SIMMEL IN CYBERSPACE

Abstract

Research in the humanities and social sciences is increasingly concerned with social media technologies and their use. This article argues that such research could benefit substantially by drawing on the work of the sociologist–psychologist–philosopher Georg Simmel (1858–1918). Simmel's conceptualization of belonging, social space and domination are among his many contributions to social media theory; yet, the significance of this work remains woefully overlooked in studies of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and the information society, more broadly. To redress this disciplinary obscurity, this article fleshes out some of Simmel's most relevant contributions to CMC scholarship and provides a close reading of his 1908 essay, The Stranger. I suggest that the subjectivity to which social media give life can be best understood as a resurrection of Simmel's stranger archetype – a figure of paradox beholden to the competing demands of inclusion and exclusion, proximity and distance, mobility and stasis. Ultimately, this article insists that not only does Simmel's work help scholars to unpack the sociality of social media, but it also helps locate the changes and continuities of discourse surrounding the relationship between sociality and knowledge.

Keywords:

• Georg Simmel
• social media
• computer-mediated communication
• space
• sociality
• belonging

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Marianne Franklin, editor of the Key Thinkers series, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and generous comments. I am also grateful to Juliet Steyn and Jenny Kidd for feedback on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

This influence stems chiefly from The Philosophy of Money (Simmel 1978 [1907]), in which Simmel presents his theory of value, exchange and alienation. Many of the ideas proposed in this treatise share much in common with Marx's (1959) Paris Manuscripts, but significantly, the latter text is only ‘discovered’ and published in the early 1930s – a quarter century after Simmel's (Frisby 2002, p. 107).

Peter Hamilton dubs him ‘the unfairly neglected founding father of sociology’ (Frisby 2002, p. viii).

Since 1908, portions of Soziologie have been translated into English by a coterie of dedicated scholars, including Donald Levine (1971), Kurt Wolff (1950, 1959) and David Frisby (2002). But the first – and as of this writing, the sole – English translation of the complete volume appeared only in 2009 (Simmel 2009), more than a century after the original German publication.

It is important to note that for Simmel, the stranger is unambiguously male. This pronoun choice reflects the era's prevailing mode of academic address, and unfortunately, it is one of the few scholarly traditions the renegade thinker does not challenge. Yet, Simmel seems well aware of the ideological underpinning of his discursive gendering. While in Female Culture (Simmel 1984 [1902]) he insists that ‘with the exception of a very few areas, our objective culture is thoroughly male’, Simmel goes on to argue that, in this male culture, ‘the naïve conflation of male values with values as such … is based on historical power relations’ (Simmel in Frisby 2002, p. xxi). This is to say that he is not completely inured to, or oblivious of, the political economy of gender. And as Frisby (2002, p. 27) notes, Simmel is ‘one of the first to permit women as “guest students” to his lectures long before they [are] allowed to enter Prussian universities as full students in 1908’.

As Stuart Hall notes, ‘… identities are constructed through, not outside, difference. This entails the radically disturbing recognition that it is only through the relation to the Other, the relation to what it is not, to precisely what it lacks, to what has been called its constitutive outside that the “positive” meaning of any term – and thus its “identity” – can be constructed’ (Hall 1996, pp. 4–5).

Vouching is a practice by which a CouchSurfing user can formally attest to the trustworthiness of another user. A vouch displays on the vouched-for user's profile, and it is only after obtaining three vouches that a user gains vouching privileges.

This does, unfortunately, edge into social determinism, ignoring Jan van Dijk's observation that ‘technology is … both defining and enabling, and that technologies and human beings are mutually shaping’ (2006, p. 17).