Shared entanglements – Web 2.0, info-liberalism & digital sharing

Abstract

This essay situates digital sharing in ‘info-liberalism’, a neologism encompassing critiques of the close alignment between neoliberal capitalism and digital communication, to capture the affective motions of online sharing and its links to neoliberal capitalism. Digital sharing is a keyword with positive semantic associations that encapsulates a contradictory impulse: by definition, sharing is not premised on a monetary exchange for goods or services, yet Web 2.0 enables and celebrates a culture of sharing and sharing-economy that it obliquely exploits to fuel its algorithmically regulated economy. The essay elaborates how algorithms create affective situations and build in philosophies of interaction through ‘affective priming’ [Massumi, B. (2015). The power at the end of the economy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.] and ‘procedural rhetoric’ [Bogost, I. (2007). Persuasive games: The expressive power of videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Bogost, I. (2008). The rhetoric of video games. In K. Salem (Ed.), The ecology of games: Connecting youth, games and learning (pp. 117–140). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.] that cue user participation in digital sharing. It uses everyday vignettes to illustrate the ordinary, ubiquitous ways that Internet companies design new media technologies to create affective situations that induce user participation while expanding their business base. Entanglement is proffered as a conceptual alternative to digital sharing. This concept extends a view of the web and the Internet as a whole as a socio-technical apparatus that merges the affective, symbolic and material, and entwines human and nonhuman entities together through digital sharing to fuel neoliberal capitalism. As a fundamental feature of the apparatus, online sharing greases the wheels of the neoliberal machine and co-opts some of the best impulses of humanity, the affective and altruistic esprit de corps aspect of sharing, to fuel its practices of economic exploitation.

Keywords:

• digital sharing
• info-liberalism
• affective situation
• neoliberal capitalism
• entanglement
• socio-technical apparatus

Acknowledgements

I want to thank Nicholas John for his steadfast support and for organizing – with Wolfgang Sützl – an excellent pre-conference at ICA in 2014. I also am grateful to Jenny Cook for her encouragement to move this essay forward. Finally, I am indebted to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and extensive commentary, all of which helped to strengthen the final version of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Marlia E. Banning is an Assistant Professor in the newly created College of Media, Communication, and Information at the University of Colorado, Boulder. [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1. Vignettes ground my theoretical observations across the essay and illustrate the everyday character of the interactions and encounters to which I refer. I borrow a narrative convention from anthropologist Kathleen Stewart in Ordinary Affect and refer to myself in the third person in these vignettes.

2. The term ‘info-liberalism’ was the key to several conference papers that I presented between 2013 and 2014 for critiquing the link between digital communication and neoliberal capitalism. While revising this manuscript in early 2015, I found the term in a 2015 Google search in Catlaw and Sandberg (2014)

3. This work has been presented in a number of professional forums, including the Joint Conference of the Society for the Social Studies of Science & the European Association for the Study of Science & Technology, the venue in which I presented my first conference paper based on my Master's Thesis.