Re-navigating the boundaries of social interactions as alienated through machines.

Digital social interactions couched in unregulated capitalism yields the overwhelmingly problematic “social media,” a strange categorical framework for how digital communications in our present have become passive modes of production for corporate profit. It seems to me that the major question of our time and place is “ownership.” Who has the right to treat your everyday social media as their own legal property? Does passive involvement in corporate ad revenue truly offer enrichment to one’s social life, or does it simply further alienate participants from their own personal power and agency? I see the Internet as a tool for the dissemination of information and the exchange of ideas, but the negotiation of power within that exchange seems pretty important. The current “battlefield” exists in a dangerous space where large corporate archives, such as YouTube, have little incentive to hold participants to any ethical standard so long as those participants are turning a profit for the corporation. It is in this space of social negotiation where digital technology continues to reveal the deeper ideological structures embedded within mainstream capital culture.

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”

–David Foster Wallace

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