The New Hunter-gatherers: Making Human Interaction Productive in the Network Society

Abstract

The article discusses a set of emerging techno-social practices that transform interpersonal interactions into acts of production of valuable, durable objects such as SNS-posts and videos. These practices rely on (and enhance) a new attentiveness towards the world (including social interactions, communication and quasi-autotelic activities) as Bestand/resource, from which value may be extracted. The rise of these practices and modes of attention obviously relies on new production and dissemination of technological infrastructures, but it also relies on and contributes to the evolution of hyperrational subjectivity, which is compatible with the demands of late-modern economies. Like corporations, ordinary people come to view leisure time interpersonal interactions as sites for the extraction of (often non-monetary) value through their objectification. The article demonstrates how the objectification and productivization of events remoulds both common everyday practices and extreme forms of criminality, all sharing a common cultural logic.

Valuing audience passions: From Smythe to Tarde

“…Two additional observations can be made. First, a similar semantics of passion is also employed within the 'self-productivisation' of users' activity (Schwarz, 2012), their voluntary objectification not only as a source of monetary audience value but also as an ingredient in a number of reflexive valuation practices that follow a wide range of different value horizons (Stark, 2011). Measurements of passions like influence, or Klout operate not only within corporate practices of audience or brand valuation, but also within a wide range of autonomous networks of wealth creation, be these social enterprise scenes or peer-to-peer production systems.…”