Digital Capitalism and Friendship: A Critical Analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v5i4.166Keywords:
lienation, social media, commodificationAbstract
This paper starts from an understanding of friendship as a series of gradients – a definition provided firstly by Aristotle – to observe the similarities and differences between interested friendship, disinterested friendship, and market relations. Introducing the notion of surveillance capitalism, the paper discusses the advent of social media and the implicit definition of friendship that underlies it. Social media favours the quantification and bureaucratisation of friendship, transforming it into a measure of personal achievement, i.e. widely promoting instrumental friendship. This transformation raises a number of issues related to alienation, self-exploitation, and the ability to relate to otherness
References
Adams, R. G., Blieszner, R., & de Vries, B. (2000). Definitions of friendship in the third age: Age, gender, and study location effects. Journal of Aging Studies, 14(1), 117–133. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0890-4065(00)80019-5
Albrechtslund, A. (2008). Online social networking as participatory surveillance. First Monday, 13(3). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v13i3.2142
Argyle, M. (2002). The psychology of happiness (2. ed., repr). Routledge.
Aristotle. (2009). The Nicomachean ethics (L. Brown, Ed.; D. Ross, Trans.). Oxford University Press.
Aristotle. (2013). Aristotle’s Politics (C. Lord, Ed.; Second edition). The University of Chicago Press.
Badhwar, N. K. (1993). The Circumstances of Justice: Pluralism, Community, and Friendship*. Journal of Political Philosophy, 1(3), 250–276. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9760.1993.tb00012.x
Barba del Horno, M. (2020). Campo, conexión y desigualdad. Hacia una economía política de las prácticas en la era del capitalismo digital. Teknokultura. Revista de Cultura Digital y Movimientos Sociales, 17(2), 121–130. https://doi.org/10.5209/tekn.69317
Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.117.3.497
Beer, D. D. (2008). Social network(ing) sites…revisiting the story so far: A response to danah boyd & Nicole Ellison. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(2), 516–529. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2008.00408.x
Benasayag, M., & Del Rey, A. (2015). Clinique du mal-être: La ‘psy’ face aux nouvelles souffrances psychiques. La Découverte.
Berberick, S. N. (2010). The Objectification of Women in Mass Media: Female Self-Image in Misogynist Culture. The New York Sociologist, 5(2), 1–15.
Berndt, T. J. (2002). Friendship Quality and Social Development. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11(1), 7–10. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.00157
Binder, J. F., Howes, A., & Smart, D. (2012). Harmony and tension on Social Network sites: Side-effects of increasing online interconnectivity. Information, Communication & Society, 15(9), 1279–1297. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2011.648949
Blatterer, H. (2010). Social Networking, Privacy, and the Pursuit of Visibility. In H. Blatterer, P. Johnson, & M. R. Markus (Eds.), Modern privacy: Shifting boundaries, new forms (pp. 73–87). Palgrave Macmillan.
boyd, danah m., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), 210–230. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00393.x
Browne, M. N., Blank, L. A., & Public Interest Enterprises, Inc. (1997). The Contrast Between Friendship and Business-Consumer Relationships: Trust is an Earned Attribute. Business and Professional Ethics Journal, 16(1), 155–170. https://doi.org/10.5840/bpej1997161/2/33
Bryant, E. M., & Marmo, J. (2012). The rules of Facebook friendship: A two-stage examination of interaction rules in close, casual, and acquaintance friendships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 29(8), 1013–1035. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407512443616
Bucher, T. (2012). Want to be on the top? Algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on Facebook. New Media & Society, 14(7), 1164–1180. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444812440159
Bukowski, W. M., Motzoi, C., & Meyer, F. (2009). Friendship as Process, Function, and Outcome. In K. H. Rubin, W. M. Bukowski, & B. P. Laursen (Eds.), Handbook of peer interactions, relationships, and groups (pp. 217–231). Guilford Press.
Bullingham, L., & Vasconcelos, A. C. (2013). ‘The presentation of self in the online world’: Goffman and the study of online identities. Journal of Information Science, 39(1), 101–112. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551512470051
Burkart, G. (2010). When Privacy Goes Public: New Media and the Transformation of the Culture of Confession. In H. Blatterer, P. Johnson, & M. R. Markus (Eds.), Modern privacy: Shifting boundaries, new forms (pp. 23–38). Palgrave Macmillan.
Chambers, D. (2017). Networked intimacy: Algorithmic friendship and scalable sociality. European Journal of Communication, 32(1), 26–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323116682792
Cometta, M. (2017). Borghesia e precarietà identitaria. Alia, Revista de Estudios Transversales, 6, 23–29.
Demir, M. (2015). Friendship and happiness: Across the life-span and cultures. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9603-3
Demir, M., Özdemir, M., & Weitekamp, L. A. (2007). Looking to happy tomorrows with friends: Best and close friendships as they predict happiness. Journal of Happiness Studies, 8(2), 243–271. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-006-9025-2
Edison Research. (2021). The Infinite Dial 2021. https://www.edisonresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/The-Infinite-Dial-2021.pdf
Ellison, N. B., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2011). Connection strategies: Social capital implications of Facebook-enabled communication practices. New Media & Society, 13(6), 873–892. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810385389
Fardouly, J., Willburger, B. K., & Vartanian, L. R. (2018). Instagram use and young women’s body image concerns and self-objectification: Testing mediational pathways. New Media & Society, 20(4), 1380–1395. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817694499
Ferraris, M., & Torrengo, G. (2014). Documentality: A Theory of Social Reality. Rivista Di Estetica, 57, 11–27. https://doi.org/10.4000/estetica.629
Fisher, D. (2019). To sing with another’s voice: Animation, circumspection, and the negotiation of Indigeneity in northern Australian new media. American Ethnologist, 46(1), 34–46. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12732
Floridi, L. (2014). The fourth revolution. How Infosphere is reshaping human reality. Oxford University Press.
Floyd, K., Hess, J. A., Miczo, L. A., Halone, K. K., Mikkelson, A. C., & Tusing, K. J. (2005). Human Affection Exchange: VIII. Further Evidence of the Benefits of Expressed Affection. Communication Quarterly, 53(3), 285–303. https://doi.org/10.1080/01463370500101071
Foley, C., Edwards, D., & Schlenker, K. (2014). Business Events and Friendship: Leveraging the Sociable Legacies. Event Management, 18(1), 53–64. https://doi.org/10.3727/152599514X13883555341887
Fortenbaugh, W. W. (1975). Aristotle’s Analysis of Friendship: Function and Analogy, Resemblance, and Focal Meaning. Phronesis, 20(1), 51–62. https://doi.org/10.1163/156852875X00157
Fraisse, J.-C. (1974). Philia: La notion d’amitié dans la philosophie antique?; essai sur un problème perdu et retrouvé. Vrin.
Fraser, N. (1995). From redistribution to recognition?: Dilemmas of justice in a’postsocialist’age. New Left Review, 212, 68–93.
Fraser, N. (2014). Can society be commodities all the way down? Post-Polanyian reflections on capitalist crisis. Economy and Society, 43(4), 541–558. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2014.898822
Fraser, N. (2015). Legitimation Crisis? On the Political Contradictions of Financialized Capitalism. Critical Historical Studies, 2(2), 157–189. https://doi.org/10.1086/683054
Fraser, N. (2020). What should socialism mean in the twenty-first century? Socialist Register, 56.
Fraser, N., & Jaeggi, R. (2018). Capitalism: A conversation in critical theory. Polity.
Frayssé, O. (2015). Is the Concept of Rent Relevant to a Discussion of Surplus Value in the Digital World? In E. Fisher & C. Fuchs (Eds.), Reconsidering Value and Labour in the Digital Age (pp. 172–187). Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137478573_10
Fuchs, C. (2013). Theorising and analysing digital labour: From global value chains to modes of production. The Political Economy of Communication, 2(1), 3–27.
Fuchs, C. (2014). Digital prosumption labour on social media in the context of the capitalist regime of time. Time & Society, 23(1), 97–123. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X13502117
Fuchs, C. (2019). Rereading Marx in the age of digital capitalism. Pluto Press.
Grayson, K. (2007). Friendship versus Business in Marketing Relationships. Journal of Marketing, 71(4), 121–139. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.71.4.121
Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action. Beacon Press.
Hackl, C., Lueth, D., & Di Bartolo, T. (2022). Navigating the metaverse: A guide to limitless possibilities in a Web 3.0 world. John Wiley & Sons.
Han, B.-C. (2017a). In the Swarm: Digital Prospects. MIT press.
Han, B.-C. (2017b). Psychopolitics. Verso.
Han, B.-C. (2020). The disappearance of rituals: A topology of the present. Polity Press.
Haythornthwaite, C. (2005). Social networks and Internet connectivity effects. Information, Communication & Society, 8(2), 125–147. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691180500146185
Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press.
Jaeggi, R. (2014). Alienation. Columbia University Press.
Johanssen, J. (2018). Towards a Psychoanalytic Concept of Affective-Digital Labour. Media and Communication, 6(3), 22–29. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v6i3.1424
Joinson, A. N. (2008). Looking at, looking up or keeping up with people?: Motives and use of facebook. Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - CHI ’08, 1027. https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357213
Jütten, T. (2011). The Colonization Thesis: Habermas on Reification. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 19(5), 701–727. https://doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2011.629672
Kapur, N. B. (1991). Why It Is Wrong to be Always Guided by the Best: Consequentialism and Friendship. Ethics, 101(3), 483–504. https://doi.org/10.1086/293313
Kiarina Kordela, A. (2023). Capital, or, Information. In S. Wróbel & K. Skonieczny, Regimes of Capital in the Post-Digital Age (1st ed., pp. 26–45). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003372578-4
Lambert, A. (2013). Intimacy and friendship on Facebook. Palgrave Macmillan.
Lampe, C., Ellison, N., & Steinfield, C. (2006). A face(book) in the crowd: Social Searching vs. social browsing. Proceedings of the 2006 20th Anniversary Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work - CSCW ’06, 167. https://doi.org/10.1145/1180875.1180901
Madianou, M. (2016). Ambient co-presence: Transnational family practices in polymedia environments. Global Networks, 16(2), 183–201. https://doi.org/10.1111/glob.12105
Mallan, K. (2009). Look at me! Look at me! Self-representation and self-exposure through online networks. Digital Culture & Education, 1(1), 51–66.
Marlow, C. (2009). Maintained Relationships on Facebook. Overstated. https://overstated.net/2009/03/09/maintained-relationships-on-facebook/
Marx, K. (1981). Capital: A critique of political economy (B. Fowkes, Trans.). Penguin Books in association with New Left Review.
Matthews, S. H. (1983). Definitions of Friendship and their Consequences in Old Age. Ageing and Society, 3(2), 141–155. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X00009983
McDonald, T. (2019). Strangership and Social Media: Moral Imaginaries of Gendered Strangers in Rural China. American Anthropologist, 121(1), 76–88. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13152
Miller, D. (2017). The ideology of friendship in the era of Facebook. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 7(1), 377–395. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau7.1.025
Miller, D., Costa, E., Haynes, N., Sinanan, J., Wang, X., McDonald, T., Spyer, J., Venkatraman, S., & Nicolescu, R. (2016). How the World Changed Social Media. UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781910634493
Mitchell, L. G. (1998). Philia and the polis. In Greeks Bearing Gifts: The Public Use of Private Relationships in the Greek World, 435–323 BC (pp. 22–40). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511582820.003
Moore, A. (2018). Anonymity, Pseudonymity, and Deliberation: Why Not Everything Should Be Connected: Anonymity, Pseudonymity & Deliberation. Journal of Political Philosophy, 26(2), 169–192. https://doi.org/10.1111/jopp.12149
Morozov, E. (2013). To save everything, click here: The folly of technological solutionism (First edition). PublicAffairs.
Napoletano, B., & Brett, C. (2020). An Ecological-Marxist Response to the Half-Earth Project. Conservation and Society, 18(1), 37. https://doi.org/10.4103/cs.cs_19_99
Niland, P., Lyons, A. C., Goodwin, I., & Hutton, F. (2015). Friendship Work on Facebook: Young Adults’ Understandings and Practices of Friendship: Friendship work on Facebook. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 25(2), 123–137. https://doi.org/10.1002/casp.2201
Oksala, J. (2016). Affective Labor and Feminist Politics. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 41(2), 281–303. https://doi.org/10.1086/682920
Pangle, L. S. (2003). Aristotle and the philosophy of friendship. Cambridge University Press.
Reinsel, D., Gantz, J., & Rydning, J. (2018). The Digitization of the World. From Edge to Core. An IDC White Paper. https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/our-story/trends/files/idc-seagate-dataage-whitepaper.pdf
Robinson, W. I. (2018). The next economic crisis: Digital capitalism and global police state. Race & Class, 60(1), 77–92. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396818769016
Rodríguez Prieto, R. (2020). Mecanismos de explotación en el capitalismo digital. Modelos de plusvalía en Red. Teknokultura. Revista de Cultura Digital y Movimientos Sociales, 17(2), 131–140. https://doi.org/10.5209/tekn.69454
Rosen, C. (2007). Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism. The New Atlantis, 17, 15–31.
Ross, S. (2019). Being Real on Fake Instagram: Likes, Images, and Media Ideologies of Value. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 29(3), 359–374. https://doi.org/10.1111/jola.12224
Rule, J. B. (2002). From mass society to perpetual contact: Models of communication technologies in social context. In J. E. Katz & M. A. Aakhus (Eds.), Perpetual contact: Mobile communication, private talk, public performance (pp. 242–254). Cambridge University Press.
Schmitt, C. (1996). Roman Catholicism and political form (G. L. Ulmen, Ed.). Greenwood Press.
Schmitt, C. (2018). The tyranny of values and other texts (R. A. Berman & S. G. Zeitlin, Eds.). Telos Press Publishing.
Sheldon, P., Rauschnabel, P. A., & Honeycutt, J. M. (2019). The dark side of social media: Psychological, managerial, and societal perspectives. Academic Press, an imprint of Elsevier.
Sherman, N. (1987). Aristotle on Friendship and the Shared Life. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 47(4), 589. https://doi.org/10.2307/2107230
Silver, A. (1990). Friendship in Commercial Society: Eighteenth-Century Social Theory and Modern Sociology. American Journal of Sociology, 95(6), 1474–1504. https://doi.org/10.1086/229461
Ugander, J., Karrer, B., Backstrom, L., & Marlow, C. (2011). The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph. ArXiv:1111.4503 [Physics]. http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4503
Utz, S., & Beukeboom, C. J. (2011). The Role of Social Network Sites in Romantic Relationships: Effects on Jealousy and Relationship Happiness. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 16(4), 511–527. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2011.01552.x
Vasan, S. (2018). Ecological Crisis and the Logic of Capital. Sociological Bulletin, 67(3), 275–289. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038022918796382
Wallace, E., Buil, I., & de Chernatony, L. (2012). Facebook ‘friendship’ and brand advocacy. Journal of Brand Management, 20(2), 128–146. https://doi.org/10.1057/bm.2012.45
Walther, J. B., Van Der Heide, B., Kim, S.-Y., Westerman, D., & Tong, S. T. (2008). The Role of Friends’ Appearance and Behavior on Evaluations of Individuals on Facebook: Are We Known by the Company We Keep?: Facebook Friends and Individual Evaluations. Human Communication Research, 34(1), 28–49. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.2007.00312.x
Wright, P. H. (1984). Self-Referent Motivation and the Intrinsic Quality of Friendship. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 1(1), 115–130. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407584011007
Zakhary, V., Sahin, C., Georgiou, T., & El Abbadi, A. (2017). LocBorg: Hiding Social Media User Location while Maintaining Online Persona. Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1145/3139958.3140057
Zhongxuan, L. (2016). Learning to Labour 2.0. Asiascape: Digital Asia, 3(3), 167–191. https://doi.org/10.1163/22142312-12340057
Zuboff, S. (2018). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. Public Affairs.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Mosè Cometta
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
