Is Social Media Capitalism's Postmodern Pleasure Trap? 'Filling the Void' w/ Marcus Gilroy-Ware

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It argues that social media use is often a psychological response
to the need for pleasure and comfort that results from the
stresses of life under postmodern capitalism, rather than being a
driver of new behaviours as newer technologies are often said to
be. Both the explosive growth of social media and the
corresponding reconfiguration of the web from an
information-based platform into an entertainment-based one are
far more easily explained in terms of the subjective
psychological experience of their users as capitalist subjects
seeking ‘depressive hedonia’ the book argues.

Filling the Void also interrogates the role of social media
networks, designed for private commercial gain, as part of a
de-facto public sphere. Both the decreasing subjective importance
of factual media and the ways in which the content of the
timeline are quietly manipulated – often using labour in the
developing world and secret algorithms – have potentially serious
implications for the capacity of social media users to query or
challenge the seeming reality offered by the established
hegemonic order.


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