Much has been written about the more deleterious dimensions of social media websites, platforms, and apps, from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, to Instagram and Snapchat, dating apps like Tinder, and more recent apps like TikTok.
We are all more than familiar with critiques of social media corporations and government surveillance, the commodification, expropriation and exploitation of user-provided data, the tailoring and curation of content, and of course recent dilemmas focused on fake news tying our use of social media to international cyber-warfare.
Given all of these potential problems, why don’t we just give up and abandon our attachment to social media? How might we grapple with the exploitative and anti-democratic aspects of social media set against the kinds of enjoyment that it procures?
Despite some of these problems, Matthew Flisfeder argues that social media helps us to grasp the coordinates, not merely of our trouble with machines and new media, but with the larger totality of twenty-first-century capitalism.
Conceiving social media as a central metaphor for our historical present, Flisfeder proposes extending the concept to its fullest potentials. Instead of abandoning the concept, Flisfeder argues that the term social media helps us to render what is problematic about contemporary neoliberal capitalism, proposing that it is only by pursuing and failing to achieve a truly authentic social media as our goal that we are best positioned to understand the real contradictions of our time, as well as dominant forms of subjectivity, consciousness, and enjoyment.
About the speaker
Matthew Flisfeder is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communications at The University of Winnipeg (Canada). He is the author of Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media (Northwestern UP 2021), Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner (Bloomsbury 2017), The Symbolic, The Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film (Palgrave Macmillan 2012), and co-editor of Žižek and Media Studies: A Reader (Palgrave Macmillan 2014).
About CAMRI
The Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) is a world-leading centre in the study of media and communication and is renowned for its critical and international research. CAMRI is situated in the School of Media and Communication. It builds on a long tradition of research in media and communication that spans five decades, as the university launched the first British media studies degree in 1975. The University of Westminster has been consistently ranked highly in media and communication studies according to the Research Excellence Framework and the QS World University Rankings.
CAMRI’s objective is to serve as a platform for critical media and communication studies that develop the legacy of the “Westminster School”. Our research analyses communication power in light of current transformations in society and the communications landscape. CAMRI’s research is organised in five thematic networks focusing on global media, political economy and communication policy, digital media, cultural identities and social change, as well as communication theory, history and philosophy. CAMRI studies the media and communication from an international and global perspective. Our work privileges sociological inquiry and qualitative methods. It takes a contextual approach that is historical, sceptical and nuanced. Our research is grounded in theory and is rich in empirical detail, thereby informing both a critical understanding of contemporary media, as well as new approaches to policy-making and practice.
CAMRI’s research is based on a broader purpose and vision for society. Our work examines how the media and society interact and aims to contribute to progressive social change, equality, justice, and democracy. CAMRI takes a public interest and humanistic approach that seeks to promote participation, facilitate informed debate and strengthen capabilities for critical thinking, complex problem solving and creativity.
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