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The Reflexive Self and Social Media
On Facebook, Exploitation and Identity
Albin Åberg
albin.aberg@student.uva.nl (id:11102942)
Supervisor: Dr. James Gledhill 2nd Reader: Dr. Beate Rössler
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction ... p.3 2. Facebook, Activity / Engagement
2.1 Introduction ... p.7 2.2 Sharing, Liking, Posting ... p.8 2.3 Temporal Timelines and Identity ... p.10 2.4 Audience, Known and Imagined ... p.13 2.5 Conclusion ... p.15 3. Marxism, Exploitation and Alienation
3.1 Introduction ... p.16 3.2 Marx's Labour Theory of Value ... p.17 3.3 Waged/Non-Waged - 'Real'/Online Labour ... p.20 3.4 Exploitation and You, Facebook and Surplus-Value ... p.22 3.5 Structural Aspects of Facebook, EULAs and Infrastructure ... p.24 3.6 Facebook and Alienation, What and Where? ... p.27 3.7 Conclusion ... p.31 4. Reflexive Self-Identity and Narrative
4.1 Introduction ... p.33 4.2 Late-Modernity and Life-Plan ... p.34 4.3 Reflexivity and Self-Identity ... p.36 4.4 Ontological Security and Narrative ... p.38 4.5 Conclusion ... p.41 5. Reflexivity and Exploitation, Facebook and Narrative
5.1 Introduction ... p.42 5.2 Alienation's Return ... p.44 5.3 Time and Place, Facebook and Late-Modernity ... p.49 5.4 Facebook, Narrative and Identity ... p.54 5.5 Conclusion ... p.59 6. Conclusion ... p.61 7. Works Cited ... p.64
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1. Introduction
With the advent of web 2.0, the landscape of online interaction has changed
profoundly. What started off as a state funded initiative to simply connect databases has turned into one of the most profound developments regarding how humans interact with each other, and especially, to what extent people interact. The term Web 2.0 was coined by Darcy DiNucci in 1999 when he was arguing that the internet was about to take a communicative turn, putting greater emphasis on user created content over the ‘static’ web that was dominant at the time where users had little influence over what was available online unless one ran one’s own website (1999: 32). The internet has effectively broken down spatial limitations regarding human
contact, no longer requiring physical proximity whilst still allowing individuals to convey a greater amount of information than has traditionally been afforded by phone calls or letters. Of course these developments have not gone unnoticed by academia and there is a burgeoning field of philosophy, sociology, and of course, communication studies, that theorise and study the web 2.0. However, arguably one of the most impactful of these developments, regarding how humans interact online, is the rise of what is now commonly referred to as ‘social media’, examples of these being Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Yelp and Facebook. To narrow it down even further, whilst all social media, to some extent, allow its users to influence what is available on the sites in question, the so-called social networking sites (SNS), have presented a brand new way of presenting oneself online. However, with the rise of these networking sites, the aforementioned academic sphere has turned to theorising to what extent and in what ways online interaction differs from real life interaction. One of the most poignant lines of critique stems from the left wing school of thought that is becoming increasingly worried with the fact that most of the social
networking taking place online is performed on corporately, and therefore capitalist, owned platforms (Allmer 2014: 47). Building from that, what are the possible
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outcomes, both positive and negative of these changes? Taking centre stage in this critique are the twin concepts of exploitation and alienation, both being core
constitutive parts of Marx’s explanation of the extraction of surplus-value, and how these operate in a sphere where participation remains uncoerced (Andrejevic 2013: 197). Assuming both alienation and exploitation are correct as far as they are concerned as theoretical explanations. To what extent can they still be considered analytically worthwhile and applicable if one of the pillars of the theories is absent, the need to undertake exploitative and alienating labour is based on a physical need, to feed oneself and provide shelter, etc. That is the core problematic of this paper: Is it possible that the uncoerced participation of individuals in exploitative social media practices (focusing on Facebook) can be better explained through the addition to the existent Marxist literature of Giddens’ theorisation of self-identity?
Why Giddens? His contribution to the field of especially sociology, is vast, and he is currently the second most cited sociology scholar on the planet, additionally, Giddens has been engaged in a very thorough reconstruction of Marxism, essentially trying to update it for the 20th and 21st centuries1. However, it is his idea of
self-identity as a multi-facetted project that is the most promising in regards to SNS usage. For between three of the most prominent scholars on Social Media and Marxist critiques thereof (Andrejevic, Fisher and Rey), none of them are capable of providing a sufficiently convincing argument as to why people willingly submit themselves to the exploitative and, to an extent, alienating practices that these sites engage in other than the sites providing a tool that allows people to interact and communicate with each other (Rey 2012; Fisher 2015; Andrejevic 2013). Additionally, this lack of an explanation becomes an even more glaring problem when coupled with the fact that, according to a study carried out by Fuchs and Sevignani, a majority of SNS users are aware of the fact that they are the target of practices that will be likened to exploitation, and that they are not agreeing with these structures
1 See Giddens’ A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism for an explication of Giddens’
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being in place (Fuchs and Sevignani 2013: p267-268). Thus, one can already see that users are participating in these systems, even though there is a certain amount of discontent with how these sites operate and therefore a more thorough explanation and investigation of why people keep using them is needed.
Giddens’ theory of self-identity as a reflexive project is one that will be able to fill in the blanks of the existing body of literature, as it provides an account of what individuals are benefitting from participating in these exploitative practices. Thus, the aim of this paper will be to show how the current body of academic theorising around SNS usage lacks an account of self-identity and the crucial role it plays in regards to the individual’s use of social networking sites. Such an account can be provided by Giddens’ theory of self-identity and through the addition of this theoretical concept, a more thorough and potent analysis of SNS can be carried out. This is to be done in order to show how, whilst the existing academia is lacking, it is not a chronic problem, and the left wing critique of social media practices is one that carries serious academic worth. But due to the lack of an account of identity, it can be argued that it is not yet able to explain, in full, why social media has presented society with such a profound shift in human interaction.
To accomplish this, this project is split into several parts. First, the chapter will aim to clarify what Facebook is, how it functions and what sort of practices it is
constituted of. Secondly it will investigate whether there is any form of correlation between identity presented online and the individual’s perceived offline or ‘real’ behaviour. Lastly, the topic of audience and the split between the known and ‘imagined’ audience will be analysed in order so as to best establish from what position the individual is visible on Facebook.
Following on from this will be an explication of the existing Marxist literature. It will be reviewed in order to show both where it succeeds and where it fails. This chapter will be structured in such a way that it begins with an explication of the Marxian labour theory of value. After that it will consider online labour and how it differs from offline labour. The structural aspects of Facebook will after that be
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covered and coupled with that, the concept of exploitation. Lastly, this chapter will consider the role of alienation on Facebook and how it functions through
commodification.
Following on from said exposition of the Marxist writings, the coming chapter will be dedicated to the work of Anthony Giddens and his theory of reflexive
self-identity. This will be done in relative isolation in order to highlight the complexities of the theoretical contribution to the field. This chapter will firstly deal with the concept of a life-plan. After that the concept of reflexivity will be introduced. And lastly the theory of a narrative as the basis for an individual’s ‘ontological security’ will be explicated.
Lastly, having clarified and defined its position within the wider field of
academia, it will be high time to turn to the incorporation of the Giddensian theory of reflexive self-identity as a beneficial and analytically potent tool in aiding the Marxist literature through illuminating how it firstly helps with explaining the deepening of alienation on Facebook. It will also show how this theory can account for the
spatiotemporal disconnect that has taken place in late-modernity. And lastly it will show how the narrative presented on Facebook, although not un-alienating, still serves a role in affording the individual with a sense of ontological security. As has been mentioned above, this paper’s main focus will be on the usage and practices of Facebook, not only because it is by far the largest SNS in existence today with almost 1.1 billion daily users (Company Info, Facebook Newsroom) but also because it provides the individual with the most comprehensive set of tools to form and present an online identity. Whilst what this paper will cover is to a certain extent translatable to other social networking sites such as Twitter or LinkedIn, for the sake of clarity they will not fall under the scope of this paper.
At this stage, it must also be mentioned that Giddens has a second theory which is used to explain how structures and institutions (and the individuals within them) function in late-modernity. Giddens refers to this as ‘structuration’, the idea that institutions are both influenced by individuals, but also influence their behaviour in
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turn2. However, as the purpose of this paper is instead to engage with the Marxist
literature, this paper will not engage with said theory, although it might at a later time prove to be a fruitful venue for future research.
The goal of this paper will therefore be to clarify and diagnose the state of
Facebook and the inherent capitalist practices that it is constituted by, but especially, this project will go one step further in situating the individual in the system, not as a member of the broad class of being a ‘user’, but to highlight the role of Facebook in the creation of the individual’s sense of self-identity. This will be done in order to develop and further the critique of Facebook and the practices of online companies that is starting to develop as an independent field of Marxist academia.
2. Facebook, Activity and Engagement
2.1 Introduction
Facebook has presented individuals with access to something brand new in terms of interpersonal communication. Through the very structure of it and its reach it has given all participants a platform from which they can show the world who they ‘are’, through a website that facilitates immediate and user to user interaction. In many ways it is the epitome of a social media platform with the site itself being built
around the very concept of interaction and sharing content about who the individual ‘is’ with others. This has in many ways impacted and to an extent changed how we interact with each other. This chapter will therefore first establish how and what, users do on Facebook. Secondly it will examine to what extent Facebook
participation corresponds to their real life-conditions and identity. Lastly, there will
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For an outline of this argument, see: Anthony Giddens, ‘The Constitution of Society: Outline of Structuration’, in which Giddens explicates on his theory of structuration in great detail.
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be a brief interrogation of the concept of an online audience and what this term entails for the individual user.
2.2 Sharing, Liking, Posting
Facebook might at first glance strike one as a clean slate, a blank canvas on which the individual can display themselves, to let their friends, family, and even perfect strangers form an impression of who they are, without having to be spatiotemporally co-located. The primary way of showing this is through one’s ‘profile page’, and the ‘timeline’ that comes attached to this. First off, on the profile page individuals ‘declare their sex, age, whereabouts, romantic status and institutional affiliations. Identity is not a performance or a toy on Facebook; it is a fixed and orderly fact’ (Grossman 2007). Whether identity is a ‘performance’ will be discussed later on, however, the profile page makes it very clear that it exists to define the ‘you’ through the facts of your existence. In most cases, this information is visible for everyone owing to the fact that users are reluctant to change their privacy settings (Kauer et al. 2013:794). This means that all this information, if the privacy settings remain
untouched, remains readily available to everyone. This has given rise to perfect strangers being able to glean much more about a person than was previously possible. Information such as previous and current employers, romantic status, or age and number of kids, information that would previously have required some amount of interaction, either direct or indirect is now publicly available.
The second main site for Facebook identity-work takes place through the timeline. The timeline, launched in 2011, is a space connected to your profile page that collates all your activity on Facebook and makes it visible on a single page. This was
introduced in order to give you the ability ‘to curate and highlight all your stories so you can express who you really are’ (Tsotsis 2011) as Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed during one of the F8 conferences. This was carried out in order to encourage
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individuals to share smaller and more ‘mundane’ events, in order to give a better depiction of who you ‘are’ (Tsotsis 2011). However, all this content that is being produced, mundane or not, takes place within a highly structured environment. Whilst it, as aforementioned, seems like Facebook provides the individual with a blank canvas on which they portray themselves, it is in fact a highly regimented set of services that exist in order for Facebook to best be able to produce data and gather information about the individual.
The content that is being produced on Facebook takes on many different shapes and forms, however, the most common ones are: posting status updates, uploading pictures, taking part in quizzes, commenting on, and ‘liking’ said content. All these are undertaken in order to better communicate who you are to others. This is in large part due to the nature of Facebook itself, the individual is always-already aware of being visible to others. Thus, all identity work takes place on Facebook with the individual keeping their audience, be it their real (such as friends), or imagined (non-friends), in mind (Baym and boyd 2012: 325). This leads to a state of affairs in which the individual is more or less constantly aware of what they do, and how they present themselves will remain indefinitely on Facebook. However, the content that is posted and by extension becomes disjointed from any spatiotemporal relation, is still malleable and open for contestation from others, the commenting and liking of posts on Facebook has become an integral part of online identity work, to the extent that it has almost been internalised (Karatzogianni 2015: 1). These ‘feedback loops’, the reacting and reincorporating of comments and likes, allows the individual to constantly evaluate and mediate their online identities. Through these mechanisms the identity-work takes on a rather more reflexive position in which the individual is always incorporating new information and feedback in the process of tailoring their identity (Aguirre and Davies 2015: 5).
One of the most prominent features for the structure of Facebook, both for the individual and his or her identity-work, but also for Facebook is the use of the like button. The like button allows what Facebook has named ‘Social Graph’, a system
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that works by gathering data at a previously unprecedented level to ‘connect’ the internet (Tsotsis 2011). Through the like button, individuals can make ‘nano-level’ statements, essentially conveying information in a way that is far more minute than a comment or a wall-post. However, these nano-level statements possess a trove of information for Facebook that is highly saleable. They have through this encouraged connectedness, managed to create a profitable system out of such a benign thing as expressing agreement with a thing (Eranti and Lonkila 2015). Eranti and Lonkila also found that the act of ‘liking’ something on Facebook is more often than not carried out with the intent to show agreement with something, but it is also used to
communicate other emotions and feelings, such as sexual interest, pity, anger, joy etc. (2015). Thus, owing to a lack of direct non-verbal communication and other cues that require physical co-location, Facebook still allows users to make more granular identity claims through the structure of Facebook. The structure of Facebook is thus set up in such a way that it ensures that people share as much information as
possible with others. Each and every one of these interactions forming a new point of data that Facebook can analyse and sell on. Facebook managed to integrate sharing in a more natural way through the introduction of the timeline. The timeline
essentially fulfils this role through making sure that all content that is connected to Social Graph, can be related to your timeline, and thus become a visible part of your identity, whether you want this to be the case or not (Tsotsis 2011). All this has allowed Facebook to create the largest data set of social relations and information hitherto existing (Ugander et al. (2011).
2.3 Temporal Timelines and Identity
So far, much stress has been put on the fact that Facebook interaction takes place in a non-spatiotemporally located sphere. This is however not to say that there is no such thing as a temporal aspect, but time on Facebook works in more of an internal
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fashion that is disjoined from interaction outside of Facebook. This can be seen in how an individual interacts with Facebook, through the very nature of the timeline, because it contains a chronological element, seeing how everything is structured according to the passing of time. However, due to the fact that time never passes on Facebook, past events never go away, they remain arrested in time, seen as a
snapshot of the present as depicted on the timeline. On Facebook, there is no water moving under the bridge (Aresta et al. 2015: p74). This structural factor forces the individual to always be answerable to their audience and thus requires a certain awareness of what one does as these things will forever be available (Litt 2012: 331). Because of this temporal quirk of Facebook, users have no other option but to present their identities as a continuum, it is a structural limitation of the website itself. So whilst the interactions that take place on Facebook are by virtue of being readily available at any given time and open for feedback, spatiotemporally disjointed from real life, the identity presented must still possess some form of temporal coherence in order for the individual’s contributions on Facebook usage to amount to anything more than mere scattered moments (Aresta, et al. 2015: 72). In order for these scattered moments to become constitutive of an identity the individual is forced to construct a form of narrative, not necessarily in the form of a full story, but at least a narrative coherent enough that they are able to justify their actions if called upon for an explanation. This can be seen in a study carried out by Ivcevic and Ambady that found that identity claims made online are more often than not constituted by behaviour that corresponds to the individual’s perceived perception of themselves, more so than how their friends perceive the individual to actually be during face-to-face interactions (2012: 43). If this is the case that online presentation is done in such a way that it is closer aligned to the individual’s perceived sense of self than their offline identity, there is a sense of creativity involved in the process of Facebook participation. Individuals only share that which will 'impact their perceived identity . . . be it through self-derogation or self-enhancing content’ (Bareket-Bojmel, Moran and Shahar (2016: 792). Thus content posted online is meant to be seen. Participation
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is based on the fact that the individual wants to present him or herself to others in order to align their perceived identity with their own sense of self-identity. Online presentation of identity can therefore be seen as one public aspect of the project of a diachronic but coherent identity. What this goes to show is that although Mark Zuckerberg, in a rather moralising statement, argues that everyone has ‘one identity’, and not affirming this one true identity shows a ‘lack of integrity’ (Kirkpatrick 2010: 199), it seems that the actual user base of his site does not entirely agree. On the contrary, what users make of this platform that allows them to broadcast their identity and self to the internet, is taking a rather more prescriptive stance and presenting something more akin to a narrative about who they think they ought to be, rather than who they really are.
This act of making one’s ideal sense of identity visible from a single point, this single point being the online audience, carries with it some Foucauldian connotations of the panopticon, where everyone is visible from a single point and is able to enact surveillance upon others in order to police conduct and ensure stability (Foucault 2000: 70). However, as has been pointed out, this form of ‘surveillance’ need not necessarily be a negative thing, because of the participatory element present in Facebook-usage, the involvement that this surveillance is constituted of is more of the nature that it questions and interrogates the coherence of a presented identity (Albrechtslund 2008) and by extension the narrative that it is a part of. It is at this point that it becomes clear that the presence of an audience (imagined or real) thus facilitates the individual’s reflexive process through an integration process that subsumes the comments of others in such a way that it becomes a naturalised part of the project of online identity-work.
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2.4 Audience, Known and Imagined
The presence of the audience is another aspect of Facebook that is constant. This could be argued is an integral part of any social media, it is difficult to be social in a vacuum. But on Facebook, the individual is intentionally given very little control over the audience in order to facilitate more data points, and more interactions taking place (Baym and boyd 2012: 325). The audience has hitherto been referred to as either a ‘real’ or an ‘imagined’ audience, the ‘real’ being constituted of your Facebook friends, the ‘imagined’ by non-friends. This binary of real and imagined is in essence all the control the individual is given in order to control who has access to the entirety of one’s Facebook profile. The individual user is given ample tools to interact with their real audience, but are more or less forced to surrender themselves to the binary of complete anonymity or complete openness when it comes to the imagined audience (Litt 2012: 335). This lack of granular control, enforces
Zuckerberg’s previous point of forcing all individuals into having a single identity For prior to Facebook, the individual was afforded the ability to present a certain ‘self’ at home and a different ‘self’ at work for example. On Facebook, the individual is no longer afforded such a luxury. The identity presented must therefore comply with and satisfy the expectations of a rather varied group of people. This leads to identity-work, again, being contained by a mere structural fact. There is no longer any room for individuals to experiment with identity, no longer is the individual:
‘Free to engage in creating a completely fictive self, I must become someone real, not who I really am pregiven from the start, but who I am allowed to be and what I am able to negotiate in the careful dynamic between who I want to be and who my friends from these multiple constituencies perceive me, allow me, and need me to be’ (Wandel and Beavers 2011: 92-93)
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The above quote highlights how the pre-SNS fluidity of identity, the ability to tailor oneself to individual contexts, is increasingly a thing of the past. In the state of constant-visibility from different groupings from one’s separate spheres, the need to tailor identity, to work on a singular, set identity, becomes increasingly important in order to give a coherent and stable sense of self (Ivcevic and Lambady 2012: 44). The solidity of one’s identity therefore has to not only be coherent enough to satisfy the expectations of a multiplicity of audiences, for as separate as these audiences may be, they all remain ‘known’. Any one person that an individual ‘friends’ on Facebook is accepted as an acquaintance or family member. There exists some form of
relationship to the individual. However, with the imagined audience, the only way an individual can interact with it is to internalise it, to work with what we believe the non-friend users of Facebook expect of oneself, the imagined audience is thus the ‘mental conceptualization of the people with whom we are communicating’ (Litt 2012: 331). This imagined audience may at first seem less relevant than its real counterpart, seeing how it largely exists outside of the established feedback loops built into Facebook (liking, commenting, sharing, etc.), however, as has been shown over and over again, if an individual fail to account for the imagined audience, there can be severe real life consequences such as job-loss and the public shaming that social media facilitates (Ronson 2015). This makes a serious case of how the self on Facebook has to be presented as a holistic entity, no longer is it possible to show one aspect of the self online. This can be attributed to the simple fact that the scope of one’s audience might change drastically overnight through the nature of sharing. As articulated in Ronson’s article, what the people posted online, they assumed would only ever reach their known audience. But due to the fact sharing is built into these systems, the consumption and reproduction of content (e.g. re-tweets and Facebook shares), can extend the reach of a piece of content from the ‘real’ to the ‘imagined’ without the individual being unable to hinder or stop this from taking place due to the boundary between the two audiences having been blurred (Litt 2012: 332).
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2.5 Conclusion
The aim of this chapter has been to establish why and to what extent people participate on Facebook. What has been shown is that identity-work on Facebook is not the free sphere of self-presentation that it has quite often been heralded to be, instead, it has shown how there are quite strict structural barriers in place in regards to how an individual can present him or herself. The most important structural barriers for the purpose of this study are: the disjointing of communication from requiring physical co-location; the suspension of content from the natural
progression of time through the non-temporal nature of online-content and the timeline; the forced presentation of self through the use of personal information on one’s profile page; and lastly, the issue of the inability to exactly know one’s
audience and reach online. This has been undertaken in order to properly establish a methodological framework on which the Critical Media Studies critique of online labour and exploitation will be grounded in order to pave the way for the addition of Giddens’ theory of reflexive identity in regards to social media. This chapter also aimed to show how there is a clear agenda to Facebook, namely the forced creation of a singular identity as opposed to the individual being able to more specifically being able to tailor his or her identity in regards to the specific context. Additionally, this chapter also established that the way individuals portray themselves online, even in the context of a forced single identity, contains an element of prescriptive imagery and identity-work, essentially the tailoring of online identity in such a way that it portrays the individual in the light that he or she want to be seen, more so than their actual self-perception.
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3. Marxism, Exploitation and Alienation
3.1 Introduction
In the preceding chapter, a great deal of stress was put on the fact that individuals on Facebook ‘produce’. They produce content through uploading photos, making status updates, liking, sharing and commenting on said photos and statuses, and in general create a digital presence. It was also mentioned, albeit in a briefer fashion, how individuals also create data points when they participate in all these activities, data that is then harnessed by Facebook in order for them to sell targeted ads to
individuals and gain a greater understanding of their user base.
This chapter will delve deeper into the act of online production and to what extent it can be considered an act of ‘labour’ under the Marxist criteria thereof. This chapter will also aim to explore the existing literature on Facebook/SNS and the left wing academia in order to establish whether the dual concepts of exploitation and alienation can be meaningfully applied to online participation. Running as a consistent thread through the latter parts of this chapter will be the aspect of the existing body of literature that this project finds problematic, including the failure of existing literature to provide a satisfactory account as to why individuals seem so willing to submit themselves to the conditions and agenda of Facebook. All of this will be undertaken in order to pave the way for an incorporation of Giddens’ theory of reflexive self-identity into the left wing theorisation of social media in the chapters to come. This chapter will thus begin with a brief overview of Marx’s labour theory of value, investigating in which aspect of labour as such that exploitation is located. Having done so, this chapter will discuss online production as ‘free labour’, a
concept introduced by Tiziana Terranova, in order to see how online production can still be considered actual production and should still be considered as potential
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territory for exploitative practices. Following naturally from that, this chapter will attempt to show how free, or online, labour still shares enough similarities with ‘real’, physical labour in order to be considered grounds of capitalist exploitation. Following that, a discussion on the structural aspects of Facebook will be
investigated, in terms of both the signing away of rights through the use of End-User License Agreements (EULA) and the physical material aspect of Facebook. Lastly, having covered the exploitative aspects of Facebook, this chapter will show how, according to Marx’s theory of labour value, users are being commodified through social media participation, and through this, alienating tendencies start to develop between the individual and his or her data and content generated.
3.2 Marx’s Labour Theory of Value
In Capital, Marx muses and theorises on a spectrum of wide-ranging aspects regarding the economics of 19th century Europe. However, one of the most poignant
points, in a brief segment of the first chapter, is Marx’s theory of labour value. This theory is based around the fact that all value-creation in society is a direct result of human labour in one way or other. There is essentially nothing that holds value just by virtue of it being a thing-in-itself (Marx 2015: 35). Things may have a use-value by virtue of being a thing-in-itself, but such value is individual and does not equate to value in the marketplace or in society, thus, use-value should be considered as something quite different from ‘value’ or exchange-value due to use-value being based around consumption or usage3. To make use of the use-value of a thing, you
have to consume it, you eat the food, you wear the shoes, the machine is worn down,
3 It is worthy of note that the labour theory of value is not an uncontested theory, however, most of the
prior established literature is based off of the labour theory of value being correct. Thus this project will function under the assumption that this is correct. However, for critiques of it, one can turn to Hardt and Negri’s ‘Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire’ for an Autonomist Marxist critique, or Joseph Persky’s ‘Marshall’s Neoclassical Labor-Values’ for a Neo-classical economist alternative to value generation.
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etc. (Marx 2015: 27). This will prove quite problematic later on when use-value has to be applied to online content, but for now, let it be accepted that the engaging of the use-value also entails the removal of said thing from the marketplace in some way. Thus, if exchange-value is the result of labour being mixed with nature through some process or another and the resulting thing has value in and of itself only through being able to be traded for some other thing of equal value, it becomes clear that value is a relative term. This relative sense of value is most easily established through shining a light on the fact that all things only hold value insofar as they are useful, ‘nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value (Marx 2015: 30). Labour and value are therefore inextricably linked.
Through the labour process the individual combines his or her labour activity with some thing in order to produce something new that has a value relative to other things. However, this labour process is one that would take place in a system of trade bartering. Under capitalism, the process is altered to an extent in which a new
element is added; surplus value. Prior to the rise of capitalism, exchange-value was established as an equivalence relation between the labour put into a thing, the ‘socially necessary labour time’ and the value of another thing requiring the same amount of labour to create. Exchange-value was thus intrinsically linked to the labour value of the thing (Marx 2015: 29). Thus the pre-capitalist exchange-value of a thing could be derived from the time and labour required to produce it. However, with the rise of capitalist employment and the development of the mode of
production that followed it, the individual labourer no longer produced ‘the actual necessaries which he himself consumes; he produces instead a particular commodity, . . . whose value is equal to the value of those necessaries or of the money with which they can be bought’ (Marx 2015: 152). No longer the free agent that produces the necessities for his or her own life, or enough to be able to trade for them, the
individual under capitalism instead labours for a wage, something that stands as a separate entity, apart, from the labourer. His reward for labouring is no longer the
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result of his labour, but instead an external entity, his wages. He no longer produces things, but commodities. Marx argues, in the oft cited section of Capital that:
A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the
products of their labour . . . the existence of the things quâ commodities, and the value relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. (2015: 47-48) It is this disjointing of labour from product that eventually culminates in the
commodity form of things. With individuals now producing commodities for a wage, instead of things for trade, a second aspect of the capitalist theory of labour value comes to the fore, surplus-value. If exchange value was, prior to capitalism, joined to socially necessary labour, with the advent of the wage system, an
individual starts producing commodities that fetch a price on the market greater than the value of his or her wage. It is at the second part of the day, when the individual is labouring not for him or herself, but starts creating surplus-value for the capitalist that labour becomes ‘no longer necessary labour, he creates no value for himself. He creates surplus-value which, for the capitalist, has all the charms of a creation out of nothing. This portion of the working day, I name surplus labour-time, and to the labour expended during that time, I give the name of surplus labour’ (Marx 2015: 152). During the second half of the day, the labour the individual undertakes is in direct service of the capitalist, not to the individual itself. Surplus-value allows the capitalist to carry on with these value-extracting practices, for in the words of
Benjamin Franklin: ‘Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more’ (2002: 376). The coupled concepts of the commodity form and ‘surplus-labour’ will become
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key to the investigation that is to follow and it is with this in mind that it is time to turn to the dissection of the way in which labour operates online and the concept of ‘free labour’.
3.3 Waged/Non-waged – ‘Real’/Online Labour
So far this chapter has clarified how Marx’s theory of labour value results in the creation of surplus-labour and exchange-value in commodified objects. Whilst it might seem counterintuitive to include a theory of value generation based around 19th century style factories, it will become clear later on as to why this comparison
still holds analytic worth when it comes to diagnosing Facebook’s business practices. First things first however, it is important to establish what it is, exactly, that
individuals ‘do’ when they engage with Facebook. As discussed in the first chapter, one of the key aspects of Facebook interaction of any form is that it is creative. No matter what or how, anything an individual does on Facebook is creative, even if it might be through the earlier mentioned ‘nano-interactions’ of liking, or through posting a status update. What matters is that it is a constant process of creation, or production. As outlined above, the act of creating, or producing, requires some form of labour. For any act of production, is by its very nature an act of changing, of labouring with something, be it raw material or personal interaction (Fuchs and Sevignani 2013: 241). At this stage it is necessary to make a crucial distinction
between ‘real’ labour and this form of online labour. In the first instance, real labour, that which is waged, carries with it a sense of biological urgency. This form of labour is undertaken in order to facilitate the labourer’s continued existence. The wage earned can be traded for commodities such as housing and sustenance (Rey 2012: 409), essential necessities needed to carry on living (Comor 2010b: 442). Online labour on the other hand carries with it no such sense of urgency. However, as was previously established, the point of the day at which the labourer stops labouring for
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the equal value of his wage and instead starts producing surplus-value for the capitalist his labour becomes surplus-labour. In this way online labour differs from real labour, for online labour is (outside of a relatively small set of people e.g. social media managers and people managing webpages (Andrejevic 2013: 197)) not a direct necessity, as the vast majority of online labourers do so for different reasons. Herein lies the main failing of existing literature, it lacks a convincing answer to why people engage in these forms of online labour? To answer this question, it must first be established how online labour functions.
If the labour that takes place after the labourer has created exchange-value equal to that of his or her wage is referred to as surplus-labour, or socially unnecessary
labour, what happens if the labourer is never reimbursed for any of his or her labour? This is the core problem of what has been termed ‘free labour’ by Tiziana Terranova. Although the majority of her contribution to this particular field of academia took place before Facebook and Social Media as a whole was invented, it still adds a worthwhile dimension to what online labour is. Terranova argues that, given the internet as a sphere of communication, without the ‘free’ labour of people creating and communicating on it, the internet would be worthless. Thus, there is value in online labour, for it is essentially what makes the internet worthwhile. It is a new dimension that is completely immanent to the ‘information society’ (2004: .74). This new dimension of labour, labour that takes place after the labourer has finished his or her waged labour for the day, must be approached from a different
perspective. For much as Marx argued that there can be exploitation in unwaged labour, e.g. housework or slavery (Fuchs and Sevignani 2013: 257). What matters is that online participation is value-generating, this stemming from the fact that
Facebook is a profitable company, the labour its userbase engages in generates more value than Facebook needs to pay its staff wages and maintain its server
infrastructure etc. And as was established above, through the extraction of surplus-value, exploitation surfaces as the core principle of any enterprise that engages in surplus-value extraction under a capitalist regime. Such enterprises that focus on the
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extraction of surplus-value, to whatever extent and through whatever means, are by nature exploitative. This is critical, for exploitation need not be inextricably linked to labour being insufferable. Even the factory worker might enjoy a good day’s labour and the joy of cooperating with his or her co-workers without being any less
exploited for it (Andrejevic 2011: 98). Online participation thus might very well be exploitative, but the individuals whose labour is the vehicle of this value-generation may not even realise it and happily remain part of these practices without them being any less exploited.
3.4 Exploitation and You, Facebook and Surplus-Value
Thus, after examining the differences between ‘real’ labour and online labour, waged labour and unwaged labour, it is now time to examine exactly how Facebook generates value. In the section covering Marx’s theory of labour value, the distinction between use and exchange-value was made, use-value consisting in the consumption or removing of an item from the market and exchange-value being an entity that stands apart from the result of the individual’s labour. However, when applied to online production, this becomes more difficult to discern, for online content possesses a duality of nature in which use and exchange-value co-exist mutually, online content can be both engaged with by the user whilst still having an exchange-value to Facebook. As opposed to the classical use-exchange-value in which something is removed upon consumption, when it comes to online content:
‘I can have my status update even while Facebook collects it, sorts it and puts it to use. Information, in short, is not destroyed because someone uses it. I can share an idea with you without losing it—and, legal restrictions aside, I can copy and share data at minimal cost to myself and without any damage to my original version of that data.’
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This dual nature of online content lies at the very core of Facebook’s business model. For as Terranova argued, without the free labour of individuals, the internet would lack its defining aspects: content and communication. And in few other places can this be seen more clearly than in Facebook’s business model. Through the production of aforementioned content, Facebook not only generates a highly detailed dataset of who you ‘are’ and what you like and think of things, but this dataset is used in order to sell it to advertisers who want to reach special key demographics with what is referred to as ‘targeted ads’ (Beverungen, Böhm and Land 2015: 474). Through the dataset, Facebook gets to know what your interests are, when you go on vacation, who your friends are, etc. They are building sellable personae, a statistical equivalent of you that stands apart from you that you never see, nor are you even perfectly aware of the fact that it exists. This business practice relies entirely on the uncoerced and, importantly, genuine contribution of its users. For if there was no content being produced, there would be no dataset which in turn would lead to Facebook not having a commodity to sell to companies wanting to advertise to their key
demographics (Andrejevic 2011: 83). So the use-value for the user, of the like, the status update, the photo, is directly linked to, but separate from the exchange-value, the user produces data and value, whilst consuming the content of others. While production and consumption are co-located (Rey 2012: 400), in a way, one could argue they are indeed entirely separate, for the dataset and the generation thereof is invisible to the individual. We stand essentially separated from our produced content and the data that this content in turn produces (Andrejevic 2011: 92). Thus whilst they are separate in the eyes of the user, the production that is undertaken is hidden under the consumption of the content available.
Here one can start to see the traces of the classical structure of Marxist exploitation, the extraction of surplus-value is undertaken at the expense of its users. For whilst the previously mentioned study by Fuchs and Sevignani showed that people do in fact disagree with the existence, and prevalence, of targeted ads (2013: 266-270), people still do subject themselves to being the target of said advertising. Eran Fisher
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argues that this is because as much as people disagree with it, they still deem it a reasonable trade. Gaining access to Facebook is worth the price of admission as he states, ‘The subjective experience of users suggests that they regard the political economy of social media as based on a fair exchange between themselves and Facebook: receiving a free tool in exchange for giving up their privacy and their control over the information they produce’ (2015: 1109). However, according to the labour theory of value, this is clearly incorrect. This can be observed simply through the fact that Facebook is a company that is making a profit. Thus, at some point, the value of the data and content produced must exceed the value of Facebook as a service. It must here be noted that the point at which the user stops labouring for the equal value of the service he enjoys and instead starts labouring for Facebook’s ability to extract surplus-value might be difficult to discern exactly, it might prove a gainful venue of research for future projects. For now, let it be accepted that
Facebook, much like any classical capitalist venture at some point breaks even in value and starts producing surplus-value, thus engaging in the exploitation of what Marx called surplus labour. And as was noted, if there is extraction of surplus-value taking place, then even in a situation in which individuals enjoy labouring, they are doing so for free. Furthermore, free labour, or socially unnecessary labour, is that which is at the core of exploitation. Therefore, as much as Facebook allows
individuals to interact with friends and is a source of enjoyment, this is all undertaken in the shadow of the extraction of surplus-value.
3.5 Structural Aspects of Facebook, EULAs and Infrastructure
As has been shown, online labour is exploitative. However, not only is it
exploitative in the sense that there is surplus-value extracted from the individual’s dataset. Through the use of a EULA Facebook secures the rights to the actual content
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itself. This is the first step in which the individual signs away his or her individual rights, the EULA or ‘Terms of Service’ for Facebook explicitly states that:
‘For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following
permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.’ (Facebook Terms of Service 2016: §2.1)
So all content that is shared is therefore not only able to be part of the exploitative process in the sense that Facebook uses it to generate data, but the individual is also forced to give Facebook the right to ‘use your name, profile picture, content, and information in connection with commercial, sponsored, or related content (such as a brand you like) served or enhanced by us’ (Facebook Terms of Service 2016: §9.1). What this means for the user is the fact that exploitation is double in nature, for in the same sense that the factory worker was alienated from the commodities that were being produced through being paid in a wage instead of establishing a proper relation to the fruits of his or her labour, so is the Facebook user separated from the content through being forced to sign away ownership over the content itself as well as their data (Andrejevic 2011: 87). The use of a EULA is nothing new and has been used for most forms of digital services for years. However, what is novel is the usage of said EULAs in relationship to Facebook and other SNS and the totality of
ownership that is established through their use. Additionally, these terms are non-negotiable, if an individual wants to participate on Facebook, he or she has to either completely surrender their rights over the content and data they produce, or not participate at all. Additionally, a part of this EULA enables Facebook to target the individual with ads based around their meta-data (Facebook Data Policy 2016).
26 Facebook relies on this contractual signing away of rights to data and contract much in the same way that the classical form of contracted wage-labour relies on the
labourer signing away the rights of his labour power and the commodities produced. This stems from another striking similarity between the two forms of labour,
Facebook cannot make a profit unless it is legally entitled to commodify the dataset produced and make use of its exchange-value in order to extract surplus-value and thus profit from it (Andrejevic 2011: 93). Therefore, it becomes evident that the relation between user and Facebook bears a resemblance to that of employer and employee, especially when it comes to the contractual rights and obligations of the two opposing parties (Banks and Humphreys 2008: 414).
Furthermore, there is one additional factor that makes Facebook resemble a factory and the labour relations within that bears striking similarities with the factory in which ‘real’ labour takes place. It is related to setting the terms of access to the services in question. If the EULA negotiates the rights of the user whilst utilising the services in question, then the question of infrastructure must also be examined. This is in order to show that not only is the user without rights when it comes to the digital aspect of Facebook, but also in regards to the physical aspect the user shares a lack of access to the means of production with the labourer. This is illustrated by the fact that Facebook does not just exist online, it has a physical presence: servers, offices, data-halls, etc. and this structural aspect is of course, much like the
machinery in the factory, owned by Facebook as a capitalist entity. The fact that the user cannot even attempt to access Facebook without having to first access
Facebook’s infrastructure pre-empt the user’s ability to access Facebook and its services. These should be seen as the means of production for Facebook (Fuchs and Sevignani 2013: 245). For in the same way the labourer under capitalism would be unable to generate value greater than that of his or her individual labour were it not for the advanced means of production, so the Facebook user is unable to generate value through his or her social activity if the servers are not maintained and run by Facebook. Thus the user is not only unable to utilise and negotiate their rights on
27 Facebook, but they are also, owing to the material aspect of it, unable to negotiate their right to access Facebook (Andrejevic 2014b: 10). The user is thus doubly without rights. This might first seem like a rather irrelevant aspect of analysis as it is in many ways a given, there must be servers and maintenance thereof in order for a website to function. But it is when seen in light of the complete signing away of rights that Facebook usage entails it comes to the fore exactly the extent to which the user is deprived of rights and access. For all that has been written about the internet would profoundly change society and reinvent labour relations and society at large, the material aspect of productivity and access still remain in place, thus the material aspect of the labour theory of value still holds. Not only is the surplus-labour value-generating for the capitalist, but the capitalist still, in its entirety control the means of production, whether the production be material or immaterial (Rey 2012: 401).
3.6 Facebook and Alienation, What and Where?
So far, this project has explored the extent to which individuals are separated from their data and the commodification of said data through the sale to advertisers in order to enable Facebook to profit. Furthermore, it has been delineated that the material infrastructure and wavering of rights through the EULA forces the user into a position of powerlessness if he or she wants to engage with and participate on Facebook, a fact that only deepens the exploitative practices that the user submits him or herself to. With that in mind, it is now high time to investigate the last aspect of the Marxist literature and the second of the twin concepts outlined in the
introduction, alienation.
Writing on social media from a Marxist perspective, P. J. Rey and Eran Fisher has argued that social media participation is exploitative, but unalienating. This project disagrees with Rey’s and Fisher’s respective arguments, but it will prove a helpful tool to use as a counterpart in order to highlight how Facebook does in fact lead to
28 alienation of the social self, not the opposite.
One of the core tenets of Marxism is that labour is by nature social, it is social in the sense that it is always undertaken in relation to other individuals, there can be no such thing as labour undertaken in isolation, for as Marx notes, labour is undertaken in order to facilitate life. It is what brings humanity together (2015: 31). Marx argued that through the capitalist conception of commodity fetishism, man becomes
alienated; he becomes estranged from himself, others and the products of his labour (Marx 2009: 30-34). Additionally, in capitalism, knowledge itself as an immaterial product, too becomes estranged from man, for within the framework it is produced, the alienated individual cannot comprehend it (Marx 1973: 616). It is in this estranged state that Rey locates the possibility of social media and Facebook usage as
unalienating. This idea stems from a conception of social labour being a literal reading of what ‘social’ means. For Rey, online, or ‘immaterial’ in his words (Rey 2015: 415), labour, is inherently tied to unalienation. This stems from the argument that social interaction online leads individuals to show their ‘real’ selves, to be that of genuine individuals, participating in real interactions with other individuals in an uncoerced state. Rey states that this uncoerced labour is unalienating on the grounds that it is self-directed; there is no manager or foreman who dictates the working conditions of social media, only individuals themselves chose what to produce (Rey 2012: 410). The fact that individuals have become their own masters in regards to what and how they produce and consume online on the other hand does not mean that such production and consumption is unalienating, nor is it non-alienated, it is neither helping to overcome alienation, nor is it non-alienated to begin with. This stems from the fact that Rey has conflated social, and therefore ‘unalienating’ labour, with where the labour process on social media is located. As was outlined above, all labour must produce value, otherwise it is useless labour. On Facebook, the value of the content produced lies not with the direct content itself, but what it results in. So although an individual may very well be arguing that what they do on Facebook is showing their real, unalienated, selves, this will be shown to not be the case.
29 However, the content that is produced is not wherein the value of Facebook lies. The content is necessary because it opens up more data-points that builds on the
individual’s dataset. It allows the commodification of the individual to grow even deeper. Just because action is uncoerced does not mean it is unalienating. As the site in which profit is produced online, the individual cannot claim to be partaking in an unalienating process, for they are never aware of the profit value they produce. Andrejevic sums this up in a concise and to the point way when he argues that ‘Alienation subsists not just in the surrender of conscious control over productive activity, but also, consequently, in its product’ (2013: 199). Fisher tries to argue that the productive activity being directly related to the individual itself is enough to claim that such activity is sufficiently unalienating. This analysis stems from the idea communication is technically a form of labour that stems from cooperation and a need to be social, much like the concept of property, it is something that cannot exist outside the social (Marx 1973: 414). Fisher thus draws the conclusion that because language is social and communicative, it better helps people commit to
communicating their ‘real’ identity’ and thus end up in a state of greater unalienation (Fisher 2012: 179). Whilst Fisher’s approach to language being communicative and helping individuals be social is technically true, he too misdiagnoses where the exploitation on Facebook is located. As was proven in the previous chapter, as much as Fisher argues that Facebook should be seen as a ‘a media for communication allowing de-alienation’ (2012: 175), there are still structural barriers in place. Individuals are not free to communicate as they please, they are still essentially ‘managed’ by Facebook, all action taking place in such a framework so as to best be able to extract the maximum amount of data from all and any communication (Beverungen, Böhm and Land 2015: 483). This holds for most sites that rely on their user base to ‘create’ the value of the site, the structural barriers in place ensure that the user can never be genuinely free from control (Comor 2010b: 450).
The argumentation from Fisher and Eran however do shine a light on the
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lies not in the communicative action of its user-base, then from where could it feasibly stem? This is further complicated by the aforementioned dual nature of content on Facebook, the use-value being consumed by the user-base whilst still being able to be exploited through the commodification and ensuing extraction of surplus-value by Facebook in order to attract advertisers. It is with the
advertisements that one should look for the sources of alienation; Facebook has not ended up in the position it is in because people are willing to invest money in it, but rather because the highly targeted advertising works (Dehghani and Tumer 2015: 600). From this, another crucial aspect of online alienation becomes visible.
Advertising is not meant just to sell goods to the individual, more than anything, Facebook advertising is meant to influence individuals, to get individuals to invest themselves in a brand without necessarily making a purchase, this spreads the brand in question further and imbues the brand in question with a sense of authority. Essentially, the individual users who engage with the brand become free advertising (Gummerus 2012: p859). This is further exacerbated by the argument of Erranti and Lonkila from the previous chapter. Individuals use the like button on Facebook to show more than that they agree with each something, it is also used to signal too other users things that are not necessarily obvious without knowing the person (2015).
Additionally, owing to the opaque nature of the data collection, an additional point of concern arises from the individual being clearly influenced by said targeted advertising, much in the same way that the labourer becomes estranged from the products of his labour although he himself made a part of it; in the same way
individuals become estranged by targeted advertising because ‘Although [it is] built from the raw material of our own productive activity and the myriad forms of experimentation and data-mining exercised upon it by marketers, this activity will return to us in ways that make it difficult to discern the traces of our own
contributions’ (Andrejevic 2011: 95). This also adds to the non-negotiable aspect of Facebook, even though the ads presented to the user are tangentially based around
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their social needs. The simple fact that the individual user has no ability to negotiate what ads, and to what extent ads are shown shows how the influence of advertising, whose core focus lies with ‘controlling and manipulating human needs’ (Fuchs 2012: 36) equates to a system in which the user eventually is only exposed to content in order to influence their behaviour in one way or another. This manipulation is controlled by the whims of either Facebook itself, or those of advertisers trying to market a product or service. Furthermore, the supposedly unalienating
communication that takes place on Facebook is subsequently data-mined for even more points of data. At this stage one can see how the individual strays further and further from the ‘unalienating’ communication that was envisaged to originally take place on Facebook. In its stead the commodified personality of a user who has no control over their data, nor is able to set the terms of communication settles in as the perfect commodity of social media, who at any time of day is willing to labour for free, unbeknownst to them furthering their own alienation and exploitation (Andrejevic 2014b: 9).
3.7 Conclusion:
At its core, Facebook has forced individuals to acquiesce most, if not all, of their rights upon entering into a contract with Facebook. This chapter, in order to properly highlight this started with an explication of Marx’s theory of labour value in order to discern in what ways Facebook can be considered an exploitative institution due to its reliance on surplus-value contributed by the labour of its users. Having done so, this chapter briefly examined the concept of labour in relation to the internet to show how online participation can be considered a form of labour, albeit an uncoerced such. After that was sufficiently established, a brief explication of how exactly Facebook generates value was in order to show how there are structural similarities between Facebook and the factory in the way surplus-value is extracted. These
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structural similarities were dissected through looking at Facebook from two angles, one being the contractual: the user’s signing away of rights through the accepting of a non-negotiable EULA. The second being the material aspect of Facebook, servers, offices etc., which are crucial to the operation of Facebook but in which the user holds no stake. This dissection established how the business practice of Facebook is set up in such a way so as to make sure the user remains in a completely powerless position in which the choice is either between complete compliance with Facebook’s agenda, or a complete rejection of its services. Following on naturally from the topic of the complete compliance, a foray into the concept of alienation and how it applies to Facebook users was made. This was undertaken in order to disprove how Rey and Fisher’s arguments, whilst interesting in their own rights, misidentify where the alienation on Facebook stems from. As it stands, any communication that takes place on Facebook cannot possibly fulfil an unalienating role as it at all times take place in a sphere that serves only to deepen alienation through even further and more
intrusive data-mining.
And this remains the core issue, for as the Fuchs and Sevignani study showed, individuals disagree with the practices that Facebook engage in when it comes to targeted advertising, and people are dissatisfied with these invasions of privacy that this data-mining undoubtedly constitute, however individuals still sign up and participate more than ever for longer and longer periods of time. Why would this be? The core argument that is presented by the most prominent scholars is simply that the service Facebook provides a service that is so convenient that it provides a service that fulfils some human desire or need (Rey 20012),(Fisher 2015),(Andrejevic
2013),(Fuchs and Sevignani 2013). However, this is not a convincing enough reason due to an issue of the relevance of data-mining itself. For if Facebook is to make money from the advertisements they have to be relevant, if there is no marked increase in sales or from bringing these ads to the attention of the alienated users, potential advertisers will pull out from spending money and thus the extraction of surplus-value would steadily decline to the point where Facebook would eventually
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become unprofitable and thus shut down (Fuchs 2010: 192). However, this is
obviously not the case. So how come Facebook manages to maintain such a vice-like grip on its users when the service it provides comes at such a steep cost even though Facebook has no ability to force its users to sign up, thus participation remaining wholly uncoerced? This paper as outlined in the introduction will argue that it stems from Facebook’s ability to satiate the individual’s sense of ‘ontological security’. This is done through better enabling the user to engage in reflexive identity-work as will become clear after the coming exposition of Anthony Giddens’ theories.
4. Reflexive Self-Identity and Narrative
4.1 Introduction
So far, this project has through in-depth investigations dealt with Facebook as a Social Media, its aims and structure and the Marxist analysis surrounding Social Media usage (both as an alienating and exploitative set of practices). At the end of said investigations the existing Marxist literature was found to be lacking an explanation as to why people keep participating in said exploitative practices even when the individual user is, to an extent, aware of these exploitative practices being in place. In order to be able to better augment the existing academic literature in the forthcoming section, this chapter will focus on Anthony Giddens’ notion of reflexive self-identity in late-modernity, more or less in isolation to be able to best show how it functions as a multifaceted system as opposed to a single theory. To accomplish this, this chapter will first investigate the role and purpose of a life-plan. Having done so, an investigation of the notion of reflexive self-identity will follow. Lastly, this chapter will cover how said reflexivity forms a narrative which becomes the foundation for
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an individual’s ‘ontological security’. The dealing with Giddens’s theory in isolation will open up a new venue of analysis, that of meaningful reflexive identity-work. This will be shown to help explain why individuals keep subjecting themselves to the exploitative and alienating practices of Facebook.
4.2 Late-Modernity and Life-Plan
One of the key aspects of Giddens’ conception of self-identity as a function of
modernity is the fact that for any conception of a self-identity to be considered valid, it must last over the ‘durée’ of the individual’s life. It cannot be a moment to moment creation and re-creation, but must instead form a ‘trajectory’, one which the
individual in question can use to investigate the path, and more importantly, use to plan for the future (Giddens 1991: 14). A simplified depiction of it would be that this life-plan, or trajectory, works in the same way as a map on which you have tracked your previous movements with a pen and have the end-point marked out, but the rest of the way there is as of yet not entirely clear. This allows the individual to see from whence they came, which turns they have taken and where the path ahead, roughly, is leading (Giddens 1991: 85). This trajectory is what the individual will be using as an internal guide to action and interaction over the course of his or her lifespan. This is of utmost importance for the coming chapters on Giddens’ relevance to Facebook and online identity because it gives the individual a sense of purpose and direction. To begin with, an investigation into how a life-plan is created and maintained is in order.
The life-plan is what an individual uses in order to get a sense of direction in navigating the busy world of late-modernity as Giddens refers to it. How come this has become relevant first now and why is it a late-modern project?
One of the main distinguishing features of modernity was the rise of capitalism as the societal mode of organisation and the commodification of labour that
