2.3.5. The Commodity Fetishism and Social Media Corporations
Lukács has based his theory of ideology as reification on Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, in which an object or something concrete (such as the commodity or money) masks the subject, the abstract, and social relations. The engaging/connecting/sharing-ideology is a special form of a reifying ideology, a form of inverted commodity fetishism: the users do not immediately experience the commodity as it is not immediately visible and experienced when logging into platforms without payment. This is diferent from buying a cinema, concert or circus ticket, where money directly mediates cultural experience. The commodification of data happens behind the users’ back. The social use-value of social media is immediately experienced and masks the commodity form. On targeted-advertising funded ‘free’ use platforms, the subject and the social mask the object and the commodity form. Inverted commodity fetishism conditions the emergence of the engaging/connecting/ sharing ideology that in a populist manner appeals to users’ direct social experience and fetishises the social in order to mask the reality of commodification. The engaging/connecting/sharing ideology foregrounds and constantly stresses categories of non-instrumental, social, communicative reason such as caring, sharing, emotions, empowering, creativity, connecting, or making. This social dimension of online media in the contemporary capitalist Internet, however, serves instrumental reason, namely the accumulation of capital. The universe of use-value and sociality has in the engaging/connecting/sharing ideology become subsumed under the logic of instrumental and technological reason that fosters capital accumulation in the interest of a particularistic capitalist class interest.
Georg Lukács as a Communications Scholar
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