Social Network Platforms and Digital Existence - Seminar Event

Abstracts

Prospecting Facebook: Beyond the Economy of Attention

Professor Greg Elmer, Ryerson University

This presentation questions the 'industrial' worker critique of social media labour, and its accompanying economy of attention framework, in an age of big data speculation and financialization. Focusing on the social networking company Facebook, the presentation will investigate the writing and rewriting of the company's IPO prospectus in an effort to understand the dramatic drop in advertising revenues since the NASDAQ stock flotation. The presentation posits a speculative theoretical framework to understand the deleterious effects of the emergent business models and revenue streams of Facebook.

 

Exploring the machinery of digital existence

Ganaele Langlois, Assistant Professor of Communication, York University

The past few years have been marked by the rise of a new critique of digital existence based on the recognition that mainstream digital technologies of the self articulate the technical, the economic, and the psycho-social in ways that radically undermine and short-circuit processes of self-production and exploration. From Stiegler’s exploration of de-individuation through explorations of how capitalism mines the psyche (Lazzarato, 2004; Bifo, 2009) to software studies’ investigation of how social networking platforms shape conditions of existence, we are currently seeing the emergence of a political economy of the psycho-social. This presentation investigates the parameters and machinery of this new political economy and its consequences for practices of the self.