[Air-l] viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace

Mon Jul 2 02:57:07 PDT 2007

FYI RE Éric GEORGE's post

I am at a bilingual university and found the translation

Author
Boltanski, Luc.
Title
The new spirit of capitalism / Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello ;  
translated by Gregory Elliott.
Publisher
London ; New York : Verso, 2005.

Location
Call #
Status
   MRT General
  HB 501 .B71313 2005

Description
xlvii, 601 p. ; 25 cm.
Note
Traduction de: Nouvel esprit du capitalisme.

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

Translated from the French.
Subject
Capitalism -- Social aspects.
Additional Author
Chiapello, Eve.
ISBN
1859845541 (hardback : alk. paper)

Peter Timusk,
B.Math statistics (2002), B.A. legal studies (2006) Carleton University
Systems Science Graduate student, University of Ottawa (2006-2007).
just trying to stay linear.
Read by hundreds of lurkers every week.

On 2-Jul-07, at 3:33 AM, Éric GEORGE wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I don't know if the book has been translated in
> other languages like English or Spanish but 'Le
> nouvel esprit du capitalisme' from Luc Boltanski
> and Eve Chiapello tries -- among other things --
> to theorize the concept of 'exploitation' in a
> connected world.
>
> Best Wishes
> Éric
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> Éric GEORGE, Professor, École des médias, Faculté
> de communication, UQAM (Montreal, Qc, Canada)
> Co Chair, Interdisciplinary Research Group on
> Communication, Information and Society (GRICIS)
> http://www.uqam.ca/gricis
>
>
>> i have read danah's article, found it interesting and like the
>> conclusion that "myspace and facebook are new representations of the
>> class divide in american youth".
>>
>> my comment goes into another direction than the discussion thus far.
>>
>> for me the important aspect of the paper is that class still  
>> counts. we
>> should try to find ways of arguing which classes we find in  
>> contemporary
>> informational capitalism and how class stratification has been  
>> changing
>> in the age of the internet.
>>
>> as i am mainly interested in and am dealing with theoretical  
>> aspects, i
>> have tried to tackle the issue of class in informational  
>> capitalism some
>> months ago.
>>
>> i think if we speak about class, we need a clear definition of it  
>> that
>> is theoreticall grounded.
>>
>> basically there are two possibilities: a marxist notion of class
>> connects the concept to exploitation, a weberian notion to
>> life-situation, life-style, etc.
>>
>> i find concepts of the first sort critical, of the second type
>> affirmative and unsuitable (e.g. the class concepts of giddens,
>> goldthorpe, etc).
>>
>> marx applied the class concept to the social relation constituting
>> surplus value production, erik olin wright added the ideas of skills
>> exploitation (cultural) and organizational exploitation (political),
>> both within strictly economic relations; bourdieu has a more general
>> class concept based on the idea of the asymmetric accumulation of
>> economic, political, cultural, and symbolic capital. hardt and negri
>> recently developed a nice idea of class relations constituted by
>> exploitation of the production of the commons.
>>
>> if one can define reputation formation at the expense of others   
>> ("i am
>> smart cause i am on facebook, you are dumb because you are on  
>> myspace",
>> etc) as symbolic exploitation that reflects underlying forms of  
>> economic
>> oppressions then i am in favour of speaking of cultural  
>> exploitation and
>> class formation in the case that danah has been describing, if one  
>> can't
>> define what the exploited surplus that is produced by the subaltern
>> groups and transfered towards the hegemonic groups in such cases of
>> non-economic exploitation, then i am in favour of speaking of
>> political/organizational and cultural forms of oppression, but not of
>> exploitation and class-formation in danah's example.
>>
>> i am actually arguing for several things:
>> * class should be connected to the idea of exploitation.
>> * we need a theory of class in the information age
>> * class counts
>> * we need neo-marxist theories of informational capitalism in  
>> order to
>> come to grips with the theoretical underpinnings and concrete-real
>> phenomena of today
>>
>> the basic theoretical question about youth and class in myspace and
>> facebook then is:
>>
>> do the facebook-upper class kids exploit the lower class myspace  
>> kids?
>> in which ways? (if so, we more go into a bourdieuian or wrightian  
>> sense
>> of exploitation and class formation) if not, then it is a form of
>> oppression or the division simply reflects that the parents of the
>> facebook kids more tend to be economic exploiters and the parents of
>> myspace kids more tend to be economic exploitees (which constitutes a
>> class concept that stays within the more traditional economic  
>> concept of
>> class).
>>
>> christian
>>
>> --
>>
>> --
>>
>> _____________________________
>>
>> Univ.Ass. Dr. Christian Fuchs
>>
>> Assistant Professor for Internet and Society
>>
>> ICT&S Center - Advanced Studies and Research
>>
>> in Information and Communication Technologies & Society
>>
>> http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at
>>
>> University of Salzburg
>>
>> Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18
>>
>> 5020 Salzburg
>>
>> Austria
>>
>> christian.fuchs at sbg.ac.at
>>
>> Phone +43 662 8044 4823
>>
>> Fax   +43 662 6389 4800
>>
>> Information-Society-Technology:
>>
>> http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at
>>
>> http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at/fuchs/
>>
>> Managing Editor of tripleC - peer reviewed open access
>>
>> online journal for the foundations of information science:
>>
>> http://triplec.uti.at
>>
>> Forthcoming BOOK:
>>
>> Fuchs, Christian (2008) Internet and Society: Social Theory in the
>> Information Age. New York: Routledge.
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> The air-l at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
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>>
>> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
>> http://www.aoir.org/
>
>
> -- 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> -----------
>
>
> Éric GEORGE
> Conference Co-Chair, CCA 2007
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> -------------
> Professeur, École des médias, Faculté de communication, UQAM
> Codirecteur, Groupe de recherche interdisciplinaire sur la  
> communication,
> l'information et la société (GRICIS) / http://www.uqam.ca/gricis
> _______________________________________________
> The air-l at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http:// 
> listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/