nsenga@mediom.qc.ca schrieb:

Hello, Christian and everybody!

You wrote:

"basically there are two possibilities: a marxist notion of class connects the concept to exploitation, a weberian notion to life-situation, life-style, etc."

What about a third view, simply descriptive of the core of the entire (human) social life? That of Veblen's distinction between the class of those engaged in daily bread-earning activities on one hand, and on the other the class of those involved (or aspiring to be) in "conspicuous consumption". I guess both FB and MS people would then belong to the second same class, as mere sub-classes!

François Nsenga Montréal, Canada

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Dear François and list, if i understand right, then veblen suggests that there is the working class and the leisure class or luxury class. sounds like a combination of marx and bourdieu, the first category is economic, the second cultural. i think bourdieu has a better distinction than veblen with his categories of economic, political, cultural, and symbolic capital that are accumulated and at the heart of class formation processes. the problem with bourdieu is that he never makes clear if these processes can all be interpreted as exploitation processes. the reason why i want to stress linking the category of class to exploitation is the normative value that the concept then gains, deconstructing the notion that science can ever be value-neutral by opposing the bourgeois pseudo-neutrality by a more radical concept that is politically loaded and implies the sublation of capitalism and the abolition of classes. so the theoretical problem is to interpret cultural classes as exploited classes. so what is first needed is a definition of exploitation and in contrast to it eventually of oppression. my feeling is that exploitation always involves the transfer of surplus (which can be material, symbolic, etc). i am not sure if veblen can help, how exactly does he define classes? after defining class, one can think about how applying the concept to social networks like myspace. best christian -- -- _____________________________ 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://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at/fuchs/ Managing Editor of tripleC - peer reviewed open access online journal for the foundations of information science: http://triplec.uti.at Forthcoming BOOK: Fuchs, Christian (2008) Internet and Society: Social Theory in the Information Age. New York: Routledge.