Pros and Cons: Negotiating Value in Blog Culture

Consumerism and Compulsory Individuality: Women, will and potential.

This article uses a discursive analysis of personal blogging handbooks and personal blogs to reflect on the politics of user-generated content (UGC) as it is created, circulated, valuated, quantifi...

Welcome to Me-Mart: The Politics of User-Generated Content in Personal Blogs

In this article I identify specific historical trajectories that are directly contingent upon the deployment and use of new media, but that are actually hidden by a focus on the purely technological. They are: the increasingly abstract and alienated nature of economic value; the subsumption of all labour — material and intellectual — under systemic capital; and the convergence of formerly distinct spheres of analysis — the spheres of production, circulation and consumption. This article examines the implications of the knowledge economy from an historical materialist perspective. I synthesize the systemic views of Marx (1846 [1972], 1875 [1972], 1970, 1973, 1976, 1978, 1981), Adorno (1951 [1974], 1964 [1973], 1991), Horkheimer and Adorno (1947 [1998]), Jarvis (1998) and Bourdieu (1991, 1998) to argue for a language-focused approach to new media research and suggest aspects of Marxist thought which might be useful in researching emergent socio-technical domains. I also identify specific categories in the M...

/pdf/hypercapitalism-a-political-economy-of-informational-4loqe8mb30.pdf

Hypercapitalism: A Political Economy of Informational Idealism

Although no scholarly consensus exists on the issue, the claim that a substantive reconfiguration of the Internet has occurred in the beginning of the 2000s has settled firmly in public common sense. The label tentatively chosen for the new turn in the medium’s evolution is Web 2.0. The developments constituting this turn have been contemplated from different perspectives in technical and business publications (O’Reilly 2005), in treatises on “convergence” or “participatory” culture (Jenkins 2006; Jenkins et al. 2009), and could be usefully interrogated by means of political economy concepts such as the “social factory” and “free labor” (Terranova 2004). Marked, or rather symbolically constructed, by these discursive pickets lies a field of practice that the members of the participatory culture, the “produsers” (Bruns 2008) of open journalism, blogs, social networking sites and other characteristic Web 2.0 applications inhabit and animate with their everyday thought, decision making and action. This paper undertakes a theoretical exploration of the user practices emerging and consolidating around the new technological and organizational models making up Web 2.0. It is informed by a qualitative study of bloggers and Facebook users conducted through focus group methodology, although the concrete empirical data are not presented here. Rather, the analysis employs the concept of “technologies of the self” by Foucault (1988) as a heuristic device in order to situate Web 2.0 use, first, in a long history of culturally evolved forms of self-constitution and, second, in a complex matrix of relationships with other types of technologies, namely, those of production, sign systems and power. This conceptual choice, we argue, furnishes a study of Web 2.0 use, which holds in balance its liberatory potential and its susceptibility to new forms of domination, rationalization and commodification.

https://people.ucalgary.ca/~bakardji/files/pubs/journals/Web2.0TechnologiesoftheSelf.pdf

Pros and Cons: Negotiating Value in Blog Culture

References

Consumerism and Compulsory Individuality: Women, will and potential.

Welcome to Me-Mart: The Politics of User-Generated Content in Personal Blogs

Hypercapitalism: A Political Economy of Informational Idealism

Web 2.0 Technologies of the Self

Catharsis in psychotherapy: A new perspective.

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