Choice or Disparation? Theorising the Social in Social Media Systems

Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture

Neal Thomas¹ 

[1] Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Studies, the University of North Carolina;

关键词: technology;    information;    media;    social;    ontology;    Epistemology;   

DOI  :  10.16997/wpcc.211

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

For millions of people around the world, social media systems now represent a central, material-semiotic mode of relation. At the level of algorithmic technique, their vision of the social is primarily achieved through the capture of, and interactive feedback upon choice and decision, made between information-objects as they are retrieved and circulated in communication. Choosing to befriend someone and not someone else, to linger over one product instead of another, or to select some search result over those above or below it, are all moments that differentiate a collective significance on these platforms. How might new materialist thinking intervene? The paper wonders whether current technical schemas for social media, which understand choice as an epistemic relation, might be fruitfully reconceived in terms of a prior ontological relation. Borrowing conceptual vocabulary from the philosopher Gilbert Simondon, the paper asks: how might we understand information as a differential effect of the distributed potential for becoming?

【 授权许可】

Unknown