“The attack on unrecorded sociality, on its existance as an ephemeral, oral phenomenon, is an effort to subsume social behavior as a productive form of work. Social activity is quantified not to give us helpful information about ourselves so we can enjoy our leisure more but to make everything we do into signification work. The “mute material process” of our social life is “made visible” in social-media data as work. Like the workers in automated offices, Facebook users become what Zuboff calls “functionaries of the text” — the text being her somewhat outmoded term for work processes translated into data monitored on screens. Clerks, once their job functions were automated, “were treated like mechanical devices in the textualization process, and were not encouraged to utilize the text to create value.” On social media, we are encouraged to create “value” in the sense of personal-identity elaboration and microcelebrity, but we are not encouraged to seize control of the process as something monetizable. Our data in these media belong to someone else, no matter what “value” we got out of creating it (or having it passively created for us). We don’t see the whole picture of how our data is used; we are “trained” only in the basic procedures of logging ourselves in, uploading and “sharing,” and, of course, consuming.”

from “gut of the quantifier”

Notes

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