On the Social Media Ideology - Journal #75 September 2016 - e-flux

To paraphrase Marx, we might hunt for jobs on LinkedIn in the morning, fish for compliments on Instagram in the afternoon, criticize each other on Twitter after dinner, and be as lascivious as we like on Tinder in the late evening, without letting any of these identities define us...  Nevertheless, something is lost in this fractionalization o... See more

ours is an era of decline that has turned from the outward to the inward obsession with identity and “authenticity,” both personal and tribal, fueled by digital connectivity. Paradoxically, social media in this sense is anti-social, leading to the disintegration of community through a kind of connected isolation.

- "the concrete practices of the tech industry now structure identity and individuality in ways that support its own hegemony. While it presents endless avenues for expression, it sees us as wholly reducible to market logic, where we are real to the degree that our consumption habits are rational. This vision of selfhood promotes uniformity and bou... See more