Spontaneous Ideology, Social Media and Late Capitalism

Abstract

Since the momentous political events of 2016 and the revelations of the Cambridge Analytica files, digital media giants such as Facebook are facing much public scrutiny, for allowing misinformation, fake news and propaganda to spread on platforms. Critics and policy makers are advocating for the regulation of these platforms, assuming that regulating content such as political advertising on the platforms will resolve permanently, the ongoing problems with social communication under late capitalism. Prior to 2016, the central mainstream discourses surrounding social media were largely positive. Marxist analysis of social media, on the other hand, primarily focussed on critically analysing the political economy of platforms by explaining how they partake in the drives of capitalism. What remains unanswered in these accounts, however, is what kind of subjectivity and concrete cultural practices are privileged on social media platforms to accrue the ideological reproduction of late capitalism. This thesis offers an account of the dialectical interactions between social media, as a dominant cultural phenomenon, and late capitalism, as the dominant mode of production today. It is argued that an Althusserian conception of spontaneous ideology or interpellation offers a nuanced understanding of how ideologies are not just ideas that exist in our heads but are part of a subjectivising process, often informed and mediated by socially signifying practices. To illustrate this, three distinct case studies are put forth, where some of the most popularized image-making trends like selfies, travel images, and Alt Right memes are analysed using a range of semiotic-psychoanalytic concepts. In all of the demands about regulating social media platforms one forgets that it is us after all, the subjects/users of social media, who (mis)recognize ourselves in one or another ideological strategy, whether its electing Donald Trump as president or denying the validity of climate change. A Lacanian account of subjectivity further helps in explaining that ideological interpellation is often a messy, contradictory affair.