thenewinquiry:

(Image via the Social Media Chronicles by Jam Zhang) 

This paper was presented on May 19, 2011 at the Post/Autonomia Conference, University of Amsterdam.

By Rob Horning 

In The Culture of New Capitalism, Richard Sennett described some of the ramifications of the transition to post-Fordist production methods, which shift enterprise risk onto workers and demand that they be more flexible and to repeatedly prove their worth. He suggests that “if institutions no longer provide a long-term frame, the individual may have to improvise his or her life-narrative, or even do without any sustained sense of self.” Perhaps what we are experiencing now, thanks to the rise of social media, is both of these things at once.

Subjects under post-Fordism and neoliberalism must be able tolerate precarity without breaking down so much that they can’t work efficiently. They must be comfortable shifting from steady wage work to a series of projects secured through whatever means necessary and be more or less self-motivated. Consumerism helps model this, putting a positive spin on the demands for flexibility and opportunism, positing these qualities as the embrace of novelty and perpetual self-reinvention. Consumerism promises that magical transformations are easy, available on demand, and that a self understood in terms of lifestyles and personality experiments—rather than in terms of communal tradition, meaningful work, or the continuity of life experience—can be a worthy expression of individual freedom.

Social media—Facebook and other similar services that have integrated with portable devices to permit continuous interactivity—have furthered consumerism’s ameliorating mission. They enhance the compensations of consumerism by making it seem more self-revelatory, less passively conformist, conserving the signifying power of our lifestyle gestures by broadcasting them to a larger audience and making them seem less ephemeral. They temper the anonymity and anomie that consumerism’s mass markets tend to impose by concretely attaching our identity to what we consume. They also provide new mechanisms of solace, administering doses of proof of our connectedness and influence. (As in: Oh, look! I’ve been retweeted!)

Read More

(Source: thenewinquiry)