Friday, October 25, 2013

Unlike Us #3 - Social Media: Design or Decline


Unlike Us #3 - Bernard Stiegler: Social Networking As a Stage of Grammatization and the New Political Question from network cultures on Vimeo.


Unlike Us #3 - Social Media: Design or Decline

Session 1: Theory and Critique of ‘Social’

Bernard Stiegler (FR) Social Networking As a Stage of Grammatization and the New Political Question

Conference Day #1 (22 March 2013)

Social networking and engineering are dimensions of the digital stage of a process of grammatization that began thirty thousand years ago. With the advent of digitization, psychic and collective memory as well as social relations have all become objects of exchange value. What this means is that, given digital technologies are organs of publishing, that is, of the production of public space and time, digitization is a process of privatization of the public thing – of the res publica. Privatization here means: commodification. In short, what is occurring is the destruction of the psychic and collective process of individuation that began with the Greek polis. Furthermore, the domination by those giants that are Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon is possible above all because very little genuine work is being done on the stakes of digitization by either the academic sphere or the political sphere.