Social Networking Tools and our Future Society
Project: The Total Library

In the chapter titled Author as Producer of Walter Benjamin's Reflections, he introduces Sergei Tretiakov's 'operating writer', and how his/her mission, as opposed to the 'informing writer', is "not to report but to struggle; not to play the spectator but to intervene actively". This description is of the author not as activist—because an activist behaves reactionary—but the author as producer, one who creates the revolution field for and with the proletariat. The activist writer is counter revolutionary as that writer "feels his solidarity with the proletariat only in his attitudes, not as a producer." Then there is the 'hack writer' who within his bourgeoisie class utilizes "the productive apparatus... by improving it in ways serving the interests of socialism." Literature, photography, music and theatre are used as examples of such tools, their political functions being to show the world as it is.

Either tool can take either stance (bourgeoisie or proletariat). The photograph for instance can present a scene capitalizing on the image of a beautiful world; with a caption, however, it can be utilized by the producer author to tell a completely different story. In case of music, Hanns Eisler observes that "music without words gained importance under capitalism". Change is impossible without words, which then makes a concert of words added to music a political meeting. Words, however, have now been assimilated into the Capitalist culture and visuals have been utilized as a political tool to be added to the music. (But now visuals are also absorbed. So what is the next emergent smooth space for production and political action? Is it reverting to the epic theatre of Brecht, the re-emergence of the soapbox and it's interruption of our thoughts and actions in order to open room for new attitudes?)

The internet, a smooth space with no boundaries for interaction and information exchange is also a tool, with its political function being the absorbing of borders and nationalities and it's ultimate function as a production apparatus, as Benjamin puts it, an apparatus "which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers-that is, readers or spectators into collaborators." (The example of his time was Brecht's epic theatre.)

In The Smooth and the Striated, Delueze and Guattari talk of the constant shift from striated space to smooth space and back. Neither space can exist on its own, and one continually sets the stage for the other to spring up from within it. A rational, gridded city as an example of the striated, will always have in it the smooth space of organic neighbourhood growth, community groups and homeless drifters. The internet first serving as a point-A-to-B information exchange route (point-to-point movement being a characteristic of striated space as opposed to smooth space where points do not terminate a path), became a space for people to become producers, creating and sharing new information, activities and ideologies—Benjamin's description of the ideal production apparatus in the hands of the proletariat. However, as prescribed of organic and planned forces intermingling, the smooth space of the internet has bred a new striated space of 'social networking tools', tools which threaten the act of production.

With "social networking tools", such as facebook, we have stopped communicating directly with each other and instead 'update' our 'status' via 'wall posts'. We do not personally invite our friends with a phone call or email, but create an 'event' in the confines of the 'social networking tool' which our network of real-life friends may not learn of if they are not a part of that insular network. We don't express grief or even news of losing a grandparent other than by creating a status update that you are 'going to a funeral'. The empathic connections between members of a society are cut, and without the feelings of kinship, care, respect, etc. the human connections in a society are severed and social responsibilities to each other are lost.

Adorno and Horkheimer, in The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception, point out that "No mention is made of the fact that the basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest. A technological rationale is the rationale of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself." We have become a smooth space of no-resistance, no production, no thought, no action, ready to be taken in by the controlled space of the anti-social tools.

These 'anti-social' networking tools have eliminated the theatre of face-to-face interaction and have removed words from the music of social engagement and of physically hearing voices and emotions resonate through bodies and space. The 'haptic' functions of the smooth are now only 'optical' functions of reading gridded information; our organic and boundless movement across the internet is placed in the striae of 'groups' we belong to; we are no longer producers, but are readers, consumers and employees of the machine of Capitalism.

( edit / delete )  Sun, Nov 9, 2008  Permanent link
Categories: rant, smooth space/striated space, facebook, anti-social networks
Sent to project: The Total Library

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