Abstract
In their analysis of key contemporary political events – the Arab Spring, European Austerity Protests, Occupy-Encampments and more recently Gezi Park – observers have rarely failed to assert the centrality, if not indispensability, of social media to the organizational dynamic in question. But while there is only modest enthusiasm for Facebook alternatives even among its critics, it does not follow from the concern that organizing takes place within and not outside of corporate spheres of communication that we should make the political economy of networks our horizon of analysis. The question of infrastructural independence in political organization arises not simply in response to the establishment of social media monopolies. As an ensemble of social-technical practices, work is increasingly mediated and modulated by experience machines, structuring and subsuming our socialities. In an economy that sees labour and life inseparable from informational technologies, their metrics and modes of organization, what is at stake is not only the political economy of online networking but the very constitution of political subjectivity – the autonomy of affect (see also LaFrance and Nathan, 2012). From the perspective of organizing networks, a key question to retrieve from the history of social and political movements relates to the status of a principle of the actionable.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 111-132 |
Number of pages | 22 |
Journal | Sociologia del Lavoro |
Volume | 133 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2014 |