TY - JOUR
AU - Briziarelli,, Marco
AB - Abstract In this paper, I use the online app Snapchat as a prism through which I illustrate a “spectacular” power of current informational/communicative capitalism: the ability to subsume and integrate a broad range of practices into a holistic socialization process that operates both at the level of media platform structures and at the level of subjectivization mechanisms. I advance this argument by historicizing Guy Debord’s notion of the Spectacle via Autonomist Marxism and Voloshinov’s materialist semiotics. Shedding light on the tensions inhabiting the post-Fordist labor process its users are involved in—such as autonomy/heteronomy, sociability/alienation, and display/concealment—I show how Snapchat points to a Spectacle that consistently operates through a dialectic of socialization, which enables and compels, consorts and estranges, and deceives and exhibits. Snapchat is a mobile, multimedia application that allows users to post and manipulate self-destroying images and messages. Since its launch in 2011, the app has consistently grown in popularity and, as of December 2018, had 186 million daily, active users (Statista, 2019). Its monetization—mostly accomplished through inserting advertising in feed channels, displaying sponsored “lenses,” and selling metadata—brought the company’s revenue close to 400 million in the last quarter of 2018 (Statista, 2019). According to its founders, Snapchat is not a social network, but a camera app dedicated to the visual curation of its users’ life experiences (Pardes, 2018). However, as its subscribers added up, the app progressively started looking and operating like a social network, connecting circles of friends through images (Piwek and Joinson, 2016). Like other web-based social media, Snapchat is regarded with both enthusiasm and concerns. On the one hand, the exchanging of “snaps” is linked to the alleged transformative power of social media to incentivize community engagement and the public sphere (Kruse, Norris & Flinchum, 2018), to shift from “one to many” to “many to many” communication logic (boyd, 2010), and to move towards a cooperative mode of the production of knowledge (Shirky, 2008), which would ideally lead to an overall democratizing experience (Castells, 2009). On the other hand, questions of privacy and “improper” usages such as “sexting” (Roesner, Gill, & Kohno, 2014) have tied Snapchat to concerns about unwanted media effects, such as limiting the freedom of and augmenting the surveillance of personal media practices (Willcocks, 2006), as well as about turning users’ prosumption (i.e., production + consumption) into new forms of labor exploitation (Fuchs, 2014). Trying to go beyond the immediate level of image exchanges through the analysis of Snapchat users’ practices as a labor process (Braverman, 1974), I will demonstrate how such links between images and the particular ways in which those images mediate capitalist, social relations make the app particularly exemplary of the current capitalist Spectacle. By that term, I do not mean literal spectacularity. I instead claim that Snapchat provides an effective view of a less dramatic but possibly more cogent phenomenon theorized by French philosopher Guy Debord: a holistic system that seamlessly integrates capitalism with its own ideological representations. Accordingly, by interpreting Snapchat through an updated and historicized notion of the Spectacle—that is, the Socialized Spectacle—I grasp a general capability of current informational/communicative capitalism to subsume and integrate a broad range of practices into a common logic of social relations: a kind of socialization that operates both at the level of media platform structures and at the level of subjectivization processes. Thus, shedding light on the tensions inhabiting the labor processes its users are involved in—such as autonomy/heteronomy, sociability/alienation, and display/concealment—I show how Snapchat points to a Spectacle that consistently operates through a dialectic of socialization, which enables and compels, consorts and estranges, and deceives and exhibits. To this purpose, I first lay out my theoretical apparatus by rethinking the notion of the Spectacle via Autonomist Marxism and Voloshinov’s materialist semiotics. Then, in order to better grasp the “spectacular” features of current capitalism, I examine the inherent tensions that characterize Snapchat’s labor process. The Spectacle and the spectacular snaps The transition from the philosophical inquiry about metaphysical objects to the inquiry into the nature and means of representation of those objects led scholars to consider language, media, and theatrical terms, such as stage, fiction, and representation, as metaphors of a (post-)modern condition. This was the case of Guy Debord’s lifespan reflections: a critique of false immediacy and estrangement of capitalist society that culminated with his manuscript, Society of the Spectacle, written in 1967 and then expanded upon in 1988 by the essay Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. Building on the Marxian notions of commodity fetishism (Marx, 1990) and alienation (Marx, 1988), Debord considered how people in capitalism come to be increasingly governed by “concrete abstractions”: invisible, immaterial, but objectively real social relations that hide their significance behind their representations, as per the case of labor relations hiding behind the fetish spectacle of commodity exchanges. Then, drawing on Lefebvre’s (1957),Critique of Everyday Life and its address of daily mystifications, Debord came to consider the original economic fetishism as epitomizing a generalized, deceiving representation: a generalized spectacle. Thus, similarly to Benjamin’s (2002) intuitions in The Arcade Project, the Spectacle conveys a powerful narration of the dialectical images produced by capitalism: the contradictory experience of directly living and viewing apparently natural social phenomena—such as walking around a store, watching a movie, or taking a snap—and being unable to grasp their social meanings. Accordingly, Debord (1967) described the Spectacle as the general manifestation of capitalism, primarily mediated by the commodity-form, or “the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life” (p. 42) and when “all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles: everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation” (p. 5). By claiming that “the spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images,” Debord (1967, p. 4) complicated his understanding of the Spectacle by a dialectic of the abstract and concrete (Ilyenkov, 1960). While he considered the Spectacle to be concrete, insofar as it shows the whole system of fluid social interaction (not directly visible), its representations are treated as abstract (i.e., abstracted from concrete reality), insofar as they reduce the complexity of the whole into imageable, sensually perceived fragments. Thus, the Spectacle is characterized by a deceptive epistemological inversion between concrete images, which function as a form of appearance, and the objective property of the spectacle, which is predominantly graspable as an abstraction. However, while Debord suggested this on various occasions, he did not explicitly address the problem that Marx had already encountered in dealing with the complex phenomenology of capitalism, which justified the differentiation between a “method of inquiry and a method of presentation” of such reality (Marx, 1990, p. 102). In this sense, I argue that the reception of Debord’s theory has been compromised by the very powerful but also ambivalent metaphor of the spectacle, at the same time constituting the object of inquiry, the method of inquiry, and a method of presentation. For this reason, I unravel such overlapping by distinguishing between united but analytically distinct levels: (a) Spectacle and (b) Spectacular. The Spectacle essentially constitutes an operationalization of the Marxian concept of social mediation (Marx, 1990): the ways in which relations of production shape social relations at large and articulate the manner in which a community conducts its affairs. The Spectacle is a concrete abstraction (i.e. objective but invisible) that is fully operative but not immediately graspable in its totality. Thus, given our inability to immediately grasp the Spectacle, we tend to perceive only its Spectacular, contradictory fragments. Those fragments are physical appearances of the Spectacle: its directly observable elements. Those Spectacular fragments appear through a wide range of semiotic codes: from media images to urbanism, and from the way everyday life is understood to the way we capture and represent it by Snapchat images. As I show later on, Debord’s intuition about the false immediacy of images is particularly useful in grasping both Snapchat’s density of meanings and in providing a unitary perspective on how late capitalism tends to reconfigure most social relations. However, while the Spectacle allows us to grasp the opaque epistemology of Snapchat, it fails to account for its complex social ontology, because it falls short of showing how concretely it reproduces its own conditions of existence (Jappe, 1999). Furthermore, the Spectacle has been considered as a fairly naive representation of overwhelming capitalist domination, reduced in media studies to another “mass society” narrative of audience victimization. As Best and Kellner (1997) pointed out, Debord depicted the Spectacle as a quasi-infallible regime of power that does not leave room for the inevitable ruptures that capitalism systematically generates (and Snapchat illustrates). According to Debord’s original Spectacle, snaps would essentially be deceptive illusions: symptoms of a condition of the separation of people from real existence and real praxis, because images only reflect reality. However, that cannot exhaust the productive and creative practices associated with Snapchat. For this reason, I reexamined the concept via Autonomist Marxism and Voloshinov’s materialist semiotics, with the objective of retaining the explanatory value of the grand narrative of the original Spectacle while increasing its ability to grasp contemporary social, cultural, and economic conditions through an information- and communication-centered perspective. The Socialized Spectacle While for Debord (1967, p. 194) the task of informational and communicational technologies was to develop ideological tools to justify the Spectacle and generate its “functionalist consciousness,” I argue that, by what I call the Socialized Spectacle, information-/communication-driven practices like Snapchat’s become labor, producing value. Therefore, through the Snapchat case, I will highlight how, in the Socialized Spectacle, social media do not simply mediate but also valorize both social relations and the subjectivities inhabiting them. Marx effectively synthesized such a materialist view on media technology: Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations. (Marx, 1990, p. 493). In other words, I assume that social media technology internalizes and acts upon all facets of material productions of life—such as social relations, ideology, and labor—so that by studying capitalist media we can acquire important knowledge about the whole capitalist social process. Accordingly, I define the Socialized Spectacle as an integral perspective that allows us to grasp how current capitalism, in a significant portion of the world, is valorizing and subsuming media-related productive activities and derivative subjective dispositions, which are particularly visible in the dialectics of socialization implied by social media such as Snapchat. The main function of this notion is to provide a broader assessment of capitalist (re-)production potential, in which the socialization implied by social media such as Snapchat dialectically combines internal tensions analogous to the Gramscian synthesis implied by the two poles of hegemony—consent and coercion—such as in sociability/alienation, autonomy/heteronomy, and display/concealment, and, at a broader level, also (media) structures/subjectivities. The Socialized Spectacle explains materially how a given logic of social relations, implemented by a new spirit of capitalism (Boltansky & Chiappello, 1999) in the case of informational/communicational capitalism, becomes both constitutive and dominant. Such a revisitation is accomplished not simply through the examination of commodity consumption and circulation, as the original Spectacle’s is, but also through prosumers’ commodity production, which, as I will show in the case of Snapchat, is disciplined and exploited as well as self-motivated and gratified. Furthermore, methodologically speaking, the emphasis on production will lead me to overcome Snapchat’s fetish layer of image exchanges (i.e., the spectacular side) through a post-Fordist labor process analysis that moves the focus from the production process to the broader realm, in which production and consumption intersect each other. To this purpose, I draw on Autonomia, a 1960s–1970s Italian radical movement that produced innovative Marxist perspectives on the capital-labor dynamics that, building on the work of Romano Alquati, Mario Tronti, and Antonio Negri, emphasize the constitutive role of the working and its transformative potential. Such a rethinking allows me to both capture Snapchat’s productive communicational activities outside the context of the traditional labor realm (e.g., factory, offices) and to start understanding subjectivities such as the Snapchat users who, while integrated within capitalist relations mediated by the app—by virtue of their productive practices and their imagination—immanently constitute a source of relative potential autonomy. Thus, the Socialized Spectacle preserves the advantage of the unitary perspective provided by the original Spectacle, while incorporating more complexity. As previously mentioned, the Socialized Spectacle derives from a historicization of the original Spectacle: while Debord provided an account of capitalism defined by Fordism and consumerism, the Autonomist thinkers described a successive post-Fordist phase that deploys communication and information technologies to increase flexibility and exploit work (Dyer-Witheford, 1994). Capital then is consistently engaged in controlling the rebellious element of workers by increasing the proportion of “dead capital” over “living capital” (Alquati, 1961): in other words, replacing people with technology. The transition to post-Fordism represented a response to the insurgency of industrial workers in the 1960s and 1970s (Dyer-Witheford, 1994), which led to massive investments in the service industry, the heavy deployment of telecommunications, and the consequent displacement of the worker from the environment of the factory to offices and homes, thus making society at large into a social factory (Tronti, 1962). According to Negri (1978), all those changes served two purposes: first, they increased the degree of relative exploitation in terms of productivity; and second, and more generally, they completed the passage from formal to real subsumption of work and life (Marx, 1990), creating a condition in which all of society is subsumed by the factory. Thus, based on Autonomia’s assessment of social/political economic change, I distinguish between a Fordist/Debordian Spectacle and a post-Fordist Spectacle: the Socialized Spectacle. When social life becomes increasingly absorbed by capital, all previous boundaries that prevented economics from completely shaping social life inevitably blur, such as the distinctions between private and public, work time and free time, unpaid creative work and paid labor. Consequently, post-Fordist work is inhabited by colossal paradoxes of socialization, which I will illustrate later on with Snapchat: the entire social existence becomes simultaneously socialized and privatized; while granted flexibility and emancipated from the regimented control inside the manufacturing plant, the worker also tends to self-activate and self-exploit; the constant communication with others characterizing the post-Fordist worker acquires more agency while becoming an individual unit of production; and work is paradoxically humanized by extending its logic to affective relations, which inevitably transforms affect into “instrumental effect” (Negri, 1978). Such dialectics of socialization, powered by Information Communication and Technology, repropose Debord’s Spectacle under a new light: while the Socialized Spectacle maintains the ambiguous status of media images as being both deceptive and revelatory, it does that by treating those images not as merely reflective of the Spectacle, but rather materially constitutive of it. Thus, while in the original Spectacle Debord lamented the loss of communication (Jappe, 1999), communication in the Socialized Spectacle becomes an omnipresent and true material force of production of capital, as the living communicational labor of interaction becomes captured, packaged, and, therefore, commodified into information (Negri, 1978). Supporting this view, Alquati (1961) advanced the notion of “valorizing information” as a link between the Marxian labor theory of value and the materially productive role of ICT in the context of post-Fordist capital. Valorizing information describes a cybernetic side of the Spectacle in which images and signs of human communication turn into codes and bits of computational logic and information theory (Shannon, 1948), bridging people and technology. Therefore, the Socialized Spectacle paradoxically substantiates communication as abstraction and by abstraction. In other words, if communication represents the necessary human interaction required, among many things, to coordinate material existence, then information a la Shannon becomes its instrumental, “purified” abstraction: concrete communicational practices turn into abstract labor; idiosyncratic communicational use-values turn into an exchange value of communicational equivalences; means of communication turn into means of transportation; and finally, logos turns into logistics. In Voloshinov’s (1973) materialist semiotics terms, spectacular signs, previously considered as epiphenomena of the Debordian Spectacle, both reflect and refract the Socialized Spectacle in the post-Fordist context: reflectively, spectacular signs work as mirror images of the spectacle; refractively, those signs also operate as productive moments of the Spectacle. In other words, they are substantial channels that, while allowing people to partially grasp the Spectacle, inevitably cause distortion both in the comprehension of the Spectacle, as well as causing changes in the very dynamics of the Spectacle. As I show later on, in the case of Snapchat, this means that snaps should be understood through the tensions of production and consumption of the capitalist Spectacle: that is, Snapchat images operate both as products, reflecting the dominant capitalist logic, and as constitutive means through which subjectivities and social relations are produced with a relative degree of autonomy from the Spectacle. Implying the indissoluble unity of signs and their material referent, I use Voloshinov’s distinction between reflective and refractive to assess both the complexity of the relationship between the Socialized Spectacle as a whole and spectacular fragments, as well as the complexity of the materialist causal relation between a social being and consciousness, which is not purely reflective but also refractory. By dialectically joining the two terms, the present framework creates a realm in which Snapchat users can have genuine but also limited degrees of agency/autonomy. In fact, due to the current material and productive preeminence of information and communication technologies, the biggest transformation from the original to the Socialized Spectacle consists in the spectacular level exemplified by Snapchat practices and by users turning much more refractive rather than reflective. By that, I show how Snapchat practices, as well as Snapchat-associated subjectivities, become much more interactive and constitutive of the assemblage of economic activity implied by current capitalism. Summing up, while Debord’s (1967) original Spectacle represents the “technical mediation” (p. 216) “of the dominant organization of production” (p. 8), thus privileging a reflective function, in the Socialized Spectacle both signs and signifying subjects become means of production of valorizing information, lacking but also producing their own material referents. I will exemplify this paradox in the second part of the paper, with Snapchat. Snapchat and the dialectics of socialization As already mentioned in the introduction, the explanatory power of the Spectacle theory risks reduction to spectacular images. In this sense, in line with Autonomia’s particular attention on labor, I move beyond Snapchat’s fetish of image exchanges by examining its users’ practices as aspects of a post-Fordist labor process, concentrating on both how and what such labor produces (Braverman, 1974). The basic elements of a labor process analysis consist of human labor, in this case implied by using and attending Snapchat; the object on which work is performed, in this case snaps and messages; the tools and purpose of such labor, in this case mainly exemplified by sociability; mechanisms of labor control, in this case mainly referring to Snapchat as a platform that ensures its subscribers utilize the app in the “appropriate,” productive way; and finally, the valorization point, in this case making sense of how (surplus) value is extracted from such a labor process (Smith, 2015). While, in the framework originally conceptualized by Braverman (1974), a labor process analysis is applied to a Fordist organization of labor, in this paper, informed by Autonomia and its post-Fordist reading, a labor process partially changes some of its foci (Gandini, 2018). If Braverman considered the worker as progressively de-skilled, deprived of his/her agency, and disciplined by technology, what will emerge from the analysis is a more ambivalent picture: users/producers who navigate relative autonomy and constraint, and who develop their subjectivity not despite technology, but through technology (Burawoy, 1979). In this sense, if for Braverman technology mostly functioned as tool of class warfare, in the post-Fordist context it becomes a dialectical platform for the socialization of skills that harness the general intellect (Virno, 2001) and affective relations (Negri, 1978), and shape subjectivities who emphasize self-direction over hetero-direction, exploiting their communicative and associative resources (Lorey, 2015). Such a realm is well exemplified by digital platforms such as Snapchat, which constitute a significant ground of operations of the on-demand economy/gig economy (Scholtz, 2016). Digital platforms can be seen as “intermediary digital infrastructures that efficiently coordinate ‘subjects’ and ‘objects,’ by mediating customers, commodities, information, advertisers, service providers, producers and suppliers” (Srnicek, 2016, pp. 43–45). Indeed, Snapchat’s capability to valorize its users’ practices depends on its platform nature, as it provides a visual, logical, and logistical infrastructure that conciliates Snapchat’s users and the interests of the advertising industry, Snap-channel sponsors, and lens sponsors. Snapchat becomes one of the spectacular stages in which the social relations generated by the Socialized Spectacle become valorizable as relations of production. According to my synthetic definition of the current Spectacle within dialectics of socialization, I focus on three tensions that characterize Snapchat practices—which can also be easily attributed to many other social media—namely: autonomy/heteronomy, sociability/alienation, and display/concealment. My empirical assessment derives from a combination of my personal experience of using the app for 4 months (from June to October 2017) with the experiences conveyed by reviews found on Youtube.com and Quora.com. In this sense, the identification of the Snapchat tensions mentioned above stem from an inductive thematization of my and the reviewers’ experiences, paying particular attention to how both existing Snapchat structures (such as the app features) and established practices of other users inform the “spontaneous” generation and circulation of content. Complementing such relative spontaneity are the users’ reviews, which I consider as a way to access a hybrid terrain in which users’ experiences become content in the format of reviews that are both created and reflexively curated by their authors. Autonomy/heteronomy As previously mentioned, in the Socialized Spectacle context, individual workers/users are ambiguously valorized: on the one hand, more spheres of their lives have been colonized by economic interest; on the other hand, especially in light of social media practices, exemplified by Snapchat, such a scenario allows for a grander range of self-expression experiences, as well as activities “through which people produce and discover a sense of personal identity” (du Gay, 1996, p. 78). It is in such a context that the Snapchat users enter the framework of the labor process as both compelled laborers and self-interested agents. A distinction that effectively synthesizes the dialectics of autonomy and heteronomy that I found in Snapchat is the one articulated by the notion of work as both an autonomous creative and non-paid activity and labor as a heteronomic, instrumental, and paid activity (Marx, 1990). While in the Marxian analysis, production has consistently generated ambiguous phenomena, such as indigence and wealth, as well as abstract quantification and concrete qualification, the dialectical logic of socialization of the current Spectacle increases such ambiguity. After having expounded upon the Autonomist argument of sociability in the previous section, it is relatively easy to consider the inventive rendering of pictures and creative messaging by Snapchat users as creative work; it is less intuitive, however, to consider Snapchat usage as labor, therefore implying various degrees of heteronomy. Drawing on Smythe’s (1977) seminal essay on the audience commodity, I identify various forms of labor in Snapchat use. First, there is unpaid laboring in the communicative, cooperative, and cognitive capacities mobilized in responding to commercial messages found in the Snapchat feature Discover. In my Snapchat experience, Discover media channels attract users by providing customized information from a variety of news sources, but also mixing them with users’ live stories. As a result, according to user Lightly, Discover becomes: A way to get news and different kinds of media that are little bit different from your typical Snapchat stories, more personal type of feed … really interesting news and stories, something to snap about. (Lightly, 2015) Alternatively, as in the case of the sponsored lenses utilized by Snapchat users to customize their photos, users’ activity in selecting, signifying, and utilizing those lenses allows the advertising industry to save on costs of circulation by closing the circuit of production and consumption of commodities (Smythe, 1977). Second, there is unpaid labor in Snapchat users generating content, which allows the platform to avoid paying professional producers for such content. While users can enjoy Snapchat for free in exchange for their audience labor, such an exchange is not symmetrical, because Snapchat users cannot financially live on Snapchat. Fuchs (2014) considered such activity as surplus digital labor, as it produces surplus value that follows Marx’s (1990) labor theory of value, given that the monetization of Snapchat is directly proportional to users’ labor-time spent on Snapchat. That is because the more content is viewed and the more content is produced, the greater is the exposure to advertising and the more consumer data is generated for advertisers (Andrejevic, 2015). Along the same lines, Terranova (2000) explored other facets of the overlap between autonomous work and heteronomous labor, previously mentioned through the notion of free labor. Free labor is polysemic, combining the senses of being voluntary and unpaid. Snapchat users work freely, in the sense of being motivated and spontaneously creating because of the enjoyment of sociability previously mentioned and, more specifically, as expressed in the motivation to share (and show off) moments. This is how Quora user Wang put it: “when something good, funny, embarrassing, or ridiculous happens to someone and they have to tell all their friends about it” (Wang, 2014). However, the enjoyment of sociability and creative, autonomous work does not completely explain the compelling aspect of heteronomy. In this sense, if we treat social media such as Snapchat as a social realm in which individuals operate as economic agents involved in the production and trade of social and cultural capital, then the heteronomic aspect becomes clearer. In such a scenario, sociability is not just something to enjoy, but a necessary resource used to build identity and reputation vis-à-vis others. As a result, socially necessary value is partly determined by ratings on social interactions. Thus, Snapchat users experience an external pressure toward a consumer display (Codeluppi, 2015), to carry on online impression management (Gill & Pratt, 2008) and to follow the neo-liberal, normative thrust that revolves around the idea of the gift economy (Barbrook, 1998). All those necessities de facto compel users to labor for Snapchat in order to accumulate social relations as potentially redeemable social capital. Finally, another particularly illustrative aspect of the autonomy/heteronomy tension—specular but not necessarily mutually exclusive to the labor theory of value (Rigi & Prey, 2015)—is the rentist perspective that understands Snapchat through a user-provider relationship. Accordingly, Snapchat users get to utilize the app free of rent when acting in accordance with the app owners’ terms: that is, essentially attracting advertisers by attracting and aggregating users. From this point of view, in their potential capital generation from Snapchat—as in the social capital example expounded above—Snapchatters do not simply operate as unwaged workers because, while they potentially make a profit, they depend on accessing the potential means of income through rent. There is, then, a sort of entrepreneurial component in that. In this scenario, the dialectics of autonomy/heteronomy emerge when we consider the coexistence of two situations. Firstly, Snapchat users inhabit an interstitial position in the labor process: being at the same time an exploited workforce that is financially unpaid and a “self-employed” workforce that uses Snapchat as a quasi-monopolistic provider of a service that they can use to acquire (mostly social) capital. In other words, the conversion point of labor into commodity—that is, the crucial link between labor and capital (Braverman, 1974) illustrated here in the Socialized Spectacle—acquires ambivalence, in the sense that Snapchat users become both the objects and subjects of commodification. Secondly, such an ambivalent position creates interesting tensions in terms of Snapchat practices that resonate with Autonomia’s living labor idea: given that rent operates though monopoly regimes that create scarcity (like enclosures for land), one fundamental scarcity in Snapchat is consumption time, as self-destroying snaps are available for only a few seconds. However, like the autonomous worker described by Autonomia who demands agency in the process of valorization, by taking screenshots of snaps, Snapchat users effectively create breaches in Snapchat’s monopoly, because they gain time and partial free access to the content of the app outside the conditions given by Snapchat’s rent, while at the same time enjoying the ephemeral hyper-expressivity of snaps expected to self-destroy. Thus, Snapchat users face the dilemma of taking advantage of two potentially divergent use-values: to retain the product of their work or to enjoy the harmless hyper-expressivity out of self-destroying, spectacular fragments. Furthermore, based on YouTube reviews on screenshots “hacks,” almost the entirety of users are aware of the potential for their work to be screenshot, “which is part of the game” (Definitelyowen, 2017). However, along with the preoccupation of being stalked, the other most recurrent preoccupation is to cut Snapchat’s intermediary role in sending notifications to the user whose picture has been screenshot, which is understood as an intrusion and loss of agency. Such an autonomous agency demonstrates how both spectacular signs and the subjectivities operating within the Socialized Spectacle do not simply and passively reproduce/reflect the Spectacle, but also display refractory consequences that affect Snapchat and, potentially, the whole Spectacle. Sociability and alienation As Rey (2012) suggested, there seems to be a trade-off between exploitation and alienation in social media. In fact, social media can extract more value from users only when people are motivated to produce more content and data by enjoyment of and involvement in sociability, which suggests a significant level of dealienation. However, the extraction of value is designed in such a way that it also systematically diminishes users’ control over their content production, thus reintroducing the question of alienation in Marxian terms: there is indeed a tension between a constructive and enthusiastic sense of sociability and a sense of alienation due to the lack of control over space and time linked to Snapchat practices, which echoes the primal tension featured by the original Spectacle in providing an organic and reassuring image of social reality while keeping people estranged from its significance. Snapchat exemplifies a kind of social media practice based on affective labor, “embedded in the moments of human interaction and communication that provides a sense of connectedness and community” (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 293). This reveals that, while “co-operation is the fundamental form of the capitalist mode of production” (Marx, 1990, p. 454), the socialization core of the current Spectacle, with its heavy deployment of information and communication technologies, expands it enormously (Virno, 2001). In the Snapchat context, the importance of affective relations is first related to the particular ways production and consumption are mediated by time scarcity, as snaps self-destroy. As I previously indicated by the dilemma of two divergent use-values, while I lose authorship and chances of documentation, therefore inducing alienation from my products/snaps, such scarcity reinforces the curation of affective relations, because snaps are valorized as scarce, spectacular, and highly expressive fragments dedicated to a restricted audienceship, thus creating an affective sense of presence and intimacy without being stored on the Internet (Handyside & Ringrose, 2017). As a Snapchat reviewer described: It is just a way for kids to share pictures and have real time moment or without worrying of how they look like every moment because those pictures self-destroy, you wanna pick your nose or look silly. (TechCrunch, 2012) The real and present aspect is, then, mostly confirmed by the reactions I have received when sending snaps, which materialize the virtual community by providing a platform for sharing a social space, concrete practices and meanings, resources and support, and identities and interpersonal relations (Baym, 2010). Therefore, Snapchat constructs a sense of community by accumulating individual recollections of “moments of human interaction” (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 293), an experience marked by collaboration and emotion (Benski & Fisher, 2013). In Snapchat, such an affective sociability is qualitatively felt by presence and intimacy, but also quantitatively measured by the number of Snap streaks, which indicate that two users have been exchanging snaps for more than three consecutive days (Definitelyowen, 2017). As a user put it: The longer you go without breaking the chain of communication, the longer your streak is. Streaks are proof of friendships, if you lose the streak you lose the friendship … Like, you can talk to someone every day, but a streak is physical evidence that you talk every day. (Definitelyowen, 2017) On the one hand, Snapchat implements sociability by spectacular representations of sociability via images and icons and by materially mediating sociability through ad hoc channels that substantiate it via presence and curate it via quantifications. In both cases, an important byproduct of those personalized takes on sociability is the impression management process that contributes to shape Snapchat users’ subjectivity (Locatelli, 2017). On the other hand, the very scarcity that creates presence and affect, involved in the construction of community and dialogue around Snapchat features such as “Your story,” contributes to a sense of alienation by fragmentation. In fact, the adding/posting of new content is highly restrictive in terms of temporal and spatial dimensions: snaps are patchy, because they are limited in the length and size of content and their communication is only directed to a specific audience; and they are limited to contemporaneity because the application is designed in such a way as to convey only current and temporary communication, as content cannot be archived and almost immediately vanishes. In this sense, Snapchat exemplifies the contradictory logic of socialization of the current Spectacle in the same way as Bucher’s (2012) study described Facebook’s algorithmic friendship: social media operate as an engaging assemblage of social relations that, while magnifying friendship/sociability potential, do so through a structure of capitalist production that significantly limits the meaning of such sociability. Based on the considerations so far expounded upon, the current Spectacle appears to be characterized by fragmentary experiences, which estranges people and prevents them from developing historical and spatial awarenesses (Wark, 2013). Accordingly, the atomized and diffused “micro-Spectacles” provided by each snap disintegrate any sense of the underlying dynamics of the overall Spectacle. There is indeed, then, a dilemmatic trade-off between a rich, affective experience that possibly provides a more concrete sense of presence of the social network surrounding the Snapchat user, and the fact that those experiences provide a fragmented (therefore incomplete) understanding of the broader reality represented by the Spectacle. Thus, while the Spectacle-as-a-whole and Spectacular-as-a-particular levels come closer, they never completely integrate. Display/concealment While I claimed that reducing the Spectacle to what it immediately shows diminishes its explanatory value compared to what it mediates (i.e., social relations, labor, logic of socialization), the Socialized Spectacle complicates such a Debordian distinction between appearance and essence. In fact, the tension between reflective and refractive signs previously mentioned suggests how the current spectacular level comprises the two-fold meaning that Hall, Evans and Nixon (2013) attributed to representation: that is, standing for the spectacle and reconstituting it. Such a principle will be reiterated in this last section, as I explore another facet of the dialectics of socialization by discussing both what Snapchat displays and what Snapchat tends to conceal. Snapchat functions by displaying spectacular fragments of subjectivities and by putting them on display (Codeluppi, 2015). It does that, first of all, for effective communication reasons, as user Definitelyowen put it: Truly, if a picture is worth one thousand words, then imagine the complexity of emotion and experience that can be conveyed via a single Snapchat photo as compared to shorthand SMS. You can convey more with less, while actually enjoying something as unselfconscious or unabashed as a live conversation—because just like a live conversation, once something is shared, it disappears into the ether. (Definitelyowen, 2017) Second, the Socialized Spectacle is centered on the self-spectacularization of individuals via information and communication technology, such as social media. The idea that mediated personal lives become entertainment for others to consume and actively use as a basis for the production of value applies effortlessly to Snapchat. In fact, one of the most important features of this application is the capability it gives users to manipulate and personalize their pictures via lenses, filters, and “bitmoji,” which are real-time visual and sound effects that can be applied to snaps. In this sense, Compton’s (2004) reflection about the practical use of the spectacular commodity—produced, consumed, and aestheticized through everyday practices—provides important cues about the spectator displaying/being on display, which are exemplified by a Snapchat Geofilter that allow users to make selfies with branded logos. However, in the Socialized Spectacle, a commodified display also becomes a modality of actively living the social, not simply its annihilation. Considering the spatial and temporal constraints already mentioned in the Sociability/Alienation section, Snapchat users’ identities do not simply appear, but are also constituted through such fragmentary recollections, living an impermanent social life conveyed by Snapchat. According to Soffer (2016), an ephemeral display becomes a constitutive tool for race, class, gender, and sexual orientation identity, operating in the interstitial kind of display that mediates between public and private realms (Handyside & Rigrise, 2017); as user TechCrunch (2012) claimed, “Snapchat brings the private self and public virtual self together.” Furthermore, the users’ personalized renderings of images through lenses, especially when leaning towards hyper-expressivity and distortions, echo the revolutionary potential of montages, as understood by film director Eisenstein and the cultural critique of Benjamin. Just like through a montage, piecing together images in Snapchat creates a dissonance that can estrange viewers, so that the very frequently grotesque aesthetics produced by the lenses applied on snaps may awake spectators from the phantasmagoria of the Spectacle conveyed by Snapchat. Another aspect that characterizes Snapchat displays is the perception that sociability is not simply something to enjoy and nurture, but is a necessity in and of itself, as well as something that needs to be displayed. According to Codeluppi (2015), exposure and showcasing provide a measure of appreciation of individuals in the context of social media being linked to seeking social capital. Snapchat emojis—icons expressing ideas and/or emotions—and the previously mentioned Snap streaks become a useful way to codify relationships. According to user Medotech (2015), “that golden heart means we are best friends and that it’s kind of cool,” and, according to user CocoChanou (2015), you can “know when a girl likes you [because she] will send you particular emojis.” Therefore, Snap streaks offer the possibility for a display that works both as an active and a passive voice; in other words, as a Spectacle of displaying/being on display for other users, but also, and more importantly, for Snapchat itself. I am not simply referring to the important question of surveillance (Andrejevic, 2002)—which in Snapchat becomes rather explicit because the Geofilter feature provides maps set to both display branded images and to locate users within the maps—but also to the incremental process of the monetization of displaying. First of all, the dynamic of displaying/being on display creates an incentive for the production of user-generated content that motivates Snapchat users to keep producing images, and attracts new users as well. Furthermore, users opening an account give legal permission to Snapchat to gather data about them and share information with the Yahoo-owned company Flurry, such as user-generated content and data, which are then processed by capital assets, such as algorithms, into metadata (Fuller & Goffey, 2013). As a result, the Spectacle of displaying/being on display captures a user’s contact list, pictures, location (via Geofilters), web browsing activity, email address, and, if one uses the feature Snapcash, credit card information. Where, then, is concealment in such spectacular display? Snapchat tends to suppress aspects of its reality through three kinds of fetishisms, which are the basis of the opaque epistemology of the Spectacle. First of all, the ephemeral nature of Snapchat quickly creates socialization and, just as quickly, dematerializes it. In the process, the unpaid activity of generating content via audience labor and its monetization vanishes and remains as irremediably invisible to users. Second, signaling one of the most striking paradoxes conveyed by the dialectics of socialization of the current Spectacle, while relationships among things are still invisible behind the screen of mobile phone applications such as Snapchat, as Fuchs and Sevignani (2013) remarked, the environment of social media creates the condition for an inverted fetishism. Accordingly, instead of hiding people behind things (as is the case with the original Spectacle), the Socialized Spectacle hides things behind people: the commodity character of Snapchat remains concealed behind the Spectacle of images and their particular use-value, which is sociability. Thus, transposing Fuchs and Sevignani’s (2013, p. 261) analysis of Facebook, Snapchat’s inverse fetishism is typically expressed by statements like “Snapchat does not exploit me because I benefit from it by connecting to other users.” The fetish is then “put upside down” because, instead of not being able to see productive social relations, people enjoy Snapchat’s sociability without seeing how the specific technological mediation affects the logic of social relations in terms, for instance, of users’ constraints and users’ valorizing practices. Indeed, through the tension of displaying/concealment, the Socialized Spectacle creates a reifying ideology that naturalizes by concealment important aspects of the political economy of social media, and introduces a third kind of fetishism. In fact, in a context in which we often do not even know what the real commodity is that major online companies sell (e.g., Amazon, Google, Facebook), Snapchat points to a spectacular fetishism: if “classical” fetishism hides labor relations behind commodities, spectacular fetishism adds an extra concealing layer made of refracting signs standing before the commodity. Thus, while in Marx and Debord, the commodity form already constituted a form of appearance that hid socially necessary labor time, in the Socialized Spectacle the commodity form becomes a myth, a second-order level of semiotic signification (Barthes, 1957). Snapchat and the cautionary tale of the socialized spectacle With a little spectacle on its own, staged by hidden vending machines secretly dropped around the United States, in November 2016 Snapchat Inc. introduced Spectacles, camera-enabled sunglasses that promised to fully incorporate the app to every moment of users’ lives. However, despite its early hype, the initiative turned out to be a failure, with less than 1% of Snapchat users buying the product and with 80% of purchasers giving up on it after a few weeks (Constantine, 2017). While their name may not necessarily refer to the Debordian-inspired notion, Snapchat’s Spectacles greatly resonated with the argument advanced by this paper, as they illustrate the assertion of a one-sided Spectacle that did not account for the current, capitalist logic of socialization. In fact, Spectacles represented the triumph of the literal and spectacular image, committing to deliver audio-visual immediacy, but lacking a socializing component, which was epitomized by users complaining of Spectacles’ missing connectivity and the social awkwardness of constant and unwanted recording. Furthermore, the Spectacles anecdote aligns with a cautionary tale about social media. First, by advancing a media theory that integrates fragmentary technological mediations with a general social mediation, this paper points to the constant danger of fetishizing an image- and technology-driven understanding of media: that is, the risk of taking the Spectacle too literally. In fact, as the exploration of Snapchat’s political economy demonstrates, the spectacular representations and the Spectacle as a whole complement and act upon each other, consistently reflecting and refracting a capitalist context in which information/communication practices have become central means of production. Second, the revival of the notion of the Spectacle via Snapchat contributes to unveiling important real and emerging dynamics of a social media political economy. In fact, my framing of the online app as a post-Fordist labor process reflects the combination of both logical and historical of inquiries on currently operative categories, which, both at the objective and subjective levels, lurk behind the fetish of images exchange provided by Snapchat. Objectively, the Socialized Spectacle consists of a matrix for social relations, based on the valorization of sociability and not limited to, but particularly implemented by, digital media technologies, which instrumentally turn the social into a platform: that is, the capitalist logistical stage for the Spectacle. Subjectively, the Socialized Spectacle consists of shaping its spectators: subjectivities that navigate a profoundly contradictory environment and, often enough, appear to be comfortable enough with it. 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TI - Snapchat’s Dialectics of Socialization: Revisiting the Theory of the Spectacle for a Critical Political Economy of Social Media
JF - Communication, Culture & Critique
DO - 10.1093/ccc/tcz029
DA - 2019-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/snapchat-s-dialectics-of-socialization-revisiting-the-theory-of-the-6nMmVrDyXI
SP - 590
VL - 12
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -