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ABSTRACT
While social media sharing has been of great interest to communication scholarship, understanding sharing theoretically has been complicated by its everyday nature and the consequent difficulty of representing it in objectifying terms. To overcome the difficulty of defaulting into a conceptual framework that represents sharing as exchange, I employ a critical phenomenological approach to sharing that emphasizes its everydayness and problematizes the subjectivity of sharers. Drawing on Heidegger, Lefebvre, Blanchot, and de Certeau, I discuss the problem of everydayness as it presents itself in the media’s straddling of the exceptional and the everyday.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 While acknowledging that sharing takes on different forms on different social media outlets, I will, for the purposes of this article, use the word “social media” in a general sense, referring to corporate, advertising-based social networking sites of which Facebook may be a prime example.
2 Wolfgang Sützl and others, eds., Cultures and Ethics of Sharing (Innsbruck: iup, 2011); Nicholas A. John and Wolfgang Sützl, “The Rise of Sharing in Communication and Media Studies,” Information, Communication & Society 19, no. 4 (2016), 437-41.
3 See for instance Nicholas A. John, The Age of Sharing (London: Polity, 2017); Jenny Kennedy, Digital Media, Sharing, and Everyday Life (New York: Routledge, 2019).
4 Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy and Gayle Salamon, eds., 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020), xiii. See Lisa Guenther’s chapter on Critical Phenomenology, 11–16. Nick Couldry, “Phenomenology and Critique,” in Conditions of Mediation, eds. Tim Markham and Scott Rodgers (New York: Peter Lang, 2017), 67–73. Michael Marder, Phenomena-critique-logos: The Project of a Critical Phenomenology (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
5 For a fuller account of the evolution of the phenomenology of sociality, see Thomas Szanto and Dermot Moran, eds., Phenomenology of Sociality. Discovering the “We” (New York and London: Routledge, 2016); Thomas Szanto, “Phenomenology and Social Theory,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Social Theory (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Alessandro Salice and Bernhard Schmid, eds., The Phenomenological Approach to Social Reality: History, Concepts, Problems (New York: Springer, 2016). On phenomenology and everyday sociality, Søren Overgaard and Dan Zahavi, “Phenomenological Sociology: The Subjectivity of Everyday Life,” in Encountering the Everyday: An Introduction to the Sociology of the Unnoticed, ed. Michael Hviid Jacobsen (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 93–115.
6 Lenore Langsdorf, “Why Phenomenology in Communication Research?” Human Studies 17 (1994): 1–8. See also Jessica N. Sturgess, “In Defense of Phenomenological Approaches to Communication Studies: an Intellectual History,” Review of Communication 18, no. 1 (2018): 1–18.
7 Paddy Scannell, “For a Phenomenology of Radio and Television,” Journal of Communication 45, no. 3 (1995), 4–19. Nick Couldry and Andreas’ Hepp (The Mediated Construction of Reality, 2017) propose a social phenomenology of media that builds on Schütz’ and Berger and Luckman’s work while adopting cultural materialism from cultural studies. See also Andreas Hepp, Deep Mediatization (New York: Routledge, 2019).
8 Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange (London: Polity, 2011).
9 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share (New York: Zone Books, 1988).
10 Russell Belk, “Sharing,” Journal of Consumer Research 36, no. 5 (2010): 715–34.
11 Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies. Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).
12 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 122–26; see also Nancy Holland, “The They,” in 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, ed. G. Weiss, A. V. Murphy, G. Salamon (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020), 315–20. Other translations of man in use include “people” or “one.” Following both English translations of Being and Time, I will remain with They.
13 Heidegger, Being and Time, 116.
14 The German word Dasein literally translates as “there-being,” less literally as “existence.” Typically used without translation in English-language literature, Heidegger employs the term to overcome the problem of the Cartesian subject surviving in Husserl’s phenomenology. The term also serves as a heuristic device in his ontological and existential take on phenomenology. It is through Dasein that the everyday's specific mode of being and the pre-subjective nature of the They can be grasped.
15 Heidegger, Being and Time, 115–16. Mitwelt (with-world) refers to the world as always already shared.
16 “Plural selves,” “group mind,” “sense of community,” and other terms have been used to refer to the problem of plural intentionality, following Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity. See Hans-Bernhard Schmid, “Plural Self-Awareness,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, no. 13 (2014): 7-24; Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
17 Belk, “Sharing,” 717. Belk does not attribute the invisibility of sharing to the absence of an acting subject, but rather to a reluctance to study sharing. However, he does consider sharing a practice that is “enacted daily.”
18 Holland, “The They,” 315.
19 Heidegger, Being and Time, 122–26.
20 Heidegger, Being and Time, 161–69. I prefer the Macquarrie and Robinson translation of Verfallenheit as “falling” over the Stambaugh translation (“falling prey”), although I use the Stambaugh translation for all other citations.
21 Mark A. Wrathall, Heidegger’s Being and Time (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 17.
22 Michael Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life: An Introduction (London; New York: Routledge, 2000), 1.
23 Michael Sheringham, “Configuring the Everyday,” in Everyday, ed. S. Johnstone (London: Whitechapel, 2008), 141.
24 Henri Lefebvre, cited in Alan Kaplan and Kristin Ross “Introduction,” Yale French Studies, no. 73 (1987), 2.
25 Henri Lefebvre, “Clearing the Ground,” in Everyday, ed. S. Johnstone (London: Whitechapel, 2008), 31.
26 Lefebvre, “Clearing the Ground,” 32.
27 Kristin Ross, “French Quotidian,” in Everyday, ed. S. Johnstone, 44.
28 James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 43–44.
29 Mark Andrejevic, “Privacy, Exploitation, and the Digital Enclosure,” Amsterdam Law Forum 1, no. 4, 56.
30 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
31 De Certeau, Practice, 29–42.
32 Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (New York: Continuum, 2004), 50.
33 Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” Yale French Studies, no. 73 (1987): 12–20.
34 Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” 14.
35 Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” 13.
36 Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” 16.
37 Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” 18.
38 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 93 (Virno's emphasis)
39 Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” 14.
40 Exemplified by the rise of the penny press in the 1830s. Bill Kovarik, Revolutions in Communication (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 70-82.
41 Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013).
42 Heidegger, Being and Time, 124.
43 Pavice Sheldon, Philipp Rauschnabel, and James M. Honeycutt, The Dark Side of Social Media. Psychological, Managerial, and Societal Perspectives (London: Elsevier, 2019).
44 Byung-Chul Han, Topology of Violence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 90–97.
45 De Certeau, Practice.
46 De Certeau, Practice, xix.
47 Lee Humphreys, The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018).
48 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same. Habitual New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).
49 Leah A. Lievrouw, Alternative and Activist New Media (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 28–41.
50 Geert Lovink and David Garcia, The ABC of Tactical Media (1997) http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9705/msg00096.html; Geert Lovink, Tactical Media, the Second Decade (2005), http://geertlovink.org/texts/tactical-media-the-second-decade/.
51 Laura Portwood-Stacer, “Media Refusal and Conspicuous Non-Consumption: The Performative and Political Dimensions of Facebook abstention,” New Media & Society 15 no. 7 (2012) 1041–57, doi:10.1177/1461444812465139, 1042
52 Laura Portwood-Stacer, “Media Refusal and Conspicuous Non-Consumption: The Performative and Political Dimensions of Facebook abstention,” New Media & Society 15 no. 7 (2012) 1041–57, doi:10.1177/1461444812465139, 1042.
53 Ben Light and Elija Cassidy, “Strategies for the Suspension and Prevention of Connection: Rendering Disconnection as Socioeconomic Lubricant with Facebook,” New Media & Society 16 no. 7 (2014), 1169-1184. doi:10.1177/1461444814544002
54 Light and Cassidy, “Strategies,” 1178.
55 Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics. Neolilberalism and the New Technologies of Power (London and New York: Polity, 2017), 1–8.
56 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Penguin, 2000). Camus distinguishes between physical and philosophical suicide.
57 Amanda Lagerkvist, “Existential Media: Toward a Theorization of Digital Thrownness,” New Media & Society 19 no. 1 (2017), 96–110. doi:10.1177/1461444816649921.
58 Loretta Borrelli, “The Suicide Irony. Seppuko and Web 2.0 Suicide Machine,” http://digicult.it/digimag/issue-052/the-suicide-irony-seppuko-and-web-2-0-suicidemachine/.
59 Tero Karppi, Disconnect: Facebook’s Affective Bonds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 7.
60 Nicholas A. John and S. Dvir-Gvirsman, “‘I Don’t Like You Any More.’ Facebook Unfriending by Israelis During the Israel-Gaza Conflict of 2014,” Journal of Communication 65 no. 6 (2015), 953–74. doi:10.1111/jcom.12188.
61 Humphreys, Qualified Self.
62 Humphreys, Qualified Self, 30.
63 Humphreys, Qualified Self, 9.
64 György Lukács, cited in Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” 16.
65 Humphreys, Qualified Self, 35.
66 Han, Psychopolitics, 1.
67 Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas (New York: Autonomedia, 1995).
68 Jenny Preece, Blair Nonnecke, and Dorine Andrews, “The Top Five Reasons for Lurking: Improving Community Experiences for Everyone,” Computers in Human Behavior 20, no. 2 (2004): 201–223. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2003.10.015; Babajide Osatuyi, “Is Lurking an Anxiety-masking Strategy on Social Media Sites? The Effects of Lurking and Computer Anxiety on Explaining Information Privacy Concern on Social Media Platforms,” Computers in Human Behavior 49 (2015): 324–32.
69 Olga Goriunova, “The Lurker and the Politics of Knowledge in Data Culture,” International Journal of Communication 11 (2017): 3917–93.
70 De Certeau, Practice, 169.
71 Chun, Updating, 22.
72 Chun, Updating, 22–23 (caps by Chun).
73 Chun, Updating, 2 and 171.
74 Chun, Updating, 171.
75 Virno, Grammars, 93.
76 Chun, Updating, 96.
77 Holland, “The They,” 316.
78 Lev Manovich, “The Practice of Everyday (Media) Life: From Mass Consumption to Cultural Production?,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009), 324.
79 Humphreys, Qualified Self, 33.
80 Heidegger, Being and Time, 332. Perhaps more adequately translated as “moment of vision” in the Macquarrie/Robinson translation, 376.
81 Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” 14.
82 Sarah Benet-Weiser, The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2012).
83 Nancy, Being Singular Plural.
84 Dean, Democracy, 31.
85 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, cited in Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics. Neoliberalism and Technologies of Power (New York: Verso, 2017), 3.
86 Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 1.
87 De Certeau, Practice, xix.