2.3.6. Users’ Consciousness
How do users react to the engaging/connecting/sharing ideology? There are diferent possible responses of audiences, users, consumers, and citizens to ideologies. They can accept, resist, or partly accept and resist ideologies. This was the point of Stuart Hall’s (1973) encoding/decoding model. The problem of this model is that in a relativist manner, it conveys the impression that all three options have the same likelihood. The likelihood of specific audience responses is complex, having to do with factors such as time, education, skills, personal experiences, political worldviews, etc. In a capitalist society, audience responses therefore tend to be asymmetrically distributed.
Empirical studies indicate that users do not simply reproduce the engaging/ connecting/sharing ideology, but rather seem to be at the same time supportive of corporate social media’s social use-value dimension and sceptical of its exchange-value dimension and the commodification of personal data (Allmer, Fuchs, Kreilinger and Sevignani 2014). They tend to have little knowledge about how the political economy of social media works and providing them with such information seems to empower them in being able to feel competent to make political and moral assessments of social media (ibid.). Internet users’ opinions towards social media are quite ambivalent and not automatically ideological.
One important implication of Lukács’ Ontology is that ideologies are not free-floating, independent structures, but are produced under specific working conditions by an ideological labour force. Concrete human beings and organisations create and reproduce the engaging/connecting/sharing ideology.
2.3.7. Social Media is Bullshit
B.J. Mendelson argues in his book Social Media is Bullshit that myths about the Internet that are based on what Harry G. Frankfurt (2005) calls ‘bullshit spread through an ‘asshole-based economy’ (Mendelson 2012, 54) that cyber hipster, tech media and marketers, analysts, corporations, mainstream media and users advance (74). Mendelson draws on his own long experience as an Internet consultant and concludes that you can only attain a lot of attention and visibility on social media if you are a powerful organisation investing a lot of money. He argues that advertising consultants tend to create the impression that social media is a great business opportunity for everyone in order to foster their own profit interests by selling the engaging/connecting/sharing ideology. Social media’s ideological workers include tech companies’ strategists, marketing gurus and consultants, neoliberal journalists, and users who reproduce this ideology as hegemony.
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Critical Theory of Communication