Anodyne
Tuesday, August 05, 2014
 
The Silence of the Masses Could Be Social Media

"[S]ocial media, which masquerades as communication between peers but primarily functions as individuals consuming the social as isolated atoms while compiling and generating data for the system. Social media are a huge effort to prevent the masses from being silent in Baudrillard’s subversive sense — if the masses are silent, they move beyond manipulation, beyond influence, beyond desire, beyond control, beyond comprehension by the forces attempting to exercise sovereignty over them. If the masses seem to speak, as they now do in social media (and through all the other means for surveilling their everyday activities with 'smart' devices), they yield the data that appears to make them manageable. They become 'social' again, in the sense of being amenable to the mechanisms of social control."
- posted by cjb @ 7:17 PM


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