level of everyday life, which enhances the quality of their lives, but at the same time this advantage comes at the price of digital economic, political and cultural alienation and reified data that serve purposes that allow powerful organisations to exploit, control and exclude the large mass of users. Given that these forms of domination are data-mediated, they tend not to be immediately visible and experienceable by the users. You do not feel and see that your data is a commodity, that the state stores and accesses citizens’ communications, and how many people talk about what you have posted on Facebook or about what the marketing teams of Shakira or Eminem, who have pages that are among the most ‘liked’ ones, have published.
The subjective level of alienation refers to the experiences and attitudes of users, i.e. if they feel alienated when using Facebook. Attitudes can in this respect be alienated, non-alienated, or a combination of both. Table 5.3 indicates prototypical attitudes. Alienated and non-alienated subjectivity in respect to Facebook do not necessarily exclude each other: users can think that social media sociality as such is advantageous, but that such platforms are problematic if they foster exploitation, surveillance, control and exclusion. Such an attitude implies on the level of political organisation the demand for an alternative form of design and organisation.
5.5.3. Digital Fetishism
The political problem is that it is easier to perceive Facebook as less alienating than a nuclear power plant that pollutes a river or lake. You can more easily use and enjoy Facebook, even when it exploits and monitors you, but you cannot swim in a nuclear contaminated lake or drink its water without seriously threatening your health. The damages caused by digital alienation are more indirect, mediated, long-term, and invisible. This does however not imply that they are unproblematic, but rather that they are more dificult to challenge and contest in social struggles. Users who argue that Facebook is great because it is social and that they therefore do not feel or do not mind digital exploitation, surveillance and exclusion express a partial truth, namely that social media can pose social advantages. At the same time their consciousness is reified because they cannot see beyond immediacy, only think about immediate individual advantages and not about the disadvantages that some users may unjustly sufer for example from being excluded from obtaining a mortgage, losing their jobs or being suspected of terrorism because of data mined from social media and analysed with predictive algorithms by credit scoring companies, employers or state institutions.
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Critical Theory of Communication