Hi all, I don't know if the book has been translated in other languages like English or Spanish but 'Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme' from Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello tries -- among other things -- to theorize the concept of 'exploitation' in a connected world. Best Wishes Éric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Éric GEORGE, Professor, École des médias, Faculté de communication, UQAM (Montreal, Qc, Canada) Co Chair, Interdisciplinary Research Group on Communication, Information and Society (GRICIS) http://www.uqam.ca/gricis
i have read danah's article, found it interesting and like the conclusion that "myspace and facebook are new representations of the class divide in american youth".
my comment goes into another direction than the discussion thus far.
for me the important aspect of the paper is that class still counts. we should try to find ways of arguing which classes we find in contemporary informational capitalism and how class stratification has been changing in the age of the internet.
as i am mainly interested in and am dealing with theoretical aspects, i have tried to tackle the issue of class in informational capitalism some months ago.
i think if we speak about class, we need a clear definition of it that is theoreticall grounded.
basically there are two possibilities: a marxist notion of class connects the concept to exploitation, a weberian notion to life-situation, life-style, etc.
i find concepts of the first sort critical, of the second type affirmative and unsuitable (e.g. the class concepts of giddens, goldthorpe, etc).
marx applied the class concept to the social relation constituting surplus value production, erik olin wright added the ideas of skills exploitation (cultural) and organizational exploitation (political), both within strictly economic relations; bourdieu has a more general class concept based on the idea of the asymmetric accumulation of economic, political, cultural, and symbolic capital. hardt and negri recently developed a nice idea of class relations constituted by exploitation of the production of the commons.
if one can define reputation formation at the expense of others ("i am smart cause i am on facebook, you are dumb because you are on myspace", etc) as symbolic exploitation that reflects underlying forms of economic oppressions then i am in favour of speaking of cultural exploitation and class formation in the case that danah has been describing, if one can't define what the exploited surplus that is produced by the subaltern groups and transfered towards the hegemonic groups in such cases of non-economic exploitation, then i am in favour of speaking of political/organizational and cultural forms of oppression, but not of exploitation and class-formation in danah's example.
i am actually arguing for several things: * class should be connected to the idea of exploitation. * we need a theory of class in the information age * class counts * we need neo-marxist theories of informational capitalism in order to come to grips with the theoretical underpinnings and concrete-real phenomena of today
the basic theoretical question about youth and class in myspace and facebook then is:
do the facebook-upper class kids exploit the lower class myspace kids? in which ways? (if so, we more go into a bourdieuian or wrightian sense of exploitation and class formation) if not, then it is a form of oppression or the division simply reflects that the parents of the facebook kids more tend to be economic exploiters and the parents of myspace kids more tend to be economic exploitees (which constitutes a class concept that stays within the more traditional economic concept of class).
christian
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_____________________________
Univ.Ass. Dr. Christian Fuchs
Assistant Professor for Internet and Society
ICT&S Center - Advanced Studies and Research
in Information and Communication Technologies & Society
http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at
University of Salzburg
Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18
5020 Salzburg
Austria
christian.fuchs@sbg.ac.at
Phone +43 662 8044 4823
Fax +43 662 6389 4800
Information-Society-Technology:
http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at/fuchs/
Managing Editor of tripleC - peer reviewed open access
online journal for the foundations of information science:
Forthcoming BOOK:
Fuchs, Christian (2008) Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age. New York: Routledge.
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-- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Éric GEORGE Conference Co-Chair, CCA 2007 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Professeur, École des médias, Faculté de communication, UQAM Codirecteur, Groupe de recherche interdisciplinaire sur la communication, l'information et la société (GRICIS) / http://www.uqam.ca/gricis