Facebook’s secretaries

Digital communication now pervades all spheres of life, creating new possibilities for commodification: personal data and communication are the new resources of surplus value. This in turn brings about a totally new category of threats to privacy. With recourse to the culture industry critique of early critical theory, this article seeks to challenge basic theoretical assumptions held within a liberal account of privacy. It draws the attention to the entanglement of technical and socio-economic transformations and aims at elaborating an alternative framing which takes into account that privacy is not in the first place a pre-political space for individual freedom but a constituted sphere in which social power relations are reproduced in a particularly deceitful way. With recourse to positions of critical theory, this article revisits the conceptual ambiguity of liberation and oppression and looks to draft prospects for a socio-theoretical justification and critique of privacy, updated for the digital age. Following the tradition of critical theory, the argument focuses on (new) forms of domination in and by privacy. It aims to prepare the ground for a critique of the social’s increasing commodification as well as an idea of privacy understood as reflexive participation in social practices.

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Das Subjekt im Zeitalter digitaler Reproduzierbarkeit

Wendt

2022

merz

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Der Beitrag rekonstruiert die Genese des digitalen Subjekts durch eine historisch-systematische Analyse medialer Formen organisationaler Strukturbildung. Die Systematisierung subjektiver Handlungsmöglichkeiten, die in Organisationen entwickelt und kultiviert wird, schreibt sich durch die Nutzung von Softwarelösungen als Praxis digitalen Selbstmanagements fort. Daraus resultiert für Medien- und Organisationspädagogik die gemeinsame Aufgabe, die Eigenlogik digitaler Strukturbildung für die Frage nach der Souveränität des digitalen Subjekts zu reflektieren.

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Facebook’s secretaries

Cited by 3 publications

References 10 publications

Neue Trends im Strukturwandel der Privatheit

Neue Trends im Strukturwandel der Privatheit

The culture industry revisited: Sociophilosophical reflections on ‘privacy’ in the digital age

Das Subjekt im Zeitalter digitaler Reproduzierbarkeit

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