Social networks register a ‘refusal of work’. But our net-time, after all, is another kind of labour. Herein lies the perversity of social networks: however radical they may be, they will always be data-mined. They are designed to be exploited. Refusal of work becomes just another form of making a buck that you never see.

And this:

Tag, Connect, Friend, Link, Share, Tweet. These are not terms that signal any form of collective intelligence, creativity or networked socialism. They are directives from the Central Software Committee. «Participation» in «social networks» will no longer work, if it ever did, as the magic recipe to transform tired and boring individuals into cool members of the mythological Collective Intelligence. If you’re not an interesting individual, your participation is not really interesting. Data clouds, after all, are clouds: they fade away. Better social networks are organized networks involving better individuals – it’s your responsibility, it’s your time. What is needed is an invention of social network software where everybody is a concept designer. Let’s kill the click and unleash a thousand million tiny tinkerers!

I’m looking for more provocative readings like this for my course on Intimacy, Love and Friendship next semester. This course was previously taught using classic readings in philosophy, but I’ve decided there’s little point me trying to replicate that version. Instead, I’ll be encouraging students to reflect on the ways intimacy, love and friendship are enabled and performed in media they use – particularly online media.

This the first course I’ll be teaching with my own content, so I’m slightly more excited than daunted at the moment. My aim is to create a cultural studies course that is sensitive to gender normativity and that makes use of online material as much as offline – any suggestions towards this end would be very welcome.

Of course I’ll post the outline here when it’s ready.