Affective labour on social networking sites
Posted on September 14th, 2007, under Research, Reading, Web(log) Stuff
The discussion currently taking place on the cultstud list about self-branding on social networking sites bears interesting relation to the similar spate of posts on fibreculture recently. Both developed out of efforts on the part of some members to develop relevant discussion groups on Facebook, and my initial response has been to wonder why lists that don’t succeed terribly well in maintaining committed discussion in the first place would fare any better in a new context. This is especially curious in the case of Facebook, which seems designed (quite literally) to truncate discussion by virtue of a range of default modes of interaction: the tiny boxes, minuscule font and the soundbites of ‘news feeds’, but also the range of non- and quasi-discursive and symbolic forms of expression that are thriving in that environment (gardens, fishtanks, booze mail, pets, magnetic words, graffiti, i-like tunes, etc).
So partly out of frustration at the lack of theorising going on about these sites, and specifically the quite constrained understandings of affect and labour that feature in the latest list exchange, I’m posting a draft version of my paper, “Thanks for the Ad(d): Neoliberalism’s Compulsory Friendship” for download here. It’s the talk I gave at Goldsmiths in July that I promised to make available. As it’s a draft, please be considerate in making use of what little might be quotable.
Sigh. Just returning to the office after four hours of media awareness training. I was stunned to be ‘made aware’ that a half page photo of me appeared in the Business section of last week’s Courier Mail. Just goes to show how many of you are readers!
On September 17th, 2007 at 12:10 pm, glen said:
yo. at work! lol, doing my blogs
some brief thoughts on your paper:
1) The limitations of current research focusing on teen “online behaviour†also seems to be limited in another way. The labour/practices of friendship evident in online social networking sites is adjacent to the lived practice of ‘offline’ friendship activities in which teenagers participate. Anecdotally, the online social networking activities are embedded in more traditional institutional contexts such as school, community-locality, and family.
2) Unlike traditional friendship activities (ie ‘hanging out’ or whatever) the online dimension of friendship is immanent to the participation or activity. There is a limited friendship infrastructure, such as linking, comments, etc (see below, pt 6), but the demonstration of friendship only comes with comments and messaging. This is unlike ‘offline’ activities where teenagers, for example, will be in the same school, locality and/or family, and therefore forced to ‘hang out’.
3) The entrepreneurial subject of neoliberalism needs to be problematised with different types of ‘cultivation’. I started thinking about this because in my romance paper I also use the word ‘cultivate’ to talk about the practice of maintaining the enigmatic dimension of romance. There are two points I want to make.
4) Firstly, Lazzarato’s work on Benetton in the most recent _Substance_ issue on postworkerist Italian thought may be useful to think about one end of the spectrum. He describes the ‘enterprise’ as the locus for production within post-fordist capitalism, a development of the factory of industrial capitalism and then the corporation. He talks about structurations of “federated labour†where subcontracted workers are labouring in the interests of the enterprise. Workers here basically have to exploit themselves as worker/entrepreneurs of themselves. So there are two levels in the asymmetrical entrepreneurial relation between the enterprise and the individual worker/entrepreneurs.
5) Secondly, the labour of teenagers to maintain friendships therefore needs to be understood not simply in terms of the ‘worker/entrepreneur’ level of the neoliberal subject (‘managing presence’), but also on the level of the enterprise. In this case, I think this is the event of the friendship itself, which is distributed across the different registers including on/offline activities and in more or less durable infrastructural relations. So “the mutually constitutive bond of friendship, connectedness and desirability†as friendship-event that serves as the enterprise to the individualist level of friend-entrepreneurs.
6) There are many ritualised forms of comment and other communications in these online spaces, such as your example of “Thanks for the addâ€. This stratifies the appropriateness of given friending practices and delimits a field of possibility for practice in maintaining friendships. The ritualisation/stractification begins on the level of protocol in the generic construction of different modes of communication (comments, PM, blogroll, trackback, etc) built into the various software applications to the level of the social stratifications actualised in discourse, etc.
7) Another different example of the ‘enterprise’ online can be found in the various types of discussion that happens between bloggers. On the one hand, the ‘conversation’ needs to be cultivated through the immanent practices of commenting, trackback, etc otherwise it collapses. Yet, when it collapses it doesn’t just disappear; it is recorded in the database where activation is only an interested google-search away.
On September 17th, 2007 at 12:46 pm, melgregg said:
Thanks Glen - really appreciate the references and further thoughts. Also the comments about institutional location: reinforces my curiosity about why those people we were ‘forced’ to hang out with at school now seem so affectively charged (with nostalgia? with fondness? or is it something more negative but no less intense) when they appear on Facebook after so long.
Particularly interested in your very last point, which makes me think about temporality. The speed of the ‘conversation’ in the moment of constructing friendship and what the network’s default archive does to this. Does it represent ‘the event’ appropriately? We will probably only know in time.