TIZIANA TERRANOVAThe Global Community of (Hyper)Social NetworksAFTERNOON COURSE (Aula Gambi)
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In 2017, the giant social networking platform Facebook announced that its new mission was going to be 'to provide the social infrastructure for the emergence of a 'global community', that is a transnationally connected (post)civil society. Facebook thus presents itself, implicitly like the Silicon Valley as a whole, the historical representative of the forces of globalization which oppose the nationalist closure of Brexit and Trump, engaged in weaving of a global social fabric which is not homogeneous, but composed of overlapping and yet culturally specific parts. The model of society evoked by Zuckerberg under the name ‘community’ is a set of connected sub-sets, which returns the image of an heterogeneous and entangled planet. The heterogeneous transnational cultures which make for Facebook’s social fabric produce variable cultural norms, which cannot be determined or governed starting from a single norm. The series of lectures relates Facebook's concept of a global community of 'groups' to Denise Ferreira Da Silva's claim the the space of the global is shaped by an analytics of raciality which introduces a cleavage between transparent 'Is' and affectable subjecta, considering the possibility of seeing Facebook's global community as an attempt to expand the space of transparency in a universal space that is engaged in the process of an 'obliteration' and 'assimilation' of racial and cultural differences. Tiziana Terranova is Associate Professor in Sociology of communications, Department of Human and Social Sciences, University ‘L’Orientale’ (Naples). She is a prominent theorist and activist, whose work focuses on the effects of information technology on society through concepts such as digital labour and the commons. She lectures on digital media cultures and politics at ‘L’Orientale’ and is a member of the free university network Euronomade and of the Robin Hood Minor Asset Management Cooperative. |