Frictionless Sharing and Digital Promiscuity

Abstract

This article analyses the recent Facebook innovation of “frictionless sharing”, a term which describes a smoother and wider distribution of content by individual users and a less overtly acknowledged but more efficient instrumentalization of users' immaterial labour within a structure of corporate monetization. It builds on my recent work on “the sharing subject” of contemporary digital media, in which I argue that current online social networking practices, in their emphasis on “sharing” content with networks of contacts, construct and validate the networked subject according to a version of neoliberal individualism. Moreover, the construction of this subject position implicitly recalls the heteronormativity of AIDS panic, through an unlikely rebranding of promiscuity as a desirable and successful mode of interactivity. If the new rhetoric of “sharing” erases the riskiness of circulation previously encoded in dominant images of virality, notably behaviours associated with HIV, then what is the relationship of the projected potential of “frictionless sharing” to existing normative frames of ethics and morality? In approaching this question, I revisit significant queer interventions into concepts of community and risk that emerged in the post-AIDS context, notably Tim Dean's recent examination of the barebacking subculture to which mediations of an idealized frictionlessness are also central.

Keywords:

• social networking
• Facebook
• barebacking
• queer theory
• intimacy

Notes

[1] Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 5.

[2] Robert Payne, “Virality 2.0: Networked Promiscuity and the Sharing Subject,” Cultural Studies 27, issue 4, (2012). doi:10.1080/09502386.2012.707219

[3] Mark Zuckerberg, “F8 2011 Keynote,” YouTube, 2011, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = 9r46UeXCzoU&feature = related

[4] Don Ball, “Will Google+ Trump Facebook with Digital Intimacy?,” Forbes, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/gyro/2012/01/30/will-google-trump-facebook-with-digital-intimacy/

[5] Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013).

[6] “F8 2011 Keynote.”

[7] “F8 2011 Keynote.”

[8] “F8 2011 Keynote.”

[9] “F8 2011 Keynote.”

[10] Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in a Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin, 2008).

[11] Bill Gates, The Road Ahead (New York: Penguin, 1996).

[12] Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, trans. P. Colilli and E. Emery (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 133–47.

[13] Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18, (2000): 33–58.

[14] Mark Andrejevic, “Social Network Exploitation,” in A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites., ed. Zizi Papacharissi (New York: Routledge, 2011), 82–102; Melissa Gregg, “Thanks for the Ad(d): Neoliberalism's Compulsory Friendship,” Online Opinion, September 21, 2007, http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article = 6400

[15] Mark Coté and Jennifer Pybus, “Learning to Immaterial Labour 2.0: Facebook and Social Networks,” in Cognitive Capitalism, Education and Digital Labor, ed. Michael A. Peters and Ergin Bulut (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 169–94.

[16] Molly Wood, “How Facebook Is Ruining Sharing,” CNet, 2011, http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-57324406–256/how-facebook-is-ruining-sharing

[17] Henry Jenkins, “If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, 2009, http://henryjenkins.org/2009/02/if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p.html

[18] Philip Bump, “The Problem with Facebook's New Frictionless Sharing,” The Atlantic, 2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/the-problem-with-facebooks-new-frictionless-sharing/245578

[19] Mike Loukides, “The End of Social,” O'Reilly Radar, 2011, http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/12/the-end-of-social.html

[20] Wood, “How Facebook Is Ruining Sharing.”

[21] “F8 2011 Keynote.”

[22] Wood, “How Facebook Is Ruining Sharing.”

[23] Tony D. Sampson, Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

[24] Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Jussi Parikka, Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (New York: Peter Lang, 2007).

[25] Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, 5.

[26] Douglas Crimp, “How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” October, 43 (1987): 250.

[27] David Halperin, What Do Gay Men Want? An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 18–23.

[28] Payne, “Virality 2.0: Networked Promiscuity and the Sharing Subject.”

[29] Jenkins, “If It Doesn't Spread, It's Dead.”

[30] Payne, “Virality 2.0: Networked Promiscuity and the Sharing Subject.”

[31] Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, 211.

[32] Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, 211.

[33] Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, 6.

[34] Delany Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, 190.

[35] Delany Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, 188.

[36] Delany Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, 37.

[37] Delany Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, 34.

[38] Delany Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, 35.

[39] Delany Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, 36.

[40] Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 60.

[41] Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 60.

[42] Evgeny Morozov has argued that Facebook and frictionless sharing are largely responsible for the death of “cyberflânerie,” the kind of serendiptious browsing celebrated during early Internet days. (My thanks to this article's anonymous reviewer for this reference.) “The Death of the Cyberflâneur,” The New York Times, 4 February 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/opinion/sunday/the-death-of-the-cyberflaneur.html?pagewanted = all

[43] Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, 52.

[44] Wood, “How Facebook Is Ruining Sharing.”

[45] Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 38.

[46] Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 38.

[47] Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 48.

[48] Richard Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 46.

[49] Tero Karppi, “Digital Suicide and the Biopolitics of Leaving Facebook,” Transformations 20 (2011), http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_20/article_02.shtml

[50] “Promoted Posts,” Facebook Help Centre: https://www.facebook.com/help/promote

[51] “Facebook Advertising Guidelines”: https://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php

[52] “Facebook Apologizes for Censoring Gay Kiss Photo,” Huffington Post, April 19, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/19/facebook-gay-kiss_n_850941.html

[53] cf. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1991).

[54] Leo Bersani, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 47.

[55] Leo Bersani, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 49.

[56] Leo Bersani, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 55.

[57] Leo Bersani, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 53.

[58] Leo Bersani, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 53.

[59] Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking, 211.

[60] Bersani, Intimacies, 55.

[61] Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays, 25.

[62] Bersani, Intimacies, 50–51.

[63] Wood, “How Facebook Is Ruining Sharing.”

[64] Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11, 124.

[65] Grusin, Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11, 124.

[66] Jussi Parikka, “Digital Monsters, Binary Aliens—Computer Viruses, Capitalism and the Flow of Information,” Fibreculture 4 (2005), http://www.fibreculture.org/journal/issue4/issue4_parikka.html

[67] “F8 2011 Keynote.”