Meaning in the Age of Social Media

Meaning in the Age of Social Media Ganaele Langlois ISBN: 9781137356611 DOI: 10.1057/9781137356611 Palgrave Macmillan Please respect intellectual property rights This material is copyright and its use is restricted by our standard site license terms and conditions (see http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/connect/info/terms_conditions.html). If you plan to copy, distribute or share in any format including, for the avoidance of doubt, posting on websites, you need the express prior permission of Palgrave Macmillan. To request permission please contact [email protected]. MEANING IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 This page intentionally left blank 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Ganaele Langlois 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Meaning in the Age of Social Media MEANING IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA Copyright © Ganaele Langlois, 2014. First published in 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–1–137–35660–4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2014 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 All rights reserved. List of Tables vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction Meaning and Social Media 1 Chapter 1 Governing Meaning 23 Chapter 2 Meaning Machines 51 Chapter 3 Meaningfulness and Subjectivation 85 Chapter 4 Social Networking and the Production of the Self 111 Chapter 5 Being in the World 141 Afterword Social Data and the Politics of Existence 169 Notes 175 Bibliography 177 Index 193 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Contents This page intentionally left blank 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 2.1 Glossematics 2.2 Guattari and Glossematics 2.3 Mixed Semiotics 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois 74 76 80 Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Tables This page intentionally left blank 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 There are numerous thanks and acknowledgments to make for the long process of researching and writing this book. The very first preliminary research was done under the supervision of Barbara Crow, Steven Bailey, and Greg Elmer at York University. Since then, this book has benefited from the support of many peers and mentors. I would like to thank in particular the past and present members of the Infoscape Centre for the Study of Social Media, including Fenwick McKelvey, Erika Biddle, Alessandra Renzi, Taina Bucher, Joanna Redden, Peter Ryan, Kenneth Werbin, and Zach Devereaux for their keen interest, encouragement, and generous feedback throughout the years. I would also like to thank the following colleagues and friends with whom I had many opportunities to not only share my work with, but most importantly to learn from: Joss Hands, Jussi Parikka, Sarah Sharma, Tanner Mirrlees, Robert Gehl, Anne Helmond, Caroline Gerlitz, Kate Millberry, and Neal Thomas. Special thanks to Richard Grusin, Wendy Chun, and Geert Lovink for generously inviting me to present different parts of this book at their respective institutions. Special thanks as well to Gary Genosko for being very patient with my constant inquiries about Félix Guattari. Many thanks for much-needed cheers to my University of Ontario Institute of Technology colleagues Andrea Slane, Shanti Fernando, Rachel Ariss, Tess Pierce, and Isabel Pedersen. Special thanks to Lucas Freeman and Lauren Kirshner for their editing expertise. There are countless other number of scholars and students met at conferences to thank as well for their keen interest in my work and astute suggestions. Last but not least, I am grateful for the financial support provided by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Acknowledgments This page intentionally left blank 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Meaning and Social Media Meaning: From Signification to Sense Making Let’s start from the simple premise that a central part of our lives is devoted to making sense of what is going on. And this involves finding the meanings of things, people, and events in order to figure out what they stand for and where we stand in relation to them. Finding meaning is a process of orientation, of deciphering the world, and building conceptual maps to guide us. Such a process never takes place in isolation. Finding meaning, even if it leads to a radical rejection of our world and the values that sustain our lives, requires acts of communication: it is a continuous search for agreement and recognition that one’s meanings are valid and therefore can be understood, perhaps shared by others. Meaning, then, is closely linked with speech, with addressing and opening up to others. Meaning, in that sense, involves a process of resonance that takes place when one opens up to the world and to others and finds agreement and recognition: it is the “I hear you” implicit in a meaningful exchange. This understanding of meaning is close to John Durham Peter’s definition of communication as a process of authentic encounter. Heidegger’s conception of “Being” as “throwness into a world together with other people” (Peters 1999, 16), as the disclosing of worlds through the opening to otherness, is key here. In such a conception, communication “does not involve transmitting information about one’s intentionality: rather, it entails bearing oneself in such a way that one is open to hearing the other’s otherness” (Peters 1999, 17). As Peters further recalls, such Heideggerian conception of 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Introduction M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A communication can be found in the works of “Sartre, Levinas, Arendt, Marcuse, Leo Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, and many more” (Peters 1999, 17), to which should also be added JeanLuc Nancy’s work on Mitsein—“being with” (2007) and “meaning as the sharing of Being” (2000, 2). The search for meaning is continuous; even though we might be clear about what and where we want to be, we will have to struggle continually to maintain that position as the world around us shifts and changes. In searching for meaning, we open up to the world and let the world in. Traditionally, the search for meaning is a philosophical or spiritual undertaking. In searching for meaning, we open up to others, hence the ethical question of the “Other”: how can we be recognized, heard, accepted, and how can we recognize, accept, and hear the Other’s meanings? More recently, the search for meaning as an ethics of the Other has become a psychoanalytical question: object relations theory (Winnicott 1982), attachment theories (Bowlby 1976, 1982, 1983), and theories focused on the question of intersubjectivity (Benjamin 1998a; Butler 1997) have shown that opening up to the world, getting recognition (Benjamin 1998b), and forming relationships with others (Laplanche 1999) is essential to living a meaningful life, to cultivating a life force, a creative energy that can discover and craft new potentialities (Winnicott 1982). For these relational theories (Frosh 2010), the search for meaning as self- and other-understanding is not something produced by a modernist, essential, and unitary subject. Rather, it is dependent on the quality of a relational space of recognition. While it can be dramatic, the search for meaning is primarily an everyday activity. How we engage in mundane conversation, the small gestures we make in response to others, how we interact with everyday objects—all these are part of the fabric of meaning making and meaning sharing. At the same time, meaning is also a question of power, in that meanings are often imposed, and serve to define us, to make us fit in within specific gender, cultural, and social roles. Meaning, in that sense, is related to power as Foucault understood it: a productive field that directs us and gives us modes of existence (Foucault 1980a). The development of the mass media as tool 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 2 3 for manipulation serving those in power has demonstrated the importance of meaning for social and political control (Adorno 2001). Meanings are what make us fit in, what make us develop certain characteristics and responsibilities and adopt culturally appropriate ways of life. Reversely, of course, finding meaning is also what enables us to formulate alternatives, to redefine the contours of our world and to break down the grid of power. The practice of making meanings is thus complex; it is both individual and collective, in turn a process of empowerment and emancipation and a tool of subjugation. Similarly, the substance of meaning (as opposed to the practice of meaning making) is difficult to pinpoint; it goes beyond the simple exchange of information or the production of linguistic signs. When we experience the meaningfulness of something, we are in some way transformed. The substance of meaning also encompasses processes that orient us, give us a direction, and also open up new fields of awareness and new possibilities of transformation: meaning is not simply what we, as subjects, assign to objects, but also what opens us up to others—other beings and other things. Meaning is creative in that it is also a never-ending process of unfolding and becoming that exists beyond the division between subject and object. That is, we impose meaning on the world, but meaning also imposes on us: something is meaningful when it resonates in us (Nancy 2002a, 58). This tension between meaning as fixed and stable information between us and objects, and meaning as becoming and unfolding, is found in the everyday usage of the word. Oftentimes, we use “meaning” and “signification” interchangeably, for instance, when we inquire about an image, asking about the signs that compose it and their associated concepts. From this perspective, meaning is a relatively fixed and agreed upon set of interpretations about an object. But when we talk about the meaning of life, for instance, we talk more about making sense, of finding a form of directionality in our becoming in and to the world. The word sense is related to the idea of direction, and circulation; it involves the gathering of different kinds of processes— linguistic and intellectual, but also affective and expressive—so that taken together they have a purpose, a direction, and an 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING AND SOCIAL MEDIA M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A intent. Sense can rely on signification, but not always: a piece of music or an abstract painting, for instance, might offer nothing to interpret from a linguistic perspective, yet move us, speak to us and, in that way, make sense for us. Sense as the conjugation of informed processes of diverse materials (e.g., sounds, signs, images, sensations) with our affective and psychological reaction to these processes involves tensions and resonances both inside ourselves and in relation to others and to the world. Sense involves felt and embodied phenomena: it is a process of relationality between what is internal to us and external to the world that cannot be understood through the study of signification alone. And indeed, when something is meaningful and moves us, we are usually rendered speechless. Meaning thus covers two extremes: that of signification and that of sense— the former, a question for linguistics; and the latter, a question for aesthetics, the philosophy of language and psychoanalysis. To put it in other words, meaning is the process through which we formalize, through language, diverse processes that both anchor us in the world and unfold us to the world. Meaning, then, is both the effort to link together signification and sense, knowing full well that oftentimes these two poles are in opposition. Meaning is this space of relational tension between signification and making sense; between attempts to fix the world according to our will and the desire to, on the contrary, unfold to the world. In this book, I define meaning as the site of tension and transition between signification and sense: between the effort to enclose the world in language and the drive to unfold to the world through language. I focus on the study of meaning by keeping alive the tensions and links between signification and sense, because I am interested in the processes through which some signs come to have impact (come to make sense) and others not. But before I can launch into further exploration of meaning, both in terms of the practices of meaning making and the substance of meaning itself, I should further add that my approach includes a set of key elements that have been traditionally ignored by linguistics, philosophy of language and literary theory: media technologies. Ultimately, my approach is anchored in an examination of media technologies, and of 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 4 5 software in particular. I do not deny the importance of purely theoretical considerations of meaning that view it through the lenses of affect, language, and the Other—such considerations occupy the last two chapters of this book—but I would like to support these considerations with a technological perspective (which I develop in chapters 1 and 2). This, I believe, is an important task, as meaning is no longer simply a human process but, as I explain below, one that is increasingly dependent on media technologies. I am interested in investigating a genealogical turn (in Foucault’s sense) in the production and circulation of meaning, one in which meaning ceases to be a mysterious human process and becomes a machinic process that can be taken over for political and economic purposes. I see that turn as central to understanding the current communication context, especially as we aim to understand the full impact of socalled social or participatory media (e.g., Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter)—software platforms that invite anybody to express themselves in order to find further meaning, be it consumer products, social connections, media objects, knowledge, and, increasingly, the whole existential realm of subjectivity and becoming. Meaning: From Media to New Media To recap, then, meaning making is mundane, yet has farreaching philosophical, psychological, political, social, and economic effects. There are several approaches to understanding meaning: some that are based in philosophical discussions about the relationships and limits between thoughts, reality and language, and others that are based in the mechanics of languages as enclosed systems of signification (e.g., Saussure). Even though these two traditions have been often pitted against each other, they will both be present in this book, as I approach the question of meaning through the question of the transition from signifying to making sense. I also use a third approach to understand meaning, one which stems from media studies to look at technologies of meaning in particular, that is, media technologies. The question of technology makes it possible to examine the relationship between signifying and making sense, in that 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING AND SOCIAL MEDIA M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A they provide the material sites through which such relationships are shaped. In many ways, media systems reveal our preoccupation with meaning. Plato, for instance, denounced writing as betrayal of true knowledge. The technology of writing, he thought, transformed knowledge into information and signs that could be stored, while their actual meaning or sense, which could only be revealed in face-to-face conversation, became lost (Plato 1972). We now have many contemporary versions of the fear that meaning, when it becomes technologized, is lost: the search engine, by making information instantaneously accessible, makes us less critical, less capable of finding meaning on our own (Carr 2008). Social media in general make us lonelier, because we are less able to open up to each other, and to foster true, meaningful connections (Turkle 2011). The paradoxical relationship between media and meaning—media are supposed to provide more meaning, yet they deprive us of what is meaningful—can be boiled down to a breakdown of the transition from signification to sense: media creates a proliferation of signs, but these signs fail to make sense. Baudrillard (1995) perhaps best expressed this: signs are pervasive yet meaningless, what we see or hear through the media does not touch us anymore, but isolates us more and more. We have never been as connected to each other, but we have never been as isolated as well. Media are important sites of meaning production and circulation, and their proliferation since the nineteenth century has multiplied and rendered extremely complex the question of the ontology of meaning. Such complexity is rooted in the new materialities through which meaning emerges: while meaning traditionally is linked to language and human cognition, analog technologies, by being able to directly record phenomena out there (light, sound waves) without recourse to language, have opened up a new realm of nonlinguistic experiences of meaning. As Barthes explored in Camera Lucida (1981), in some photographs one can find both signification (what Barthes calls the studium) and something else that opens one up and pierces the distance between viewer and object, between present and past (the punctum): something that resonates yet cannot be found in linguistic analysis—something that makes 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 6 7 sense. Digital technologies, in turn, have transformed diverse materialities (sounds, images, text) into binary data, rendering what was understood as external reality malleable and subject to transformation (Manovich 2008). This new mediation has radically changed our trust in media representations and the meanings we derive from them (Bolter and Grusin 2000). I understand media in the same way as Lisa Gitelman (2006), as sites for the experience of meaning. These sites, I would add, are composed of users, audiences and producers, institutions, policies, rules, routines, professional hierarchies and ethics, aesthetics, and technologies all in the service of enabling the production, storage, and distribution of meanings. The challenge becomes one of understanding the specific role of media technologies in shaping both practices of meaning making and substances of meaning. The positions taken by media studies with regard to meaning are complex and contradictory. The first of these contradictions is the tendency to separate the substance of meaning from media technologies. This has been the position adopted by British and US cultural studies. The substance of meaning has been traditionally approached in terms of content, and its analysis has been heavily shaped by linguistics through a focus on the question of signification. Content-focused approaches to meaning in media studies explore the question of power: how content serve to subjugate or empower, to maintain unequal relations of power, ideologies, and stereotypes or, on the contrary, to formulate new positions and new ways of living together. Media technologies have a role to play in all of this, but the understanding of this role mostly stems from a social constructionist perspective: media technologies might introduce new communication practices, but they tend to be appropriated and adapted to the needs of mostly dominant groups (Williams 2013). From this perspective, both the substance of meaning and the practices of meaning making are dependent on a host of mostly social and cultural factors, with media technologies having limited impact. It is, of course, extremely reductive to boil down cultural studies of media to the study of the content of media messages. More recent explorations of affect as shared, transindividual yet embodied, and sometimes unconscious movement 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING AND SOCIAL MEDIA M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A that transform relationships and our unfolding sense of self, represent a turn away from the question of signification to an approach that is closer to the concept of sense as defined in the previous section (Gregg and Seigworth 2010). The problem with such an approach in the context of this book is one of vocabulary: in order to separate themselves from analysis centered on signification as a conceptual and intellectual process, affect theory has tended to reject the word “meaning” altogether (Blackman 2012, 17). From their perspective, meaning is too conceptually loaded, already marked by traditional linguistics, especially Saussure’s definition of language as entirely self-contained. The question of affect, however, helps explain that meaning as making sense has a nonverbal dimension that involves giving form to flows of affects and associating them with other flows: material, signifying, subjective, economic, social, and political. Making sense, in contrast to affect, consists of an effort to give form to what is inchoate. At the other end of the spectrum of media studies is a field devoted to understanding the systemic effects of media technologies—medium theory as developed by Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. Medium theory is focused on understanding the social impact of media technologies and posits media technologies as “crucial determinants of the social fabric” (Carey 2008). From the perspective of the question of meaning, medium theory has often radically departed from the analysis of the substance of meaning, or content, as pithily summarized by McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” (McLuhan and Fiore 2001). This does not mean that medium theory does away with meaning altogether; rather, it is focused on understanding how practices of meaning making as shaped by media technologies have far-reaching effects. Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan were fundamental in examining how the introduction of writing, print technologies, and analog technologies played a central role in reorganizing the social, political, economic as well as cultural and psychological fields. Print, for instance, created the possibility of greater territorial expansion and control (Innis 2007), while linear, alphabetical writing served to privilege rational sequential thought in the West (McLuhan 1965). Analog technologies, in turn, fundamentally changed human 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 8 9 perceptions, both in large-scale social phenomena such as the birth of national identities through newspapers, and in the more intimate realm of subjectivity, personal memory, family, and friendship, for instance, with photography as an intimate memory device. Television fundamentally changed politics and turned it into an image-based process, where the visual appearances of politicians became as important, if not more important, than the content of their speeches (Kittler 1996). From this perspective, media technologies develop specific rituals (Carey 2008) of communication—ways of using technologies, ways of interacting with content, and ways of accessing and interpreting meanings. Such a perspective—one placing the technological on at least equal footing with the cultural—is helpful in examining the turn from meaning making as an essential human characteristic to meaning making as machinic (and oftentimes with the mass media) an industrial and commercial process. This turn is brilliantly illustrated in Kittler’s exploration of analog technologies, which explores the material and technological dimensions of meaning. While meaning making might seem to be a practice of the mind, and therefore immaterial, Kittler argues for an approach to meaning as a material question: meaning is first and foremost dependent on the storage, selection, and processing of relevant data (1990, 369). Meaning is not solely a capacity of the human mind; it requires adaptation to institutions of knowledge (i.e., libraries and universities), to prescriptive frameworks that define the kinds of knowledge that are valid and useful (e.g., “hard facts” are more meaningful and reliable than folk storytelling), and to technologies of access and retrieval (i.e., library cards, search engines). From this perspective, both the practices of meaning making and the substance of meaning are material and technological first and foremost, and the technological and material context determines what constitute meaningfulness and meaninglessness. This allows for a reconciliation between the study of the substance of meaning and the study of the practices of meaning making: media technologies have rendered meaning material, and therefore subject to further material and technological interventions. Such a move away from questions of content, or interpretation, to examining the conditions within which acts of interpretation 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING AND SOCIAL MEDIA M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A and meaning making can take place thus privilege material factors as a starting point to understand the relationship between meaning and media. Both perspectives on meaning—as socially constructed or technologically determined—have been pitted heavily against each other, often resulting in the formulation of extreme and caricatural positions that either gave all power to social and human elements or to media technologies. The technological determinism versus social constructionism debate has been covered at length in many places and would take too long to summarize here (Slack and Wise 2005a, 2005b). Suffice it to say that the approach I follow here is one of rejecting direct causality models and hermetic and essentialist categories, that is, technology versus society. The perspective I adopt on studying the relationships between technology and the social or cultural with regard to meaning is one of hybridity (Latour 1990). What we understand as media are composed of complex webs, or assemblages of disparate actors—human actors, of course, but also technological actors and institutional actors that are linked with and codetermine each other. In the same way, what we understand as meaning is dependent on a complex web of linguistic, technological, material, psychological, spiritual, individual, and collective factors that establish the significations and senses of things. The different human and nonhuman actors, to borrow a term from Actor-Network Theory, that constitute specific mediated experiences of meaning have their spaces of agencies and therefore can constrain and transform each other and the practices and values they are supposed to embody. For instance, to recall a previous example, television changed what constituted meaningfulness by favoring visual elements over auditory ones (Kittler 1996). Furthermore, these relationships between human and nonhuman actors over time solidify into bigger units—that is, into a media practice (e.g., making a movie requires specific rules, processes, and grammar). Therefore, the ways in which these actors are made to work or are articulated and imbricated with each other changes the conditions within which meaning can be experienced. This leads to the following question: What organizes the relationships, or articulations between these diverse actors to 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 10 11 favor the emergence of specific processes of both signification and making sense? Indeed, the tracing of the spaces of agency of different human and nonhuman actors only tells part of the story. What remains to be analyzed are the organizing principles that intervene in the negotiation of these spaces of agency: What are the processes through which one media practice among a multiplicity of others comes to be accepted as the norm? For instance, why is the Google search algorithm regarded as the most reliable universal search engine capable of finding the most meaningful information? The answer to this question is complex: it requires an examination of different search algorithms, of the changing nature of the production and circulation of information on the web, and of the political economy of search engines as profit-making enterprises and new global media giants. Thus, understanding media as sites for the experience of meaning requires not only identifying the specific actors that populate and delineate a media space and media temporality, but also the power formations that are expressed and reinforced through their specific articulations with each other. Power formations, here, should be understood in a Foucauldian sense as networks through which specific effects—that is, specific ways of ascribing what is meaningful and what is meaningless—can be produced. Power formations define the frame within which specific possibilities are favored over others. To sum up, if we start with the premise that media are sites for the experience of meaning, then we have to redefine meaning as a material and technological process, and not only a spiritual, psychoanalytical, philosophical, or cultural one. It becomes necessary to understand media as complex assemblages of technological, material, cultural, political, and economic actors that are in the business of not only producing and communicating meaning, but also of setting up the conditions within which meaningfulness and meaninglessness appear. This, in turn, demands that we understand what kinds of power formations organize and are reinforced through media: that which can have a say in the development and use of media also can shape how meaning can be approached, what can be understood as meaningful, and what is to be considered as meaningless. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING AND SOCIAL MEDIA M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A As explained above, a genealogy of the relationship between different media and meaning has been done brilliantly elsewhere. This book is concerned with the relationship between meaning and new media, and how new media introduce specific regimens for producing, storing, distributing, and accessing meaning. Of particular concern are the more mundane forms of new media that are becoming the everyday conduits for all other media (television, film, radio): computer networks, such as the Internet, and in particular the so-called social or participatory media thought to be ushering in a communication revolution by presenting radically new models of usage and new ways of making profit from mediated communication, or meanings. Indeed, we are now seeing a media revolution characterized by greater possibility of participation in the communication process: whereas in the previous mass-media age, a few producers bombarded audiences with their often biased messages, in the new social or participatory media environment, everybody can create messages on websites, blogs, social networks such as Facebook, video websites such as YouTube, and microblogging sites such as Twitter. These new conditions for the production and circulation of meanings have created an entirely new context of communication. The term “social or participatory media” is misleading, though, as it often invokes images of instantaneous communication where all that needs to be done is to type a few words and click a few times. This understanding of social/participatory media is limited. In reality, the participatory media model simplifies the process of creating, storing, and accessing content at the user level by implementing a series of very fast, yet complex, software mediations. For instance, the letters that I type on my computer keyboard become electric signals, which are then transformed into binary data, which is then understood and formatted into letter on my computer screen by another piece of software. When I press the “send” button, this means that another piece of software makes sure that my text gets assigned the necessary protocols so that it can get to another point in the network, and when I press the “open” button, another piece of software decodes a set of data packets back into a human-understandable text. In that sense, we should consider the substance of meaning in the new media 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 12 13 environment as not just what we see on our screen, what is legible to the average user, but it also involves different types of software transforming whatever we input and reshaping its format. Software is, in a sense, ideological (Chun 2005): software enacts a series of decisions as to how a set of meanings will be formatted and communicated. In this way, software influences interpretation. As Matt Fuller demonstrated with his WebStalker alternative software (2002), the ways in which we attribute meaningfulness to information depends on the formatting of such information. Fuller further argues that designing alternative interfaces that use a network metaphor instead of a page metaphor allows us to deconstruct common conventions and imagine other ways of finding meaning out of information that are not based on the linearity of texts, but rather on a principle of connectivity. Thanks partly to software (to distinguish it from hardware, i.e., computers and screens, handheld devices, etc.), new media change the conditions of meaning production and circulation first at the level of formatting because of their capacity to translate human input into malleable data and malleable data back into textual meaning. There is a radical change in the substance of meaning as processed through software: meaning is now composed of different kinds of physical and chemical signals turned into electricity, binary data, and linguistic signs. Second, this malleability of the substance of meaning also creates new possibilities for practices of meaning making, such as digital manipulation (Manovich 2008). The field of software studies (Manovich 2001; Fuller 2008) explores the cultural impact of software: the limits and possibilities that are embedded in software; how software manages the formatting of meaning and perceptions; and consequently how software has become a field of power relations. This last aspect is illustrated in the politics of software: open-source initiatives against the race to patenting all kinds of software, for instance, as well as attempts to embed laws into the codes of the Internet (Lessig 2006), or to control protocols that enable communication on computer networks (Galloway 2004), as illustrated by concerns over network neutrality and the fight against illegal downloading. In that sense, software is defined as a complex web of relationships, involving 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING AND SOCIAL MEDIA M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A human design, policy and regulations, economic interests, and cultural concerns. As the field of software studies has demonstrated, the term “software” denotes a range of programs with varying degrees of visibility, from the software that allows for human manipulation at the interface level, to automated software that is invisible to the user and functions without human intervention. Software is complex because it is overlaid (Chun 2005, 28): a piece of software is dependent on another piece of software to function. Software studies thus usefully show that the relationship between meaning and software cannot simply be observed at the user-interface level—what we see and how we interact with what we see on a computer screen. Rather, we need to open the black box of participatory communication in order to understand the ways in which social media software manages meaning in ways that are often invisible, in particular, the automated production of meaning. Social or participatory media are not only designed to accommodate vast amounts of user-generated content; they are also meant to support users in their quest for meaning. This involves helping users make sense of the vast amount of significations that surround them and, more radically, giving users the meanings they are searching for. That is, social media not only provide objective information but also entertainment, enlightenment, enjoyment, and so on. Participatory software does not simply format the substance and practices of meaning—it has developed its own ways of automatically producing meaning out of human input. This means a radical reconfiguration of actors in the meaning-making process and, in particular, of human actors who cease being a crucial source of meaning and become the object, or receptacle, of meaning making. This new reconfiguration raises multiple questions and paradoxes that we will explore shortly. Social Media Software as a Meaning-Making Machine: Three Paradoxes In 2004, Google launched its immensely popular Gmail, a revolutionary free email service with nearly unlimited storage. There was a trade-off, of course: users had to agree to have targeted advertisements pushed on their Gmail page, and this 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 14 15 involved having their incoming and outgoing messages scrutinized. That a third party could read one’s private conversations raised a few eyebrows, but Google’s answer to those concerns was fireproof: no human would read the messages, only software (Guynn 2013). The software, Google explained, did not care about what was being said—about the content of one’s conversation in a human sense of making a value judgment. The Adsense software that Google defended was a pure statistical, informational machine. The software’s task was to look for keyword matches between the content of users’ conversations and a list of products: a romantic breakup could then be associated indiscernibly with a weight-loss program, a dating service, or a divorce lawyer; a sinus problem with snoring aids or alternative cold medication. The software only looked for keyword matches using an algorithm; it was not, Google explained, able to understand, and therefore, it could not snoop. The implication was that Google Adsense software was not an artificial intelligence machine capable of mimicking, and perhaps surpassing, human linguistic, cultural, and psychological abilities. On the contrary, the Adsense software was effectively stupid: it did not possess language, and could only process data following a specific algorithmic logic. In effect, however, Gmail had introduced an altogether new mode of communication, where software became an agent capable of having linguistic and cultural effects—capable, in short, of influencing and guiding our thoughts, of starting a meaningful communicational exchange, in this case, with an advertising system. Thus, the first paradox of software is that it cannot make sense of linguistic signs, yet its job is to produce, and distribute signs in order to make connections and thereby make sense. Fast-forward a few years and software such as Google’s Adsense have become the backbone of most of our (human) communication online: we rely on search engines such as Google to find the information that is most relevant for us; we rely on social networking platforms such as Facebook to find new and old friends for us; and we rely on Amazon.com to provide us with books. I define such meaning-making software as semiotechnological: semiotics is the science of signification, thus semiotechnologies are mechanical ways of producing significations, and by extension meanings, out of data. Indeed, such 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING AND SOCIAL MEDIA M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A software does not simply produce signs—it now plays a central cultural and affective role; it helps us become more satisfied, more involved in our world, more in touch with the people in our lives, and more knowledgeable about ourselves and others. Even dire proclamations about our growing addiction to the Internet and its attendant side effects (i.e., increasing isolation, impatience, and loss of critical judgment) agree on this point: semiotechnological software, that is, software that directly participates in the production and distribution of meanings, is becoming, for better or for worse, an essential component of human communication to the extent that it is now dedicated to the production of modes of existence—who we are, who we want to become, and who we connect with. This trend is only exacerbated by the increasing difficulty of separating the online from the offline: ubiquitous portable devices ensure that we are constantly connected and accounted for on the many social and media platforms that organize our lives. Current plans for an augmented reality where software would be directly embedded in our vision further highlight this drive to have software directly participate in not only our linguistic or cultural perceptions, but also in our affective experiences—our existence as individual and connected selves in the world. Hence, the second paradox of software is that it mechanically produces signs and organizes communication, but in so doing, goes beyond the level of language to that of human existence. Software is a machine, but it now pretends to magically produce us. Thus, a radical transposition has occurred: we do not make sense; software makes sense for us. Semiotechnological software intervenes in important and often seemingly mysterious ways in our exchanges with each other, and with the world. As a means to continuously produce new human connections—with new relevant products for consumption, with new professional and social contacts, and with new ideas to share—semiotechnological software not only organizes our existence, but also participates in a new economic system (immaterial capitalism) based on creating economic value out of social, intellectual, and affective acts. This was perhaps quite famously illustrated by the short-lived Burger King Whopper Sacrifice Facebook application in 2009. In a humorous 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 16 17 twist to deconstruct the Facebook social recommendation software, Burger King promised a free Whopper burger to anyone who would unfriend ten people on Facebook, thus equating the value of one Facebook friendship to a small bite of a burger. Facebook was quick to ban the application, which humorously raised a serious question about the construction of the cultural and economic value of friendship on social networks. Indeed, what is the meaning of friendship on Facebook? On the one hand, the Facebook platform is designed to enhance human connections by encouraging users to continuously add friends to their network. The logic of Facebook is that the more connected a user is to other users, the more meaningful his or her life is, or simply, more connection, more meaning. In turn, the Burger King application asked users about the affective value of some of their friendships: which friendships were so meaningless they could be discarded for less than a burger? And Facebook’s answer to quickly ban the application, given its viral popularity, was a direct answer to that question; indeed, there was a definite economic loss when the cultural value of Facebook friendships was redefined: smaller friendship networks—which might mean more carefully selected and therefore more meaningful connections—led to less user data to market. Hence, the third paradox of semiotechnological software is the predominantly corporate context within which it is deployed problematically links the economic, cultural, and psychological values of meaning: the attribution of meaningful value serves to create markets as much as it is an essential human activity. These new articulations between the field of existence and the field of profit need to be further examined, as they constitute a whole new context for understanding the new regimes of meaning that have become dominant models for networked, digital communication. Chapter Overview To recapitulate the problem of meaning in the information age as follows: 1. Meaning encompasses both signification (the production of fixed interpretations) and making sense (the fluxes that move 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING AND SOCIAL MEDIA M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A us, change us, and transform us and our relations to the world). These two poles are often in tension: a set of signs might make no sense at all; sense might escape any attempts to fix it in language. Meaning is therefore the problematic site of transition between signification and making sense. 2. With the arrival of media technologies, meaning has ceased to be a purely human capacity, and has become a material and technological process, subject to transformations and therefore subject to strategic power interventions. 3. The kind of software developed on participatory media platforms does not simply provide new substances of meaning or new practices of meaning making. Software does not simply influence or shape meanings and their perceptions, it produces them and, in so doing, changes the role of the human agent from an active participant in the creation of meaning to a passive one of receiving meaning. 4. This poses a direct challenge to the common perception that participatory media platforms are intrinsically democratic, because anybody can participate in the communication process. The new configuration whereby meanings produced by humans are not the only kinds of meaning requires further examination of the new power relations mediated through software. Thus, my study of the transformation of meaning through software starts from the following proposition: whereas older media forms were primarily designed to format meaning— both in the constitution of signs and in the designing of specific practices of making sense—online participatory media are concerned with the automated production and circulation of meaning. This means a radical decentralization, displacement, and recasting of the human elements in the process of meaning making. In the following chapters, I examine the ramifications of this novel process of everyday communication being shaped, controlled, guided, and managed through software. The overall arc developed in this book is to first examine processes of signification, and how the automated production of signs serves to produce actions, reactions, and behaviors that attempt to create the sense of communicative situations. In so 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 18 19 doing, this book goes progressively from a focus on signification to that of making sense, and traces not only the processes through which automated significations come to make sense, but also how they fail to do so, thereby opening new venues for reconsidering the role of these technologies in the vision of democratic communication. Chapter 1, “Governing Meaning,” analyzes the context within which new processes of meaning making take place, and explains how commercial imperatives allied with software possibilities have transformed meaning into a valuable commodity. This first chapter thus offers a political economy analysis of social media corporations, and how they manage the conditions of meaning. Drawing on recent work on immaterial labor and linguistic and cognitive capitalism (Lazzarato, Virno, Pasquinelli), this chapter demonstrates that social media platforms are not primarily in the business of accommodating large amounts of human-produced meaning. Rather, they are in charge of managing or governing a multiplicity of information and of finding ways to create meaningful connections that can be mediated through a for-profit motive. Chapter 2, “Meaning Machines,” deals with the theoretical context within which we can understand software as part of meaning-making machines, that is, as a semiotechnology in charge of producing both meaning and the conditions for the experience of meaningfulness. The materiality of meaning has changed through software, so that meaning can no longer be seen as made up of linguistic signs. It is also constituted of signals, information, and data that are algorithmically, rather than linguistically or culturally, processed. This new ontology of meaning requires a framework that goes beyond traditional textual and discourse analyses. Here, Guattari’s mixed semiotics is useful, as it offers a way to see meaning as produced through material, social, technical, economic, psychological, and political processes. Following Guattari, it is possible to develop a framework for mapping the interactions of the different elements present in meaning making through software. Through this, we can understand the points at which these elements of meaning making can be manipulated to serve power interests, be they economic or political. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING AND SOCIAL MEDIA M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A Armed with an understanding of both the political economy and technolinguistic context of the new conditions of meaning on social media, it becomes possible to launch into a case study analysis of how social media commodify not only meaning as content, but also, more importantly, the existential and psychic fields of the experience of meaning. Software platforms in particular invite and coerce users to fit within specific modes of agency or subjectivation processes. Chapter 3, “Meaningfulness and Subjectivation,” offers a close analysis of Amazon.com’s recommendation software. Amazon.com is one of the first companies to have successfully developed a system that feeds on user participation in order to produce tailored recommendations, particularly in the case of books. This system operates at the crossroad of different practices of meaning—not only the meanings produced by users at the interface level, but also the enframing of these meanings within a software-defined experiential mode of meaningfulness. The Amazon platform thus provides the illusion of freedom as the never-ending production of meanings, but imposes at the same time a very restricted and limited logic for understanding and experiencing such meanings. Chapter 4, “Social Networking and the Production of the Self,” draws some conclusions on the imbrication of meaning with commercial imperatives in the case of social networking platforms (i.e., Facebook), whose main commodities are not objects, but the desire for anybody to make sense of the world they live in and connect with others. In particular, this chapter focuses on how software-based meaning-making processes have served to colonize the field of subjectivity, and beyond that the psychic field of existence and becoming—the space where we make sense not only of ourselves and others, but also where we seek mutual recognition. Using post-Fordist theories (Franco “Bifo” Berardi) in conjunction with relational psychoanalytical work focused on the question of encounter, intersubjectivity, and recognition (Winnicott, Judith Butler, Jessica Benjamin), this chapter investigates what happens to the psyche as a space of creativity, and to the liberating capacities of communication in the context of software-assisted social connectivity. As such, the chapter shows that while we might be free to say anything 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 20 21 we like, the constant demand for connectivity fosters negative psychic externalities (stress, loneliness, and boredom) that highlight the rupture between the desire for intersubjective connection and commodified network connectivity. Chapter 5, “Being in the World,” considers how social media platforms could and should be developed beyond the commercial, for-profit model so as to technologically enact an ethics of recognition. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of pharmacology—the poison which is also the cure—this chapter defines a framework for reenvisioning software design practices. It does so by reflecting on a 2009 exhibition of Raymond Depardon and Paul Virilio’s works on the meaning of our place on earth. This multimedia exhibit addressed the problem of media technologies as tools with which we could make sense of the world, and the current gap between software technologies capable of processing incredibly large amounts of information and the human capacity to comprehend such information and make sense of it. It then becomes clear that the search for meaning is an embodied, felt, and shared practice (John Durham Peters, de Certeau, Bakhtin). While there is a classic divide between authentic communication (face-to-face encounter) and mediated communication (e.g., Plato’s critique of writing in the Phaedrus), the chapter explores how relational psychoanalysis’s ethics of encounter could be integrated in software design. In particular, the formulation of norms of recognition (Butler, Benjamin) and of transitional spaces (Winnicott) that allow for creative reflection on the relationship between the self and others, and between the self and the world, should be integrated within the design of social media platforms. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING AND SOCIAL MEDIA This page intentionally left blank 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Governing Meaning* In the introduction, I defined meaning as the space where the transition from signification to making sense problematically unfolds, where words, images, and sounds potentially cease to be simply signs and become existential markers through which we experience belonging (or not) in the world, our being (or failing to be) with others. In the social media environment, meaning has become a technological and commercial process. We now have a handful of social media corporations (Google, Facebook, and Twitter in North America) that dominate the field and market of participatory communication. There is, of course, the notable exception of Wikipedia as a not-for-profit entity, but the fact is that what we understand as social media are corporations that derive a profit out of users’ communication. Curiously enough, the corporate aspects of social media tend not to be included in many analyses examining the formation of new communicative practices on social media, for instance, the practices that shape participatory culture (Jenkins 2006b). We could say that the field is divided between the study of social media communication on the one hand, and the political economy of social media on the other. On the one hand, we have analyses of how users harness the power of social media in order to make themselves heard, be it at the political or intimate level. On the other hand, we have analyses of the economic and technological structure of corporate social media that draw an altogether grimmer picture of invasion of privacy and widespread commodification of personal data. On the one hand, there is a 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Chapter 1 M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A celebration of free communication, and on the other, a series of warnings about our loss of control over our data. Or to put it another way, on the one hand, a focus on the human users, and on the other, a focus on the technological and economic structure of software platforms. My main point in this chapter is to reconcile these two positions, because meaning is not simply a human process anymore, but a technological, and by extension, a commercial one. This divide in the field is important if we want to understand the conditions within which meaning making takes place on social media platforms. The question that I would like to raise in this chapter is about which processes are now involved in meaning making beyond what we human users produce as content. My approach here is to look at the context of meaning before delving into an analysis of the processes that are involved in the transition from signification to making sense. By context, I mean the specific dynamics and elements that create the possibility of meaning (Slack and Wise 2005a, 128). A strict separation between the context of meaning and meaning itself is artificial. However, I find it necessary to make this separation because common theoretical and methodological approaches to meaning, especially those dealing primarily with signification, tend to ignore the question of context altogether—that is, the material, technological, economic, political, and nonlinguistic processes that form the architecture, or, as I will later define it, the platform through which a phenomenon such as meaning is made possible. By looking at the current participatory context of meaning, I want to raise the following questions: Who are the actors, organizations, and processes that invest in the production and circulation of meaning and create the social media context? What kinds of communication architecture are being developed to make online meaning possible and what interests do they reflect? What are the emerging agreed upon understandings of meaning, both as a cultural, social, political, human, and technological practice and, increasingly, as a profitable commodity? And finally, what kinds of limitations and possibilities does this context impose on the general concept of meaning? In pursuing these questions, I want to get away from 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 24 25 the idea that the participatory environment is just about users being free to express themselves, and I want to highlight that the participatory model that we are now experiencing is developed by specific commercial interests. For our purposes, context includes not only a diverse set of processes and elements such as media technologies and existing cultural norms, values, and practices, but also economic and political processes such as structures of ownership, content regulations, technical regulations, industry standards, and media policies. Meaning is not a stable or homogeneous set of processes. Rather, the internal logics of meaning are dependent on the context that makes meaning possible in the first place. For instance, the possibilities for meaning differ depending on whether we are dealing with a face-to-face or phone conversation. So media technologies, along with the institutional, political, economic, and cultural dynamics within which they are developed, build a specific context for meaning. In particular, the proliferation of content on social media—where anybody can post anything—introduces a radically different communication context, which in turn affects how we approach meaning. Therefore, examining the changes in meaning production, storage, and circulation introduced by social media technologies is crucial. However, I will also argue in this chapter that examining only the cultural impact of participatory technologies does not provide the full picture; it is also important to consider economic and political factors. In particular, the fact that social media provide greater freedom of expression has to be squared with the for-profit motive behind the most popular platforms. For this reason, I want to insist on questions of political economy, because the development of business models that primarily invest in user-produced content and behaviors on social media have a definite influence on how meaning is shaped and defined. My argument is that the largely for-profit environment that characterizes the participatory environment has created a new context for meaning, a context that requires the everintensifying production and circulation of meaning in order to advance a commercial imperative. One could say that with the rise of commercial media in the twentieth century, meaning 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 GOVERNING ME ANING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A became a business, and that social media are not new in this respect. Indeed, the more meaningful and popular a media content is for an audience, the more that audience is likely to stick with the platform that delivers this content and constitute itself into a target for advertising and marketing. Yet, if we look at the specific technologies and communicative possibilities offered by social media, we can see that there has been a radical shift in the treatment of meaning within a broader commercial context. The uniqueness of the social media model with regard to the commercialization of meaning is as follows: 1. No limitation on content: Whereas previous corporate media, for economic and technical reasons, had to limit their production of meaning and balance quality and cost of production, the social media environment is characterized by the proliferation of many kinds of meaning. A Hollywood director might post an excerpt from his or her upcoming feature on YouTube, while I can upload low-quality short footage taken with my cell phone. 2. Lessened interest in content: This proliferation of meaning produced by users is key, because it means that social media platforms are moving away from focusing on the content of a message: they are less in the business of regulating what is being posted and have been refusing legal responsibility for it. To continue with the example of YouTube, for instance, it is up to the copyright owner to flag a video as breaking copyright law. YouTube and most other social media platforms are reluctant to become censors or content regulators except, sometimes, in specific and limited cases involving extremely sensitive content, such as hate speech or pornography. Indeed, social media corporations are not in the business of producing content: they are in the business of hosting and retrieving large amounts of information. 3. A business of establishing meaningful connections through personalization: Social media platforms may have distanced themselves from content, but that does not mean they have given up on meaning altogether. Their business model is still largely advertising based, and their task is to make sure the right advertisement goes to the right potential consumer 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 26 27 (and as we will see in chapters 3 and 4, their task is also to transform the user into a consumer). Social media platforms exist to match users and objects of consumption through creating personalized user profiles. They therefore focus on generating what is meaningful for us. 4. A focus on meaningfulness: Social media platforms are less involved in the content of meaning, but are more focused on assigning degrees of meaningfulness for different types of content and practices, both user-produced and advertisingbased. What needs to be studied, therefore, is the question of how meaningfulness is articulated with economic value. From a platform perspective, what matters is not the actual content; rather, it is its relevance for different types of users. The same content might be meaningful to me, but meaningless to you, and the platform is in charge of figuring out such differences. These four characteristics form the core of the argument in this chapter. They will be used to further understand what I call the politics and governance of meaning on participatory platforms. I define politics in a broad sense as the ensemble of power relations that form the specific context within which meaning can take place. Power relations should not be understood solely as restrictive or controlling, but also as productive, in that they define the conditions under which meaning is possible (Foucault 1980a). By governance, I mean a set of processes used to manage the production and circulation of meaning. Politics and governance are complementary concepts: examining the politics of meaning is helpful to understand how specific modes of meaning production and distribution appear, while focusing on the question of governance serves to identify who and what is being favored in these specific modes of meaning production and circulation. In other words, in order to understand what meaning in the participatory environment is, we need, first, to identify the actual processes and relations that make meaning possible in the first place (the politics of meaning), and second, to understand who has control over these processes and relations and can therefore shape them (the governance of meaning). 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 GOVERNING ME ANING 28 M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A The social media context is made up of many online entities, among which a handful have risen to prominence. Most of these entities have a recognizable focus—social connections on Facebook and other social networks, video upload and sharing on YouTube, picture uploading and sharing on Flickr, microblogging on Twitter, encyclopedic articles on Wikipedia— although there are all-purpose social media entities, such as Google, that act as a search engine, social network, email provider, and multimedia-content provider. All social media entities allow for the publishing and sharing of multimedia content and the building of relationships among users and between users and content. For instance, one can share with friends and comment on a YouTube video on Facebook. Oftentimes, social media are so simple to use that the question of how they actually work is never raised. However, it is crucial to go beyond first impressions at the user-interface level and to have a closer look at the technological infrastructure of social media. The development, from the early 2000s onward, of the so-called Web 2.0 (O’Reilly 2005) and subsequent rise of a participatory culture (Jenkins 2006b) was based on two new characteristics (Langlois et al. 2009). The first was to rely primarily on users to produce content, rather than on specialists (i.e., journalists, editors). Wikipedia, for instance, invites anybody to participate in the writing of encyclopedia articles, and Amazon relies mostly on users to review and rate products, while YouTube has become a hub for amateur video production. The second characteristic follows from the first: the development of software platforms that simplify the publication process at the user level. Previously, in order to post a text, video, or picture online, one had to learn HTML coding. In the social media environment, by contrast, one has only to type or copy and paste an image or sound file and press the “publish” button. As Cramer and Fuller (2008, 148–149) note, this simplification of publishing on the user side leads to more complexity on the software side. Whereas the Web 1.0 environment was characterized by a fairly simple code for publishing content online based on the HTML/HTTP protocols, in the Web 2.0 environment there 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 From Meaning to Meaningfulness 29 has been a multiplication of code and software to automatically publish content online and manage information. Each social media entity tends to develop its own type of software applications and modules that connect to each other. The overall set of connected software modules is commonly called a software platform. As explained in the introduction, software is the key to understanding new media in general: software links hardware to users, and software creates the symbolic environment through which users can express themselves (Chun 2005). All the functions that we interact with when we communicate online—file folders, buttons, home page, and so on—tend to be symbolic functions. The software is in charge of transforming those symbolic functions into commands that can be understood by other pieces of software and hardware. This is the general model for understanding how new media work. With social media platforms, however, there tends to be a proliferation of software talking to other pieces of software or Application Programming Interfaces. Simply put, a participatory platform is made up of software applications that talk to each other. This is the way the Facebook application model works: developers can create applications on Facebook and therefore connect to the Facebook platform. This latter point is crucial to understanding how profit can be generated out of the circulation of meaning: the ability to create third-party applications to connect to a social media software platform is what allows for the creation of target markets and audiences. For instance, the popular Facebook game Farmville is an application that allows a third-party developer to tap into the immense pool of Facebook users and gather profile information, which can then be used to create targeted advertising. Hence the problem with social media platforms: they rely on the gathering of user data to create revenues, but in so doing raise important questions about privacy. The social media model is built on the idea of inviting large number of users to express themselves: the larger the number of users posting texts, updates, videos, or pictures, the more successful the participatory platform. It would be shortsighted, however, to stop the analysis of social media here. The kind of individual and collective freedom of expression offered by social 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 GOVERNING ME ANING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A media is but one aspect of the new communication context that we now have to deal with. It is not the most important technological aspect of social media if we want to understand the new power relations that are now emerging in this new communication context. Social media platforms do more than accommodate vast amounts of information: they make it possible to find meaning in that seemingly infinite sea of online information. That is, the role of social media platforms is to help us navigate large amounts of information, and to help us find ways to make our information meaningful and visible to others. In that sense, social media mix two principles of online communication: the linking principle and the personalization principle. The linking principle is about defining associations between different types of information. This principle has been present ever since Vannevar Bush’s exploration of the Memex (1945) as an associative device that would allow for the creation of meaningful links between disparate bits of content and information. Bush’ vision was further developed through Ted Nelson’s work on hypertext (1981) and through Tim Berners-Lee’s early conceptualization of the hyperlink (1999). As Bush argued, the problem is not so much having access to information, it is about what to do with it. In order to make information relevant and meaningful, Bush argued that it is necessary to be able to craft unique trails of association that mimic the way the creative and engaged mind works. This would ensure the discovery of new meanings and new possibilities (political, scientific, economic, and so on) for living together. For instance, when I create a link on my blog post to a story on a news website, this means that I find this story relevant and meaningful for understanding and perhaps supporting the arguments made in my post. This hyperlink thus creates an associative path between two different types of content, and therefore makes information navigable. The personalization principle is more recent and is a characteristic of the social media environment: early conceptualization of the Internet and the World Wide Web focused on the user’s ability to be either anonymous or free to craft his or her online identity. The early discussion forums all gave the option of choosing a nickname, and early forms of online gaming were based primarily on the possibility of radically altering one’s real 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 30 31 identity. The rise of social networking (Friendster, MySpace, Facebook in North America) produced shift toward personalization, where increasingly users had to identify themselves and were discouraged from inventing online personae. For instance, the Google search engine was anonymous at first: I could type in a keyword search, and my search results would have been the same as any other user. Now, the Google search engine, much like the Facebook platform, returns results based on my specific profile: results that are geographically close to me are featured first, for instance. On Facebook, results relevant to my network of Facebook friends are featured first. The personalization process gives primacy to first-person perspectives (Langlois et al. 2009) whereby each experience of being online is increasingly unique in terms of content that the platform provides each user. Such a personalization process links together a specific logic of meaningfulness and a commercial imperative: implementing an information retrieval logic that is closely tied to my personal profile, my personal likes and networks further enables gathering of information about me that can then be analyzed and returned back to me as suggested recommendations. Linking and personalization work together on social media platforms: linking is the process of building meaningful traces that obey the logic of personalization. The main point to remember is that personalized linking is not just a process of retrieving meaning—it is primarily a process of retrieving meaningful information. That is, while there might be a lot of content and meaning published on social media platform, the main problem that should occupy us concerns how such meanings are made available to other users. While in the previous Web 1.0 environment, users were in charge of ensuring that information was made available to others through linking and defining metatags and keywords, in the social media environment, such process is increasingly done by software. Indeed, there are many kinds of software modules that help sorting out information and finding its meaningfulness—tags help further define and categorize information, ranking systems such as search engines implement criteria for attributing degrees of importance and meaningfulness to information, personalization software scans correlate our personal profiles and criteria and compare them 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 GOVERNING ME ANING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A with informational objects so as to customize our experience of communicating online. If we look at a photograph that is shared online on Flickr, for instance, we notice quickly that what we are dealing with is not just an image, but a series of information that helps place the image in different contexts: identification number, information about the author, the type of camera, date, time and place the picture was taken, tags that identify the theme of the picture, licensing information, and other pictures related to the image. Social media platforms, then, manage all kinds of information associated with an object (a picture, a text, a video, a sound file, for instance). It is this management that helps users find the meaning of different pieces of information: the software platforms are in charge of making this information visible and meaningful, which implies a system of information hierarchy, from the most meaningful to the least meaningful. In so doing, there is an industrialization of meaning production and circulation on social media platforms: while users can create some meaning, the software modules are in charge of finding meaningful content and meaningful connections within a social media ecology that can include not only one’s user-generated content and other user-generated content, but also advertising content and personalized content generated by the platform itself. What this involves, with regard to rethinking common understandings of meaning in the social media context, is a bifurcation between the production of meaning and the management of meaningfulness: we are free to produce as many meanings as we want, but the ranking of the meaningfulness of these meanings is out of our hands, as it is mediated and controlled by software platforms. To sum up, the social media model is based on allowing as many users to create content as possible, and this involves the creation of sophisticated software platforms to take over and automatize the creation, publication, and distribution of content. Furthermore, the social media model offers ways of making content meaningful by making sure that it is not only stored and sharable, but also searchable, traceable, and connected to other types of information and meanings. In particular, this expansion toward the management of meaningfulness rather 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 32 GOVERNING ME ANING 33 Better Communication? Representational and Network Perspectives The recurring promise of new media ever since the rise of the Internet has been that of the democratization of meaning. The promise is as follows: user-friendly communication tools coupled with faster networks and affordable and transportable hardware equals greater possibility for anybody to express themselves, formulate new meanings, and take action. In so doing, the hope embedded and expressed through networked communication is that of a new politics of meaning—a new context where long-standing power relations that limit the democratic potential of the production and circulation of meaning are undermined and replaced by more egalitarian practices. In the previous mass-media universe of unidirectional messages, the main site of critique was on the unequal relationships between an elite controlling the media (Herman and Chomsky 2002; McChesney 2008), and disempowered masses whose limited agency lay in their capacities to create alternate meanings out of messages imposed on them within the confines of their social and cultural positioning (Hall 1980). In order to resolve this unequal distribution of communicative agencies, the focus was on facilitating access to communication and on fostering free and unfettered expression. With the rise of new forms of usergenerated content on social media platforms where anybody can create, publish, and share videos, text, pictures, and sound, concerns for equal access to the means of communication have been reduced to discussions on the cost of equipment, improving user-friendliness, and user education. The new increased capacity to exchange content is seen as challenging a dominant order and its associated ideologies, cultural values, and practices. In the social media context, everybody can have access to means of communication, and everybody has a chance to be heard: anybody can become a moviemaker, a sound artist, a community journalist, or a blogger and have a chance to be heard. We 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 than just the management of meaning as content is helpful for understanding where user participation encounters economic imperatives. M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A thus hear optimistic claims of how the development of tools to facilitate user-generated content is fundamental to the rise of a new participatory culture (Benkler 2006; Jenkins 2006a) where there is no separation between producers and audiences anymore (Bruns 2008), but rather the emergence of publics actively engaged in creating and sharing culture. We now have a set of simple equations: corporate social media economically thrive on users expressing themselves, therefore it is in their interest to allow for the maximum freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is inseparable from democratic ideals of equality and empowerment, and therefore corporate social media foster more democracy. The for-profit interest, thus, seemingly works hand in hand with ideals of social equality and social progress. This equation has been best illustrated, most recently, with the Arab Spring of 2011. There has been an abundance of pictures in the Western media of the Arab Spring depicting citizens using social media platforms to share information, connect with each other, and organize protests. Social media now play an important role in grassroots movements across the globe, allow us access to a greater diversity of voices and information, and keep social and intimate connections alive. In short, social media help to make life both more meaningful and more democratic. Traditionally in Western-style democracies, the problems about the media and the democratization of communication and meaning were about the structural economic, social, and political barriers preventing access to means of communication. Now that we have a new context where it seems that these barriers have mostly disappeared and anybody can express themselves and connect with others, have we reached some ideal condition where all that is left is to wait until broad agreements are reached through respectful discussion? In other words, has the search for meanings that would lead to democratic empowerment ceased to be a problem and become a question of time, education, and exertion? While some enthusiastic accounts associate social media technologies with cultural participation and a renewed semiotic democracy (Fiske 1989) where all kinds of meaning can freely emerge and change conditions of life, it should be clear that positing technology as an ineluctable force of change is 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 34 35 reductionist and simplistic. Barriers to communication have been recreated, as demonstrated by spyware and new forms of online censorship. For-profit social media platforms have also been denounced for invasion of privacy, loss of intellectual property, and commercialization of personal data—in short, for working against and making use of the information and meanings freely provided by users. Last but not least, the participation of everybody and the exchange of all kinds of meanings also lead to increased misinformation, biases (Dean 2009) and a plethora of verbal violence. The picture, then, is not as straight as it first appeared. Communication on social media platforms is rife with problems, and one of the debates is about whether these problems are glitches that can be fixed through education, further technological adjustment, and regulation, or they are systemic and inherent to the social media’s economic and technological system. With regard to the question of meaning, the issue lies in the framework that is currently used, one that focuses exclusively on the proliferation of meaning, because such proliferation was prevented in the previous mass-media context. As I have posited at the beginning of this chapter, social media corporations are less about meaning as the proliferation of content, and more about meaning as the attribution of meaningfulness to information. The business of social media is to find the information that will be meaningful to a particular user. That is, social media are not simply databases; they are processing systems. They do not simply store information; they make it retrievable and meaningful. Making a conceptual transition from meaning as content to meaning as the attribution of meaningfulness helps us understand the current paradox of communication on social media. The paradox is as follows: we might be free to express ourselves, but this does not mean that questions of control and power, including the question of democratic communication, have disappeared. The specific context of unequal communication in the mass-media age might be on the wane, but new powerful actors aiming to capitalize on user-generated content have appeared, raising questions about private control over the flows of information and access to knowledge. We might be able to express ourselves on these commercial user-generated 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 GOVERNING ME ANING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A platforms such as Facebook, Amazon, and YouTube, but stringent terms of service and use show that we do not fully control the circulation of our content both on the web and through invisible commercial networks. In short, the displacement of the mass-media model in favor of a networked model radically changes the configuration of power relations and, therefore, how we should understand the notion of democratic communication and subsequently the conditions of meaning making. New unequal power relations on social media raise questions not only about content, but also about users themselves, and in particular the perplexing status of users as free, yet exploited agents on social media platforms. Research into immaterial labor (Terranova 2000, 2004), provides an invaluable insight into how encouragement to express oneself online is also, from a commercial perspective, providing a valuable service for free. From this perspective, the America Online (AOL) NetSlaves from the 1990s have been replaced by hordes of Facebook and YouTube users freely providing information and content that can be marketed. Michael Zimmer (2008) explains that, as users, the promise of online participatory media is that we can be free to express ourselves from a cultural, political, and economic perspective, but this freedom comes at the cost of further embedding ourselves within networks of surveillance, marketing, and advertising. These paradoxical understandings of communicative agency and limitations in the user-generated content environment point out that the very assumptions about users on which current critical analyses of online communication are based also need to be revisited. The paradox between freedom of communication and control over the networking of information points out that critical approaches to social media are based on two different, limited paradigms, simplified here in order to highlight their differences and limitations. The first paradigm is user-centric, in that it focuses on the link between empowering users and fostering more democratic communication. From this perspective, communication is first and foremost a human affair and online technologies are here to support the creation and sharing of cultural meanings. As such, social media offer platforms on which human agents can develop new cultural practices 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 36 37 of communication—new ways of expressing themselves and exchanging meanings, representations, and information. The term “platform,” in the user-centric perspective, has to be understood in its nontechnical meaning: a device that props a speaker up and makes her or him audible and visible to others. From this perspective, instantaneous communication, userfriendly design, and intuitive user interfaces greatly simplify the communication process and therefore enable greater participation and agency. Alternatively, sophisticated search engines and recommendation software enhance the communication process by helping users sort through massive amount of content to get at what is most meaningful. What I call the network paradigm, on the other hand, does not so much focus on the content of communication, but rather on the networked conditions and regulations within which information can circulate online. Analyses of the connection between technical infrastructure and political and economic dynamics have forcefully demonstrated how the intersection of code and law (Lessig 2006), or protocol and control (Galloway 2004) is a site of struggle over network control. For instance, Lawrence Lessig’s analysis of how the regulation of the code layer—the systems that technically enable the exchange and circulation of information—is increasingly managed by the market and the state, shows how new forms of control pervert the very democratic ideals of free and unfettered communication on which the Internet is based. Currently, political and legal struggles over deep-packet inspection, traffic shaping and throttling, and the monitoring of flows of information to track illegal downloading, to name but a few issues, demonstrate how the very conditions of networking on the Internet and the web are being reshaped by political and economic interests, such as private carriers and the entertainment industry. Ultimately, such practices of information control(led?) via network regulation limit our agency and privacy as users with regard to what we can actually produce and access. The user- and network-centric paradigms illustrate two differing conceptions of content online and in the online participatory media environment as the product of either unfettered participation or as technologically controlled, managed, 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 GOVERNING ME ANING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A marketed, and sometimes censored by political, economic, and legal interests. The first step toward bridging these two conceptions lies in acknowledging that each paradigm has a different focus: the user-centric paradigm focuses more on the question of cultural expression and representation, while the network paradigm deals primarily with processes of transmission. Whether it critically explores protocols (Galloway 2004) or code and its relationship to copyright law (Lessig 2006), the network paradigm has been focused on the technical elements that enable the transmission of information across networks, and on the ways in which transmission is governed through a complex of techniques, political and legal decision making, and commercial or noncommercial interests. Some of the central questions regarding the transmission of information online are about whether information can circulate freely and instantaneously, and how it can be controlled, limited, appropriated, and rechanneled on different networks (e.g., networks of surveillance and advertising). In contrast, focusing on cultural expression implies seeing content not so much as information that travels over computer networks, but rather as the culturally recognizable signs that appear on user interfaces. From this perspective, examining the many processes that enable transmission tends to recede in the background insofar as the main concern is with the instantaneous translation of thought into multimedia and hyperlinked content on user interfaces. The user-centric paradigm is concerned with modalities of representation: how meaning appears to the human user. There are two dynamics at stake with the process of cultural expression online. The first dynamic is to achieve effects of transparency (Bolter and Grusin 2000), that seek to erase the presence of the medium to give an impression of direct translation of human thought into cultural symbols. The use of symbols such as buttons and file folders rather than command lines is a common instance of transparency. The second dynamic is that of hypermediacy (Bolter and Grusin 2000), which, in the participatory media environment, is a process of making software present throughout the communication process by elevating it to a cultural actor on par with human users. On the Amazon website, for instance, the recommendation 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 38 39 software is capable of providing culturally relevant book suggestions based on purchase patterns, and Google advertising tailors ads to users’ past online activity. Thus, the premise of the cultural expression perspective is that online communication can augment the thinking process and the process of cultural exchange. While the object of study—content either as information or as representation—is the same, these different perspectives focus on altogether different sets of actors, processes, and dynamics. While this description of the two approaches to online content is somewhat of a caricature in that it is difficult to talk about transmission without at least peripherally raising questions about expression and vice versa, it illustrates certain trends and potential blind sights in current approaches to participatory media. I propose a more systematic integration of the transmission and cultural expression perspectives. The first step toward integrating these two paradigms involves a reassessment of processes of cultural expression in the participatory media environment through a renewed attention to the often-invisible networked conditions that enable them. That is, paying attention to networked conditions requires expanding the notion of cultural expression to encompass the networks of technical, institutional, commercial, and political actors that foster the material and cultural conditions of online communication. Focusing on the networked conditions within which the cultural process of communication takes place, and within which parameters of participation are defined, involves tracking the interplay between networks of technology, policy making, economic interests, legal frameworks, and the cultural production and circulation of meanings. The second step involves rethinking the notion of networked conditions, which, in the transmission model, refers to a binary framework of open versus closed, where the question is about whether information is free to circulate or not. Cultural expression, in turn, cannot be reduced to this binary framework, especially in the participatory media context where the onus is on accommodating as much user participation as possible. In that sense, examining the networked conditions of cultural expression should not be reduced to the question of whether or not participatory media systems allow 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 GOVERNING ME ANING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A users to communicate, but more primarily on how online participatory media networks accommodate and manage the openendedness of cultural expression. With regard to the democratic potential of participatory media, such a new framework requires new critical questions. In the previous mass-media era, the critical questions were about censorship—“what can be said?”— and access—“who can speak?” In the new framework, the first critical question is, “how can we say something and to what effect?,” meaning, “what is the apparatus through which we express ourselves, and what are the possible cultural impacts and values of specific instances of cultural expression?” The second question is not about who can speak, but rather, “what are the assemblages of hardware, software, and users that make possible specific modes of expression, and how are these assemblages governed?,” meaning, “how is the field of cultural expression managed by technocultural power formations?” The New Governance of Meaning The main theoretical challenge in identifying the networked conditions within which participatory communication flows are stabilized as cultural models is about developing a technocultural framework to trace the articulations of technological dynamics, social relations, and cultural processes—from the material level of data transmission through the translation of information into cultural symbols to the social relationships among communicative actors. The concept of assemblage as a stabilized set of articulations between heterogeneous elements and process is extremely useful here as well. This concept finds an echo in cultural studies of technology frameworks focusing on the “interrelated conditions within which technologies exist” (Slack 1989, 329). In particular, the concept of articulations— the “nonnecessary connections of different elements that, when connected in a particular way, form a specific unity” (Slack 1989, 331)—is helpful to trace how communication processes become stabilized. Furthermore, the tracing of assemblages can benefit from Actor-Network theory’s invitation to see the rise of technologies as resulting from the multicausal and reciprocal relationships between social, political, and economic agents, 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 40 41 human actors, and technical entities and processes (Latour 1987, 1996, 2005). That is, the concept of assemblage as an analytical tool makes it possible to trace elements that are involved in the process of meaning making, but have traditionally not been considered as such. While the question of meaning has always been seen in terms of human language, it is now important to consider technologies of information processing and retrieval, and the design of software interfaces. As assemblages, participatory media platforms enable the production, distribution, and experience of meaning through the process of assigning meaning and giving a recognizable cultural shape to information and data. As such, one should focus on the networked conditions within which meaning can be expressed, and on social media platforms as sites of articulation between information processing, software dynamics, linguistic processes, and cultural practices. From this perspective, the whole process of communication on social media platforms consists of an effort to codify the flows of meaning—to codify the dynamics through which meanings are expressed, actualized, and recognized as adequate reflections of an experience of the world. By codifying, I do not simply mean turn everything into binary data. Rather, codifying is about implementing specific sets of systems and processes through which the translation from information to meaning can occur. To go back to the example of the Google search engine, one could say that the role of a search engine is not simply to find information, but to find the information that is most meaningful to users. In order to do so, specific codes have to be applied. For instance, a common rule with the Google search engine is that of the Page Rank algorithm: if there are two websites linked to a query, the one that is linked to the most from other websites will be deemed more meaningful and relevant than the other one, and will therefore be placed on top. The search engine thus involves the enactment of specific steps that assign some kind of value to different types of information (in this particular case, inlinks), regardless of the content of that information. In relation to the discussion of the Flickr picture at the beginning of this chapter, the search engine makes use of contextual data rather than content itself in order to assign the meaning of information. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 GOVERNING ME ANING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A Usually, such operations are successful, but sometimes not. The practice of Google bombing, which entails users linking to a particular website and using specific tags for describing this website, is an illustration of this. One might remember the “weapons of mass destruction” query during the war in Iraq that led to a fake error 404 website stating that “the weapons of mass destruction you were looking were not found.” In that situation, the codes employed by the Google search engine to decide which information was most meaningful were manipulated to serve political means. This example illustrates that the meaning of information is not determined solely by the content of a message, but also and primarily by the informational context that surrounds it. The question of power resurfaces here, in that the codes that are used by social media platforms enact specific assumptions about which type of information is most relevant for users. For instance, our discussion in the first part of the chapter about the growing reliance on personalization highlights a radical change in what is considered meaningful: what is most meaningful is not what is relevant to the largest number of users (that would be a universalization principle), but what fits most closely with the profile of one particular user (personalization). Consequently, the codification of meaning also involves users themselves in that users have no choice as to which kind of information is considered as most relevant for them. Users do not tend to participate in software design. Indeed, such software modules are usually patented and therefore are impossible to dissect and change. The codification of the attribution of meaningfulness thus takes place through secretive and privatized processes. At the same time, these secretive codes impose specific ways of dealing with information. Such understanding about the role of technology in assigning the conditions within which one can access and understand meaning can be traced back to the work of Foucault (1980a) and after him, Félix Guattari (1977, 1995, 1996b) and Maurizio Lazzarato (2004). Foucault, in particular, argued that communicative practices in the context of the written text enact specific assumptions about how texts should be read, and about the roles, hierarchies, and legitimate practices between 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 42 43 authors/producers and readers/consumers. In the same way, the social media context is also built through assumptions, or what I called codes, about what kind of information is meaningful, and about the proper ways of making use of software systems. This last aspect is related to what kind of users social media platforms favor, which, not surprisingly, is the kind of user who constantly participates in the production of content and willingly supplies more profile information. Users who do not participate enough on social media are invited to participate more through email reminders about what other people are saying, recommendations as to who one should be friends with, and generally about “what you’re missing out on” messages. Specific user behaviors are thus favored, and not only shape a portrait of the ideal user, but also define a range of acceptable kinds of practices (examined in depth in chapter 4). Therefore, social media platforms, far from being neutral places that just transmit the information they receive from users, are the platforms that codify the process by which meaning production and circulation can take place. The point that I would like to raise in turn is about the principles of governance embedded in social media platforms. The concept of governance found in Foucault and Lazzarato refers to “the ensemble of techniques and procedures put into place to direct the conduct of men and to take account of the probabilities of their action and their relations” (Lazzarato 2009, 114). The concept of governance is central to understanding that while there might be a radical decentralization of communication online; this does not mean that power relations have disappeared. Rather, the locus of power is shifting away from control over content to the management of degrees of meaningfulness and the attribution of cultural value. The concept of governance as applied to the platform environment enables us to get away from the binary of closed versus open communication. Indeed, governance or the work of accounting for any number of possibilities of expression highlights a shift away from meaning itself toward the management of the circulation of content along a “more meaningful/less meaningful” axis. That is, with governance, all types of information have some meaning, and it becomes a question of deciding which information is more meaningful than others. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 GOVERNING ME ANING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A The common feature of all participatory media platforms is that they not only allow users to express themselves by enabling content transmission, but also establish the customized networked conditions within which something can become culturally meaningful and shareable. The platform acts as a manager that enables, directs, and channels specific flows of communication as well as specific logics of transformation of data into culturally recognizable and valuable signs and symbols. Thus, it is useful to think about participatory media platforms as conduits for governance, that is, as the conduits that actualize technocultural assemblages and therefore manage a field of communication processes, practices, and expectations by articulating together hardware, software, and users. Seeing the platform as a conduit for governance makes it possible to recast the question of “free” communication. The governance process in the participatory media environment is not primarily about censorship; rather, it is about enabling and assigning levels of meaningfulness—what matters more and should therefore be more prominent and visible. This requires not only techniques of assigning a cultural value to information, but also strategies to foster specific cultural perception of the platform (i.e., how a specific platform is relevant to me) as well as processes to delineate communicative agencies (i.e., what I feel I can say and do on the platform). The first aspect of the platform as a conduit of governance is its capacity to act as a manager of information: the goal of the platform is to accommodate as much participation as possible to decide what, in a sea of information, is meaningful, relevant, and should be made more prominently visible on different user interfaces. This is a radical point of departure from traditional mass-media systems, which were based on accommodating only a limited amount of information from set sources. In the platform model, flexibility of sources and ever-expanding information storage are the basis for information management. The platform not only stores information, but also through software processing, enacts specific technocultural logics whereby information can become culturally relevant and valuable. However, the technocultural logic to decide on what should be made more visible varies from one platform to the next. The Google 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 44 45 search engine, for instance, classifies search results according to a technocultural logic that translates a web protocol—the inlink—into a cultural value of relevancy. Alternatively, the Facebook search engine works by redefining relevancy not only in terms of quantity (e.g., number of inlinks), but also in terms of content customization according to one’s friendship network. Therefore, the platform as manager of information is in charge of attributing degrees of visibility that correspond to specific attributions of cultural value to information. The governance processes enabled by a participatory media platform are not only about managing information, but also about managing the cultural perceptions, on the user side, of software processes. This does not only take place through the assignment of cultural value to information by software processes that sort and rank data, but also through the establishment of equivalencies between communicative acts and cultural practices. A fascinating, and much-debated illustration of this is the relationship between the communicative act of “friending” on social networks and the cultural practice of building friendship (Boyd 2006). The complex and at times contradictory relationships between “friending” and a whole range of cultural practices, from making connections and developing acquaintances to maintaining friendship has been a popular topic of debate. Because in this case the relationship between communicative acts and cultural practices is not completely stabilized, “friending” illustrates the importance of the platform as enabling dynamics of equivalency so that software-assisted processes and communicative acts become culturally meaningful practices for users. Of course, the management of cultural perceptions involves not only software processes, but a whole apparatus of commercial, discursive, and affective dynamics as well. The platform thus manages users’ cultural perceptions of the communicative process. In that sense, the platform enacts dynamics of visibility and invisibility: it makes information more or less visible according to its relevance, and makes some software processes (e.g., recommendation systems) more salient for users than others. As such, the platform manages how it is perceived. There are modulations of the processes of visibility and invisibility, of what different categories of users can see or 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 GOVERNING ME ANING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A not. For instance, what web users see as relevant and meaningful on their user interface might be different from that for an advertising or marketing partner. The data and information might be the same, but its value and visibility might be different depending on the user category. Herein also lies the limitation of the claim that participatory culture is more democratic. The appearance of democratic communication is contrived, in the sense that the platform, through modulations of visibility and invisibility, includes some communicative features and excludes others. With corporate platforms, this usually takes the form of reducing communication to expression at the user-interface level, while evacuating any consideration of the conditions within which such process of expression is possible. That is, while it might be easy to post something on Facebook, user agency is limited to uploading content and interacting with symbolic devices at the interface level, and, compared to the Web 1.0 HTML environment, only minimally includes question of web design and layout, and control over how information circulates. In short, freedom of expression usually means a narrowing down of communicational possibilities on the user side, and relegating whole parts of the communication process to back-end and invisible software processes. The question of control of personal information on social networks is an illustration of this process of managing cultural perceptions of what the communication process stands for through multiple visual, discursive, and technical strategies. Managing user perceptions by articulating technical processes with cultural values and practices is thus the second aspect of the platform as a conduit for governance, following the first aspect of platform governance, which is about the management of information. The third governance aspect of the platform logically follows from the second, and concerns the shaping of agencies, including both user and software agency. The first area of interest here pertains to the agency of software in relation to users, and especially software’s capacity to act as a cultural actor capable of understanding users. From a software studies perspective, it appears that the platform assigns a specific cultural form and visibility to the software in charge of making sense of users and the information they provide, and 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 46 47 this can take the form of, for instance, an avatar, or a recommendation system that actively requires feedback from users, or a system that is invisible for users yet has a central effect on the customization of information. User agency is closely tied to the management of cultural perception, in that platforms have different ways of defining the field of users’ communicative agencies. While in context such as open-source programming, communicative agency includes control over code, that is, over the architecture of communication (Kelty 2008), in the more commercial participatory media environment, communicative agency is reduced to cultural expression at the user-interface level, as discussed above. However, the platform does not only aim to restrict the agency of users, but also to delineate and channel it. Lazzarato’s discussion of how contemporary forms of governance intervene in the creation of a common world by defining and making accessible a possible field of experience is useful here (2004b, 94–96). Lazzarato refers back to Ranciere’s “distribution of the sensible”—to the process through which specific modes of expression and action are defined and assigned, along with specific possibilities, ways of being, of perceiving and sensing the world, and specific regimes of visibility and invisibility. Lazzarato argues that, traditionally, this distribution of the sensible was organized through a dualism and opposition between those who could be seen and represented and those who did not count and therefore were invisible, between those who could legitimately say something and be heard (i.e., members of the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie) and those who could not (i.e., the proletariat). Such a distribution of the sensible, Lazzarato continues, is no longer the dominant one in the neoliberal context. Rather, contemporary forms of governance operate by moving away from the rejection of specific populations and establishing differentialities along a continuum of agency. That is, in the new distribution of the sensible, anybody can express themselves, but there are modulations and differentials of agency, rather than a binary of attribution/refusal of agency. With regard to user participation, it can be said that the platform, as a conduit of governance, offers a basis of communicative agency for all. A popular business model is that anybody 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 GOVERNING ME ANING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A can sign up for a free account and is therefore given a basis of communicative agency. The provision of ever-expanding storage space, such as on Google Mail, is a form of distribution of communicative agency that encourages users not to erase any of their emails so that the recommendation software can offer more targeted types of advertising based on one’s entire history of email exchanges. On the other hand, differential modes of agency enacted by participatory media platforms consist of rewarding the more participative users with a greater range of communicative functions. For instance, the common warning that choosing restricted privacy settings on a given website might lessen one’s experience highlights how the platform enacts strategies of differentiality. Social networks such as Facebook offer an illustration of this distribution/differentiation dynamic. On any given social networking platforms (e.g., Facebook, but also MySpace) everybody is given a similar account page and set of communicative tools. The social networking platform, however, operates a series of differentiations among users by offering communicational bonuses depending on what the user chooses to do. For instance, the trade-off for signing up for Facebook applications and giving third-party access to one’s Facebook data is having a greater range of communicative possibilities. A default setting on Facebook to say “hello” to friends is the “poke” button, but by installing the “Super-Poke” application, users can send not only “super-pokes,” but also “hugs” and a range of other gestures. The democratic claim of the participatory media environment is partly true: anybody can express themselves and encounter minimal censorship. However, the locus of power and focus of the governance process is not on content per se, but on the conditions within which meaning can emerge. In short, the process of governance on participatory media platforms is about defining degrees of meaningfulness through the attribution of cultural values, the shaping of cultural perceptions of the platform, and the establishment of a horizon of communicative possibilities and agencies. Such a process works at the crossroads of different technocultural operations: translating information into meaningful content, establishing equivalencies between technical processes of communication and cultural practices, and 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 48 49 organizing differentials of agency both between users and software, and among different categories of users. As such, undertaking a critical analysis of online participatory media and their associated practices of communication requires an understanding of how networks of technologies, users, and social processes define and delineate specific modes of experiencing meaning. The question of the governance and conditioning of these networks demands a new framework that does not simply focus on the users, or on transmission technologies, but on the assemblages of culture and technology, and users and software. This chapter thus argued for a shift in the conceptual framework we currently use to understand meaning—a shift away from a conception of meaning as that which is shaped and expressed by humans, to a conception of meaning as a technocultural process that articulates meaningfulness with different informational components. This means a shift in conceptualizing where the agency lies. Users, while having more opportunity to express themselves, do not have complete agency over the process of finding and distributing what is meaningful. Social media platforms have the upper hand as they set and define the codes through which information becomes meaningful, and force users to adapt to these conditions. What this means, then, is that we need a new analytical framework for meaning, one that shifts away from the question of signification to one that is focused on examining how meaning serves to distribute and actualize specific relations of power between software platforms, users, and language. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 GOVERNING ME ANING This page intentionally left blank 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Meaning Machines* “ T his is bad,” my friend said gesturing toward her laptop. She was signed into her Yahoo! mail, which all of a sudden had started featuring prominent ads for “Hot Teenage Lesbian Sex.” “What’s going on? How come this thing thinks I’m an old perv?” The answer was actually quite simple. My friend had been working on her new novel and had been emailing back and forth revisions to her agent, as well as emailing herself drafts as a backup. The novel was about the friendship between two teenaged girls and included a few pages focusing on the topic of sexual fantasies, including lesbian sex. “This is what happened,” I explained to her, “the content of your emails is scanned by a piece of software that then matches you up with targeted advertising.” And what is matched with lesbian sex, in the Yahoo! mail universe?—porn and the male heterosexual gaze. This comes as no surprise in many ways: the most common way of commercializing sexuality is through pornography. Hence, somebody like my friend who defines herself as a feminist is put in the shoes of a male porn viewer who enjoys the objectification of women and of nonheterosexual sex. This kind of software backfire is quite common, although perhaps not always as spectacular as this instance. My friend’s experience was interesting because it highlighted the importance of a communicative process—automated targeted advertising—that most of us pay very little attention to, and through this, the role of software in the production of meanings that try to reflect and 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Chapter 2 M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A define us, and in so doing open specific horizons of becoming. While the ads on our email accounts or on other social media are peripheral blips we usually ignore, not being central to our conversations, we nevertheless rely on software to create recommendations in many other ways. After all, who of my friends gets to be more visible and therefore more meaningful to me on social networks, and what kind of information makes it to the top of my search results depends on software. In this chapter and the next, I would like to focus on what happens when software is, whether we human users want it or not, a communicational actor with which we have to interact. In this chapter in particular, I want to define the method by which we can investigate this new role of software in the development of meaning machines: automated and semiautomated ways of producing meaning, with the human user as a component, but not the driving force of these systems. I conceptualize software as an “actor” in line with Actor-Network theory (Law 1992; Latour 1999, 2005), which defines nonhumans such as technical objects as possessing agency, as being able to influence, reshape, and bend to their will other nonhuman and human actors. Software as an actor, then, is not a neutral conduit, or a mirror of our desires: it can impose a specific will, it can transform us, it promises to reveal new meaningful horizons, yet at the same time, it is not on the same footing as human actors in that it neither thinks nor is capable of any kind of cultural understanding. I shall focus more in later chapters about what this does to us, human actors, but for this chapter and the next, I want to focus primarily on understanding software as a new kind of communicational actor, as an entity that produces meanings and meaningfulness, an entity that interacts with us. Embedded in these interactions, as we will see in the next chapter, is often the specific interest of social media platforms, in particular for-profit ones. As such, I am interested first in understanding the processes at stake when something like software—which, as opposed to human beings, does not think or speak—becomes part of a process that has traditionally been seen only as intelligible speech among human actors. Software can now intervene and dictates the content and format of what 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 52 53 is traditionally understood as cultural communication; it does not simply work in the background of data processing and exchange. This requires understanding how software is used to orchestrate the links between informational processes such as data processing, human language, and human users as those who experience meaning and through this derive ways of being and modes of existence. That is, my conception of the user is someone who experiences nonhuman produced meaning and is potentially transformed by it, someone for whom meaning is directly tied to the ordering and making sense of one’s existence. Furthermore, software as an actor does not emerge out of nothing: it is changed, adapted, and reshaped by the industry that produces it, and perhaps sometimes by other actors such as users. This last point will be followed up in the final chapter, but for now, we need not lose sight of the political economy of participatory communication, and especially the search for profits out of mining the mundane life of users. Software as a communicational actor on corporate platforms is mostly in charge of facilitating the continuous production and commercialization of information out of users and their communicative environments. Thus, to the tracing of how software orchestrates the links between informational processes, language, and human users, we need to add the broader political economy of specific social media platforms. The challenge for this chapter is to define the framework needed for tracing the communicational agency of software through such diverse and heterogeneous processes as information processing, cultural understanding, linguistic activity, and economics. The question of method is unavoidable here, in that traditional methods fall short of providing an analytical framework. Methods related to language and the cultural shaping of meaning such as content analysis, discourse analysis, and audience theory fall short in that they see the communication process as inherently and primarily about human actors and groups. As such, they have very little to offer by way of examining software as a communicational actor in the process of shaping, producing, and sharing meanings. On the other side of the spectrum, there are methods for understanding the social and cultural impact of 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING MACHINES M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A technological processes. Actor-Network Theory has already been mentioned, as well as cultural studies of technology approaches (Slack and Wise 2005a, 2005b). Such approaches open the door to recognizing the heterogeneity of the processes that create technosocial and technocultural environments: they show that the division between technology on the one hand, and society on the other, does not hold. Rather, they focus on the interpenetration of the social and technological by focusing on the agency of human and nonhuman actors, and their relationships. Through such approaches, one can understand how to unravel the agency of software as it crosses different fields such as information, economics, language, and perception. That being said, the question of meaning itself is one that is rarely raised in the study of technological actors because the large-scale encounter between information technology and language as organized through software is a fairly recent phenomenon. Indeed, to this day, meaning and technology still tend to be treated as belonging to radically different worlds, to the extent that some reject the notion that technology has anything to do with meaning altogether (Harman 2002; Hansen 2000). There are multiple reasons for this divide, primarily around the question of ontology, that is, whether the human effort to find meaning negates the nature of nonhuman objects as radically without meaning. I will not deal in detail with these debates here, as my specific focus on software as a communicational actor requires a framework to understand how technology and language are made to work together. I treat software as a very specific kind of technology, one that does not only change and shape a physical and perceptual environment for users, but also one that takes over the traditionally intrinsically human processes of producing and sharing meaning. In that sense, I understand software as central to the creation of meaning machines. I understand the term “machine” not only in its traditional sense of an apparatus that accomplishes specific tasks, but also in the sense of the “abstract machine” as first developed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987). The abstract machine helps mapping regularities without calling forth a macrostructure that would determine all phenomena: “What we then posit is an abstraction (that does not exist in the 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 54 55 actual) that is machine-like in its function in that it produces regularities” (1987, 64). Thus, meaning machines are assemblages of diverse technological, human, and cultural components that work through signs in order to create not only meanings, but also effects of meaningfulness and meaninglessness. Meaning machines serve to create abstract machines, broad regularities that make a specific communication system feel like the only one possible. By sorting through and articulating together different processes in order to produce meaning, manage, and colonize a communicative territory, a meaning machine imposes specific kinds of regularities onto an open-ended communication field, such as everyday conversation and exchange. As such, the idea of mapping meaning machines is not simply for descriptive purposes; ultimately, it can help us see what kind of processes are favored over others, and what kinds of relationships are denied or made possible. In other words, mapping meaning machines is about understanding particular conceptions of what meaning is, and how meaning is made on different platforms. Before we can arrive at such an understanding, however, we need to establish a framework for looking at the articulation of technology and language. First, we need to explore the insight that meaning, far from being just about language and interpretation, is technocultural. This will make it possible to understand the role of software, and in particular semiotechnological software, within meaning machines that articulate disparate processes together in order to produce meaning. In turn, this will make it possible to map the trajectory of meaning and to link it with the question of power. Indeed, one of the main concerns of this book is about how the production and circulation of meaning serves to create regimes of power: specific ways in which some elements and processes are favored, some realities produced to the detriment of others, some modes of existence to the detriment of others. This point is extremely important in that the goal of studying software as a meaning machine is to understand how the definition of what is meaningful can serve specific interests, narrow down possibilities, and close off alternatives. Meaning, in that sense, is tied to the politics of 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING MACHINES 56 M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A Meaning and Language The previous chapter examined the political economy context of social media. Its main argument was that social media are not simply about facilitating participatory culture, but about harnessing it. From the perspective of meaning, this harnessing is about assigning meaningfulness and defining the processes through which information becomes relevant, meaningful, practical, and indeed actual. The question, then, is about how this harnessing actually takes place. How is meaningfulness created? As mentioned above, there are three core components of the software-based production of meaningfulness, namely informational technologies, language, and existence. I would like to put information technologies to the side for a moment, and focus in particular on the relationship between meaning, language, and existence—that is, between language and the ordering of the world we live in. That we mainly create meaning through language is no surprise. Meaning is something that requires expression: it is not simply felt, but also communicated, even if done in dialogue with oneself. But the real issue is about the relationship between language and meaning: whether meaning is strictly linguistic, or whether it uses language, but cannot be entirely folded in it. Classically, language is the primary object of study by which we approach the question of meaning. However, as I will demonstrate here, the folding in the study of meaning into the study of signification—the use of linguistic signs—is limiting. Indeed, as argued in the introduction, finding the meaning of things, as in making sense of the world, is not only linguistic play: it is about defining the frame through which we can unfold in the world and to one another. It is, in other words, about defining the parameters of existence as Deleuze and Guattari defined it (1983, 1987). The problem becomes one of looking at the articulation between language and existence, between signification and making sense, and the governing of such articulations. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 existence, of what makes life worth living. Mapping software within meaning machines is about seeing which possibilities for making sense of the world have not been actualized. 57 Here is, in a nutshell, the argument that I will be developing in this section: what I call the plane of meaning, where making sense of the world takes place, is where language, as signification, and existence encounter one another. The main concern, then, is about the processes and elements that organize these encounters. Interestingly enough, these processes and elements can be signifying processes—the production of signs through language—and nonsignifying ones, as in the case of technologies of communication. How does this perspective on meaning differ from traditional ones? Let’s first start with the relationship between meaning and language, and the original equation of the two. As Weber recalls (1976, 920), any question related to meaning tends to refer traditionally to either a representational framework or a structuralist linguistic framework. Both frameworks share a basic premise that language is central to the creation of meaning, and that therefore the key is to understand the relationship between an object out there (the referent, for instance, the chair in my living room) and the sign that expresses it. The sign is composed of a signifier (the symbols used to create a representation, such as the letters C-H-A-I-R), and a signified (a general concept associated with an object out there, in this case: the general idea chair). In the “representational-denominational conception of language” (920), the sign exists as a means through which we can refer to a reality, concept, or object that is outside of language, and “meaning is ontologically and linguistically prior to the linguistic entity, which it ‘authorizes’” (920). In other words, meaning exists prior to language, and language is just a means of expression. The concept of chair, for instance, is already in my mind prior to being expressed. From this perspective, a sign points at a reality out there. In contrast, Saussure’s structuralist framework, which still remains the most popular framework for the analysis of meaning, departs from a model of language as representation toward a model of language as a self-referential, closed, and autonomous system (925). Saussure (Saussure et al. 1986) examines the question of meaning by focusing on the value of a sign, which he defines as the differential relationship of a sign with other signs. Saussure’s classic example is to look at words that relate to similar concepts. One 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING MACHINES M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A might have the impression, for instance, that the meaning of the English word “sheep” is the same as the French word “mouton” as it designates the same animal. Yet, in English, there is another word to designate the same animal, but as meat: “mutton.” Therefore, sheep and mutton, even though they designate broadly a specific kind of animal, do not have the same value: they are different from each other, and furthermore different from the seemingly equivalent French word “mouton.” As such, meaning in Saussurean linguistics is not based in relation to something outside of language, but rather on the differences that exist between a sign and other signs. This leads to a definition of meaning as produced through the semiotic process without references to an outside reality. Applications of these are found when we realize that the signification of “good” is dependent on “bad,” the signification of “light” is dependent on “dark,” and so on. Signification understood in this way is cut off from a reality “out there”; the referent—the actual object designated through a sign—disappears completely. Meaning from a Saussurean perspective is thus rooted in conceptual differences, not material or social ones. Both representational and structuralist approaches to meaning posit a strong and problematic separation between language and an external world and are therefore limited. In the case of the representational paradigm, the problem is that it fails to acknowledge that the so-called reality out there can be transformed through language. This is what Saussure demonstrated with his study of the value of signs—that meaning might refer to something out there, but is also mediated through the chain of values that exist within a language. That being said, it would be equally a mistake to say that meaning is only the play of linguistic differences, as Saussure posited in his definition of language as an enclosed system. Saussure focused on what he called “la langue,” that is the linguistic system, rather than “la parole,” or the everyday use of language in lived situations. While there is a need to study the formal evolution of a specific language as a system of signs, signs have as social life, and not simply a conceptual one. That is, meaning is dependent on social and material context, not just on the values within a linguistic system. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 58 59 What is meaning, then, if it is neither a representation of a reality out there, nor the conceptual difference between signs in specific linguistic systems? That meaning is a lived experience subject to change indicates that it should perhaps be seen less as some kind of entity and more like a plane of encounter between diverse kinds of processes that shape a human world of relationships—linguistic processes, of course, but also social, material, and technological ones. That meanings emerge and evolve in human relationships also leads to this premise: the language that we use to express ourselves and to define our place in the world is subject to change, as well as to the inflection of political, economic, and cultural forces. Thus, in the production of meaning, we find not only creativity—which is something I will address specifically in the final chapter of this book—but also the struggle over defining conditions of life. These conditions of life are not directly material or structural, as in classical Marxist theory, but concern how we approach the world and how its possibilities are defined (Lazzarato 2004b). In short, they concern the field of existence, or, to put it in other words, the meaningful trajectories through which we live our lives. A classic example of this is from Stuart Hall’s analysis of the antiracist slogan “black is beautiful” (2001), where he explains that changing the connotations of the sign “black” was a political fight and was about opening up new realities or ways of seeing others and ways of redefining one’s social positions in line with greater social equality. Meanings, then, can change and create new conditions of life. Another way of expressing this idea is to say that the use of language carries with it the “ability of distributing effects at a distance” (Wise 1997, 63). From this perspective, the process of creating meaning is not about representing something out there, but about actively shaping our relationships to and expectations of the world. Thinking of meaning as a plane of encounter opens up new possibilities for research, in that through the study of meaning, we do not simply understand the work of representation, but of social struggles and power formations to define conditions of existence. Relating meaning to social life, then, requires seeing meaning as a plane of encounter between disparate 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING MACHINES M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A elements—language, of course, but also the many processes that constitute specific social worlds. The work of Foucault on discourse is important in this regard. Foucault focused on discourses, sets of texts such as academic articles, scientific books, newspaper articles, and political speeches that focused on a specific topic, such as madness or sexuality (1988a, 1990). The study of the discourse embedded in these texts aimed to uncover commonalities about the definition of normal and abnormal behavior and the shaping of protocols and processes to address perceived abnormal behaviors in a diverse range of institutions such as medical institutions, schools, and legislatures. In so doing, the study of specific discourses about madness, for instance, helped understand how the reality and conditions of existence for anybody assigned with the label “mad” arose at specific times. As such, Foucault’s analytical move toward discourse as the space where “power and knowledge are joined together” (1980b, 100) is central to the examination of the field of meaning as the location where common realities and modes of existence are crafted. From Foucault’s perspective, the production and circulation of knowledge as set meanings also enables, enacts, and legitimizes social relations of power. By power, Foucault means a “productive network” (1980b, 119) in which the roles and relationships between subjects are defined. Discourse also produces and defines objects of knowledge, the appropriate methodology through which one can meaningfully talk about objects and the subjects who can legitimately participate in the production and exchange of discourse. For instance, medical discourse serves to define and enforce specific scientific procedures for treatment and consequently to delegitimize others. Furthermore, it gives agency to a category of people, that is, medical professionals, to the detriment of others. Thus, the point of discourse analysis, following Foucault’s framework, consists in studying “not only the expressive value and formal transformation of discourse, but its mode of existence,” and the “manner in which discourse is articulated on the basis of social relationships” (1977, 137). The joining of power (the legitimate authority to act) and knowledge (the ability to claim to possess a “true” understanding of the world) is by no means simple and 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 60 61 therefore discourse is a site of struggle and contestations among different types of knowledge (legitimate, repressed, buried, minority knowledge) and power (i.e., of who can take action and have an effect in the social organization of the world). In this regard, the production of meaning is not simply about constructing representations of what makes sense in the world, but about constructing specific conditions of existence: appropriate ways of life and ways of understanding what happens in the world. As a result, the study of discourse highlights the ways in which power works not only as a coercive force, but also as a productive one in that it makes specific ways of being possible. In Foucault’s work, we find a way of looking at the production and distribution of meaning as a potential strategy to manage the field of existence. Words, then, do not simply describe; they create the world we live in, and they organize not only social relations, but psychological and material relations as well. The sets of meanings we are given to understand our place in the world with others shape how we interact with and treat each other. Of course, words do not act in a vacuum: it is the articulation of what is being said along with its institutionalization that allows discourse to create conditions of existence. Such preoccupation with the pragmatic effects of language— how language participates in ordering the world—is further developed in Deleuze and Guattari’s exploration of the concept “order-word.” Order-words shape and hierarchize the world and inscribe realities. For instance, a judge declaring, “You are free to go,” is a linguistic act with real-world effects: it creates new social circumstances (Austin 1975). At the same time, these real-world effects can only take place within a social and institutional setting that defines the specific roles among participants in order for this communicative exchange to function and actualize a new set of circumstances (Porter and Porter 2003, 139). This analysis of the effects of words in social and institutional contexts in Deleuze and Guattari participates in a broader critique of the dominance of Saussure’s model for understanding language. Deleuze and Guattari denounce the “tyranny of the signifier,” that is, the problematic centrality of the signifier for explaining the formation of meanings (1983, 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING MACHINES M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A 242–243). Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of Saussurean linguistics and its derivations (1983, 1987) redefines meaning as the end result of an ensemble of processes that partly use signification to connect to, intervene in, and shape a social world. Meaning here involves effects that are not simply linguistic, but also psychological, social, political, technical, and material. This pragmatic approach to language recasts the relationships between signification and power by examining meaning as the interface through which language and the social world are articulated with each other. As Guattari puts it when summarizing the influence of Foucault on his work, the aim is to examine ‘the pivotal point between semiotic representation and the pragmatics of “existentialization”’ (1996a, 181), that is, the articulation between linguistic activity and the production of a shared world of power relations and a shared field of possibilities (Lazzarato 2004b, 21). This new framework requires a definition of meaning as a plane of existentialization rather than the product of a signifying process. As a plane through which specific conditions of existence become actual, meaning brings together disparate processes—linguistic, of course, but also institutional, political, social, and economic. For Deleuze and Guattari, such analysis helps understand how contemporary forms of capitalism invest directly into the field of meaning in order to create the ideal conditions of consumption: one wants a consumer product not only because it is useful, but also because it is meaningful, because it promises a new sense of existence. Consequently, the production and circulation of meaning is not an inherently human capacity, but a set of processes that can be distributed so that meanings are produced by a system, that is, a meaning machine. At this juncture, the question of technology appears. Indeed, the management of the production and circulation of meaning requires a wide array of technologies, including media, hardware, and software. Technocultural Meaning Now that we have established that meaning involves, but is not limited to, linguistic signification, and that meaning is the plane where possibilities are actualized and conditions of 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 62 63 existence are defined, we can focus in turn on the idea that meaning is made up of heterogeneous processes. These processes can be social in that they are developed along political, economic, or cultural lines, as we have just seen. Furthermore, as we shall see in this section, they are material and technological. Traditionally, creating meaning is seen as an intrinsically human experience: as humans, we make sense of the world through this unique system called language. However, such a view of meaning as one, only human, and two, only linguistic, is limited. On the contrary, meaning can be both nonhuman and nonlinguistic. This may come as no surprise to some. After all, McLuhan said the very same thing when he famously declared that “the medium is the message,” that is, that as humans we come to meaning not only by reading linguistic signs, but perhaps most importantly through the nonlinguistic, perceptual formatting of signs. Furthermore, specific types of perceptions are activated through different media technologies. McLuhan’s exploration of technology, including media technologies, as the extensions of “man” (1965) focused on this very specific point: meaning is also physiological, and physiology can be manipulated through technological and material interventions. This point is exemplified by research in neuroscience and cognitive behavior: the part of the brain activated for reading radically changes depending on whether print or a computer screen is read (Wolf 2008). For instance, reading on a computer screen reinforces surface scanning, as opposed to the deep reading of a printed book. The understanding of texts and therefore the meanings we derive from them, then, depends on their material and technical support. Whereas meaning has been traditionally seen as the human mind constructing an understanding of the world, we now have to consider the relationship between human and meaning as much more complex: meaning is not a direct imposition from the human mind onto a reality, but rather something that is shaped by the materials and techniques used to produce it. The consequence of this new perspective on meaning is a fairly radical rupture between hermeneutics and posthermeneutics. While hermeneutics is the study of interpretation understood as the creation and communication of meaning in the human 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING MACHINES M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A mind, posthermeneutics posits that this seemingly entirely human activity of interpretation is conditioned by nonhuman elements. In the field of media studies, this analytical transition took place when questions about the manifest characteristics and properties of different materialities and technologies of communication encountered textual analysis. Gumbrecht (2004), for instance, describes the posthermeneutic turn in the following way: Our main fascination came from the question of how different media—different materialities—of communication would affect the meaning that they carried. We no longer believed that a meaning complex could be kept separated from its mediality, that is, from the difference of appearing on a printed page, or a computer screen, or in a voice message. (11) In the posthermeneutic framework, then, the focus turns away from the meaning of a text to an analysis of the conditions through which such meaning is made possible. The study of meaning is not an exercise in interpretation anymore, but an effort to understand the conditioning of the practice of interpretation itself through material, technological, and social processes. As such, we find here a point of contact with Foucault’s work on discourse. As mentioned above, Foucault operates a decentering of the human subject, and subsequently of the human capacity to produce meaning. That is, the capacity to derive meaning is something that is shaped through power formations. Rather than being a creative act, then, the production of meaning becomes one of fitting into power formations. The question raised, in turn, is about how power formations manage the capacity to create meaning, and the role of technology in it. Friedrich Kittler (1990, 1997) adopts such an approach in his study of discourse networks, which links together discourse and technologies of communication. Kittler defines discourse networks as “networks of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data” (1990, 369). By relevant data, Kittler refers to what is deemed meaningful in a given historical period. Kittler expands 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 64 65 Foucault’s analysis of the processes of establishing social relations through language, but introduces media technologies as key components. In departure from Foucault, Kittler takes into account the specificities of media systems as modes through which information, knowledge, values, and identities are mediated and therefore shaped. Of particular interest is Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, which explores how the proliferation of analog media from the nineteenth century onward has fundamentally reshaped modes of interpretation and decentered the production and circulation of meaning. Drawing on Nietzsche’s famous realization after switching from handwriting to typewriting that “our writing tools guide our thoughts,” Kittler’s analysis focuses not only on the capacity of a given technology to transform the practice of meaning making, but also on the ways in which such technologies are then inscribed within networks of knowledge—educational institutions, libraries, data repositories, which store and distribute the information that is deemed meaningful. Kittler’s approach does not separate the medium from the message. His framework offers ways to examine how specific conditions of meaning production are created through the assemblage of communication technologies, cultural processes, and institutions (Gane 2005, 29). Technical analysis, discourse analysis, historical consideration, and textual analysis can all be combined to examine the rise of specific conditions of interpretation. Overall, Kittler’s posthermeneutic approach shows that the study of meaning is the study of the conditions through which we come to understand the reality offered to us and understand our place in the world. Making sense of the world, therefore, is not a pure human ability—it is conditioned and shaped through the articulation of heterogeneous processes. From this, we can understand why the study of meaning requires not only looking at the content of a text, but also at the technologies and social processes that create the conditions within which texts are read. Thus, we need to look at the characteristics of communication technologies: what kind of materials they use, what kind of sense perceptions they target, what kind of social and cultural contexts they are adopted into and subsequently transform. Including technologies and materialities into 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING MACHINES M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A the study of meaning requires that we avoid determinisms—that is, declaring that technologies dictate human behavior or, on the contrary, that the social forces entirely domesticate technology. Media transform the conditions within which we humans come to interpret, produce, and share meanings. At the same time, media can be harnessed by specific social forces to establish power formations. What is key here is to look at the relationships between technologies, the social, and language as one of assemblage (Phillips 2006); it is more useful to look at the connections between these heterogeneous elements and what these connections produce, rather than try to define each element as a separate entity. And meaning could then be thought of as the plane of this encounter. Meaning Machines Through this posthermeneutic framework, we find a transformation in our object of study: it is not simply texts that need to be examined for their meanings, but the whole assemblage of technologies and social and cultural processes that make a text, its author(s), and its users possible. In other words, the whole production and circulation of meaning should be seen from a technocultural perspective. Furthermore, with the rise of new media, the notion of text itself becomes limited. The notion of text belongs to a bygone media era dominated by print, while what appears on our computer screens are multiple strands of texts, sound bites, and bits, all mashed up and organized by a range of software modules—what Bolter and Grusin (2000) defined as hypermediacy. As such, the concept of the interface has come to replace “text” in discussions of the online environment. However, the interface should not be simply understood as what appears on a computer screen, but rather as a mediator between software processes and cultural representations. As N. Katherine Hayles (2004) declared, “Print is flat. Code is deep.” A text in its conventional understanding consists of a set of meanings expressed through signs, be they visual, written, or audio. Traditionally, text-focused methodologies deal with content in its linguistic and social aspects rather than with the technological or material context that enables the production 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 66 67 and circulation of signs. However, the move here is to examine how an interface such as a web page reflects its technocultural conditions of production, circulation, and intervention within a social field. The problem with the early conceptualizations of the interface as a product of a human actor making use of code is that the interface first tends to be viewed primarily as a human artifact, whose production is facilitated by a set of communication tools, and second, that it tends to be disconnected, especially on online social media platforms, from the networked media environment that materially enables its production and circulation. It is tempting to focus on an amateur YouTube video just in terms of its form and content, and ask how the meanings in the video differ and challenge meanings in other videos, such as those produced by media professionals. However, it is equally important to broaden the scope of enquiry and ask how such a video comes to be seen by other users, requiring not only that we ask what potential meanings can be derived from the video, but also what the processes are through which such a video can appear onscreen in the first place, and how it can circulate across networks and onto other online and mobile platforms. This question requires us to pay attention to the graphical user interface and to examine the other visual elements that surround and contextualize the video—other videos, search boxes, and so on. Attention to the networking of a given video is needed: How is such a video identified, categorized, retrieved, and circulated, and according to which search logics? Such questions concern not only the techniques of information search and retrieval, but, by extension, how the meaningfulness of a video is defined not only by other human users, but also increasingly by software processes. They demand a reconsideration of meaning as a multifaceted object of study that encompasses visual interfaces, layers of code, and logics of networking of information. Meaning, as an object of study, cannot simply be narrowed down to the linguistic signs that appear on a visual interface. Rather, the study of meaning also needs to include, for instance, the source code of a web page—the many languages and programs that are rendered invisible to users but are nevertheless central in shaping information into culturally recognizable signs. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING MACHINES M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A By extension, the question of meaning does not just comprise the many elements that make content visible in the first place, but also, in the social media environment, the processes through which content circulates through information networks and is equally produced by nonhuman, software actors. Indeed, looking at online communication cannot be reduced to studying what another user is saying, but also needs to take into account what software-produced visual elements are saying, framing, suggesting, and recommending. It is therefore useful to switch the focus from a specific set of meanings expressed by an author to the enactment of multiple technocultural processes of meaning production and circulation that make use of semiotic and nonsemiotic, representational and informational processes. Furthermore, there are now different types of communicative actors on social media platforms. A web page, particularly one hosted on a social media platform, is not just content posted by an author using specific conventions of expression, such as HTML coding. As mentioned earlier, a web page now features content that is produced by other categories of users, human or software, including software in charge of visually organizing information and making recommendations. A web page, thus, is the interface through which different types of content are put in relation to one another. Recommendations are produced by software in charge of correlating all kinds of data. Other forms of organizing content, such as tagging, involve collaboration between users and software in terms of creating a taxonomy of tags and attributing tags to enable information retrieval. This multiplicity of content points to disparate actors, materials, and processes at play in the production of signification on social media platforms. Thus, one cannot talk of a unified or simple process of the production and circulation of meaning as signification on social media platforms. Consequently, it makes sense to think about processes of meaning production and circulation as being regulated by meaning machines—a range of technocultural processes that, by working with, through, and around signs, organize the relationships, mediations, and translations between data input, information, linguistic symbols, cultural practices of communication, and 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 68 69 users. Rather than being a human activity supported by technical tools, such as a diverse range of media tools, meaning (as the operation of meaning machines) encompasses technocultural processes and constructs that not only organize the logics through which data becomes meaningful or meaning informational, but also distributes agencies and relationships between different categories of communicational actors, such as various classes of institutional and individual users, and software actors. By extension, meaning machines participate in the organization of a broader world of power formations: whoever or whatever set of actors defines, influences, and otherwise mobilizes meaning machines can intervene in shaping cultural perceptions of specific communication processes, as well as the way in which these relate with existing realities. The concept of the meaning machine makes it possible to look at the role of software, and in particular semiotechnological software, within different communicative processes. With regard to the production of meaning, semiotechnological software acts in at least three different ways on social media platforms. First, it acts in the back end, at the level of the production of databases. Software sorts through and classifies all kinds of information into retrievable data that might be meaningful for users. Second, software translates data into culturally recognizable signs at the level of the user interface. It thus has an aesthetic and ideological role in providing cultural frameworks that human users rely on to interpret what is being communicated to them. Third, software can automatically produce meanings. This third way is the most unique to social media platforms— the production of tailored and targeted recommendations and suggestions. This is where the term “social media and participatory culture” might be misleading. In general, we think of social media and participatory culture as unfettered communication among humans. Yet, social media are constructed on the principle of having software manage and intervene in human communication process, both at the level of formatting, and at the level of content. Software produces content when it correlates data together. However, this does not mean that the kind of software we find on social media platforms is some sort of 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING MACHINES M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A artificial intelligence, capable of creativity or thought. Software on social media platform does not think. It is through the correlation of different kinds of information that it produces signs. The targeted advertising and recommendations that we encounter on social media platforms might seem relevant, to the point and even providing something that we, as user, did not know was what we were looking for. However, such meaningfulness is not produced because an artificial intelligence happens to know and understand us. Rather, what occurs is that data is correlated according to a specific logic of association: I am more likely to like what one of my friends likes, rather than what a stranger likes. What this means is that software does produce signs, and modes of existence, but it does so without any kind of human understanding and representational and linguistic capacity. Semiotechnological software intervenes in the linguistic plane, in the production of signs, by using data, not language. It is hardly surprising that the logics of semiotechnological software are kept secret, and are protected by the companies who develop them. Search algorithms, such as the Google Pagerank algorithm, the Amazon recommendation system, and the Facebook Edgerank and Graphrank algorithms, among many others, are meant to identify important stories in a personalized manner (Bucher 2012b). Since all these algorithms are patented, it is impossible to know exactly how they work, although patent documents give a general idea as to the logics of meaningfulness embedded in them. As such, in order to understand the logic of meaningfulness embedded in any given software we are obliged to do some reverse engineering (Gehl 2014). By mapping effects, we can understand the management of the field of meaning. The concept of a meaning machine thus broadens the focus to include not only questions regarding meaning as content, but, more importantly, how regularities and patterns for meaning production and circulation come to manage the field of meaning. Central to these processes of regulation and management are nonrepresentational and informational technologies and software processes in charge of collecting, ranking, and retrieving information. The main challenge in understanding meaning machines in the 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 70 71 social media context is determining the role played by these new nonlinguistic components and processes in the formation of regimes of meaning production and circulation. It is useful at this point to bring in Félix Guattari’s work on mixed semiotics. Guattari is most known for his work with Gilles Deleuze on Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, but he was also one of the first to analyze the nascent relationships in the 1970s and 1980s between information, capitalism, and language. As Gary Genosko recalls, Guattari attempted to develop the first semiotics adapted to the global information economies of the network society, even though his untimely passing in 1992 did not permit him to experience the extraordinary accelerations of the 1990s towards and beyond the millennium of the burgeoning infotechnocultural era of digital capitalism; still, he was already attentive to the stirrings of the fusion of capitalism and informatics in his studies dating from the 1980s of the global economy of Integrated Worldwide Capitalism. (2008, 11) Guattari’s mixed semiotics framework to analyze the new articulations of linguistic signs and informational material has much in common with Foucault. Indeed, Guattari pays attention to the question of power and existence: his main question is about how language can be mobilized for purposes of subjectivation, that is, for the production of subjects under specific power formations, in particular in a capitalist context. The main difference between Guattari’s framework and Foucault’s discourse is that Guattari was the first to decenter the production of signs in the creation of modes of existence, in the sense that he realized that signification is only one aspect of the articulation of power and language. The colonization of the field of meaning and existence takes place through language, Guattari explains, not centrally at the level of the signification of signs, but rather at the level of the management of an entire system of sign production and circulation in order to create modes of existence. To put it another way, Guattari switched the main question from “What does this means/signify?” to “How does this work and who does it serve?” With regard to the question of meaning, it could 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING MACHINES M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A be said that Guattari does not get rid of meaning altogether, but he pushes to the periphery questions regarding signification and representation in order to make way for an analysis of how the world is ordered, made sense of through the articulation of language with capitalist power formations. As Genosko further explains, Guattari’s mixed semiotics framework opens a way for examining how “a-signifying signs,” that is, nonlinguistic, nonrepresentational signs, serve to further automatize a capitalist system. The “strings of numbers and characters on a typical magnetic stripe” on, for instance, a credit card are asignifying signs that “have no meaning, but for Guattari, operationalize local powers” (2008, 14)—that is, they create effects and conditions of existence. Bits and numbers do not mean anything in the classical sense, but they order the world and assign possibilities. However, while nonlinguistic signs have gained in importance with the coupling of capitalist logics and information technologies, they should not simply be considered as entirely disconnected from other linguistic phenomena. My interest here is on what happens when these asignifying signs encounter cultural logics of representation. Indeed, the recommendation software that tells us what we like, what we are looking for, and who we are should be defined as a site of articulation of nonsignifying informational processes with signifying ones. The mixed semiotics framework offers a way to open up the field of software-managed meaning altogether, and to map relations about heterogeneous elements such as linguistic signs and informational material, social processes, economic dynamics, and technologies. The mixed semiotics framework is not as well known as it deserves to be, mainly because of a lack of availability of some of Guattari’s key books on the topic, such as Molecular Revolution, and partly because the mixed semiotics framework itself is quite complex and presents a whole set of concepts and new definitions. It is worthwhile, however, to delve into this framework in some depth to identify new processes and articulations that are not visible through any other methodologies. In particular, if we focus on the heterogeneous assemblage of signifying and asignifying processes that work with and through signs to organize the world and our relation to it, then we can identify three types of meaning machines involved in 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 72 ME ANING MACHINES 73 Signifying Meaning Machines The kind of mixed semiotics approach first sketched out by Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987) and further elaborated upon by Guattari (1977) allows for a redefinition of meaning as the effects of language, effect that is not simply linguistic but also social, cultural, and psychological. Deleuze and Guattari’s claim is therefore that “linguistics is nothing without a pragmatics (semiotic or political) to define the effectuation of the condition of possibility of language and the usage of linguistic elements” (1987, 85). As the mixed semiotics framework shows, meaning is now increasingly determined by nonlinguistic processes, and of particular relevance to this discussion, informational processes of data collection, storage, and retrieval. Meaning on social media platforms extends beyond user expression and involves new meaning machines to organize, regulate, and frame the production and circulation of meanings as signified content appearing on visual interfaces. In order to map heterogeneous elements, Guattari draws and elaborates on Hjelmslev’s glossematics framework, which focuses on linguistic signs as the articulation of mental processes, such as ideas, with materials of expression. The main characteristic of Hjelmslev’s framework is to show that acts of signification are dependent on a range of material processes. As Hjelmslev explains it, a sign is not an object, but a semiotic function that establishes a connection between two planes: the plane of expression and the plane of content (Hjelmslev 1971, 72). There are two levels at which content and expression can be analyzed, that of substance and that of form. Once a substance of expression and a substance of content are formalized, they can be further translated into a form of expression and a form of content through the semiotic function of the sign, which establishes a link between these two categories. The process of sign production in glossematics can be represented as depicted in table 2.1.1 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 the software-based and managed production of meaning: meaning machines that deal directly with signification, nonlinguistic meaning machines, and asignifying meaning machines. 74 M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A Expression Content Glossematics Matter (purport) Substance Form Unformed amorphous mass (unknowable until it is formed into a substance) Materials available for manifesting content Actual assemblage of materials used to structure content Content of the human mind before any structuring intervention Content of the human mind in a structured form As an illustration of the glossematics framework, let’s take the example of a stop sign. The substance of the content “stop” could be expressed through different substances of expression (such as written letters, sounds, and colors), but in the case of a stop sign it is associated with a specific form of expression (the color red). Thus, the level of expression makes it possible to raise the question of the materiality of signification (including software processes), as opposed to traditional linguistic frameworks. Furthermore, in its reformulation as part of mixed semiotics, the glossematics framework can be further expanded to include questions of power and knowledge. Indeed, Guattari’s first move in making the transition from glossematics to mixed semiotics is the inclusion of the question of power within the problematic of meaning making and representation (1977, 242). In particular, Guattari asks about the processes through which the transition from substance to form can take place, both at the level of expression and content. In La révolution moléculaire (1977, 307–308), Guattari focuses on two types of formalizations, one of which takes place at the level of content, and the other at the level of expression and explains how power formations intervene to colonize these processes and their articulation. But first, Guattari expands the categories of expression and content, in order to include in the heterogeneous processes at stake in producing meaning and effects of meaningfulness and meaninglessness. Thus, the category of substance of expression involves not only “semiotics and semiology,” but also “domains that are extra-linguistic, non-human, 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Table 2.1 75 biological, technological, aesthetic, etc.” (1995, 24) to which we can add informational processes. The substance of content is also further expanded to include not just the broad label of concepts, but also social values and rules. At the level of expression, the type of formalization that takes place is a linguistic one, in that all the possibilities of language are reduced to specific syntaxes—the proper rules for using language. The type of formalization that takes place at the level of content involves a recentering of power formations to establish semiotic and pragmatic interpretations, that is, a field of possibilities as to what can be said legitimately and what counts as meaningful. The relationship between expression and content is realized through political and social structures (1977, 241). For Guattari, the production of meaning via signifying processes involves the articulation between the formalized content of a social field (social values and rules) and a machinery of expression that ultimately serves to “automatize the behaviors, interpretations, and meanings recommended by the system” (1977, 307; my translation). Thus, what Guattari calls an “abstract semiotic machine” allows for the articulation of the linguistic machine (the proper language rules) with the structuration of specific power formations. For Guattari, this meeting point is important as it potentially allows for the reinforcement of a broader structure of power that goes beyond the production of specific, contextualized significations. Who has the right and legitimacy to articulate the linguistic machine with power formations is of crucial importance here, as Guattari argues that it is the centralization of that articulation within a broad economic and social machine (e.g., the state) that allows for the production of a system where the field of signification corresponds to the social, economic, and moral dimensions of broad power formations (1977, 308). For Guattari, then, there is no arbitrary relationship in signification, between the categories of signifier and signified. On the contrary, the relationship between signifier and signified is a manifestation of power, inasmuch as language is not any language, but the language of a dominant class or group (1977, 272). Thus, the table representing this process of signification could be redesigned as shown in table 2.2. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING MACHINES 76 M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A Guattari and Glossematics Substance Expression Content Form Linguistic machine: Harnessing of expressive materials Ensemble of expressive materials: – Linguistic: signifying chain, batteries of signs such as sound, image, and so on Guattari (1996c) – Extralinguistic domains: biological, political, social, technological, and so on Specific syntax Social values, social rules Signified contents: • Establishment of specific equivalencies and significations • Legitimization of specific semiotic and pragmatic interpretations • Specific rhetoric Proper language rules Abstract Semiotic Machine: Process of articulation of the linguistic machine with power formations Production of an ordered world: homogeneity of the field of production with the social, economic, and moral dimensions of power. Recentering, rearticulation, and hierarchization of power formations Guattari expands Foucault’s conception of discourse to ask about how an ensemble of expressive materials, itself formalized by specific power relations, is articulated with a social horizon that already has developed preferred meanings and modes of interpretation in order to produce a common world of possibilities and expectations. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Table 2.2 77 Such an approach to signification as the operation of power dynamics to manage different types of expressive materials is important for thinking about signifying meaning machines in the social media context. Signifying meaning machines can be defined as the technocultural processes that work directly with linguistic signs to link together the formalization and expression of content—that is, the proper interpretation with proper rules of expression. The signifying meaning machines that are developed in the social media context are the ones that are dealing with the formatting of content and the building of specific modes of interpretation in users. Interface design is an important site of analysis here, in that meaning machines of signification set up visual regimes that influence the user’s perception of content and meaning. For instance, the concept of a web page makes use of specific visual metaphors and rules to the detriment of others. The meaning machines that format signs into a web page thus impose specific ways of approaching linguistic signs online. As Chun argues, the interface is useful for identifying the ideologies embedded in software, in that it produces specific modes of representations that shape modes of activity, and thus users (2005, 43). Meaning machines of signification involve software designed to define not only what can be said, but also how something can be expressed. Thus, meaning machines of signification impose specific constraints on users. A simple example of this is the 140 characters limit on the microblogging platform Twitter. In forcing users to condense their communication, the platform imposes specific modes of expression and communication among users—sound bites rather than longer argumentation, dialogue rather than soliloquy. Meaning machines of signification impose a specific communicative order and shape the purpose and cultural value of the overall communication process on different platforms. The visual elements and communicative acts that are made possible on a specific platform thus define specific modes of interpretation and involvement with content for users. Meaning machines of signification yield themselves to deconstruction. For instance, alternative ways of exploring the 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING MACHINES M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A potential of the web through the creation of alternative modes of surfing have been at the core of Geert Lovink and Mieke Gerritzen’s Browser Day Project and Matthew Fuller’s Web Stalker that was mentioned in the introduction. Fuller’s experimental Web Stalker (2003)—a web browser that deconstructs the visual conventions embedded in popular web browsers— overcomes the page metaphor to represent web browsing in spatial terms, where URLs are featured as circles and hyperlinks as lines, and with text and images collected in a separate window. Fuller’s exploration, through the Web Stalker, of the cultural conventions embedded in visual interface—how websites are usually perceived as a collection of pages and hyperlinks—highlights how the focus of meaning machines of signification is not on the content of a message, but on the regimes within which such content is perceived. Changing these regimes of perception by altering the visual metaphors offered to users opens up new alternatives and possibilities for what could be achieved through communicating online. Nonlinguistic and Asignifying Meaning Machines The signifying meaning machines described above invite us to look at software as that which creates regularities of expression, or as that which works on format rather than content. In the social media context, this kind of formatting of communication is only one of the software-based processes that is involved in the production and circulation of meaning. Let’s now look at recommendation software, and other kinds of software in charge of producing signs. As I said at the beginning of this chapter, recommendation software produces culturally understandable signs, but does so without thinking or interpreting in the classical, humanist-based sense of the term. The paradox of recommendation software is that it relies on nonlinguistic processes in order to produce meaning as linguistic signs. The meaning machines at play in the nonhuman production of signs are nonlinguistic, therefore they differ from the meaning machines of signification mentioned above, which work directly with the perception of linguistic signs. We can identify at least 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 78 79 three processes that are involved in the production of automated recommendation and other kind of software-produced content: data gathering, of course, but also the processing of data into mineable information, and then the application of specific logics of retrieval onto this information in order to create recommendations. This last nonlinguistic process directly involves the kind of proprietary software mentioned earlier, in particular ranking algorithms. We can see, then, that meaning machines of signification represent only a part of the process, and that there is a whole infrastructure of nonlinguistic meaning machines that poses several challenges for our understanding of meaning on social media. First, as I mentioned before, is the fact that social media are complex sites of production of meaning that involve human users, but also software and combinations of software and users. The process of tagging mentioned earlier involves not only traditional human processes of interpretation, but also nonlinguistic processes of information processing. The challenge then, is not only to recognize these different types of actors involved in tagging and their hybridization, but also to see how they interact with each other. This leads to the second challenge in looking at the role of nonlinguistic meaning machines: the orchestration of these diverse processes. Indeed, an examination of nonlinguistic meaning machines should not focus solely on the ways in which they mimic human processes of interpretation by positing, for instance, that what is meaningful for people who have a similar profile to mine is probably meaningful for me. Indeed, the question is more about what and who is being served and favored through the growing importance of software as a communicative actor that engages directly with users. This is where we move away from the question of meaning as signification to that of existentialization. It is here that the mixed semiotics framework becomes important as a way to map the relationship between nonlinguistic meaning machines, signifying meaning machines, and existence. For Guattari, signifying semiologies—semiologies which are focused principally on the production of signs, or, as he 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING MACHINES 80 calls them, “semiotically formed substances” (1996b, 149)— are only a minor part of the relationship between power and language. There are other processes at work, and these involve a redefinition of the category of matter, which, in Hjelmslev’s glossematics framework was defined as an amorphous mass. For Guattari, on the contrary, matter can manifest itself “in terms of unformed, unorganized material intensities,” without being transformed into a substance (Genosko 2002, 166). As Guattari explains, matter can also be divided along the lines of expression and content, with “sens” or purport as the matter of expression and the continuum of material fluxes as the matter of content. With this in mind, we now better see the relationships between the five criteria of matter-substance form and expression content. These relationships, or modes of semiotization, are presented in table 2.3 (Guattari 1996b, 149–151). Table 2.3 Mixed Semiotics Matter Expression Substance Form Asignifying semiotics Purport (sens) Signifying semiologies Content Continuum of material fluxes Asemiotic encodings 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A ME ANING MACHINES 81 1. Asemiotic encodings: An asemiotic encoding is nonsemiotically formed matter, that is, matter that “functions independently of the constitution of a semiotic substance” (1996b, 149). Guattari’s example is that of genetic encoding, which is the formalization of material intensities into a code that is not a signifying system (1996, 149). Asemiotic encodings, such as DNA, contain a biological and an informational level. The biological intensities are encoded into an informational code that acts as a support of expression. As Genosko (2002, 167) further explains, genetic encodings can be transposed as signifying substances and in that sense can be semiotically captured and disciplined, but they are not in themselves formalized through semiotic substances. 2. Signifying semiologies: This category comprises “sign systems with semiotically formed substances on the expression and content planes” (Genosko 2002, 167). They are divided into two kinds. Symbolic semiologies involve several types of substances of expression. Guattari refers to gestural semiotics, semiotics of sign language, and ritual semiotics among others as examples of symbolic semiologies, since their substance of expression is not linguistic but gestural. Semiologies of signification, on the other hand, rely on one unique substance of expression—a linguistic one, be it made of sound, images, or other substances and are the ones that we usually think of when we think of language. 3. Asignifying semiotics: Asignifying semiotics involves “a-signifying machines (that) continue to rely on signifying semiotics, but they only use them as a tool, as an instrument of semiotic deterritorialization allowing semiotic fluxes to establish new connections with the most deterritorialized material fluxes” (1996b, 150). That is, asignifying machines circulate on the planes of expression and content, and create relationships between matter, substance, and form that are not primarily signifying. Guattari gives the example of “physico-chemical theory,” arguing that its goal is not to 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Guattari’s (1996b, 149–151) definition of modes of semiotization is as follows: M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A offer “a mental representation of the atom or electricity, even though, in order to express itself, it must continue to have recourse to a language of significations and icons.” Rather, asignifying semiotics “produce another organization of reality” (Seem and Guattari 1974, 39). As Guattari puts it, the machines of mathematical signs, musical machines, or revolutionary collective set-ups might in appearance have a meaning. But what counts, in the theory of physics for example, is not the meaning to be found at a given link in the chain, but rather the fact that there is what Charles Sanders Peirce calls an effect of diagrammatization. Signs work and produce within what is Real, at the same levels as the Real, with the same justification as the Real. (Seem and Guattari 1974, 40) In this complex mapping of modes of semiotization, it is important to pay attention to the concept of asignification. Asignifying semiotics involves the harnessing of material intensities and the deployment of a system of signs to intervene in the production of reality. In doing so, asignifying semiotics are not primarily concerned with meaning as the content of signification, but with the adequation of a communicative ensemble with the real. Of the three modes of semiotization described by Guattari, the concept of asignification opens the way for an examination of the processes that make disparate meaning machines— linguistic and nonlinguistic—work together in order to produce a communicative context that serves to produce specific realities. Guattari’s concept of asignifying semiologies that work to produce reality opens a way to understand the relationships and governance between diverse meaning machines. Guattari’s notion of asignification points out again that the study of meaning is not simply about the content of a message, but, more importantly, about the organization of the world and the perception of our place in it. In the corporate social media system, this question of the organization of the world involves a patterning of activity, or rather, the setting up of the specific processes within which we can make sense of the world. The asignifying logic highlights the question of the governance of 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 82 83 heterogeneous processes in order to achieve a communicative coherence, and to assign specific patterns, or regimes of the production and circulation of meaning, to an open-ended field of communication. We can find there a trade-off at play on social media platforms, as opposed to previous forms of online communication: the multiplication of meanings can only take place through heavily regulated, rigid, and oftentimes blackboxed modes of expression. For instance, it is much easier to click a “share” button on a social network platform than it is to embed a hyperlink on an HTML page; however, HTML gave much more freedom to users to design and customize their web pages. The deployment of meaning machines serves a logic of coherence by taking away from users’ essential creative dynamics with regard to new ways of publishing content, linking knowledge, or experiencing social relations. This can be seen as an extension of the shaping of users’ visual perceptions explored above: meaning machines serve not only to organize perceptions of the communication process and its possibilities, but also to ensure that there is no disruption to the constant production and circulation of meaning. In this sense, they take on a creative role of producing not only more meanings but also more meaningful links, social relationships, and online experiences. It is interesting to notice that in the corporate social media environment, this software-assisted and nonhuman creation of more meaning takes the form of the constant production of affinities and the absence of disruption. For instance, we can have friends on social networks, but no enemies. That is, the logic embedded in the meaning machines of social networking is that anybody is a potential friend, it is just a question of fostering the meaningful links—other friends, similar likes, and so on—that will enable the actualization of friendship. Social media platforms are thus in charge of governing diverse semiotics, discursive and technical processes to produce homogeneous communicative worlds where specific modes of the production and circulation of meaning become the norm. The aim of the platform is to create a coherent world where diverse interests—those of users and marketers—can be made to work together, or be of use to one another. As such, the question of 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 ME ANING MACHINES M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A the management of meaning machines at the asignifying level, and therefore of the management of actors—human subjects, software processes, commercial interests, and so on—shows that there is a dimension to social media platforms that in the final instance should be understood not so much as a question of meaning, but rather as a question of meaningfulness. That is, the logic of the platform is ultimately to augment userproduced signified content with a range of meanings produced through diverse meaning machines. In doing so, the platform is in charge of connecting the user’s potential of expression with potential actualizations articulated by other meaning machines so that, for instance, a recommendation actualizes a social need for friendship, or an advertised product answers a material or cultural yearning. In this way, the logic of the platform is to make meaning more meaningful through the patterning of regimes of meaning production and circulation. It is, ultimately, about inviting users to actualize themselves within technocultural and technocommercial networks. The question of meaning in social media is a question of power. Meaning has to be rethought as the interface through which language and technologies are articulated together in specific ways to form what I have been calling meaning machines. The question of how meaning machines become operators of power formation has only been sketched in very broad terms in this chapter, and will be further developed in the next through a case-study analysis. Overall, the question of meaning machines points to blind spots in the study of meaning: it interprets meaning not simply as a human affair because informational processes that do not have any signifying goals play a central role in linking linguistic practice to social realities, and therefore communicative agency and cultural subjectivities online are radically dependent on and actualized through nonhuman processes. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 84 Meaningfulness and Subjectivation Let me recall a Super Bowl 2010 Google video ad titled “Parisian Love.” In it, we see easily recognizable Google interfaces—mostly the Google search engine, but also Google Translate and Google Maps— queried by an anonymous user over the span of many years. We start with a search for study abroad programs in Paris, go through queries on how to romance in French and where to take a date, followed by how-to advice on long-distance relationships, then how to find a job in Paris, a church to get married in, and ultimately how to assemble a crib. The message, of course, is that Google has all the answers, both practical and profound. The ad illustrates quite powerfully the crucial importance of Google as a platform that lends meaning to our lives. It marks a significant departure from the previous image of the search engine as a retriever of knowledge and information. Google, the ad shows, now acts as a confidante and figure of empowerment; it takes an active role in enabling a process of becoming, both at the psychic level of desire and satisfaction, and at the social level of fitting in. In other words, Google does not simply provide the right kind of information; it provides safety, certainty, and connections, fulfilling a psychosocial function by bringing in social order and individual satisfaction. This portrayal of Google echoes its transformation over the years from a search engine to a megacorporation that invests in all kinds of information and in psychosocial life—not only scientific or academic knowledge and mass-media content (Google Scholar, Google Books, and Google News), but also everyday forms of expression (Blogger, YouTube) and mundane social exchange (Google+, Gmail). The sheer range of data that Google collects is the basis of its success, of its capacity to offer a platform on which our lives can take shape and become meaningful. And indeed, one of the other 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Chapter 3 M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A key changes for Google was a redesign of their search algorithm to include the specific data profile of the user undertaking the query, so that search results on the same query now differ depending on who is launching a Google search. In taking this step, Google showed that its business had shifted from being an objective provider of information to being a meaning machine that is intimately connected to every one of us. It is this intimate connection, present not only in Google but also in many other social media platforms, that I want to look at and deconstruct in this chapter. In particular, I want to examine the machinery through which such connection occurs, and what it reveals about the relationship between users and meaning machines. In the previous chapter, I introduced recommendation software as an actor of a limited sort—one incapable of selfreflection or understanding, one that only applies a specific logic to the correlation of data so as to provoke effects of meaningfulness. Recommendation software is thus a starting point to try to understand how meaning machines—machines that assemble software processes with linguistic ones and existential ones—have changed how we make sense of the world. I focused mainly on exposing the meaning machine system and showing how it raised the question of the governance and potential colonization of users’ experience of meaning. What I would like to do now is explore this notion of governing the experience of meaning as a moment of intimate connection between meaning machines and users. I use the word intimate in the sense that this connection taps into psychosocial dimensions of life, that is, the encounter and unfolding of the self and the world. I want to show that this new connection is the result of the externalization of the search for meaningfulness away from the psychic processes internal to humans toward meaning machines. In this chapter and the next, I want to demonstrate that this externalization is key to understanding the new kinds of power relations that are surfacing with social media and especially the ways in which they refashion and mine psychosocial processes that are integral to making sense of the world and of the self and the Other. I will focus in particular on the capitalist system that inhabits our common experiences of social media communication and how that system mobilizes meaning machines in order to create value out of these psychosocial processes. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 86 87 It may seem awkward to start with economic questions in order to understand the kind of connection that is established between a meaning machine and its users. The focus on the capitalist context is crucial, however, because it directly shapes the design and deployment of specific kinds of meaning machines. How the Google Pagerank or Facebook Graph algorithms work is directly tied in with the kind of profit that these two corporations seek to derive from the exchange of meanings that takes place on their platforms. Furthermore, what interests me is not only the type of connection that is established between meaning machines and users, but also, from a critical and pragmatic perspective, who is being served through such connection. The key to understanding who is being served lies in the psychosocial response that the meaning machine is supposed to produce in users: finding something meaningful should lead to a sense of satisfaction and joy. Indeed, we all have derived at some point satisfaction and enjoyment from being immersed in responsive environments. At the same time, though, the kind of satisfaction and enjoyment that is being fostered through the connection of users to meaning machines serves a commercial and for-profit purpose: it somehow produces value. It would seem, at first, that this connection is proof of smooth capitalism: the perfect joining of the search for meaningfulness and capitalism. However, if we start interrogating the notion of user satisfaction and deconstruct it, then, we might find that such emotional and existential responses are constructed by the system, that is, that they do not arise from the inside of the individual psyche. What is important here is to understand that the user is not a singular entity separate from the meaning machine, but one that is produced by and situated within the meaning machine in order to fulfill some economic role. The satisfaction that users derive, then, is symptomatic of the folding in of users within a broader system that could be qualified, following the concepts developed in the last chapter, as asignifying. Thus, a meaning machine’s purpose is not simply to mine the field of meaning, but also to shape it and to redefine what is meaningful and what is meaningless and by extension, to shape what it means to live a meaningful life according to specific profit 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 M E A N I N G F U L N E S S A N D S U B J E C T I VAT I O N 88 M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A logic. It is the mechanics of such process that I want to examine in close details here. In chapter 1, I addressed the new political economy of social media as one that sees the development of new forms of capitalism that invest in meaning and meaningfulness. I would now like to expand this new phenomenon of the capitalist investment in meaning by placing it in the context of recently named forms of capitalism, broadly understood as marking a “linguistic turn” in capitalism: “informational capitalism,” “cognitive capitalism,” and “semio-capitalism.” Such analyses are found in the work of Italian Autonomist theorists and activists such as Maurizio Lazzarato (2004a, 2004b, 2008, 2011), Paolo Virno (2003), and Franco “Bifo” Berardi (2009a, 2009b, 2011, 2012), and others whom they have influenced. The broad argument shared by all these theorists is that new forms of capitalism are using language as a means to invest in the field of subjectivity, and that contemporary forms of capitalism have developed a vested interest in the development of new forms of subjectivation. Such forms of subjectivation are not coercive, but productive. They aim to give life to an ideal living capitalist subject that feels and responds to the world in accordance with a capitalist logic. This is reminiscent of Guattari’s discussion of asignification mentioned in the previous chapter. Indeed, Guattari’s work had been extremely influential for the Autonomia movement. In particular, Guattari’s Three Ecologies is one of the first analysis of the rise of informational capitalism alongside older forms of capitalism as precipitating not only an ecological and social crisis, but also a crisis of subjectivity. What Guattari calls “world integrated capitalism” aims to mine all dimensions of life, from the external world of natural resources to the psyche. The mining of the psyche is done through the strategic management and articulation of language and information technologies. Information technologies provide the large-scale systems through which the plane of language can be colonized and then used to produce modes of subjectivation, which I discussed in the last chapter. Social media corporations are thus, 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Capitalism, Language, and Subjectivity 89 from this perspective, new forms of technolinguistic capitalism. This systemic investment in human subjectivity, however, begs the question: How does one make a profit out of something as intangible and immaterial as meaning or subjectivity? Traditional forms of capitalism rely on the production of material products to be sold for profit in a marketplace. Key to this industrial capitalist system is access to material resources, which includes natural resources (gas, electricity, minerals, for instance), as well as access to physical labor to transform these natural resources into consumer products. The logic of capitalism is that resources and labor costs have to be kept low in order to have the widest possible profit margin. However, the rise of the so-called information society in Western countries, accompanied by deindustrialization in the 1970s onward reveals a shift toward new forms of capitalism to produce immaterial goods and services out of immaterial resources. Immaterial goods include knowledge, meanings, and creation, and, immaterial resources include imagination, intelligence, emotions, affects, and thoughts. The resources for social media companies are immaterial: they are the meanings that circulate online, in everyday chatter as well as mundane communicative acts, such as adding friends, liking, linking, and so on. The transformation of these resources into valuable commodities is done through software processes that store, categorize, and correlate all this information into data that can then be mobilized and utilized for various purposes, such as creating targeted advertising. Of course, these new forms of immaterial capitalism do not do away with material resources and physical labor such as hardware, infrastructure, and the e-waste resulting from it, but what is different with these industries is that material resources are at the service of the production of immaterial commodities, rather than the other way around. Indeed, some of the early immaterial industries emerged as a support of the industrial capitalist system: immaterial labor has been long used to market consumer products. Advertising, for instance, plays a key role in promoting consumerism by producing meanings, discourses, and ideal subject positions that equate happiness with consumption. Similarly, the rise of massmedia entertainment, especially radio, cinema, and television 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 M E A N I N G F U L N E S S A N D S U B J E C T I VAT I O N M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A in the 1930s onward has been described by some critical studies scholars as a system that propagates the ideology of consumerism, and thus serves as a form of rationalization for the capitalist system. Mass entertainment provided the delusion necessary for workers to think that they were happy, that the capitalist system that was exploiting them was actually the way to a better life and to happiness (Adorno 2001). Capitalist mass entertainment has therefore been described as a factory of false consciousness—a way to fool people into believing that they could reach happiness by participating in a system that actually exploited them. However, the mass entertainment system can also be analyzed as an immaterial industry creating immaterial products, rather than simply a conduit for the marketing of material commodities. What the mass entertainment system produces is audiences, and that is what it sells to advertisers. The audience commodity in the corporate television system (Smythe 2005) marks a turn toward the extraction of value out of the subjective. In particular, television extracts the attention of the audience, or more specifically, the capacity of individuals to pay attention to messages. What the mass entertainment system sells and markets is therefore a subjective capacity. This selling of brains (Lazzarato 2004b) also involves the shaping of audience members as attentive subjects. So, for instance, to ensure that audiences will not click away during commercials, television programs feature moments of intensity or intrigue right before the break. It is this type of shaping of subjective capacities that is also at the core of the corporate social media model with respect to advertising. And indeed, the corporate social media model has been described as an attention economy (a “Culture Machine”) that markets subjective capacities for engagement with messages. Immaterial industries have thus come to exist alongside, and not simply in support of, material ones: the selling of material commodities becomes a secondary goal to the selling of subjective material. The rise of immaterial commodities can further be seen in industries that capitalize on intellectual property and that privatize immaterial products such as information, knowledge, and creations in order to sell them for a profit. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 90 91 All the immaterial industries named so far are present on the Internet and, indeed, some of the most long-standing, key debates about the Internet have been about their refashioning. We now have not only online advertising, but also significant investment in developing new modes of mass-media consumption through connected devices (computers, of course, but also smartphones and tablets). As well, intellectual property has been a hot-button issue associated with the Internet, from the peer-to-peer exchange of copyrighted movies, TV shows, music, and books to the emergence of competing private and open-source models for software development and modes of information exchange. The current social media industries are traversed and shaped by these other industries: they feature advertising, mass entertainment commercial goods, and have a vested interest in privatizing user-produced content. Yet, corporate social media not only provide platforms for marketing; they also actively shape user engagement and connection with these other industries. More than attention, corporate social media sell the capacity to modulate messages to users depending on their state of mind at a given moment. The targeted advertising on my Gmail account, for instance, adapts to the content of my most recent emails. Thus, what is different with social media corporations as opposed to other forms of immaterial capitalism is their capacity to produce psychosocial knowledge by collecting and analyzing user data. Indeed, corporate social media platforms could be described as brokers of information: their goal is to allow for new connections between industry needs and user data. Corporate social media provide intelligence about users that are targeted by other immaterial industries. For instance, an MIT Technology Review article titled “What Facebook Knows” (Simonite 2012) points out that the kind of data collected by Facebook is unprecedented in its detail and scope, and that the kind of sociological knowledge that can be derived from it is indeed a valuable commodity to be sold and used by interested parties. These new forms of immaterial capitalism are asignifying in that they invest in communication and language as a means to gain a deeper understanding and command of human life, and particularly subjective or psychosocial 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 M E A N I N G F U L N E S S A N D S U B J E C T I VAT I O N M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A life. Maurizio Lazzarato (2004b) has described this shift toward immaterial capitalism by stating that capitalism is not a world of production anymore, but rather the production of worlds: a system to favor the rise of specific modes of subjectivation that fit with a capitalist motive. As we have seen in recent decades, there has been a transition away from material resources toward immaterial ones, and from material commodities to immaterial services and goods, such as profiling and recommendations. Labor also has profoundly changed, increasingly taking the form of intellectual, emotional, and subjective labor. Previous forms of capitalism were criticized for their disregard of subjective and psychosocial well-being of their workers; all that mattered was increasing the capacity for physical labor. And indeed, the capacity for critique, curiosity, and the search for social connections were all heavily discouraged by the system of industrial capitalism. Immaterial labor, on the contrary, requires the mobilization of intelligence, creativity, and imagination as well as affective, emotional, and social skills (Berardi 2009a, 2009b). Software designers, game developers, and other creative types drive the development of social media platforms. Corporate social media as employers have facilitated the cultivation of such skills for their most qualified workers by turning workplaces into campuses where the divide between work and leisure is blurred and where social connectivity to foster creativity is encouraged (Hardt and Negri 2005). Not all types of immaterial labor are equal though, and the rise of new forms of exploitation and precarious work are being documented, as in the case of call-center workers (Brophy 2008), gold farming (De Peuter and Dyer-Witheford 2009), and the delocalization of software development. Interestingly enough, then, is the status of users in the social media environment as not only resources to be mined but also as providers of free labor. The concept of free labor has existed before corporate social media (Terranova 2000) and highlights how users are encouraged to take over the production and management of online communication. As such, writing free articles and posts, moderating comments, tagging, and otherwise classifying information 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 92 93 online have all been described as forms of unpaid communicative labor. Free labor is something that users engage in willingly, and this willing participation has only accelerated with the rise of social media platforms. Yet, the situation with corporate social media platforms is more complex than previous accounts of free labor suggest. Users of social media platforms not only volunteer for communicative labor, their simple presence online is enough for the platform to generate some form of profit. Signing in, reading, browsing, and other forms of online presence all have become part of the economy of social media platforms. More than labor, it could be said that simply living one’s mundane life online now produces something of value for the corporate social media platform. What could be considered passive and unproductive behaviors, such as reading a post, browsing, and lurking are now productive in the sense that they reveal something about the user and can be used to craft a more nuanced psychosocial profile. Corporate social media thus do not simply enlist the conscious activities of users as forms of free labor; they work on all aspects of psychosocial life. Thus, the user is not only a site of production, labor, and consumption; the user is also envisioned by social media platform as living and constantly unfolding to the world, and indeed, the user responds to this. The intense attachment experienced by users to the social media platform of their choice is growingly characterized as addiction, and stories abound about the pitfalls of too much constant connecting through texting, facebooking, twitting, and so on. More and more, the psychoanalytical vocabulary has been used to describe the constant and seemingly difficult to control engagement of users with social media platforms. Much like the lure of television, which involves not only being caught up in the signifying flows of “the narrative content of the program,” but also in the experience of “a perceptual fascination provoked by the screen’s luminous animation which borders on the hypnotic” (Guattari 1995, 16), the fascination with constantly changing and updated interfaces taps into affective and perceptual forms of engagement. Furthermore, the digital networks on which social media platforms are built have been described as tapping into unconscious 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 M E A N I N G F U L N E S S A N D S U B J E C T I VAT I O N M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A drives (Dean 2013) for immediate satisfaction. Digital networks also inscribe users within their own logic of speed and immediate response (Genosko 2014), thus provoking a constant psychic destabilization (Berardi 2009a, 2009b). In so doing, social media platforms tap into psychic processes, and not only social or cultural ones. Of course, users seek some social recognition among their peers when engaging in social media, but they are also captured by meaning machines at the unconscious and perceptual level. In that sense, we have to think about the kind of attachment and connection that is fostered between users and meaning machines as one that works not only from the outside of social norms and values, but also from the inside of psychic life. Through this, we can start interrogating the user experience on social media platforms in its affective and emotional dimension of engagement, joy, and satisfaction. The social media platform thus functions through the promise of subjective, psychosocial enhancement. The promise of meaningfulness, of gaining a better understanding of self and others, and of deriving some kind of satisfaction from this is central to this user engagement with meaning machine. In sum, we could say that users also become the recipient of goods and services provided by the corporate social media platform. Interestingly, these goods and services are not only material, but also psychosocial: the point of being on Facebook or Twitter, for instance, is to gain a sense of personal satisfaction, a way of feeling like one is seen and heard. This new process does not quite fit into more traditional Marxist analysis of capitalism, especially ones focused on the process of alienation of workers from the product of their work, which becomes the property of factory owners. Indeed, there is more of a feedback loop that takes place with the corporate social media where users directly benefit from having their personal and social information mined. This level of engagement with a platform as a user marks a departure as well with regard to the kinds of commodities and services produced by corporate social media. What differs with corporate social media is that mundane life has now become valuable, and that users get something in return from their communicative labor. Corporate social media are service 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 94 95 providers: they give users something that they did not have before, which is the potential for making sense of themselves and their world. The product of corporate social media, then, is not simply knowledge about a user, although it can be that. It is the production of an enhanced user, one that is somehow transformed. And it is that promise of transformation that ties in users to corporate social media platforms. This transformation is supposed to benefit both users and third parties that make use of the platform to sell or promote goods and services. The meaning machine provides users with new psychosocial dynamics: recommendations are supposed to surprise us, please us, and foster new connections, relations, imagination, and creativity. As such, corporate social media deal directly with the transformation of subjective psychosocial materials. They do not simply work from the outside, but also from the inside of subjectivity. In the previous chapter, I discussed the question of subjectivity from a Foucauldian perspective, arguing that subjectivity is the critical articulation where existence encounters power formations, or rather, that power formations give the possibility for one to exist as long as they fit in specific subject positions defined by the dominant order. In this type of framework, subjectivity is defined from the outside, by power formations that enlist heterogeneous assemblages of discourses, technologies, economic processes, and so on. Yet, social media corporations do not simply act from the outside: the fact that users freely participate and enjoy the social media system cannot simply be blamed on factory false consciousness. In other words, while users can be cynical about the ways they are used by corporate platforms, there is also a sense of enjoyment that is key to understanding user subjection. This is the work of meaningfulness—that of revealing users to themselves and to others, and of providing the means to continue doing so. This type of enhancement is perhaps unique to the participatory media model. Social media platforms, in other words, offer users a way to undertake a work of self-transformation. They do not impose modes of existence; they provoke their arising within users. Maurizio Lazzarato’s analysis of the machinic production of subjectivities (2006) is useful here. Lazzarato identifies 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 M E A N I N G F U L N E S S A N D S U B J E C T I VAT I O N M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A two processes of subjectivation: enslavement on the one hand, and subjection on the other. Enslavement is about becoming a cog or part of the machine. Subjection, on the other hand, is the process of shaping acting subjects that use the machine. Lazzarato invites us to think about the agency of users as something that is not exterior to a machine, but as something that is fostered within the machine. This can help understand that the user is, in many ways, produced as a creative and responsive agent by the meaning machine. The key question, then, is about how such processes of subjection hook into an individual’s psychosocial life. Indeed, there is a paradox in that users often feel that they can and do freely act on social media platforms, yet they also fulfill the demands of the machine. Such a process of subjection cannot therefore be coercive; it is about the production of modes of existence, such as self-actualization. These modes are what connect user activity to the capitalist logic of the social media corporations. Meaning Machines and Consumer Subjectivation The connection of users to meaning machines is thus a willing engagement in using meaning machines to find some kind of meaningfulness. But what exactly constitutes meaningfulness? As we have seen, it is indeed a somewhat open category: it can refer to satisfaction, enjoyment, wisdom, excitement, or peace; or it can be a private, intimate feeling as well as a public and social one. Meaningfulness as the ordering or making sense of the world depends on a range of psychosocial factors that determine what is more important or less important. Sometimes, meaningfulness can be found in public recognition, other time in private contemplation. Furthermore, finding something meaningful is not simply about assigning a status to an object, but also about creating a relation with it, whether practical, emotional, or both. By finding something meaningful, one is somehow transformed, enhanced. The question, in turn, is about how meaning machines participate in defining what is meaningful and what is not according to profit-making logics. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 96 97 I would like to now examine the construction of meaningfulness as it unfolds in the relations between users and meaning machines, through an analysis of one of the oldest social media model: Amazon.com. Amazon is a pioneer in e-commerce and one of the most visited websites worldwide. It also boasts of one of the largest catalogs of products, low prices, and fast delivery system. However, the reasons for its success are not simply infrastructure related. What makes Amazon unique is the psychosocial experience it provides on its platform: a way to not only search and find products, but to do so in a responsive environment, that is, an environment that constantly reveals to users new paths, new meanings, and new meaningful products. Indeed, the experience of being on Amazon.com is unique in that it is about following paths of recommendations from one product to the next. There are thus two aspects about the Amazon platform that make it stand out from other e-commerce websites. One, the Amazon platform relies on user-generated content to rank items through ratings, reviews, comments, lists, and so on more than it relies on commercial sources, such as publishers or professional reviews. As such, it is one of the first social media models in that it is focused on providing a socialized experience online. Second, the Amazon platform provides a way to navigate all kinds of content—commodities, user ratings, and comments and reviews—through its recommendation system. The Amazon platform of course has search boxes and product categories, but the recommendation system is what has made it unique as an experience of being online. Amazon sells everything these days, but its recommendation system started with books, and so its model for book selling is where I would like to focus. Searching and buying books is not like buying other kinds of consumer products. In looking for a book, one looks for a meaningful experience—enjoyment as well as the opening of new horizons. Amazon has not recreated the traditional experience of browsing through stacks of books in a physical bookstore. Rather, it has completely transformed it. If one searches for a specific book title on the Amazon platform, one does not simply get a list of search returns, but also a list of recommendations related to these search returns. As 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 M E A N I N G F U L N E S S A N D S U B J E C T I VAT I O N M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A well, clicking onto the product page for a book leads to not only getting all kinds of information about a specific book (such as reviews or rankings), but also to a list of recommendations linked with this specific title. Amazon, then, much like the Google example at the beginning of this chapter, is not a provider of information and goods—it provides meaningfulness to users. The key difference between Amazon and Google, however, is that Google provides definite answers to specific questions, whereas the Amazon platform is about opening new paths, new possibilities, new books to be read, beyond the momentary satisfaction of buying and reading a specific book. As such, the logic of the Amazon platform relies on a specific definition of what meaningfulness is as a psychosocial experience: a work of constant exploration, rather than the finding of answers. The Amazon platform is a cultural platform as much as a commercial one: it does not simply provide commodities, but also a way to meaningfully navigate through information. The most important feature of the Amazon platform is therefore not the millions of titles that its catalog offers, but how users are assisted by software programs in their search for books so that they are not inundated by the volume of information contained in the platform. Thus, the Amazon platform articulates two distinct processes together, even though they are often conflated: the search for meaningfulness and the selling of commodities. Of course, any shopping experience is about joining these two dynamics, but the question is about how the Amazon platform does it through an automated recommendation system. Indeed, such articulation requires a series of transitions from the cultural to the economic, from uncertainty (e.g., browsing for books) to action (e.g., buying a book), and from the subjective experience of the users to the constraints of an economic system. The question becomes one of knowing how such transitions are orchestrated by the different meaning machines on Amazon.com. At the technical level, the architecture of the Amazon platform makes it possible to process a large amount of heterogeneous data—not only book titles, price information, and order 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 98 99 processing forms, but also the user-produced meanings such as books reviews as well as communicative actions, such as clicking on a link. The Amazon platform is based on what is called a service-oriented architecture composed of two levels: a back end that includes databases and data processing, and a service level made up of software modules. Thus, while accessing the Amazon.com homepage is instantaneous from a user perspective, there are upward of one hundred services deployed to collect and process data to construct a personalized homepage. While, for instance, there are software modules that will retrieve a user profile and the data associated with it, there are other software modules that retrieve updated best-selling lists, special offers, and so on. These nonlinguistic meaning machines that collect and process data thus form the backbone on which the highly personalized experience of using the Amazon platform can unfold. These nonlinguistic meaning machines also fundamentally change books themselves from material objects that can be held and flipped through into virtual objects that can be browsed, searched, and, more importantly, correlated with other kinds of data, such as other books, recommendations, reviews, and so on. This kind of remediation of books on the Amazon platform transforms them from individual objects into “nodes on a network consisting of other books, commentaries, and various kinds of meta-information” (Esposito 2003). Indeed, the Amazon recommendation system is the meaning machine of signification on the platform in that it correlates all kinds of information and signified content such as user reviews, product placements, special offers, and so on to create an immersive and interpellative browsing experience. Amazon’s patented recommendation system is called “item-to-item collaborative filtering” (Linden, Smith, and York 2003). According to its patent documentation, it differs from other recommendation systems in that “rather than matching the user to similar customers, item-to-item collaborative filtering matches each of the user’s purchased and rated items to similar items, then combines those items into a recommendation list” (Linden, Smith, and York 2003, 8). Item-to-item collaborative filtering finds similarities by looking not only at keywords, but also at the 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 M E A N I N G F U L N E S S A N D S U B J E C T I VAT I O N M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A kind of interactions that items are subjected to: for instance, items that customers buy together will be linked as potential recommendations for other users, as well as items viewed in the same browsing session and items that are similarly rated. In so doing, the Amazon platform can provide a seemingly infinite number of recommendations, because these recommendations are updated not only whenever new items appear on the catalog, but also every time there is a new user interaction. Most of the time, the recommendations on Amazon make sense. For instance, searching for a mystery novel will lead to recommendations about other mystery novels. However, Amazon differs in that it measures the probability of an item being similar to another item regardless of the categories within which these items are placed. As Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, explains, We not only help readers find books, we also help books find readers, and with personalized recommendations based on the patterns we see. I remember one of the first times this struck me. The main book on the page was on Zen. There were other suggestions for Zen books, and in the middle of those was a book on how to have a clutter-free desk. That’s not something a human editor would have ever picked. But statistically, the people who were interested in the Zen books also wanted clutter-free desks. The computer is blind to the fact that these things are dissimilar in some way that’s important to humans. It looks right through that and says yes, try this. And it works. (Anderson 2005) Bezos shows that there is an element of meaningful incongruity that is at stake in the recommendation process, in that the software transcends traditional cultural categories and in so doing, can operate through logic of ever-expanding inclusion. Indeed, the more items viewed by a user on Amazon.com, the more recommendations are created. Clicking on a list of recommendations leads to another list of recommendations, and so on, as the software keeps looking for similarities. Thus, the recommendation system defines the horizon of meaningfulness as a constant flow of unfolding new possibilities. The interesting part of the Amazon recommendation system is that it always 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 100 101 works by addition, not subtraction. For instance, a person in real life might recommend a book to me, but might also recommend that I should avoid reading another book, because I will probably dislike it. The Amazon recommendation system never does that; it does not search for limits or boundaries of taste, but rather aims to transcend these boundaries. In so doing, the management of the plane of meaningfulness on the Amazon platform proceeds by looking at small differentials within a chain of similarities. Meaningfulness, then, is not defined by users, but rather orchestrated by the Amazon recommendation system. The recommendation system plays on small differences to define a horizon of meaningfulness, resonating with Gilles Lipovetsky’s argument in The Empire of Fashion that contemporary Western society can be characterized by its “infatuation with meaning.” Lipovetsky examines how mass consumption produced a “graduated system made up of small distinctions and nuances” so that “the consumer age coincides with a process of permanent formal renewal, a process whose goal is that artificial triggering of a dynamic aging and market revitalization” through “a universe of products organized in terms of micro-differences” (1994, 137–139). And indeed, these “small differentiations and nuances” are realized through the play of differentiation within similarities in the algorithmic logic of the recommendation system. The “permanent formal renewal” includes not only the addition of new titles, but also the algorithmic processing of the countless actions of users in terms of pages viewed and items bought and reviewed. An example of this is the Amazonpatented “Increases in Sales Rank as a Measure of Interest.” This patent document argues that the increase or decrease in sales rank of an item can be interpreted as an increased or decreased interest in that particular item. The document compares this new measure of interest to traditional best-selling lists and argues that sales-rank lists are better because they reflect “real-time or near-real-time change,” whereas bestsellers list are “slow to change.” This is clearly seen as an advantage for Amazon.com, in that by constantly adjusting the representation of actions of users to users, users are encouraged to regularly 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 M E A N I N G F U L N E S S A N D S U B J E C T I VAT I O N M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A visit the site. The perpetual novelty of the site is not limited to lists of popular items, and is also generalized through Amazon. com’s recommendation system, where recommendations are always changing since they are based on processing the actions of users. The recommendation system on the Amazon platform thus defines a horizon of meaningfulness as one that is composed of a chain of similarities and that is orchestrated through the play of small differences. The question in turn is about how users fit into this process. If meaningfulness is not simply about assigning status to an external object but also about building a transformative relationship to it, then we need to look at how users can situate themselves vis-à-vis a meaning machine that provides a constant stream of potentially meaningful commodities. The relationship between users and meaning machine could be first described as coercive in that it requires the constant mining of users. If we go back to the two modes of subjectivation mentioned above, it could be said that the combination of tracking of users and the recommendation system creates a mode of user exploitation within a meaning machine. Indeed, while the Amazon platform promotes user engagement under the form of writing customer reviews, creating lists, and rating and tagging items, such actions are then reinterpreted by the recommendation system to further continue the chain of small differentiation within similarities. While the meaning machine therefore works as a preindividual level of constant data mining and correlation, it also deploys techniques to work on the individual level in delineating specific subject positions, in particular the consuming subject position. The Amazon platform tracks geographic, demographic, psychographic (Elmer 2004, 8), and consumer behavior data through cookies, invitations to give information on the “My Profile” page, and the recording of items bought and viewed. Anonymity is not encouraged on the Amazon platform. As explained in the Amazon.com’s privacy notice, Amazon.com collects different kinds of data on users, including information given by users through, for instance, their wish lists and profile pages; what Amazon.com calls “automatic information” that is collected by the website 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 102 103 without asking the permission of users (i.e., cookies); email communications, including the capacity to know whether a user opens emails received from Amazon.com; and finally, information from other sources such as merchants that have agreements with Amazon.com and Amazon.com’s subsidiaries. The user on the Amazon platform is constantly monitored and tracked, and this serves not only to build more recommendations, but also to make users exist within specific subject positions: users are constantly being called forth as consumers. Indeed, while there is a plurality of meanings on the Amazon platform through an endless flow of recommendations, the kind of relationships that users can build with these recommendations boils down to the buying of commodities. The omnipresence of a shopping cart, the discounts offered when one buys several books at the same time, the push toward buying items within a certain time frame in order to have them delivered on time all serve as a form of commercial imperative. One could say that users can do other acts on the website, such as writing reviews, but actually only users who have previously bought something on the Amazon platform are allowed to do so. Furthermore, the guidelines for reviews on the website strongly encourage users to focus on commodities rather than debate or discuss with other users. As the guidelines state that a customer review should “focus on specific features of the item and your experience with it,” there is no thread for reviews, for instance, where a commenter can answer specifically to the post of another commenter. Rather, reviews are stand-alone textual units. One has, therefore, to become a consumer in order to gain any kind of agency on the platform and furthermore, to focus on commodities rather than the social and human communicational fabric that surrounds them. This enfolding of users within a capitalist meaning machine helps explain the paradoxical relationship between the participatory aspect of the Amazon platform and its consumer imperative. The meaning machine does not tightly control what users say, but rather how they come to speak. In short, the platform controls modes of self-actualization that are part of the process of finding meaning. Finding something meaningful, 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 M E A N I N G F U L N E S S A N D S U B J E C T I VAT I O N M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A as explained above, is not simply about assigning meaning to something outside of oneself, it is also about fostering a relationship where one is transformed in relation to an external entity. As such, finding meaningfulness is also a moment of relational self-actualization. I treat differently the books that are most meaningful to me because any interaction I have with them is about reactualizing a meaningful relationship. The interaction is, in that sense, productive and creative. But how are such interactions translated online through a meaning machine? This is where we depart from processes of exploitation and enfolding within a meaning machine and move toward processes of actualization of users through tapping into psychosocial processes of being recognized, valued, and satisfied. The user on the Amazon platform, as we have just seen, is an identified and unique individual: the Amazon homepage greets me every time I visit the platform, even if I have not officially signed into my account using my email and password. The Amazon homepage is unique to my profile and features specific, yet ever-changing recommendations. On the Amazon platform, I become an individual and the meaning machine interacts with me from that perspective rather than, say, the perspective of every user being anonymous or part of a general audience. As we have already seen, the Amazon platform does encourage user participation, but this does not translate into forms of socialization. User interactions with each other are always channeled back to the commodity through various visual and software regimes. The constant reminder of one’s status as a unique individual serves to enhance the pursuit of “personal pleasure” through “psychological gratification” (Lipovetsky 1994, 145) as opposed to, for instance, social status and social legitimacy. And indeed, social ties on the Amazon platform are limited. Even though there are forms of social exchange on the Amazon platform, they only serve as a reinforcement of the users as consumers. Any form of sociality—such as wish lists made available to friends—is exclusively centered on objects to consume: one can only represent oneself to others through discussing or featuring commodities bought and desired. The promise of psychological gratification and personal pleasure is 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 104 105 also reinforced by the recommendation system through the prediction of user desires. The recommendation system becomes an asignifying machine, in that it aims at the actualization of users: it calls users into existence by interpreting behaviors and inscribing them as potential interests and desires for specific commodities. In that sense, there is a “(self) revolutionary and spiritual power of consumer profiling technologies—the ability of hypercustomized products and services to unearth the real self” (Elmer 2004, 7). The process of self-actualization is thus taken over by the meaning machine, and the user is inscribed within a subjectivation process geared toward individual satisfaction. The only way to exist on the Amazon platform is, therefore, through consumption. Network Subjects, or the Crafting of Psychic Life I have introduced the Amazon platform as one of the first instance of contemporary corporate social media platform. This might now seem like a misnomer of sorts, after all, the Amazon platform is fundamentally about online shopping, and the kind of interactions it allows among users is limited. Yet, what makes it a social platform is its reliance on a piece of recommendation software to orchestrate the relationships among users, and between users and cultural commodities such as books. All the popular corporate social media platforms function along the same lines: they pattern and craft relationships among disparate actors, they order a specific world within which users can exist and they define a horizon and rules of meaningfulness. At the same time, each social media platform differs from the other with regard to the horizon of meaningfulness they build, and how they construct users themselves. For instance, Facebook would be a quite different meaning machine than the Amazon platform: individuality is indexed to constant sociality, rather than emerging as a category of its own. Herein lies the power of corporate social media platforms: they are largely indifferent to what users think and say, so long as it does not undermine the law; they care about the patterns of relationality that can emerge out of various behaviors. In the case of the Amazon platform, 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 M E A N I N G F U L N E S S A N D S U B J E C T I VAT I O N M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A the patterns of relationality are about producing a constant flow of commodities that is meaningful to users because it responds and adapts to their behaviors and that of other users. In other words, the recommendation software takes over a large aspect of the construction of sociability: it reconstructs according to a specific logic the social and cultural context within which some commodities are more meaningful than others. The key characteristic of the recommendation software is that it provides a horizon of meaningfulness marked by constant flow and modulation according to minute user behavioral changes. The recommendation software thus externalizes a process of meaningfulness while excluding human agency. Meaningfulness is not something that is decided through conversation and exchange among human actors anymore; it is managed by a meaning machine. This externalization of traditional human processes fosters an altogether different context for understanding the relationship between human actors and the economic system that is capitalism. Matteo Pasquinelli (2011) declared the following about the characteristic of the autonomia/operaismo theories: “From Marx’s fragments on machines to the concept of cognitive capitalism, the school of operaismo has never considered language as the ‘house of Being’ (Heidegger), but on the contrary as new means of production at the centre of contemporary economy.” It perhaps would be more appropriate to say that in the case of corporate social media, language has indeed become a means of production, but that in so doing it aims to shape, orchestrate, and derive value from one’s sense of being and existence. The focus of contemporary forms of capitalism is, of course, on subjectivity—traditionally, the construction of an “I” in answer to power formations that define appropriate social rules, norms, and expectations. Subjectivity, indeed, implies the imposition of subject positions from the outside. What social media do, however, is extract a process internal to a sense of self, which is the search for something meaningful as it takes place along psychosocial lines. This externalization or opening up of the self onto a meaning machine throws into disarray the traditional analytical framework for understanding the relationship 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 106 107 between capitalist power and the self. Therefore, we need to rethink subjectivity as something that is not only imposed from the outside, but rather produced internally—not simply the construction of a sense of “I” according to power formations, but also the tapping into entire field of psychosocial life as it is inhabited by a specific person at a specific time. What we usually understand as subjectivity, then, has to include fantasy, projection, desire, emotions, affects, thoughts, memories, and, as we will see more in depth in the next chapter, processes of recognition and sharing, along with more traditional categories of identity and the embodiment of social status and social norms. The concept of the abstract machine is helpful here to understand the articulation of language with existence. As Guattari explains, the analysis of an abstract machine includes both what he calls a discursive field, which is the field of meaning formation, and the machinic level that provides a process of existentialization. With abstract machines, then, the question switches from being one of representation to what Guattari calls “existential intelligibility” (1985). The abstract machine makes meaning formations possible through a process of existentialization, that is, by giving existence to and actualizing the practices through which meanings can be produced. This existentializing function is what produces users as producers and receivers of meanings. As Guattari (1987) argues, the analysis of the constitution of subjectivities reveals that elements at the level of expression or content do not simply act at a conventional discursive level. Discursive elements become “existential materials” through which subjectivities can be defined. As such, the meanings themselves are not as important as the specific articulations of discourses with other cultural, economic, political, institutional, biological, and technical processes (e.g., recommendation software) to delineate the agency of subjects. In Guattari’s words, the discursive materials serve to enable processes of “auto-referential subjectivity.” That is, discursive materials are used within an assemblage to produce effects of stability and regularity, thus allowing for the shaping of recognizable and identifiable collective and individual subjectivities. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 M E A N I N G F U L N E S S A N D S U B J E C T I VAT I O N M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A This exploration of the process of autoreferential subjectivation, as Guattari further argues, functions alongside the power formations and knowledge processes as originally described by Foucault. While “power formations acts from the outside through either direct coercion or the shaping of a horizon of imagination and knowledge formations articulate subjectivities with techno-scientific and economic pragmatics,” “autoreferential subjectivation” produces a processual subjectivity that reproduces itself through the mobilization of existentializing materials, which include discourses and meaning formations (1987, 3). The meaning machine on the Amazon platform acts as an abstract machine as it works on individuality and targets personal gratification through commodity purchase, rather than, for instance, attaining some kind of social status through consumption. The concept of an autoreferential subjectivity, furthermore, helps us see how social media platforms work from the inside out, that is, through the externalization of the previously human-centered process of making sense, ordering, and finding meaning. Autoreferential subjectivation is a form of feedback loop, in that the process that was first externalized through the meaning machine is reinternalized, albeit with the directions and rhythms imposed on it by the meaning machine. More than being a product or a free laborer or a site of consumption, the user in corporate social media system serves as a central node for recursive processes of subjectivation. Corporate social media do not try to fix the user into definite subject positions. Rather, they attempt to modulate psychosocial fluxes in order to produce desired effects according to specific and ever-changing situations. Rather than trying to fix or freeze individuals into subject positions, corporate social media work through fluidity and microcaptures. This stream of hyperpersonalization serves to constantly reinscribe users into capitalist networks and logics. The meaning machines, therefore, allow for a new kind of connection between user and capitalist logics that takes place through tapping into the psychosocial processes 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 108 109 at stake in the search for meaningfulness: satisfaction, contentment, curiosity, and imagination. What needs to be explored, then, is the consequences of such hooking up of users onto meaning machines, that is, the psychosocial externalities that are produced through these new existential systems. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 M E A N I N G F U L N E S S A N D S U B J E C T I VAT I O N This page intentionally left blank 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Social Networking and the Production of the Self There is a popular French website that could loosely be trans- lated as “Life Sucks” (Vie de merde) where anybody can post humorous anecdotes about embarrassing events in their lives, from saying the wrong thing in front of in-laws to snoring on public transports and so on. One such anecdote published a while back, and which says something about the externalization of the self on social media platforms, read as follows: “Today, I’ve been single for such a long time that my Facebook ads are not about online dating anymore, but about adopting a dog.” I like to think of these instances of being told who one is and what one should do by a nonhuman software apparatus as emblematic of the rise of psychic media. By psychic media, I not only mean media that work directly on and with the human psyche, but also media that act like palm-reader psychics, that scrutinize patterns in order to predict and potentially orient actions. I have talked about this aspect of social media platforms already in the previous chapter and started explaining how social media as industries are about the mining and mobilization of the psyche within corporate networks. In that sense, they are similar to the stereotype we have of the unsavory psychics: they interrogate, scrutinize, and pay attention to all kinds of clues to gain some kind of understanding as to what makes a person act a certain way. Thus, with social media, we encounter the systematic management of the plane of meaningfulness and existence or, put another way, the political economy of psychic 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Chapter 4 M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A life. What I would like to do here is to focus particularly on a type of social media that deals intensively with psychic processes in order to mine the very self of the user: social networking platforms such as Facebook and Google+, to cite the two important social networking sites in the Western world. Social networking sites derive profit out of knowledge about users and their social context. Social context is not only information about the sociodemographic profile of users, but also their social relations. Social relations are usually expressed through “friending” others, anybody from close friends to family, professional relations, and vague acquaintances. Social networking platforms are about developing social individuality. That is, everything on them is filtered according to the specific context of users: who they are, of course, but also and importantly, who they connect with. What is interesting about social networking sites is that they deal primarily with the self, rather than selling commodities or entertainment. Social networking platforms are about working with and producing the self in order to financialize and commodify psychic life. The mechanics of such new mining and mobilization of psychic life require the externalization of the previously internal human process of making sense of oneself onto nonhuman information systems, such as recommendation software. On social networking platforms, it is not only the mediation and interfacing between self and world that is fundamentally redesigned, but also the relationship between self to self: how we account for ourselves, how we reflect on ourselves, and overall, how we define the meaningfulness of our selves and engage in the process of unfolding to life and existence. It is this specific aspect—the relationship of the self to the self that defines selfmeaningfulness—that I would like to start with in this chapter, in order to build a reflection toward the relationship of the self to the world in this chapter and the next. The meaning and meaningfulness of the self is quite different from the meaningfulness of commodities that we saw in the previous chapter. In analyzing the meaning of the self, we leave the world of signification and switch our attention to the process of making sense. As discussed in the introduction, finding meaning, as in making sense, is a process of orientation, gauging the position 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 112 113 of the self in a world with others. While the spatial imagery is strong, it is also useful to think of the temporal dimension of sense making: our remembrances and traces of the past in the present guide our anticipation of the future. What one was and what one might become are essential questions to finding the meaningfulness of the self. As we will further explore, the relationship of the self to the self is one that often takes place through an interpersonal and technical apparatus. In order to think about ourselves, even in the most private circumstances, we need an Other, even if a fictional one or an internal witness, to hear us (Laub 2003). This process of having an Other listen to us is only multiplied on social media, and in particular on social networking platforms such as Facebook. On social networking platforms as well, finding self-meaning is no longer a private, individual process, but one that is externalized onto a meaning machine that handles informational chaos and complexity: the process of listening is done by other users and by a meaning machine that also interprets the self back to the user. As a result, finding the meaning of oneself in the social media context is not experienced as a lengthy and arduous process by a human user, but as instantaneous results that magically come from a technical environment. The figure of the user, then, occupies a paradoxical space: it is both active in telling about its self to others and giving prompts to the meaning machine system, but it also has to integrate externalized moments of meaningfulness that are produced by the recommendation system, just as the user mentioned at the beginning of this chapter has to integrate the suggestion to adopt a dog. The question that arises out of this new user-machine configuration concerns the consequences of these processes of externalization of the production of the self and its reinternalization. The point of this chapter is not to analyze why people engage in acts of self-documentation on social networking platforms; there are many reasons for this. Rather, I want to look at what happens after that first impulse toward self-expression, and how social networking meaning machines make use of and mobilize the desire to see oneself. This requires looking at how social networking architecture mediates the act of producing 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 SOCIAL NET WORKING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A representation of the self and interjects specific socioeconomic interests in the process. What I am interested in, then, is the production of an externalized self-image through corporate meaning machines. Further, I am interested in the moment of reintegration of that machine-made self-image by the user. This will require a better understanding of the refashioning of the psyche within meaning machines. In particular, I want to rephrase these movements of externalization and internalization as the transition from processes of subjectivation to those of individuation. While subjectivation is the work of power formations in formulating possibilities of existence and assigning degrees of meaningfulness to them, individuation is the process of constituting oneself as an individual, as an “I” who acts in the world. These two processes have to be distinguished, even though individuation relies on processes of subjectivation. That is, we become individuals through reacting to the model subjects offered to us. We can accept them, reject them, formulate alternatives to them, and so on. The relationship between subjectivation and individuation is key here, in that it demands an analysis of how this negotiation takes place in technological as well as cultural and economic ways. The Double Mediation of Self-Documentation There has been a massive popularization of self-documentation with the arrival of corporate social networking platforms. Indeed, the cliché is that while lot of people can and do start a written diary or open a blog, many give up on the enterprise after a short while. The sustained effort of keeping a record of one’s life for an online audience is not something that was common for everybody before corporate social networking. The reasons for the popularity of self-documentation have been the subject of a long, unresolved debate. Among the many reasons that are cited, we can find the search for personal gratification against the boredom of daily life, as illustrated by a recent Facebook ad featuring a bored teenager at the family dinner table escaping into the fascinating and lively world of Facebook connections. Linked to this, of course, are the increasingly dire warnings of a culture of networked individualism 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 114 115 (Castells 2005) and narcissism, especially among younger generations, where self-satisfaction and social status come before anything else. Concerns about online addiction are also regularly raised in the mainstream media. Others find it all harmless, arguing that exploring the self and connecting with others is a very normal, mundane process that just happens to now take place online, complementing offline relationships. Of course, social networking sites such as Facebook present themselves as socially and psychologically gratifying. The mix of entertainment and social connection, the coexistence of mass and interpersonal modes of communication, and the blurring lines between public and intimate settings, along with the reliance on automated recommendations and a for-profit logic form the specific context for new ways of accounting for and documenting the self. All these disparate elements present a complex genealogy for social networking. The question of online self-mediation has a long history in the field of Internet and new media studies, especially through explorations of such concepts as identity and performance. The screen interface as the means through which the self can distance and transform itself was noted as one of the main cultural breakthroughs brought about by the rise of virtual culture. In the 1990s and early 2000s, interest lay specifically in the possibility of radically differentiating the physical from the virtual self (Nakamura 2002; Turkle 2011). Text-based games and forums allowed for the creation of radically new identities and made it possible for users to adopt another gender or race. As well, avatar-based games allowed for even more transformation into imagined creatures, for a kind of new play (Silverstone 1999) on identities. This freedom to experience new identities led to mixed results: on the one hand, users reported feeling liberated from the confines of their physical identities and limitations, and empowered to be part of a true public sphere of equal communication (Rheingold 1991); on the other hand, the adoption of a different identity did not automatically dismantle prejudices related to race or gender, but rather often reinforced them (Nakamura 2002). The arrival of corporate social networking sites such as Myspace, Friendster, and Facebook has fundamentally changed 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 SOCIAL NET WORKING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A the relationships between the physical self and the online self. Social networking requires users not to invent new identities and to stick to their real-life self and social relationships. There is no possibility for a radical metamorphosis of the self and the social networking platform is designed as a way to support and augment one’s “real” self. The pressure to have a unique identifier is now common on most corporate social media platforms. As seen in previous chapters, social media try to understand both shared and unique patterns of behaviors among users in order to produce targeted recommendations and establish a detailed profile of each user. Even more common now is a system to track users not only on a specific social media platform, but also across different platforms online. Facebook or Google IDs can now be used to sign in to other platforms, such as Flickr, and every time a user clicks a social media icon on a website, such as the Facebook “Like” or the Google+ button, this information is added to the profile of the user (Gerlitz and Helmond 2013). Cookies and other tracking devices add further information about the surfing behaviors of users. Thus, social media platforms deny the potential radical division between physical and online self and create a single identity, one that is constantly tracked within social media platforms and as it circulates on the Internet. If anything, what we are witnessing with this continuous tracking of the users online is the alienation of user’s experience of their selves online from the kind of “grey” (Werbin 2011) or furtive profiling that is established through constant surveillance. That is, a division is established between a circumscribed sphere of purely expressive agency for users and their externalization and profiling as standing reserves of bits (Barney 1999) that can be mobilized into an array of corporate networks. The user profile always lurks in the background, and can be mobilized at specific times through technocorporate networks. Hence, the current concerns with privacy and control over one’s data. Gray profiling, of course, is key to the formulation of the self-image from meaning machines to users, as we have seen in the previous chapter. From the perspective of the meaning machine, the user gives informational input, and the machine assigns it meaning by linking it to other kinds of information. The image of the self is not a purely cultural or 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 116 117 existential work anymore, but one that is negotiated through informational and corporate networks. There is thus a first division in the self being produced on social networking platforms between the self as profile produced by meaning machines and the kind of self-expression that users of social networking platforms engage in. In other words, the externalization of selfrepresentation as, commonly, a consumer profile onto meaning machine exists alongside other modes of self-documentation. Another piece in the puzzle of social networking is the mediation of self-presentation and the new cultural, aesthetic, social, and intimate practices that accompany it. The rise of information technologies has seen an explosion of forms of networked and multimedia self-documentation, starting with blogs and webcam diaries and continuing to different social networking platforms. From this, new forms of narrativization of the self have appeared. While the written diary of old saw a tension with the paradox of having to rely on a narrator to establish a coherent and stable portrayal of self in the process of discovering itself, new modes of self-documentation play on other formats of self-presentation. Pictures and videos of the self borrow from the visual cultures commercial television entertainment and celebrity culture, while the hypertextuality of most forms of social networking has at times been described as a celebration of the plurality and discontinuity of everyday experiences of a self. More recently, the rise of memes—pictures or video snippets accompanied by pithy text—presents a new networking of self-representation as short sound bites, further deconstructing the image of the self as continuous. With these new forms, to which we could add other forms of short text such as comments as well as the use of buttons such as the Facebook “Like” button, self-documentation is not only about keeping a record of one’s past self, but more importantly, of establishing self-presence to others. These forms of phatic communication thus change the temporality of self-documentation from one that focused on the production of memory and of establishing a sense of continuity to ones that are about the externalization of self-actualization in the present moment. The meaning of the self, then, changes from being based in a continuity of experience to being able to recall oneself to others in the present 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 SOCIAL NET WORKING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A moment. The networking of the self thus adopts the temporality of the networks, and the constant demand for new information rather than much slower practices of self-reflection and introspection. Social networking thus presents itself as a hybrid of different forms of self-documentation: it is mundane just like a phone call; it is also a recorded memory like a diary. The main transformation brought about by social networking is that it deploys meaning machines to keep track of these acts of selfpresence and self-documentation in order to create gray profiles (Werbin 2011) that then form the basis for more recommendations and software-generated possibilities of existence. Not only are there new formats and technologies available for keeping traces of the self, such as hypertext, video, sound, and other multimedia formats, but there is also a new social context for sharing the self. Indeed, while the written diary of old was supposed to be an entirely private and secret exercise in documenting the self, networked forms of self-documentation such as blogs have opened the private realm of introspection onto the public. This intertwining of privacy and publicity has resulted in hybrid forms of connected privacy, found in such places as webcam diaries and blogs (Kitzmann 2004), which display private thoughts and invite audiences to relate to these thoughts in an empathic manner by respecting the integrity of the person disclosing him- or herself. Social networking only increases the publicity of acts of self-documentation to the extent that selfdocumentation is constantly shared with others through automated updates sent to one’s social networks. Indeed, blogs and other forms of online diaries were a mix of public and private in that while accessible to all, they could be kept private from one’s real-life social and family networks through the use of pseudonyms and other forms of anonymity. On the other hand, the documentation of the self through social networking aims to directly target one’s social conditions of existence and how one is perceived by others. The documentation of the self takes place through the constant gaze of and interactions from “real” others. This has given rise to a kind of professionalization of self-documentation practices, where constant awareness of the gaze of others and the potential consequences in one’s social status both on- and offline play an important role in choosing 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 118 119 what to tell and what to show. Thus, there has been a rise of different types of social networking platforms, including some with the purpose of crafting a strictly professional image (LinkedIn, but also Twitter). Furthermore, the social scrutinizing of selfdocumentation has led to a constant management of one’s selfimage and one’s relationships to others. The kind of relational architecture imposed by the social networking platform plays an important role in giving birth to new forms of displaying important relationships. Danah Boyd’s analysis of youth culture online (2006), for instance, revealed how the management of one’s social relationships online serves a crucial role in establishing one’s sense of self in relationships offline. In this context, self-meaning relies on a double mediation: a technical one, but also an interpersonal one. That is, in order for the self to be able to account for and document itself, there needs be a double mediation through a technical and institutional apparatus and through the presence and attention of another. Indeed, even the most private and silent form of selfintrospection requires the presence of an Other to listen and be witness to the self-presentation, even if that presence takes on a spiritual and religious dimension, or that of an imagined audience in the case of the diary form. The work of making sense of the self through the presence of another is epitomized by the practices of confession and psychoanalysis. In both cases, there is the requirement of the presence of a witness to the process of self-representation, a witness that serves to reconnect the self to a moral and religious order in the first case, and to itself and to the world in the other. The presence of the other is a fundamental requirement: it is only through addressing an Other and being listened to that one can engage in the work of selfunderstanding and transformation. The meaning of the self emerges in a relational setting. Furthermore, both the confession and the psychoanalytic session rely on a technical and institutional apparatus (the confessional bench and the couch, respectively) but also specific discursive rules such as that of confessing sins, or in the case of traditional psychoanalysis, dream work and free associations. The setting, rules, and processes for the accounting of the self become techniques of the self (Foucault): they foster the framework by which the self not 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 SOCIAL NET WORKING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A only distances from itself, but also distances from the world, so as to define its failures and its potential. Yet, these instances of self-documentation and of the opening of the self to the scrutiny of a powerful Other take place in a specialized context, outside of everyday life. Everyday and mundane practices of self-documentation and accounting are also extremely common, and also rely on double mediation. The written diary and its imaginary audience immediately come to mind. As Kittler (1996) recalls, writing technology brings with it the capacity to preserve a past self, but through the very abstract means of language. By contrast, analog technologies allowed for the recording of perceptual experiences of the self—what one looked or sounded like. Barthes in particular has focused in length on the photograph as ghostly irruption of the past in the present, which he described as punctum, as what pierces through the present. Thus, there are multiple practices of self-documentation that have been popularized by media technologies. These new practices, furthermore, are not only private practices of self-introspection, but also social practices of displaying the self to others. These more social forms of selfdocumentation are, for instance, writing letters and postcards and phone conversations with friends and family. Giving news about oneself and describing one’s everyday actions is not something that just appeared with social networking. Rather, it has been a technically mediated practice for a long time and since the broad popularization of communication technologies. Selfdocumentation can also be ephemeral, and not about constituting a past self, but rather about establishing a sense of self to other in the present, as in the case of phone conversations, for instance. Self-documentation can thus be a social act—one that is shaped depending on who is the other that one describes oneself to. The memoirs and its broad audience, for instance, differ significantly in mode of self-presentation from the epistolary exchange between two close friends. Furthermore, the technical mediation of self-presentation changes what the represented self is: what can be recorded of the self and what is left out have a direct influence on the understanding of oneself. This goes back to the posthermeneutic argument that Kittler put forward: how we understand ourselves, who we are and our meaning and 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 120 121 meaningfulness is dependent on specific discourse networks, that is, on the articulation of specific media technologies for communicating and recording with the specific cultural and social norms about how one should conduct oneself. What emerges from all these new practices of self-documentation is a transformation of the question of the represented self. Self-documentation is a practice of self-creation and introspection, but also of self-idealization. There are numerous instances of diary writers forgetting the more unsavory aspects of their lives, effectively editing their selves. A form of editing or tailoring is also present on social networking platforms due to the constant gaze and mobilization of “real” others as witnesses of one’s self. The represented self and the kind of self-awareness that accompany it are thus the product not only of what the “I” wants to say about itself, but also of the demand for fitting in with social norms and expected behaviors. Furthermore, new forms of self-representations are also fostered by specific social media architectures, including visual interfaces, expressive and relational possibilities, and corporate and network demands for constant self-disclosure. Thus, in talking about self-documentation, we inevitably encounter the question of power and knowledge, and have to see how the practice of self-documentation turns into processes of both subjectivation and individuation. Troubling the Account of the Self The work of accounting for and documenting the self on social network platforms has thus undergone profound changes with the arrival of social media. That being said, what we have seen above—the work of self-representation—is only one aspect of the production of the self online. Self-representation, as we have seen, is both an active gesture originating from a human user to keep a record of one’s actions, and also, with the arrival of corporate social media, an automated recording of the minutiae of user behaviors to create a gray portrait of the user. In this section, I am less interested in the representational dimensions of the self than the experience of the meaningfulness of its existence. Or, to put it another way, it is not the meaning of the self as a series of fixed portraits that we should only focus 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 SOCIAL NET WORKING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A on, but also the ways in which the self comes to make sense of itself in the world, that is, the ways in which the self organizes and understands the experience of its own unfolding to the world. In other words, the goal of self-documentation is not simply about who we are, but also how to be. This is another way to express the shift from signification to asignification that we saw in chapter 2. The articulation of meaning with existence in the case of self-documentation is a common one: selfreflection is both turned toward the past (who I was) and to the present and future (how I am and how I should be). To go back to the example at the beginning of the chapter, what we have with corporate social networks is an articulation of selfrepresentation and the ways in which we come to make sense of our experiences of ourselves. That is, the single user on Facebook might be using the platform as a way to record his past actions for himself and other people and, at the same time, the meaning machine offers him a trajectory of becoming. The user encounters an external existential dynamic that hijacks the work of making sense of the self and injects in it economic concerns. Thus, social networking sites introduce an externalization of the process of self-production or making sense of the self; it is not only the user who gets to decide on his or her trajectory of becoming, but the meaning machine as well. Thus, what needs to be studied is the externalization of self-production through meaning machine, and the ways in which this externalization is in turn integrated back into the self as a sense of existence. How one should be requires a reflection of the interpenetration of the external apparatus and the internal experience of one’s self. The psyche is an important concept in this regard, as it constitutes the field of existential experience. As Berardi (2009b) puts it, the psyche or soul is whatever turns organic matter into a body—it is the plane through which making sense of the self and the world takes place. The psyche thus becomes a terrain of investigation in that the focus should be on the interfacing between the intrapsychic world and the interpsychic one— not only the experience of oneself, but also the experience of oneself with other humans and nonhumans, both consciously and unconsciously. Such interpenetration can be seen in the shift from subjectivation (the production of subject according 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 122 123 to power formations) to individuation (the sense of “I” as it unfolds to itself and to others in the world). What I argue here is that social networking is not only about fostering processes of subjectivation, but also of injecting itself into processes of individuation. Psychoanalysis opens the way for analyzing how the psyche reacts to processes of subjectivation in both conscious and unconscious ways. Indeed, the psychoanalytical approach could be described as the inquiry into how the psychic landscape creates specific modes of individuation in its experience of the world, that is, how the “I” is formulated in both conscious and unconscious ways and through the resonance in the psyche of past and present experiences. Autonomist work on immaterial labor and semiocapitalism draws extensively on psychoanalytical approaches, particularly alternative and critical approaches, such as Guattari’s schizoanalysis and the antipsychiatry movement. In that regard, Autonomist theories differ in their use of psychoanalytical theories, as they do not attempt to explain issues through set frameworks, such as the Freudian or Lacanian frameworks, but make use of psychoanalytical theories as part of a conceptual toolbox. The critical approach developed through Autonomist theories puts the study of the psyche in specific socioeconomic contexts. First, it does not aim, unlike Freud’s original project, to formulate an abstract and universal theory of the psyche but to examine the psyche within context-specific situations (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Second, the Autonomists share a deep suspicion of the psychoanalytical and psychiatric establishment’s relationships and support of dominant power formations, particularly in the historical treatment of perceived forms of deviance. Third, there is an interest in taking psychoanalysis outside of the confines of the clinical setting and to confront it with social, economic, and technical forces. Overall, the study of the study of psyche cannot be a neutral endeavor—it is also a political one and has to be involved in the raising of critical awareness, resistance, and change at both the social and individual level. This type of critical approach to the study of the psyche is found in Guattari’s work, especially in Molecular Revolution in Brazil, which is a series of essays, interviews, and transcripts 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 SOCIAL NET WORKING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A from workshops partly about the importance of individual and collective psychic processes for understanding political change. Guattari makes a useful differentiation between three concepts: subjectivation, individuation, and singularization. While subjectivation is a set of tactics employed by dominant powers in order to create hierarchies and justify modes of existence, individuation—and here Guattari follows the work of Simondon (1989) on the topic—is the process by which an “I” recognizes itself as such, as embodied within a specific context. Collective individuation takes place in the formulation of a “we” that recognizes itself in specific ways of being. It is important to keep in mind that individuation never ends (Simondon 1989): becoming an “I” is a process that takes place in a social, biological, political, technical, and economic context that itself is in flux. Furthermore, as Stiegler’s exploration of Simondon shows (1998), both individual and collective individuation are linked: one cannot happen without the other. The “I” is dependent on the “we” as, for instance, in the earlier section of this chapter, where the production of a sense of self relied on an Other as a listener and witness. Finally, singularization is the dynamics through which the internalization of dominant values fails, and turns to other values (Guattari 2008, 67). Singularization is the moment when breakdowns in both the processes of subjectivation and individuation lead to creativity in formulating new horizons of existence. As such, it is not contained by subjectivation and individuation, even though it reworks these dynamics. As Genosko (2002, 129) puts it, singularization is a self-organizing process that at its most basic level concerns bringing together ensembles of diverse components (material/semiotic; individual/collective), that is, assemblages . . . that deploy their own intrinsic references (inventing relations with the outside as well), and the analysis of their effects (especially transformations) on the formation of subjectivity beyond the individuated subject and prefabricated versions of him/her; for Guattari, “the assemblage of enunciation ‘exceeds’ the problematic of the individuated subject, the consciously delimited thinking monad, faculties of the soul (apprehension, will) in their classical sense.” 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 124 125 Singularization is a reworking of the heterogeneous assemblages mentioned in the previous two chapters in order to imagine and create new possibilities of existence. Singularization, therefore, is highly relevant to critical awareness and transformation both at the individual level and the collective level. Indeed, singularization is linked with the formation of multitudes (Hardt and Negri 2005)—new social formations that create and operate in the world through singularization against dominant powers. The relationships between subjectivation, individuation, and singularization are complex. Subjectivation and individuation are in a tense relation: subjectivation is the attempt to shape the possibilities of individuation, while individuation maps itself in reaction to processes of subjectivation. Individuation can and does exceed processes of subjectivation both in conscious and unconscious ways. Singularization is the remapping and transformation of the components of subjectivation and individuation. The question, then, is, how do the relationships between subjectivation, individuation, and singularization play out on social networking platforms? As we have seen in the previous chapter, there is a kind of subjectivation at play on corporate social media platforms with a constant prod toward consumption through targeted advertising and recommendations. However, such forms of consumer subjectivation are but one aspect of what is taking place on corporate social media. Subjectivation also means being invited and encouraged to fit in the logics of social networking platforms through continuous status updates, accepting recommendations, clicking on links, and so on through continuous use of the platform. Such good behaviors are usually rewarded: if I invite other people to use a social media platform, then I can get bigger storage for my account or credit for purchases, and other perks. On Facebook, the more active users will see their posts ranked more important to other users in their networks. Increasingly as well, an active Facebook or Twitter user—one who not only posts a lot, but whose posts are commented on or retweeted—can receive a social score through a third party. Klout, for instance, ranks the “social influence” of users, indicates ways to improve one’s score, and offers “perks” to the high 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 SOCIAL NET WORKING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A rankers in the form of products and discounts. Furthermore, Klout scores have been used to select opinion leaders to promote special events such as commercial product launches and so on (Gerlitz 2013). There is thus a financial value attached to the self, and the corporate social networking models articulate this financial value with self-meaningfulness. Conversely, failing to document oneself on social media platforms usually leads to corrective reminders. For instance, not logging in to Twitter or Facebook means receiving emails on what one is missing right now. Subjectivation takes place when we are invited and encouraged to adopt specific modes of usership—ways of expressing ourselves, ways of valuing the informational logic of the platform and its recommendation system, ways of relating to others. Subsequently, one of the biggest perks of being a “good” user is to be recognized and seen by the rest of the network: the more I contribute on Facebook and interact with peers and accept lack of control over my own data, the more prominently my contributions will be featured, therefore, the more popular I will become; the more I review products on other social media platforms such as Amazon.com, the more I will be presented as a trustworthy contributor. This reward system allows for a sense of empowerment of user, of greater possibilities, and is in keeping with Foucault’s definition of power as productive rather than entirely repressive: the subject, in this case the social media user, has to conform to rules of self-expression in order to have the possibility of enriching him- or herself. The meaningfulness of the self is established as the possibility of self-actualization through stronger connectivity, reputation, and capacity to influence others. What the self is, and how meaningful it can be is thus a process heavily shaped by the social media platform. Thus, what is different from other forms of self-documentation, and much more enticing about social networking platforms, is that they promise immediate satisfaction: through a constant stream of updates and recommendations, they create a world where there is always the potential for something meaningful to be given, found, and delivered. In short, the platform deals away with chaos and complexity; there are always new connections to be made, new things, products, people to look forward to meeting, as 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 126 127 long as one meets the demands of networked subjectivation. Social networking keeps away the uncertainties and struggles to connect to others and understands oneself by developing a much simpler informational and corporate logic of how to make sense of the world. Thus, the process of self-documentation is not simply about the rules of self-representation, but also about the adoption of specific modes of existence. Norms of expression, discourse, and communication as well as economic incentives build models of the good user, whose constant selfdocumentation leads to gratification. The more I update my profile, the promise goes, the more satisfied I will be. Not only will I have the kind of information that corresponds to me, but the social-networking meaning machine will also ensure that I get the most out of my connections as well. The meaning machine will understand what kind of image of “me” I want to present out there, and will help share it to others and therefore mark it as meaningful. Furthermore, this image of myself can be coupled with corporate interests, but not only this, consider the kind of attention the social media economy is attracting from the world of professional politics, where attracting opinion leaders online has been a common practice since the beginning of social media (Elmer, Langlois, and McKelvey 2012). These twin processes of subjectivation—the subjectivation of the acting self and the represented self—also need to be integrated back into the user. That is, subjectivation emanates from a context, from existing power formation. This process of internalization, in turn, is a part of a dynamic of individuation and potential singularization—when “I” recognize myself as an individual who both differs and yet is connected to others in specific ways. In other words, we need to operate a transition from subjectivation to individuation in a similar manner to the one that Foucault (1987, 1988b) started when undertaking an exploration of the “care of the self” and “techniques of the self” and their relationships with an ethics of the self. Foucault’s move away from the study of the relationship between the subject and power to a focus on the care of the self indicates a focus on the uneasy interface between subjectivation and individuation on one hand, and between individuation and singularization on the other. The awareness of one’s 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 SOCIAL NET WORKING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A unfolding to life can lead to a critical reflection and the imagination of new possibilities. In this case, finding the meaning of the self is an ethical endeavor, which can open the door toward a critical reflection on modes of subjectivation. That is, it is in the articulation of individuation with singularization that the critique of subjectivation and the imagining of other possibilities can happen. In so doing, there is a sense of autonomy that reappears, not in the modern sense of a free and unfettered individual, but in the sense of a capacity for self-reflection. Giving an account of oneself, then, can participate in an ethics of self-definition. In accounting for oneself, one can engage in a process of differentiation from dynamics of subjectivation This is where the notion of the subject becomes more problematic. If subjectivation is the strategic shaping of possibilities of existence by dominant forces, then, from an ethical perspective, we need to interrogate how individuation—the capacity to recognize oneself as an “I” acting in the world—is influenced by the process of subjectivation. The concordance between processes of subjectivation and self-recognition is not a given. There are, of course, moments when such concordance occurs. Louis Althusser (2006) examined these moments of interpellation, where one is hailed as a specific subject by the dominant power and immediately recognizes him- or herself as such. For instance, in being hailed by a policeman, one might recognize oneself as already guilty, or a student might recognize him- or herself as deficient when criticized by an authoritarian teacher figure. But the relationship between subjectivation and the construction of an “I” is often troubled. Giving an account of oneself is, as Judith Butler (2005) reminds us, a reflective struggle with subject positions and a practice through which we become aware of dominant modes of subjectivation. One’s singularity, which emerges out of the struggle of taking responsibility for one’s actions, potentially goes against the imposition of subject positions. Here, the relationship of the self to the self becomes both an ethical and political process. In establishing singularity, the self accounting for itself can become aware of what is not in itself defined by power formations. This is not to say that there is a predefined independent and free modern individual, 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 128 SOCIAL NET WORKING 129 A critical analysis of subjection involves: (1) an account of the way regulatory power maintains subjects in subordination by producing and exploiting the demand for continuity, visibility and place; (2) recognition that the subject produced as continuous, visible, and located is nevertheless haunted by an inassimilable remainder, a melancholia that marks the limits of subjectivation [my italics]; (3) an account of the iterability of the subject that shows how agency may well consist in opposing and transforming the social terms by which it is spawned. (1997, 29) Butler further examines the “inassimilable remainder” in the Psychic Life of Power through a comparison between the psyche and the subject: “The psyche, which includes the unconscious, is very different from the subject: the psyche is precisely what exceeds the imprisonment effects of the discursive demand to inhabit a coherent identity, to become a coherent subject” (1997, 86). Giving an account of oneself is a complex process of not only becoming to the world through taking responsibility and accounting for one’s actions in the past. The act of self-documentation is classically a serious endeavor of figuring out in the present moment what one has been and what one might become: it involves a temporality, a specific relation of the past, the present, and the future as a mode of orientation of oneself. The narrative of the self offered is often a fictional creation to give coherence to a series of events and self-states, an effort of the imagination, and perhaps even a lie to give stability by inventing some kind of order to explain one’s behavior and thoughts. As Butler reminds us (1997, 39), the relationship of the self to the self is further obfuscated by the radical otherness of language, both as an abstraction that cannot possibly fully account for the entirety of even a single meaningful experience, and because language is never one’s own language, but the language defined by power and knowledge formations. Giving an 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 but rather the opening up of a field of subjectivation, where social forces and psychic processes these social forces try to mold encounter one another. Judith Butler summarizes this new approach to subjectivity as follows: 130 M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A Individuation, Singularization, and Recognition The work of Bernard Stiegler is key to understanding the relationship between social networking platforms and individuation. In particular, Stiegler focuses on digital technologies as a form of mnemotechnologies, that is, technologies that allows for “the externalization of living memory onto inorganic substrate” (Thomas 2013). Mnemotechnologies are not simply supports for memory; their capacities extend beyond any individual and collective human capacity to remember. Much like Innis’s, McLuhan’s, and Kittler’s explorations of communication and media technologies, Stiegler (2011) argues that mnemotechnologies not only extend memory but transform and construct it, and with it the processes of not only remembering and recalling (retention), but also the capacity to be in the present (attention) and to project into the future (protention). All three dimensions of retention, attention, and protention are central to individuation and indeed, mnemotechnologies organize the relationship between psychic or individual individuation (I) and collective individuation (we). Contemporary mnemotechnologies such as social media differ from previous mnemotechnologies in that they are in the business of profiting from processes of individuation. Here, it is not simply the formulation of dynamics of subjectivation that is at stake, but a technical intervention within processes of individuation themselves. It is helpful at this point to delve into the processes of retention, attention, and protention as they are transformed by social media. Retention includes not only memory and remembering, but also forgetting and discarding; it is the capacity to imagine out of the past. In that sense, retention is essential to learning. What is kept and not kept, remembered and forgotten, is going to influence the kind of “I” and the “we” that is produced through self-documentation on social networking platforms. The commodification of memory as data to be mined, sold, and exchanged has profoundly reorganized processes of retention, 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 account of oneself always requires a struggle with social norms and orders, and is also inherently a work of individuation, and potentially a work of singularization. 131 that is, how we make use of the past to make sense of the present. In particular, issues surrounding retention and social media have surfaced in relation to private data ownership and the use of user data to create profits, as explained in the previous chapter. As such, the externalization of retention processes through social media allows for its monetization and financialization. Hence, the gray commodified profiles of the users mentioned earlier in this chapter that create a kind of double of the user. At the collective level, the commodification of retention has allowed for corporate interests to further invade the social: as we have seen, for instance, friendships and relationships are financially appraised as reputation scores. The transformation of attention through digital media has been a popular topic in recent years. N. Katherine Hayles (2008) distinguishes between two kinds of attention. On the one hand, deep attention is the capacity for sustained focus on an object, for example, a book or a complex mathematical problem. Hyperattention, on the other hand, is the capacity to switch rapidly to different competing tasks. In that sense, it is reminiscent of multitasking. Digital technologies facilitate the rise of hyperattention: a common web page on any social media platform contains many different kinds of information, all competing for user attention, not to mention that commonly there are multiple windows open and platforms being used at the same time. Think, for instance, about how on Facebook there are not only stories to be read, but also advertising, private messages, instant chat, and so on. Protention, or the capacity to envisage what could or should happen next is also fundamentally transformed with the arrival of digital technologies. On the one hand, there is an externalization of protention onto the meaning machine, just like the example Facebook ad cited at the beginning of this chapter: the recommendation system organizes what happens next. At the same time, the notion “future” itself is transformed, in that constant prediction and premediation (Grusin 2010) negate the idea of the future itself. That is, the idea of the future as what is not, or rather, what is left open to possibilities is denied by techniques of prediction, premediation, and sometimes preemption. The capacity to imagine oneself in the future is therefore 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 SOCIAL NET WORKING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A radically transformed into a certainty of being further folded into corporate meaning machines. Individuation, which relies on technologies to remember and imagine from the past in order to focus on the present and project in the future, is thus fundamentally refashioned through digital technologies so much so that, as Stiegler puts it, “there is an inversion in the relation between life and media: the media now relates life each day with such force that this ‘relation’ seems not only to anticipate but ineluctably to precede, that is, to determine, life itself” (Stiegler 2008b, 80–81). Corporate social media participate in this trend by managing life, or the field of existence; they inject processes not only of subjectivation, but also by dictate modes of individuation. Thus, social media hold a new kind of power; they are more than just means of communication. This is why, perhaps, giving up social media is not quite the same thing as giving up TV or video games. What is at stake is more than entertainment or information gathering; social media allow us to carry on living: they provide a platform for experiencing friendship, love, utter boredom, and loneliness in no particular order, in short, the very stuff of life, that is, the meaningfulness of the self with others. Without them as a constant presence on our computers, tablets, or cell phones, we would be missing out, quite literally, on our lives. In that sense, social media do not simply act at the level of memory in the processes of individuation; they also offer what could be called modes of recognition. The concept of recognition comes from relational psychoanalysis and was developed mainly in the United Kingdom and North America, although it is influenced and related to the work of Laplanche (1999). Relational psychoanalysis, as the name suggests, looks at the centrality of the experience of the Other for the development of the psyche. It puts forward the argument that one cannot individuate without an Other, be it an individual or collective Other. It is, in that sense, similar to the concept of individual and collective individuation developed by Simondon and Stiegler. While the idea of the other can be related to the process of subjectivation—an Other can encourage or order me to fit within a specific subject position—relational psychoanalysis puts forward the primacy of the Other for the capacity to 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 132 133 both individuate and to experience singularization. What this means is that only by being recognized by an Other can I individuate. This argument was advanced in a study of how infants and young children come to develop a sense of “I,” an experience of themselves as both receiver of experience and originator of action (Bowlby 2005; Winnicott 1992). The study found that the mother figure recognizes the infant as an individual before the infant is able to recognize him- or herself as such, and that this recognition enables the infant’s process of formulating an “I.” Furthermore, recognition involves also a process by which the infant or the child learns to recognize otherness and can subsequently develop a sense of self in a world with others. This process of recognition requires attempts by the child to control and destroy the Other, for instance, the mother figure. The capacity for the mother figure to “survive” attempts of destruction and negation (e.g., by not reacting with violence to the demands of the child) allows the child to accept and recognize the existence of separate others. In that sense, recognition is a basis for relational ethics and sociability, and it articulates together both individual and collective individuation. That is, recognition is the process through which one can individuate in relation to others. Conversely, infants and children abandoned and deprived of this process of recognition cannot develop the capacity to individuate and suffer strong psychological and developmental challenges. To this, I would add that the possibility of singularization is tremendously lessened if one has not had the experience of specific forms of healthy recognition. From the point of view of the child, being recognized by an Other reality that one cannot control is what allows for the development of the paradoxical capacity to differentiate oneself while maintaining a bond of sameness with the Other (Benjamin 1998b). Mutual recognition, where two or more individuals recognize each other, relies on this paradoxical relation so that “in every experience of similarity and subjective1 sharing, there must be enough difference to create the feeling of reality, that a degree of imperfection ‘ratifies’ the existence of the world” (Benjamin 1988, 47). That is, the capacity to cocreate the world is the basis of transformation. Relational psychoanalysis helps further understand the 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 SOCIAL NET WORKING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A critical political and social dimension of recognition as the relational process through which the making sense of oneself and of the world can happen in an ethical manner, without a cycle of domination and submission (Benjamin 1988). As such, the process of mutual recognition involves inevitable breakdowns and repairs; it is not about perfect understanding, but it is about the tense navigation between sameness and difference. It is through these breakdowns and repairs that fragile encounters among others can take place, and through it the sharing of a meaningful world where both individual and collective individuation can take place and that the possibility of singularization appears. Thus, recognition, or the process of experiencing our meaningfulness to others, and mutual recognition, the process of experiencing the meaningfulness of a “we,” is not only a psychological process, but also an ethical and critical one. In that sense, these can be used to assess popular social networking model, in that it makes it possible to focus on how users are recognized, or fail to be recognized by a meaning machine, and on how meaning machines shape processes of mutual recognition. Psychic Externalities How, then, are we recognized or failed to be recognized by social networking platforms and how does this further transform processes of individuation and singularization? A caveat is needed here: there are more than one dynamic of recognition at work on social networking platforms. Indeed, the meaning machine engages in acts of recognition, but recognition also takes place among users. The kind of failure of recognition among users is usually symptomatic of a cycle of domination and submission. The common complaints and worries about social networking sites are usually about the kind of verbal and emotional abuse that can surface through them: trolling, hate speech, cyberstalking and harassment, and online bullying, among others. These types of failures of recognition are being examined from psychological, educational, and legal perspectives. Here, I will focus on the kind of failures of recognition that are symptomatic of the meaning machines on social networking platforms. The promise of social networking platforms 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 134 135 is that of immediate satisfaction through constant connectivity and engagement with others and with a recommendation system: the “I” is formulated in a connected environment and through the constant gaze and probes of others. On that level, it might seem like the perfect conditions for mutual recognition. Yet as we have seen, only certain modes and acts of individuation are allowed on social networking platforms: only certain ways of being and engaging with the “I.” A silent introspection, for instance, is interpreted as missing out on what is happening. As well, only specific acts of recognition are allowed: empathic silence, for instance, cannot exist on social networking platforms that interpret the absence of communication as lessened reputational impact. Think for instance, about the death of a loved one announced on Facebook. The lack of immediate reaction is already preinterpreted as not caring, rather than being in shock, or being so emotionally overwhelmed one cannot say anything for the moment. Anything that cannot be expressed through connectivity—listening carefully, pondering, reflecting, and so on—becomes a negative and something to be avoided. There is thus a transformation in the rhythms of recognition: pauses are not allowed, and thus, the cycle of breakdowns and repairs necessary for the deepening of mutual recognition is negated. The disconnections that are integral to the shared process of finding meaningfulness are thus discarded. The consequences of the refashioning of individuation and recognition on social media might be difficult to see at first because we are now encouraged to judge the success of our communicational environment by focusing solely on the avoidance of boredom and immediate satisfaction and gratification. The belief promoted by social media is that the relational process should be smooth, fast, and ever changing. The Facebook family dinner advertising mentioned earlier in the chapter illustrates this belief: it puts forward the notion that one can find meaningfulness only if one receives a constant stream of entertainment and updates. Boredom is to be avoided at all cost, even if it means negating specific type of relational bonds, such as family ones. Yet, the Facebook ad is not simply about putting two relational settings—friends versus family—against each other. It also transforms the idea of the meaningfulness of the 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 SOCIAL NET WORKING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A self with others by imposing on it the constant unfolding of updates and acts of phatic communication. The narrowing down of the meaningfulness of the self and of others can be further explored through the idea of psychic externalities. In economics, externalities refer to the consequences of an economic process for third parties originally uninvolved in the process. Externalities can be positive or negative. An example of negative externalities is the pollution and waste that is the by-product of industrial development. It is interesting in turn to adapt the concept of externalities to the context of immaterial labor and cognitive capitalism. The mining of the psyche through the management of subjectivation, individuation, and recognition on social media produces negative externalities as well, but at the level of the psyche, not the environment. Here again, psychoanalytical approaches are useful because they make it possible to transition away from material consequences to psychic ones. Negative psychic externalities are the byproducts of the mining of the psyche, of the “soul at work” to borrow from Franco Bifo Berardi (2009b). Indeed, Berardi has been at the forefront of looking at the psychic consequences of semiocapitalism in terms of a global increase in anxiety, stress, paranoia, and depression. For Berardi, the inhuman speed of global informational capital provokes psychic derailments: the psyche is unable to sustain the tension and stress of having to adapt to the speed of instantaneous information exchange. A now classic example of this is the kind of stress put on workers equipped with mobile phones and who are under pressure to immediately answer work demands at all time. Heather Menzies made a similar point in No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life (2005), where she examines the effects of the contraction of time in daily life through the rise of communication technologies within capitalist societies. Much like computers were at first touted for enabling a paper-free environment but paradoxically led to the consumption of more paper, social media foster lassitude, frustration, and loneliness. Such a point is also made in Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together (2012). Turkle’s book is often dismissed as yet another pessimistic account of new media, but it is one of the first ethnographies of social media use among young adults. The book raises an important point: 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 136 137 through social media use, we expose our vulnerabilities—our need for connection, for recognition, for meaningfulness—to a technological apparatus that has instilled itself as that which can make sense of the world for us. The problem is that connection to the world in order to discover one’s place in the world is not the same as network connectivity: the constant linking that happens through social media gives very little space to pauses, constructive breakdowns, and the creation of new ways of seeking reassurance from the world. Depression, isolation, and loneliness, Turkle argues, are the negative consequences of an environment that dictates the speed and modalities of engagement with others. The contradiction of social networking sites in the experience of the self has recently been further reinforced by a psychological study of the subjective well-being of a sample of Facebook users, and the realization that there is a decline in feelings of well-being the more the Facebook is used, regardless of how it is used (Kross et al. 2013). Psychic externalities are thus more than breakdowns—they are failures that point out the limits of corporate meaning machines on social media platforms. And last but not least, engagement with social media platforms can lead to an alienation of the self from the self. The common negative (and true?) clichés about social networking sites, especially ones that rely heavily on pictures such as Instagram, is that they encourage shallow superficiality rather than authenticity, that it is only a part of the self presented that fits with the demands of connectivity. In other words, the process of individuation is entirely folded into the process of subjectivation. In psychoanalytical terms, such process is referred to as the creation of a false self (Winnicott 1982). A false self is created to fit into external pressures that one cannot control and the true self—the self that feels alive, spontaneous, authentic, and capable of creativity, of forging meanings and finding meaningfulness, of transforming itself—is buried. The idea that there is a “true” self might seem at odds with the arguments developed so far, in that the self is an unfinished entity or, rather, a process of becoming, but this notion of true self should not be seen from an essentialist perspective. Rather, the idea of the true self is the self that is able to account for itself, the self that is aware of its capacity for 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 SOCIAL NET WORKING M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A singularization, for not only rejecting norms, but also for creating other norms. The true self is the product of the dance of recognition explained above: the capacity to negotiate sameness and difference while at the same time formulating the relationship between “I” and “we.” In other words, the true self is the attempt to express oneself in order to be seen and heard by others, while the false self is the attempt to express oneself in order to manipulate or fit into the perceptions that others already have of me. In the case of social networking sites, the false self can easily become the connected self that is put forward, while the more complex or fragile or nonconformist aspects of one’s experience are buried. The kind of photographic selfpresentation that is popular these days—that is, the selfie—and its reliance on poses derived from celebrity culture would correspond to the putting forward of a false self. Winnicott (1960) argues that while a false self is a common occurrence, it brings about psychological problems if it becomes one’s dominant mode of living in the world. The predominance of the false self and the incapacity to formulate and craft a true self, to find modes of spontaneity and authenticity or, in other words, singularization, leads to a pervasive feeling of emptiness, a sense of a depleted life along with the rise of mental health issues such as depression, anguish, stress, and paranoia. In that sense, social networking tends to negate the possibility of singularization, that is, the crafting of one’s sense of autonomy and agency in the definition of the meaningfulness of the self with and through others. I focused in this chapter on the moment of internalization of external self-image and its psychosocial consequences. The moment of reinternalization of the self, the moment when the process of self-reflection leads to deciding what is “me” and what is not “me,” who “I” am and importantly, how I should and ought to be is key for thinking about an ethics of social media, and beyond this about how social media could be used beyond the corporate motive to fulfill crucial critical roles. As potential tools for self-reflection, as means to critically reflect and engage in life, social media platforms should be subject to some kind of scrutiny beyond being celebrated for providing unfettered expression. Again, it is not what can be said that is 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 138 139 crucial here, but rather how we experience, reflect, and change our unfolding to the world, to others and to ourselves. Rather than the content of our search for meaningfulness, it is the process of making sense that takes the upper hand. Rather than merely words, then, we can start looking at rhythms and patterns to think about what constitutes meaningfulness. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 SOCIAL NET WORKING This page intentionally left blank 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Being in the World E very few years, Apple comes up with a new version of its immensely popular iPhone. And every few years, the new capacities of the phone are showcased in sleek TV ads that celebrate a culture of connectivity by design. The iPhone, in these ads, bypasses human limits and avoids communication failures: it makes for perfect understanding among users. A particular new iPhone feature comes to my mind to illustrate the promise of perfect communication: when its camera was made bidirectional, capable of facing the user or the world out there. The phone experience, then, was not limited to a voice far away, but augmented to include physical presence: people could actually see each other. In one ad, a deaf and mute husband uses the iPhone camera to communicate via sign language with his faraway wife: it is a new communicative magic that takes place, one that erases physical limitations and promotes inclusiveness. In another ad, a teenager, when asked the question, “Are you going to say you’re sorry?” by a sympathetic mother, silently says “no” to her screen with her head, while her facial and body expressions say, “But I want to.” Failures, misunderstandings, and silences are avoided and these visions of perfected understanding and connectivity are multiplied in the ads, which weave seamlessly all kinds of relationships: husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, unborn babies and future parents, friends, sisters, and so on. The technology makes it possible to experience community, to find order, safety, and meaning in the world and with each other. Networked technologies, the 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Chapter 5 M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A ads suggest, are technologies of care and not just social good: they enrich, secure, hold, and protect, all the while allowing for the pure exchange of love. As sappy as these ads might seem for the cynical scholar, the overstated promise of perfect communication and understanding is something that should be further examined. In these ads, we find an original definition of communication: as Peters recalls, the original Latin word “communicare” means to “impart, share, make common” (1999, 7). In that sense, communication is about building worlds together. The work to do is to examine how this ideal of world building is constructed and changed through social media technologies. Beyond the problematic rhetoric of perfect communication as absence of failure, these ads suggest that the building of common worlds involves an ethics of understanding and listening, of being able to see and navigate the affective contradictions and emotional complexities expressed in an act of communication. A common world is not something that is imposed by a speaker, and it is not something that can just be produced through rational discussion: it requires a personal involvement in wanting to understand an Other, in engaging in the ethics of mutual recognition. In the previous chapter, we saw how making sense of oneself is, paradoxically, a process that cannot happen in solipsistic isolation. An Other has to be present, even in imagination, to witness and recognize the process of making sense. I also explained in the previous chapter how this dependence on the Other has deep psychological roots: one simply cannot become oneself without an external presence to recognize and enable this process. Relationality is at the heart of an ethics of becoming. Indeed, we have traveled very far from meaning as signification. Finding meaning is not about content, although it relies on it, but it is more importantly about patterns and rhythms of relationality: I am free to engage and struggle with defining myself and my place in the world only when I am allowed to do so by others. The relational process of being witnessed and recognized takes on many shapes, from emphatic gestures to silent listening. Once we understand that making sense requires this process of recognition by an Other, 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 142 143 we have established a pillar of sorts by which we can critically assess social media platforms. As we have seen, furthermore, the external Other does not simply refer to other human actors, but also to technological ones, and corporate social media platforms have taken on a central role in allowing for the hijacking of the process of recognition to embed them within specific corporate interests. In so doing, one of the main issues with corporate social media is that even though they allow for free expression, they fail at offering a right context for recognition. Social media require constant participation, constant update, and constant acts of presence: in so doing, they bypass the continuous movement from failures to repairs that is at the basis of healthy processes of recognition. This leads to the main focus of this chapter: the relationship between meaning and listening, and specifically how social media platforms could be rethought as spaces of recognition. So far, I have been focusing on meaning through the production of signs and through acts of making sense, of speaking about oneself and about the world. In this chapter, I want to focus on the other essential component for meaning to appear: the process of witnessing and listening. Meaning making is not a solitary activity; it is social, cultural, relational, and technological. Most research into meaning making recognizes this fact, but it tends to focus on the positive side of meaning making, or rather its active aspects: sign production, visible engagement and response, and so on. Conversely, the less visible aspects of meaning making, such as listening and witnessing, silently struggling with understanding and so on, tend to remain ignored. As such, it is useful to draw from Jean-Luc Nancy’s (2002a) argument that the possibility of meaning is linked to the ability to listen: meaning is resonance, what happens right after something is uttered and does not simply belong to a specific subject anymore, but reaches out to others and echoes in the world. In that sense, listening and attempting to understand help further understand an ethics of positive singularization; it is not simply about breakdown and creativity, but also about reflecting on breakdown and creativity through a practice of mutual recognition. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 BEING IN THE WORLD M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A In many ways, the reflections in this chapter are attempts to formulate a pharmacological account of social media. The pharmakon, as Stiegler (2010a) reminds us, is the poison that can also be the cure. The pharmacological approach is inventive: it identifies the specific ambivalences in existing technological systems to formulate alternatives and new possibilities. In order to engage in a pharmacological reflection, I will switch the focus quite a bit here and move away from social media platforms specifically to social media as part of our environment. Indeed, a reflection on meaning as world building and being with others in the world requires that we study the link between social media dynamics and the ways they mediate the work of building worlds together. In so doing, I will also move away from solely focusing on corporate social media toward a reflection on current conditions of mediation, which have been changed by the arrival of social media. As such, I am concerned here with the relationship between processes of mediation and how they shape the conditions of meaning as not only what is uttered, but also what is received, understood, and engraved. To do so, I will examine a 2008 exhibition titled Native Land—Stop Eject, which offered a reflection on the contemporary conditions of mediation. The building of common worlds is a political task, and in that sense I want to bring to the reader’s mind the relationship between meaning making and democracy. I do not want to speak particularly about participatory communication as an instance of democratic media making from a participatory perspective, but I would like to extend such concerns with the rhythm of mutual recognition that is orchestrated through media forms, and that could potentially be present on social media. Democracy and community, or the capacity to uphold the building of common worlds as both an ethical and political project, thus forms the backbone of this final chapter. Authentic Encounters, Common Worlds, and Mediation How does communication allow for the building of common worlds? There have traditionally been two ways of answering this question. The first conceptualizes communication as the exchange of information whereby subjects can agree or disagree, 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 144 145 through the exchange of interpretations, on what constitutes the reality of an object being discussed. Media technologies, from this perspective, are the means that in turn facilitate, manage, censor, limit, or encourage the production and distribution of information, representations, and significations. The second conception of communication is that it is not just a process of signification, although language is still central, but a process of both authentic encounter and opening to the world. Communication is not about rational and separate subjectivities that encounter each other, but rather a dance of intersubjectivity that is characterized by mutual recognition (Benjamin 2004). This understanding of communication is found particularly in Jean-Luc Nancy’s exploration of Mitsein, or “being with” (2007) and before him Maurice Blanchot. For Nancy, being is already being with, and existence is always already coexistence with others. While Nancy’s philosophical tradition differs greatly from Simondon, there is definitely a parallel here with the notion of individual and collective individuation. Furthermore, throwness into the world and to others is what we ultimately uncover through the practice of making sense, which refers, in this case, not to the noiseless exchange of information, but rather to the kind of revelation of and to the world that is expressed in forms of arts, such as poetry, literature, and painting. Meaning, from this perspective, is the “sharing of being” (Nancy 2000, 2): it is the manifestation of coexistence as openness to the world. That is, making sense is a process of becoming aware of our exposition to the world. This is not to say that there exists a predetermined design to existence and to the world; rather, the possibility of sense is already there, in the multiplicity of passing phenomena (Devisch 2006). Such perspective on communication places silence, including listening, rather than words, at the center of making sense. To this philosophical tradition, we should also add relational and social psychoanalysis, which explains that the process of making sense of oneself in the world involves a transformative relationship between client and therapist that extends beyond the confines of the therapeutic setting. One’s transformation toward realizing one’s humanity, in that sense, cannot be separated from addressing an ethics of relationality, which 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 BEING IN THE WORLD M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A can include a call toward social transformation. That is to say, transformation as new forms of individuation and potentially singularization can only take place through the experience of an Other to listen to us, to ground us in the world and for others. Furthermore, the process of exchange between therapist and client is one of dual transformation: both the client and the therapist are engaged in the process of making sense, and are thus in a relational alliance and are affected and transformed through their communication. Attunement between therapist and client is what allows for the possibility of authentic encounter, which is described not as perfect understanding, but as a rhythm of exchange, failures, and repairs, in which silences and phatic presence play a key role. That is, the point of the therapeutic exchange is not one of complete merger; on the contrary, it is a dance between individual individuation (the articulation of an “I”) and collective individuation—the formulation of a “we.” Both processes cannot happen without the other, yet they are not the same. This kind of mutual recognition forms the basis of coexistence. Of course, in the psychoanalytical tradition, attunement is heavy on the side of the therapist, but such process serve as a basis for understanding how an ethics of transformation without domination can take place. Communication as a healing process, as a dynamic of uncovering a true creative self, takes place through a relation, through the attunement to the principle of coexistence. Being, again, is being-with, and the capacity to find meaningfulness unfolds from this realization. These two conceptions of the communication process—as the exchange of information and as authentic encounter— seem at first to be radically opposed, especially in the ways in which they understand the role of media technologies. Communication as information exchange tends to give a critical place to media technologies as the means through which the building of common worlds can occur. The faithful communication of what one intends is key to successful communication: noise reduction allows for the proper transmission of messages. On the other hand, communication as authentic encounter traditionally implies a rejection of the chatter and noise of mass 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 146 147 and social media in order to focus on embodiment and presence of oneself and others in and to the world, on reaching out to touch and be touched—processes that are notoriously resistant to their retranscription via media technologies (Peters 1999, 269–270). From this perspective, it seems that media, with their logic of proliferation of representations, verisimilitudes, and significations, would constitute a barrier to the true expression of meaning. In many ways, this divide is a replay of Plato’s Phaedrus, especially the part where Socrates describes the danger of the then relatively new technology of writing: by committing speech to written symbols, Socrates argues, we lose the possibility of authentic exchange. Writing is a deadening technology; it marks the arrival of external storage and retrieval systems to replace face-to-face encounters where knowledge and meaning come alive through the building of common worlds. With writing technologies as well as with any subsequent media technologies, the argument goes, we lose an ethics of encounter: true meaningfulness is lost and all that remains is signification and information. The media technologies falsely promise to reconstruct authentic communication, only to betray it. More often than not, authentic encounter appears as the missing core of everyday contemporary mediation: current forms of connectivity isolate us. That being said, Plato’s accounts of Socrates’s philosophical dialogues—the oral process of exchange with interlocutors in order to pursue the truth—show that there is not an original moment of perfect communication that was ruined by the arrival of technology. Indeed, Plato’s accounts of Socrates’s encounters with the Sophists—the master rhetoricians who manipulated words and engaged in verbal exchange to get the upper hand in political debate and assert their power—illustrate the falsity of an original state of pure and perfect authentic encounter. Even language as original mediation and essential human characteristic can, in that sense, both betray and lead to authentic communication and true meaning. Media technologies are no different: in our contemporary situation, they are actually essential to providing the context within which the capacity for meaningfulness can take place at the same time as they seem 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 BEING IN THE WORLD M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A to betray this very capacity. We started to see in the last chapter how Stiegler explains this. He approaches media technologies from the perspective of individuation on the one hand, and knowledge on the other. Individuation—which includes both recognizing oneself as embodied “I” and as part of the community (“we”)—is dependent on technologies of knowledge and memory. Who I recognize myself to be is based on the kind of knowledge about the world and about others that is transmitted to me. In that sense, the individuation of the “I” cannot take place without the individuation of the “we,” which Stiegler (2010b) refers to as coindividuation. Furthermore, coindividuation takes place within a technical milieu that organizes modes of transmission of knowledge, values, and affects, which Stiegler refers to, in turn, as transindividuation. Transindividuation is a political phenomenon: who controls and manipulates the technical milieu within which coindividuation takes place controls modes of individuation themselves, as we have seen in the previous chapter The problem, then, is not media technologies, but the ways in which specific interests insert themselves into media technologies, shape them, and install processes of deindividuation and subjectivation. That being said, the question of authentic encounter as the ethics of coindividuation still has to address the problem of mediation. Authentic encounter still carries with it the demand for some kind of immediacy and directness: it is often associated with touch, not only physical touch, but also emotional touch and closeness. The role of mediation, in that sense, is paradoxical: it can both create distance from and closeness with. Barthes (1981) names that paradox as the difference between studium and punctum in photography: the studium is about the cultural significance of a picture, while the punctum is that which pierces through not only the picture, but also the viewer. The punctum, Barthes adds, is about being wounded by a photograph, or by one of its details. The punctum is a moment of singularization: the cultural codes of the image break down and what is left is a sense of presence to what has been for the viewer. In photography, one is touched by the presence of something, or someone that was: the photographic medium, in that sense, allows for 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 148 149 authentic encounters across time and space. Mediation then can be used to show the failures of signification, and through such failures, the birth of sense as presence to the world and to otherness. Such differentiation partakes in a reflection on the limits of language, which Nancy and Blanchot further address in their reflection on art: literature and poetry for Blanchot, painting and cinema for Nancy. Art can reveal and open us up to the sense of the world: the literary space (Blanchot) can be the place wherein language breaks down and, through this, sense appears. The betrayal of language, then, serves to push us to the limits of where the possibility of making sense actually exists. This position is similar to what Wittgenstein in the Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus refers to as the “mystical” things that “cannot be put into words” and yet “make themselves manifest” (2007, 6.522). Expression is not only about saying, but it is also about showing and revealing what cannot be said but only directly experienced as authentic encounter with the world and others: showing is showing what is, what was, what has been, and what could be. In that sense, mediation is not betrayal, but actually a movement toward breaking down the frame of signification in order to open up to the possibility of sense: failure becomes opening. While such reflection might seem remote from the everyday social media situation, I would like to offer an illustration of this cycle of breakdown and failure of signification in a mediated environment through a reflection on the 2008 Native Land—Stop Eject exhibition. Mourning What Is Lost: Reflections on Native Land—Stop Eject Terre natale: ailleurs commence ici—translated in English as Native Land—Stop Eject—was a multimedia and multidisciplinary exhibition organized by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris in the fall and winter of 2008–2009. The main exhibit included two films by photographer and documentary filmmaker Raymond Depardon and two multimedia installations by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Mark Hansen, Laura Kurgan, and Ben Rublin realized in collaboration with 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 BEING IN THE WORLD M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A philosopher and urbanist Paul Virilio. Over the course of several months, the overall project was extended through online interviews, podcasts, and videos on the Fondation Cartier website as well as culturemobile.net, and through academic discussion panels, other artistic events, shows, and performances. The complementarity between offline and online events, the involvement of many participants from diverse artistic and academic backgrounds, and the accompanying multiplicity of means and modes of communication that were used illustrated only too well the complexity and scope of the question guiding the whole project: “What is left of this world, our native land, of the history of what so far is the only habitable planet?” (Virilio 2008, 1). Overall, Native Land—Stop Eject was not simply an art exhibit, but a physical, mediated, and virtual space of exploration to grapple with the multiple economic, social, ecological, political, and cultural crises that we still now experience and will face in the future. From the disappearance of minority cultures due to agricultural or urban expansion to forced migrations and the culture of speed through mobile technologies, Native Land—Stop Eject illustrated only too well the pressing need to address the multiple issues stemming from the unique conjunction of economic, political, technological, and environmental crises as well as the complexity, and the fragility, of creating the very spaces that would make speaking to these issues possible. While the work of Paul Virilio on media, warfare, and the technological annihilation of speed and time has received much attention, Raymond Depardon is less well known in North America as a celebrated photojournalist and documentary filmmaker. In the past few years, Depardon’s work has been focused on minority cultures, with a critically acclaimed series of three documentaries on the disappearance of the peasant world in France. For Native Land—Stop Eject, Depardon presented two works: a series of interviews with members of disappearing minority cultures all over the world (Hear Them Speak) and silent footage of a 14-day world tour of major cities (A World Tour in 14 Days). The installations realized in collaboration with Virilio used a multimedia approach to address questions 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 150 151 related to forced migrations worldwide due to environmental, economic, and political revolutions and crises. The first of the Virilio installations involved 48 television screens suspended from a ceiling showing footage of forced movements of population due to environmental disasters, war, famine, and “choreographed” according to visual effects such as color, motion, image, speed, or color composition” (Chandès, Depardon, and Virilio 2008, IV). The second installation offered an immersive visualization of information and data on global migration, including forced migrations flows and financial flows. The first of the Native Land—Stop Eject projects—Depardon’s Hear Them Speak/Prendre Parole is a starting point to examine the relationship between technical mediation and the building of a space—whether mental, virtual, or physical—that would not only be about talking or entering into a dialogue, but would also be a space to reconstruct the possibility and ability to speak and would therefore constitute an authentic encounter. “The ability to speak,” or “the act of speaking,” or “the capture of speech” does not fully translate the French prendre parole, which describes the embodiment of language and its actualization and incorporation in and to the world. Prendre parole is about the incorporation, embodiment, and unfolding of Being through the word in the world. Furthermore, the definition of “speech” does not fully correspond to that of parole as it encompasses a rhetorical dimension (i.e., giving a speech) while parole denotes the lived moment of address to somebody. Prendre parole means claiming the right to speak to a listening audience. It is, therefore, a demand for attention and a call for authentic encounter. That is, prendre parole is the first moment where a demand is made for recognition. As such, prendre parole is fundamentally different from having the capacity to say whatever one wants. This distinction applies to social media platforms, as they need not simply be about the capacity to say whatever one wants, but the capacity to formulate a demand for mutual recognition, that is, to ask participants in a communicative encounter to pay attention to a demand for authentic encounter. One of the key aims of Native Land—Stop Eject was to offer new ways of exploring the notion of speech or parole 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 BEING IN THE WORLD M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A and its complex, and contradictory relationships with technologies of mediation, which in turn document speech, drown it in a sea of information and noise, and ultimately testify to its absence. More precisely, Native Land—Stop Eject showed that it is now necessary to think of the multiplicity of communications technologies and the complex milieu of mediation that emerges from it as a critical issue that requires renewing and reinventing a new politics of speech. Speaking cannot simply be equated to talking, or expressing oneself, because speech or parole cannot be understood solely as a conceptual process of signification, but as the presence of meaning in the world. Speech refers to another dimension of communication, which involves a process of binding people together in the world, whether through agreement or disagreement. This dimension of communication, as John Durham Peters argues, is “more fundamentally a political and ethical problem than a semantic one” (1999, 30). As I have mentioned above, my understanding of speech or parole relies partially on the traditional definition of a singular and embodied occurrence as opposed to the abstract system of language. However, in departure from Saussure, and closer to Bakhtin’s definition (2007), speech or parole should also be understood as a dialogic encounter tied to the listeners and the social world that make it possible. For Bakhtin, speech is not only an encounter between people and the social context that surrounds it, but also an encounter with the world. Speech is one way to symbolically bind people together and to the world. The idea of building a space for speech is not simply about allowing for the production of representations and the exchange of ideas, but is about the possibility of addressing and reorganizing the world at large. In that sense, prendre parole, although it is a symbolic and therefore not an “effective” capture of power, it is a political act, one that opens up the field of possibilities by reconfiguring and undermining common tropes and perceptions and creating new gaps allowing for new understandings, organizations, and connections to appear (de Certeau 1994, 38). One of the tensions that made Native Land—Stop Eject so compelling was the acknowledgment that the state of the world is one of catastrophe and constant chaos that urgently needs 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 152 153 to be addressed. And at the same time, the exhibit made clear that the possibilities of building the space to listen and speak to the issues is fragile, fleeting, and drowned by constant flows of information and the multiplication of technological blinders. Hear Them Speak featured video recordings of nomads, farmers, islanders, and indigenous peoples from Chile, Ethiopia, Bolivia, France, and Brazil, “all of whom were whether threatened with extinction or living on the periphery of globalization” (Chandès et al., 2008, I). In a podcast, Depardon explains that the film does not attempt to document the daily lives or struggles of these minority cultures, but to listen to them speak about their native land: “Let us listen to these people, be they Chipaya, Yanomami, or Afar. Let us listen to these people and give them a chance to speak, so we can hear them express themselves in their language, with their own way of speaking, their own facial expressions” (2008, I). The resulting film is constituted of a series of close-ups of people expressing their anger and sadness about current threats to their ways of life due to globalization (Yanomami, Brazil), singing about their relationship to their land (Afar, Ethiopia), describing the death of their culture and language (Kawésqar, Chile), and reflecting on the tensions between minority languages and a dominant order (Occitan, France). Depardon further explains that his approach was to refrain from interpreting indigenous cultures and to give audiences a chance to listen to their otherness and wisdom. Rather than guiding a discussion or exchange, he only asked one question to each of the participants about what native land meant for them and recorded their answers. To borrow from Roland Barthes’s terminology, Depardon’s approach focused on punctum rather than studium, on the poignant detail—“that which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow and pierces me”—rather than a “body of information” that needs to be decoded (1981, 26). The punctum in Hear Them Speak was the speech of those at the margins. Depardon’s Hear Them Speak stands in stark contrast to Virilio’s series of interventions prepared for the exhibit (Chandès, Depardon, and Virilio 2008). Virilio focuses on speed and the multiplication of wireless communication technologies as 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 BEING IN THE WORLD M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A creating a series of blinders that renders us incapable of connecting with the world. For Virilio, in contrast to the indigenous people still living in their native land, the multiplication of technologies of speed and instantaneity has created an effect of “Stop Eject”—of a radical disconnect through the annihilation of space, distance, and time. As Virilio describes it, the drive to speed—to instantaneous communication and the multiplication of screens and mediating devices—prevents us from seeing the inevitability of the crises that the eschatological and suicidal drives toward technological innovation are both creating and suppressing (Virilio 2008). Furthermore, while the people in the Depardon film claim the native land as theirs not because they have private ownership of their land, but because they understand its complexity (Chandès et al., 2008) and inhabit it, Virilio’s description of the technological world is one of appropriation of the land through the destruction of its natural resources and hope for the replacement of the native land with other technological spaces, such as exoplanets (Sloterdijk 2008). In Hear Them Speak, the voices heard expressed the need of roots in their native land, while Virilio’s description of contemporary processes of globalization and urbanization focuses on being uprooted, disconnected from the ground (through the multiplication of skyscrapers, lifts, planes) and from physical space through technologies of instantaneous communication and speed (2008, 195). There are thus strong oppositions between Depardon’s and Virilio’s approach in their installations to speech and communication technologies. On the one hand, Depardon’s film limits itself to presenting the act of speaking by minority and mostly oral cultures at the margins of globalization, who have very little, if any, access to communication technologies and limited access to contemporary means of transportation. On the other hand, as Virilio recalls, amid the rapidity of modern life, there is a growing nostalgia “for the world’s magnitude, its immensity” (Chandès, Depardon, and Virilio 2008, I). Virilio argues that technologies prevent us from seeing, hearing, and speaking meaningfully—that is, from connecting, nurturing, and constructing worlds with others (Peters 1999, 30). Indeed, the two Virilio installations 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 154 155 depict the erasure of the inhabitants of the native land through footage and visualization of forced migrations. The contrast between the simplicity of the Depardon film and the multiplicity of screens and complexity of images and information for the Virilio portion of the exhibition illustrate the literal drowning of the possibility of speech by the multiplication of technologies of speed and instantaneity. According to Virilio, “the nature of being sedentary and nomadic has changed . . . Sedentary people are at home wherever they go. With their cell phones or laptops, [they are] as comfortable in an elevator or on a plane as in a high-speed train. This is the sedentary person. The nomad, on the other hand, is someone who is never at home, anywhere” (Chandès, Depardon, and Virilio 2008, I). In this new configuration, the nomad is the victim of forced migration due to political, economic, social, and environmental crises, while sedentary people are able to abstract themselves from the destruction of the native land. The capacity for speech and the ethical demand for mutual recognition are thus literally drowned as possibilities for listening, for being embodied and present to the world, disappear. Modulations between Failure and Repair It would be a mistake to think that the message from Native Land—Stop Eject is that we should reject media technologies (despite the fact that Virilio has declared numerous times that he very rarely travels and does not even have a landline phone). Indeed, the opposition between speech and media technology, particularly new media technologies, is not as straightforward in Native Land—Stop Eject; after all, the Virilio installations made use of the very communication technologies that he himself rejects. Native Land—Stop Eject does not radically oppose the simplicity and orality of speech to contemporary media technologies. On the contrary, Native Land—Stop Eject invites us to examine the conditions that could make speech (parole) possible again. These conditions partake of processes of modulation of content, technologies, media formats, and practices of viewership that destabilize and in that way recreate 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 BEING IN THE WORLD M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A a space for speech. It is a dance, in that sense, of failure and repair that takes place through different modulations that offer a play on mediation. The modulations present in Depardon’s first film are aimed at reconstructing the possibility of “hearing them speak” through the modulation of voice and image. The monumental projection of the film on an 80-square-meter screen in a relatively small room was aimed to create an effect of presence so that viewers in the pitch-black room are literally engulfed in the images of close-up faces. This makes the presence of the speaker even more felt. Furthermore, Depardon also used uncompressed sound recording technology in order to further make the speech of Other—the speech of minorities—heard. Hear Them Speak was not, therefore, transferable to smaller screens. Its immersive visual and auditory setting was necessary to impose the presence of the Other and break the Western viewers’ frames of reference. There is, furthermore, a tension between a breaking down of communication and its repair in the Hear Them Speak film. That is, while a connection is established through the presence of the Other on a monumental screen, the radical otherness, strangeness, and separation between speakers and listeners is still maintained. There is a series of modulations that render this possible: not only the use of rare minority dialects and languages at the level of content, but also a strong polarization and distantiation between speakers and listeners. This effect of distantiation that takes place through the monumentality of the film involves a process of silencing viewers and therefore of muting their frames of reference. Furthermore, the viewers’ frame of reference is not replaced by an authorial frame of reference—rather, the muting process is one of exhaustion of the logic of representation in order to build a space where the people portrayed in the film can be present to the viewers in their radical otherness. The projection setup strongly builds on the opposition and complementarity between speaking and listening, and by erasing the viewers’ immediate context of reference, constructs a demand and possibility for authentic encounter. This divide between the indigenous native speakers and those engulfed in a process of annihilation through technologies of 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 156 157 speed and instantaneity is a common theme in all four Native Land—Stop Eject installations. In his World Tour in 14 Days of major cities, which was undertaken as a way to explore Virilio’s description of the world’s shrinking distance, Depardon further elaborates on the silencing of viewers by presenting them with two silent films projected simultaneously. Through this dual projection, the common landscapes of major urban centers become eerily foreign because of the absence of traffic noise and of the chatter of passersby. The modulating process again is that of distantiation—of making the representations of common cityscapes foreign by suppressing sound to separate viewers from their common frames of reference. In the Virilio installations, the modulations of the relationships between viewers and representations serve as a covert exploration of the incapacity of speaking meaningfully. With regard to content, the first of the Virilio installations illustrates the erasure of the native speakers by presenting footage of forced migrations on multiple television screens. In the second Virilio installation, the human “on the ground” dimension disappears through the use of visualizations of global flows of populations and goods. While the Depardon films are focused on creating a punctum effect, the Virilio installations return to a studium dimension— the presentation of information about global crises and forced migrations. At the same time, the Virilio installations demonstrate the failure of current media technologies, especially visualization technologies in actually addressing, or speaking to the issues stemming from the conjunction of economic, political, urban, and environmental crises. The modulations that create this effect take place through distantiating content (the studium) from the viewers’ practices of interpretation through hypermediation. As Bolter and Grusin explain, hypermediation is an aesthetic effect of insisting on the artificiality of mediation. For instance, the multiplication of screens results in the scattering of the viewer’s gaze in the first installation. In the second installation, immersion in the artificiality of data visualizations highlights the difficulty in grasping and imagining the global dimensions of contemporary and projected movements of populations and goods. Finally, the life-size projection in one 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 BEING IN THE WORLD M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A corner of the first exhibit, showing a film of Virilio denouncing technological blindness, reinforces a sense of dissatisfaction that opens up a space of unease. Far from being a failure of the installations, this dissatisfaction with the limitations of current new media technologies that can represent but do not speak to issues illustrates only too well the paradox of communication that Peters describes in the following terms: “Too often, ‘communication’ misleads us from the task of building worlds together. It invites us into a world of union without politics, understandings without language, and souls without bodies, only to make politics, language and bodies reappear as obstacles rather than blessings” (1999, 30–31). At first, Native Land—Stop Eject seems to operate through strong oppositions between speech and representation, between the simplicity and truth carried by the oral world and the failure of contemporary communication technologies, and between those who still inhabit the world (the native land) and the technologically driven societies that are annihilating any sense of groundedness, both literal and symbolic. However, Depardon’s and Virilio’s explorations of what is left of the native land through a series of complex and contradictory modulations articulating content, media formats, and modes and practices of consumption and spectatorship, open up a space that, while pointing out the lack of speech and the failures of communication technologies, highlights the gaps and noises of mediation. In so doing, speech reappears not only as a fragile process, but also as an ethical demand for openness. Native Land—Stop Eject thus further shows that speech is, as de Certeau puts it, a “symbolic place” that “points out the space fostered by the distance that separates the represented from their representations, the members of a society from the modalities of their association” (1994, 38). In that sense, Native Land—Stop Eject is an exercise in singularization by pushing away frames of representation in order to unveil the demand for authentic encounter. Native Land—Stop Eject invites us to disconnect speech from its oral, nontechnological conception and to use the multiplicity of communication technologies as means of fostering or rehabilitating the fleeting spaces to work on recapturing speech 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 158 159 and fostering moments of authentic encounters. The invitation then is to look at the communication continuum and pay attention to how the relationships between language, media, and practices can be modulated and attuned to the ethical underpinnings of communication as a gesture of openness. The Native Land—Stop Eject exhibition was a play on the paradoxes of mediation and more precisely between two kinds of competing mediation. The first kind of mediation is representation, through images and sound, and the second is of abstraction of information as data to be visualized. In many ways then, Native Land—Stop Eject addresses one of the paradoxes of social media at the core of this book: the difference between cultural representations that take place at the level of the user interface and gray data processing that takes place in the background. While representation involves humans in the world, abstraction is more and more used to inject specific economic interests in the process of communication on social media. It is the new and nascent relationships between representation and abstraction that the exhibition addressed back in 2008. At first, it might seem that there is a strong antagonism between mediation as representation and mediation as abstraction, in that representation seems to appear as the ways to modulate the failures and repairs of the communication process that enable the possibility for authentic encounters. On the other hand, abstraction as data flows seems to lead to failure in authentic encounter; it deindividualizes, disembodies, and creates affective distance. And yet, again, such antagonism between representation and abstraction might not be as straightforward as it first seems. That is to say, Native Land—Stop Eject was driven by the question of how to harness new forms of mediation in the service of creating a space of authentic encounter. It showed that the demand for authentic encounter is not simply betrayed by or achieved through mediation. Rather, the history of authentic encounter and mediation has always been a complex one, and while it has traditionally been approached through the lens of representation, it also needs to be addressed to the question of abstraction. Native Land—Stop Eject approached this new problem by creating a space of destabilization. The installations 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 BEING IN THE WORLD M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A took abstractions such as data visualization away from the computer screen and transformed them into projections within a discrete physical space. In that sense, abstraction was confronted to embodiment within a physical reality and was thus remediated as space. Mediation and Transitionality The problem now before us is how to relate the question of mediation and authentic encounter to the social media environment. What Native Land—Stop Eject showed, overall, is that it is wrong to situate all hopes or all blames in technologies of mediation, including social media. Rather, the pattern of failures and repairs that is at the core of the relationship between mediation and authentic encounter is refashioned through the arrival of new technologies. That is to say, the key issue is about the design of technologies, of becoming aware of their specific affordances and using those to create moments and spaces of mediation that would allow for the possibility of authentic encounter. What I would like to do in this particular section is to begin thinking through some of the design questions that could enable a space for authentic encounter. In particular, I am interested in the ways in which the question of mediation as abstraction could be approached. This does not imply ignoring questions related to representation and authentic encounter, but rather acknowledging the particular problem with social media platforms, as opposed to other new media forms, is that abstraction in large part drives representation. That is, data storage and analysis form the basis of the corporate social media model in that it allows platforms to create automated and targeted representations, which then play a key role in filtering all kinds of content. This is becoming more and more of a political problem as this particular model of abstraction is becoming predominant on the Internet. The risks that such transformation of the Internet raises are numerous. Take, for instance, the capacity to look at a user’s search history and online behavior as a way to draw a detailed health profile that can be used to deny insurance coverage (Talbot 2013). The capacity to target and identify key populations can result in providing narrow, niche information 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 160 161 (Sunstein 2009), and therefore deny, or make more difficult, access to alternative information. Clustering users according to what is similar among them, furthermore, might lead to the reinforcement of strong divisions based on political and religious beliefs as lesser and lesser people are confronted with others that do not resemble them in a social media logic that favors similarities over differences. What kinds of design of social media would be able to answer such challenges regarding surveillance and extreme profiling? It has to be acknowledged, of course, that there is a pressing need for legal frameworks governing data use, including what kind of data can be collected, shared, and sold, and the right to have one’s data erased. These would form the backbone of the ethics of mutual recognition: the agreement not to take advantage of another, the guarantee not to use social media as tools for domination and subjectivation. This goes back to the question of ownership of data within the for-profit model. The alternative software movement has been addressing these issues by designing social media platforms that would respect the right to be anonymous and the right not to have one’s data collected. One could cite Diaspora as an example of a not-for-profit, decentralized social network, Crabgrass as an instance of a software libre web application designed for group collaboration, and Thimbl as an open-source microblogging alternative to Twitter. There are many other examples of free, libre, and open-source alternatives to social media platforms as discussed in particular on the Unlike U’s web pages of the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam. While such alternatives to social media are crucial experiments in delineating spaces free of corporate interests, there is nevertheless a need to think about alternative social media platforms that would allow for the use and analysis of data. Data, indeed, is becoming more and more crucial to understanding critical issues in our time. An example of this would be the Afghan and Iraq wars’ logs released by Wikileaks in the spring of 2010. The 500,000 war logs that were released were impossible to go through by hand. Instead, they were put into a database for query. This form of data journalism (Gray, Chambers, and Bounegru 2012) allowed for the emergence of patterns regarding, for instance, the high number of civilian 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 BEING IN THE WORLD M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A casualties in both wars that were not officially released by the US army. Such patterns would have been very difficult to examine by hand alone; they needed to emerge out of the data. In the same way, access to data is crucial information to organize alternatives. An example of this is Occupy Data (occupy-data. org), which offers datasets, tools, and analysis to examine issues that are important for the Occupy movement such as economic inequalities, discrimination, financialization, corruption, and impacts of the mortgage crises in the United States, among others. Data and the abstraction of phenomena as data are central to understanding contemporary issues, raising awareness about them, and developing political alternatives. Besides the pressing need for regulating data collection and the parameters of data analysis, there is still the question of abstraction as mediation, and how it can answer the demand for authentic encounter. The creation of digital representations that mimic physical ones, as in gaming or in Second Life, is only part of the answer. Where abstraction can be useful is in formulating spaces of transitionality. The “transitional space” is a term coined by Winnicott (1971) when exploring the importance of play in the psychological development of children. Winnicott explains that transitional spaces and objects serve the purpose of relating the intrapsychic world to an intersubjective one. That is, their purpose is to define a sort of no man’s land between what is internal to the psyche and the world out there: they are that which allow internal wishes to encounter a reality out there without any real consequences. Winnicott gives the example of the teddy bear as a relational object that mediates the internal world of a child with a reality out there and thus serves as a testing ground, as a way to develop creative ways of relating to the world without any real-world risks. Transitional spaces and objects play a crucial role in the development of a sense of individual autonomy and creativity. Transitional spaces and objects are thus central to building the capacity to coindividuate, that is, to negotiate the development of oneself in the world and with others. By extension, Winnicott talks about art and culture as transitional spaces where creativity can be expressed and new possibilities for being in the world arise. Winnicott 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 162 BEING IN THE WORLD 163 My claim is that if there is a need for this double statement, there is also need for a triple one: the third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore, is an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute. It is an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated. (1971, 3) Transitionality is the space where new experiences and therefore new meanings can appear. Furthermore, transitionality is not limited to playing by oneself; it also allows for the emergence of modes of relationality as the sharing and coconstruction of experience (Bromberg 2011, 97). The role of media as fostering transitional spaces is easy to see here: stories we tell ourselves represent attempts at coming to grips with reality and with emotions, affects, and thoughts, which allow us to define ourselves in the world (Silverstone 1994). Stiegler (2010b) has further developed the idea of the transitional object as a technical object that supplements our bonds with an Other: transitional objects help me think not only about myself, but also about how I am in relation with others, and what others mean to me. Of course, transitional objects and spaces are not de facto spaces of authentic encounter and indeed, in consumer culture, marketing is the science of transitional objects (Roberts, Gilbert, and Hayward 2013, 179), but the concept of the transitional offers a new way of thinking about the relationship between experimentation, virtuality, and creativity. With regard to the design of alternative social media platforms, as opposed to virtual spaces of simulation like video games, these could be spaces of experimentation with other ways of becoming and unfolding to the world and to others. That is, the concept of the transitional offers a way to think about how the demand for authentic encounter could be involved as an active principle in the creation of such a thing as the social and, by extension, social media. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 describes transitionality as that which is in between and mediates internal and external reality: M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A Data could play an important role in the development of transitional spaces geared toward the possibility of authentic encounter. As seen above, data is now central to the representation of broadscale, contemporary social issues. But abstraction could also be used to understand smaller scale, everyday situations. By this, I mean that there could be a way to think about automated personalization and recommendation as a way to foster reflection on the state of oneself in the world. In many ways, personalized profiles could be used to question processes of individuation and open the way for singularization. This would require abandoning the notion that social media platforms are only about positive forms of communication such as constant participation; rather, they could as well be developed as spaces of reflection. Such a conception of abstraction as a distorted mirror and transitional space would be about providing a new gaze and a new perspective to the condition of connectivity on social media platforms and could be used to recover the ethical demand for mutual recognition. To elaborate, abstract spaces of transitionality are similar to Foucault’s heterotopias. The concept of heterotopia—simultaneously the Other place and the place of otherness—has mostly been employed in reflections on physical space. A heterotopia is the space that not only mirrors but also questions and distorts habitual spaces: the cemetery, for instance, mimics and yet subverts the space of the living town with its social hierarchies. Foucault never mentions media in his definition of heterotopia, but says the following about mirrors: The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 164 165 virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. (1986, 24) Foucault’s description moves away from the trope of the mirror as the site of narcissistic gaze. Rather, Foucault describes the mirror as the site of new potentials, as the site of evocation, beneath the formulation of an “I,” of the demand for collective individuation, that is, of the desire for the gaze of an Other to recognize us. But the mirror presents this as a potentiality, rather than actuality and, in so doing, calls into question the “I” that seeks to recognize itself. That is, the mirror is where the “I” is othered, suspended, and opened to the world and to others. In that sense, it also carries with it the potential for singularization. Would it be possible, then, to develop heterotopic, transitional social media platforms that would not only illuminate the relations in the space we inhabit, but also displace subjects into other contexts, other relationalities? Heterotopias are about moments of suspension where the habitual self in the world is othered, and therefore on the brink of failure: they carry with them the question and possibility of singularization. Heterotopias, then, are sites where the categories of meaningfulness and meaninglessness are questioned and blurred, and through this new indeterminacy arises the potential for new possibilities of meaning making and sharing and of new modes of experience. The use of social media data for building of alternative platforms that carry within them the heterotopic principle requires two types of transformation. The first one is the constant abstraction produced by data mining: abstraction from lived experience in the case of data visualization, abstraction and disembodiment toward constant updates and the expectation of responses on social networking platforms, and toward constant consumption on social media platforms in general. These kinds of abstractions are forms of deindividuation, that is, a kind of 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 BEING IN THE WORLD M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A system where the psychic self is haunted by its own social data: recommendations, gray profiling, targeted advertising take over not only thoughts, but also emotions, affects, social ties, modes of self-perception, in all, the self in the world. The kind of transformation of abstraction that is required is one where the categories of self, Other, and the world are more troubled, where connections might actually be suggested and new possibilities of envisioning modes of coindividuation and singularization developed. That is, the transformation that could occur is not one of fighting abstraction, but turning it more toward the kind of play that Winnicott (1971) talks about: a way to think about, test, and explore the relationship between self, others, and the world through an active engagement with data. To this, of course, we should add a capacity for self-reflection on the potential of different kinds of transformation, which leads to the second kind of transformation: that of altogether transforming the intrinsically economic nature of data on social media platforms into a political and social one. By this, I do not only mean a strengthening of legal frameworks as they pertain to data collection and use and the reappropriation of data by users, but I also mean the transformation of data-analysis software to fulfill needs other than commercial ones. Indeed, so-called social data is social only in name: it is identified, collected, and analyzed with a for-profit motive. The question is about what social data would look like if it were approached for purposes of social awareness and critical transformation. This kind of politics of social media data is needed in order to develop alternatives to social media platforms that would allow for an exploration of common meanings as not only representations, but also modes of existence. That is, data processing could become a heterotopic process where existing norms and practices can be questioned, tested, and explored to build new forms of living together in the world. What kind of recommendation software could be built in order to reflect the testing of new modes of individuation? Such a question goes back to the idea of building alternatives to corporate social media platforms that not only offer the same kind of participatory tools found on corporate social media platforms, but also offer alternative 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 166 167 ways to analyze data. This requires starting to think critically about software design, and furthermore to recognize that social media software design should be a site of critical activism. The construction of meaning as the process of exploring and questioning modes of existence could take place only through new forms of design of social media software and platforms. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 BEING IN THE WORLD This page intentionally left blank 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Social Data and the Politics of Existence This book was intended to show the inadequacy of common frameworks used to understand the creation of meaning on corporate social media platforms. It focused first of all on meaning in all its nuance and conflicting definitions: meaning is both signification and sense making, the fixing of the world into words and the openness to new affective resonances and experiences that tend to escape any sort of description. Meaning is fascinating, because it is about the oscillation between these two poles of trying to fix our relations between self, world, and others and being opened up by these relations as they escape any attempts at immobilization. Meaning making, then, shares a tense relationship with becoming, with opening up to existence: it can be a plane of playfulness, in Winnicott’s sense, that is, a mode of testing and questioning existing modes of existence, and a way to formulate other possibilities of existence. In that sense, it can be a mode of coindividuation and singularization—of formulating shared horizons of existence and new possibilities. Alternatively, it can also be the plane where existence itself is managed, distorted, and governed. This latter point constituted the first of the two arcs of my overall argument. Indeed, this book can be seen as a negative critique of the problematic articulation of corporate interests with the participatory communication model. By drawing on theories of semiocapitalism, and in particular Guattari’s asignifying semiotics, this book argued that the current articulations of 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Afterword M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A language, software, and corporate interests have fostered new strategies for the management of subjectivities and, beyond that, psychic life. I focused specifically on the question of the mining of psychic life—emotions, desires, relations—through meaning machines and, in particular, recommendation and profiling software. As such, I conceptualized corporate social media platforms as a layered system: on top, at the surface, sits the sea of user exchanges—the videos, texts, pokes, images, and so on that we share with each other as we go about our lives. My interest was to focus not so much on this sea of exchange, but on what lies beneath it: the system by which such immense amounts of meaning are managed, ordered, and made sense of. This, I argued, is crucial for understanding the role played by corporate social media platforms in our lives. I should add that I do not want to devalue research that takes place at the level of user exchanges. However, this kind of research of ignores the structuring of such exchanges and their management by software meaning machines. As such, I wish to emphasize that research into any kind of discourses online—about politics, or social transformation—can benefit from paying some attention to the ways in which platforms structure and insert their own interests within user exchanges. Furthermore, corporate social media might appear to level communication inequalities at first, but what we are witnessing now is an altogether new way of deriving profits from all communicative aspects of life. Thus, my interest lay in understanding how the life of intangible thoughts, affects, memory, and emotions is opened up for mining and financialization through the intervention of software. This new form of technological management of the field of meaning allows for the seamless insertion of capitalist interests to open up highly personalized and targeted new markets. These new markets are diverse: they are not only about the selling of commodities, but increasingly about the management of individual and collective life in all its aspects. And indeed, Big Data has become, over the past few years, a key area for economic and political development. Funding for Big Data projects worldwide along with the rise of Big Data companies to process immense amount of data all promise to make complexity manageable. This promise in 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 170 171 the development of algorithms to model and anticipate social, political, environmental, and economic change carries with it the potential for new forms of knowledge as well as new forms of power. In particular, social media data can be used to formulate complete and thorough individual profiles of not only what we are, but also what we desire and what moves us. The risks of such new processes are multiple. During the writing of this book, there was a series of high-profile stories about new forms of surveillance and data gathering. These not only included the tracking of mobile technologies users by the likes of Apple, but also the tracking of citizens via mobile and Internet technologies by police for purposes of preempting dissent (Renzi and Elmer 2012) all over the world. The culmination of all these stories was undoubtedly the National Security Agency (NSA) scandal: the secret data collection of millions of Internet users all around the world. The ramifications of the kind of power such knowledge could yield are multiple and something, according to the German Justice minister, reminiscent of a “Hollywood horror movie” (Travis, Connolly, and Watt 2013). We could already foresee how such knowledge could be used to censor free speech, control access to healthcare, insurance, employment, and so on. There is thus a pressing need for new legal frameworks to regulate data collection and ownership. In light of all this, the NSA asking corporate social media platforms such as Facebook and Google for their social media data comes as no surprise: social media corporations own immense amounts of data, and therefore possess both a broad and precise knowledge of the lives of their users. The kind of knowledge that social media corporations have is not simply information about likes and preferences, but also the capacity to modulate modes of coindividuation. Indeed, social media platforms offer ways to not only work on subjectivation—that is, the process of acting on the outside to mold the ways in which individuals have to define themselves in accordance with their given social, economic, cultural, and political contexts—these corporations also work from the inside out by shaping and modulating the processes through which we recognize ourselves and each others. Coindividuation is the process whereby one has to go outside of oneself in order 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 S O C I A L D ATA A N D T H E P O L I T I C S O F E X I S T EN C E M E A N I N G I N T H E AG E O F S O C I A L M E D I A to shape one’s inner life: it is the continuous work of shaping a singular identity, always in relation to the formation of a community, of a “we” to which one belongs. Social media corporations intervene in this process of making sense of the world and ourselves in order to manage and inscribe it within capitalist networks. The consequences of this for psychic life are only beginning to be discussed, and deserve further research. What we have now is a set of strong suggestions from diverse sources that link semiocapitalism, immaterial labor, and specific forms of mental illnesses such as stress, paranoia, anxiety, and depression. Social media corporations participate in this trend, and the processes by which they invade psychic life deserve further exploration. In that regard, this book suggests a stronger alliance between political economy of immaterial labor and semiocapitalism, psychoanalysis, and affect theory. Indeed, corporate social media platforms are instances of how affect can be modulated and formalized into meanings in order to produce some kind of financial value. In that regard, this book only scratched the surface of the kind of interdisciplinary theoretical and analytical work that is needed in order to understand the new conditions of psychic life. This leads to the second arc of this book: that of working toward a more affirmative or pharmacological take on the potentials of social media. The focus here is to build alternatives that not only respond to concerns about privacy and the right to anonymity on social media platforms, but also to pay attention to how the very concept of the “social” in social media could help develop new ways of being together and exploring modes of coindividuation and singularization. In many ways, this move is similar to the traditional Marxist call for workers to seize the means of production: we users might be interested in seizing the means through which we can make sense of the world. That is, there needs to be a democratization of the tools used for data collection and analysis. Such a move can take place at several levels. The role of software activism, including free, libre, and open-source software comes to mind. As well, the question of analysis and collection of data requires thinking about the potential roles public institutions such as universities and arm’s length state organizations could play in ensuring that there are 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 172 173 strong ethical frameworks in social data research. This requires working with user consent, anonymization of data, for instance. An example of such a process of data collection and analysis is Digital Footprints (digitalfootprints.dk), which makes it possible to collect and analyze Facebook user data with user consent. Overall, while there has been a lot of work put into developing alternative social media platforms on the part of software activists, it is now time to work toward the democratization and regulation of social media data research for the common good, rather than for purely corporate interests. What is needed is not only regulations on corporate collection, analysis, and selling of data, but also a new set of reflections and large-scale public debates on social data knowledge in the public interest. And indeed, this book argued that the controversies around social data are about understanding how the field of individual and collective existence is at the center of new forms of increasingly political struggles. It is here in particular that I want to move away from arguments that technology is irredeemable, and that only in embodied and unmediated encounters can we actually come to develop viable alternatives and find ways of living together. While the question of authentic encounter should never be forgotten, and while mediation will always render the question of encounter more complex and subject to distortion, it is nevertheless possible to develop creative approaches to the ways in which we are increasingly mediated and coindividuated through our own social media data. Here again, the concept of play comes to the fore: the testing of new modes of experience could be done through new forms of playing with data, of finding in data new ways to enter into sense making. The concept of play is also linked with that of heterotopia in the case of alternative social media platforms: beyond utopia and dystopia, heterotopia is a principle of otherness, of othering what we perceive to be the normal order of things, and therefore of highlighting limitations and opening the door to the formulation of creative alternatives. In all, social media is about the politics of becoming, of finding new ways to make sense of existence and critically reflecting on what constitute meaningfulness and meaninglessness. 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 S O C I A L D ATA A N D T H E P O L I T I C S O F E X I S T EN C E This page intentionally left blank 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 1 Governing Meaning * Some parts of this chapter are based on a previous article titled “Participatory Media and the New Governance of Communication,” Television and New Media 14, 2 (2013): 91–105. 2 Meaning Machines * Some parts of this chapter were published in an earlier article titled “Meaning, Semiotechnologies and Participatory Media,” Culture Machine 12 (2011). http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/ current. 1. 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See also individuation commodification of personal data, 23, 130–1 communication, 1–2, 5, 9, 91–2, 127, 130, 164 decentralization of, 43–9, 83, 115, 144, 169–70 human, 15–16, 69, 103 meaning of, 63, 142, 145–7, 158 paradox of, 158 participatory, 14, 23, 40, 53, 144, 169 perfect, 141–2 phatic, 117, 136 technologies, 7, 12, 15, 52–7, 64–9, 77–8, 86, 120, 130–6, 152–9, 164 cookies, 102, 103, 116 copyright, 26, 38, 91 Crabgrass, 161 Cramer, Florian, 28 cultural studies, 7, 40, 54 cyberstalking, 134 data, 7, 9, 12–17, 23, 40–2, 48, 85, 162 alternative practices and, 164–7 Big Data, 170 journalism, 161–2 mining, 29, 35, 79, 102, 116, 130, 165, 170 ownership, 131, 161 processing and ranking, 44–53, 64–70, 73, 91, 98–9, 126, 160 profile of user, 86, 99 visualization, 157–60 de Peuter, Greig, 92 Dean, Jodi, 35, 94 Deleuze, Gilles, 54, 56, 61–2, 71, 73, 123 Anti-Oedipus, 71 A Thousand Plateaus, 71 democracy and social media, 18–19, 33–7, 40, 46, 48, 144, 172–3 Depardon, Raymond, 21, 149–58 Hear Them Speak/Prendre Parole, 150–5 World Tour in 14 Days, 150, 157 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 INDEX Derrida, Jacques, 2 Devisch, Ignaas, 145 Diaspora, 161 Digital Footprints, 173 digital manipulation, 13 Diller Scofidio + Renfro, 149 Dyer-Witheford, Nick, 92 Elmer, Greg, 102, 105, 127, 171 Empire of Fashion, The (Lipovetsky), 101 Esposito, Joseph, 99 ethics of the Other, 2 of relationality/recognition, 21, 133, 142–8, 161 of the self, 127–8 of social media, 138 e-waste, 89 existentialization, 62, 79, 107 expression, 46, 56–7, 68, 107, 149, 175 cultural, 38–40, 47 freedom of, 25, 29, 33–4, 43, 46 self-, 113, 117, 126 semiotics of, 73–85 externalities, 21, 109, 136–7 Facebook, 5, 12, 15, 20, 23, 28, 29, 31, 36, 46, 94, 105, 122, 131, 135, 137, 171 Burger King Whopper Sacrifice application, 16–17 gestures, 48 logic of, 17 search engine, 45 self-documentation and, 111–17, 125–6 Farmville, 29 Fiske, John, 34 Flickr, 28, 32, 41, 116 Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 149–50 Foucault, Michel, 2, 11, 27, 95, 108, 119 195 care of the self, 127–8 discourse, 60–5, 71, 76 genealogy, 5 governance, 42–3 heterotopia, 164–5, 173 on power, 2, 108, 126–7 freedom. See under expression; speech Freud, Sigmund, 123 Friendster, 31, 115 Frosh, Steven, 2 Fuller, Matthew, 13, 28, 78 WebStalker, 13, 78 Galloway, Alexander, 13, 37, 38 Gane, Nicholas, 65 Gehl, Robert, 70 genealogy, 5, 12, 115 Genosko, Gary, 71–2, 80–1, 94, 124, 175 Gerlitz, Carolin, 116, 126 Gerritzen, Mieke, 78 Gitelman, Lisa, 7 globalization, 153–4 Google, 23, 28, 39, 85–6 Adsense, 15 applications (various), 85 bombing, 42 Gmail, 14–15, 48, 85, 91 Google+, 85, 112, 116 search algorithm, 11 search engine, 11, 31, 41–5, 85 Super Bowl 2010 video, 85 governance of meaning, 27, 43–9, 86 Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Kittler), 65 gray profiling, 116–18, 121, 131, 166 Gregg, Melissa, 8 Grusin, Richard, 7, 38, 66, 131, 157 Guattari, Félix, 19, 42, 54, 56, 61–2, 71–6, 79–82, 88, 93, 107–8, 123–4, 169 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 INDEX 196 Guattari, Félix—Continued Anti-Oedipus, 71 Molecular Revolution, 72, 74 Molecular Revolution in Brazil, 123 A Thousand Plateaus, 71 Three Ecologies, 88 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 64, 175 Guynn, Jessica, 15 Hall, Stuart, 33, 59 Hansen, Mark, 54, 149 Hardt, Michael, 92, 125 Harman, Graham, 54 hate speech, 26, 134 Hayles, Katherine N., 66, 131 Hear Them Speak/Prendre Parole (Depardon), 150–5 Heidegger, Martin, 1, 106 Herman, Edward, 33 hermeneutics, 63–4 heterotopia, 164–5, 173 Hjelmslev, Louis, 73, 80 HTML coding, 28, 68, 83 hyperattention, 131 hyperlink, 30 hypermediacy, 38, 66 hypertext, 30, 117–18 illegal downloading, 13, 37 immaterial capitalism, 16, 89–92 goods and production, 89–93 labor, 19, 36, 89, 92–3, 123, 136, 172 individuation, 114, 121, 123–37, 145–8, 164–6, 175 coindividuation, 148, 166, 169, 171–2 deindividuation, 148, 165 transindividuation, 148 information, 65–75, 79, 81, 85–6, 89–90, 98–9, 116, 131–2, 151–3. See also data alternative, 160–2 exchange, 91–4, 102–3, 136, 144–7 informational capitalism, 88 informational networks, 117–18 meta-, 99 society, 89 technologies, 54, 56, 72, 88, 112, 117 infrastructure. See meaning, machines; social media, infrastructure Innis, Harold, 8, 130 Instagram, 137 Institute for Network Cultures (Amsterdam), 161 intellectual property, 35, 90–1 interface, the concept of, 66–72. See also user interface Internet, 12, 13, 16, 30, 33, 37, 91, 115–16, 160, 171 Iraq war, 42 Jenkins, Henry, 23, 28, 34 Kelty, Christopher, 47 Kittler, Friedrich, 9, 10, 64–5, 120, 130 Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 65 Kitzmann, Andreas, 118 Klout, 125–6 Kurgan, Laura, 149 labor, 89–94. See also immaterial, labor Lacan, Jacques, 123 language, 106–7, 120, 145–9, 151–9, 169–70. See also linguistics; meaning effects of, 61, 73–8 otherness of, 129–30 philosophy of, 4 sign, 141 Laplanche, Jean, 2, 132 Latour, Bruno, 10, 41, 52 Laub, Dori, 113 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 INDEX Law, John, 52 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 19, 42–3, 47, 59, 62, 88, 90, 92 on subjectification, 95–6 Lessig, Lawrence, 13, 37, 38 Levinas, Emmanuel, 2 libre (software), 161, 172 Linden, Gregory, 99 linguistics, 4, 7–8, 56–91 LinkedIn, 119 Lipovetsky, Gilles, 101, 104 The Empire of Fashion, 101 literary theory, 4 Manovich, Lev, 7, 13 Marcuse, Herbert, 2 Marxist perspective, 59, 94, 106, 172 McChesney, Robert, 33 McLuhan, Marshall, 8, 63, 130 meaning automated production and circulation of, 11–18. See also meaning, machines as a commercial process, 23. See also advertising; social media, corporations definition of, 1–5, 23–4, 58–60, 73 democratization of, 33 governance of, 27, 43–9, 86 industrialization of, 32 and linguistic theory, 56–91 machines, 19, 51–6, 62, 68–87, 94–109, 113–18, 122, 127, 131–4, 137, 170 making, 2–20, 24, 36, 41, 65, 74, 143–4, 165, 169 meaningfulness and meaninglessness, 3, 9–11, 13, 19–20, 85–8, 94–109 the new ontology of, 19 the plane of, 57–66, 101, 111 media definition of, 10–11 197 new. See new media participatory, 5, 12–14, 18, 37–49 psychic, 111 social. See social media studies, 5, 7–9, 64, 115 technologies, 4, 5, 7–10, 18, 21, 25, 34, 63–5, 120–1, 130, 142–8, 155–8 Memex, 30 memory, 9, 117–18, 130–2, 148, 170. See also retention mental health, 138 Menzies, Heather, 136 No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life, 136 Mitsein, 2, 145 mnemotechnologies, 130 Molecular Revolution (Guattari), 72, 74 Molecular Revolution in Brazil (Guattari), 123 multitudes, 125 Myspace, 31, 48, 115 Nakamura, Lisa, 115 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 2, 3, 143, 145, 149 Native Land—Stop Eject (exhibition: Chandès, Depardon, Virilio), 144, 149–60 Negri, Antonio, 92, 125 Nelson, Ted, 30 NetSlaves (AOL), 36 network neutrality, 13 network paradigm, 37–40 networked technologies, 141 new media, 7, 12–13, 29, 33, 66, 115, 136, 155, 158, 160 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 65 No Time: Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life (Menzies), 136 NSA (National Security Agency), 171 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 INDEX INDEX Occupy Data, 162 Occupy movement, 162 online bullying, 134 open-source, 47, 91, 161, 172 operaismo, 106 O’Reilly, Tim, 28 Other, the, 1–2, 5, 86, 113, 119, 124, 132–3, 142–3, 146, 156, 163–5 otherness, 1, 129, 133, 149, 153, 156, 164, 173 participatory culture, 23, 28, 34, 46, 56, 69 Pasquinelli, Matteo, 19, 106 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 82 personalization, 30–1, 42 automated, 164 hyperpersonalization, 108 Peters, John Durham, 1, 2, 21, 142, 147, 152, 154, 158 Phaedrus (Plato), 21, 147 pharmakon, 144 Phillips, John, 66 platform architecture, 24, 47, 98–9, 113–14, 119, 121 platform governance, 44–9 Plato, 6, 21, 147 Phaedrus, 21, 147 play, 162–3, 166, 169, 173 political economy of immaterial labor, 172 of social media, 11, 19–25, 53, 56, 111 politics, 9, 27, 158 of existence, 170–3 of meaning, 33 professional, 127 of social media, 13, 27, 166 of speech, 152 pornography, 26, 51 Porter, Kerry-Ann, 61 Porter, Robert, 61 power, 10–11, 18–19, 71–2, 74, 124 formations, 11, 40, 59, 64, 66, 69–76, 95, 106–8, 114, 123–9 and language, 71–2, 80, 147, 152–5 and meaning, 2–3, 7, 27, 33–4, 48–9, 55, 59–64, 84 relations, 13, 18, 27, 30, 33, 36, 43, 60–2, 76, 86. See also under Foucault, Michel and social media, 23, 33–6, 42–3, 77, 85, 105–8, 121, 132, 171 premediation, 131 Prendre Parole, 151–2 privacy, 29–31, 37, 116, 172 hybrid forms of, 118 invasion of, 23, 35 settings, 48 protention, 130–1 psyche, the, 20, 87–8, 111, 114, 122–3, 129, 132, 136, 162 Psychic Life of Power (Butler), 129 psychoanalysis, 4, 119, 123, 172 relational, 21, 132–4, 145–6 punctum, 6, 148, 153, 157 Ranciere, Jacques, 47 recognition, 132 ethics of, 21, 161 failures of, 134–5 and meaning making, 1–2, 20 modes of, 132 mutual, 1, 20–1, 133–5, 142–6, 151–5, 161, 164 self-, 128–30, 133 on social media, 135–8, 142–3 social/public, 94, 96, 107, 134 recommendation. See under software relationality, 4, 105–6, 142, 145, 163 Renzi, Alessandra, 171 retention, 130–1 Rheingold, Howard, 115 Rublin, Ben, 149 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 198 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 2 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 5, 8, 57–8, 61–2, 152 search engines, 6, 9, 11, 15, 28, 31, 37, 41, 85. See also Facebook; Google Second Life, 162 Seem, Mark, 82 Seigworth, Gregory, 8 self, the, 20–1, 86, 106–7, 111–22, 127–9, 132, 136–8, 166 self-disclosure, 121 self-documentation, 113–30 self-idealization, 121 selfie, 138 self-perception, 166 self-reflection, 118, 128, 138, 166 semiocapitalism, 172 semiologies, 79–82 semiotechnologies, 15–17, 19, 55, 69–70. See also software semiotics, 15 asignifying, 80–1 glossematic, 73–6 mixed, 19, 71–4, 79–80 modes of semiotization, 81 sense, 3–5 making, 1–11, 15–20, 23–4, 46, 53, 56–65, 72, 82, 86, 95, 100, 106–8, 112–13, 137, 142–7, 169–73. See also meaning, making and mediation, 148–9 of self, 119–34, 138–9, 162 signification, 3–8, 10–11, 14–15, 17–19, 23–4, 49, 56–8, 62–3, 68–82, 88, 112, 122, 142, 145–9, 152, 169. See also under semiotics signs culturally recognizable, 38, 44, 69, 78 linguistic, 3, 4, 6, 13, 15, 19, 56–8, 77 199 nonlinguistic, 16, 18, 23, 63, 66–73, 78, 82, 143 Silverstone, Roger, 115, 163 Simondon, Gilbert, 124, 132, 145 Simonite, Tom, 91 “What Facebook Knows,” 91 singularity, 128 singularization, 124–7, 130, 133–4, 138, 143, 146–8, 158, 164–6, 169, 172 Slack, Jennifer Daryl, 10, 24, 40, 54 smartphones, 91 Smith, Brent, 99 Smythe, Dallas, 90 social media business model, 25–6, 47–8. See also advertising, targeted corporations, 19, 23, 26, 35, 88, 91, 95–6, 171–2 cross-platform IDs, 116 as Culture Machine, 90 environment, 23, 26, 28–33, 68, 83, 92, 160 infrastructure, 28, 37, 97 and the management of psychic life, 94, 112, 170, 172 and meaning making, 6, 14, 19–21 pharmacological account of, 21, 144, 172 platform architecture. See under platform platforms, 19, 21, 24, 26–36, 41–3, 49, 52–3, 67–70, 73, 83–6, 91–6, 105, 108, 111, 116, 125–6, 137–8, 143–4, 151, 160–7, 169–73. See also Amazon; Facebook; Google political economy of, 11, 19–25, 53, 56, 111 power of, 23, 33–6, 42–3, 77, 85, 105–8, 121, 132, 171 as processing systems, 35 and self-expression, 113–17 software, 14–16, 29, 167 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 INDEX 200 social networking, 15, 20, 31, 48, 83, 111–39 Socrates, 147 software agency of, 46–9, 52–6, 69–71, 78–84, 92–109, 118, 166, 169–70 alternative software, 13, 161–7, 172–3 and ideology, 13, 77 as the key to understanding new media, 29 paradoxes of, 15, 16, 17, 35, 78 participatory, 14. See also media, participatory politics of, 13–14 recommendation, 17, 20, 31, 37–8, 43, 45–8, 52, 68–72, 78–9, 84, 86, 97–107, 112–18, 125–6, 131, 135, 164, 166, 170 semiotechnological, 15–17, 55, 69–70 social media. See under social media studies, 13–14, 46 speech, 1, 4, 52, 147, 151–8 free speech, 20–1, 171 hate speech, 26, 134 spontaneity, 138 spyware, 35 Stiegler, Bernard, 21, 124, 130, 132, 144, 148, 163, 165 Strauss, Leo, 2 studium, 6, 148, 153, 157 subjectivation, 20, 71, 88, 92, 96, 102, 105, 107–8, 114, 121–32, 136–7, 148, 161, 171. See also autoreferential subjectivation Sunstein, Cass, 161 surveillance, 36, 38, 116, 161, 171 tablets, 91, 132 tagging, 68, 79, 92, 102 Talbot, David, 160 Terranova, Tiziana, 36, 92 Thimbl, 161 Thomas, Neal, 130 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari), 71 Three Ecologies (Guattari), 88 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein), 149 transindividuation, 148 transitional spaces, 21, 162–4 transitionality, 160–4 trolling, 134 Turkle, Sherry, 6, 115, 136–7 Alone Together, 136 Twitter, 5, 12, 23, 28 Unlike Us (Institute for Network Cultures), 161 urbanization, 154 US army, 162 user agency, 46, 96, 106–7, 116, 138 user-centric paradigm, 36–8 user clustering, 161 user-generated content, 14, 32–6, 97 user interfaces, 14, 28, 37–8, 44–7, 69, 159 user profiles, 26–7, 99, 116. See also gray profiling Vie de merde (French website), 111 Virilio, Paul, 21, 150–8 Virno, Paolo, 19, 88 Web 1.0, 30–1, 46 Web 2.0, 28–9 Weber, Samuel, 57 WebStalker, 13, 78 Werbin, Kenneth, 116, 118 “What Facebook Knows” (Simonite), 91 Wikileaks, 161 Wikipedia, 5, 23, 28 Williams, Raymond, 7 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 INDEX INDEX World Tour in 14 Days (Depardon), 150, 157 World Wide Web, 30 Yahoo!, 51 York, Jeremy, 99 YouTube, 5, 12, 26, 28, 36, 67, 85 Zimmer, Michael, 36 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24 Winnicott, Donald, 2, 20, 21, 133, 137, 138, 162, 166, 169 Wise, J. Macgregor, 10, 24, 54, 59 Wittgenstein, Ludwig von, 149 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 149 WMDs (weapons of mass destruction), 42 Wolf, Maryanne, 63 201 This page intentionally left blank 10.1057/9781137356611 - Meaning in the Age of Social Media, Ganaele Langlois Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to The Chinese University of Hong Kong - PalgraveConnect - 2016-02-24