Social Media is The World’s Biggest

Fetishism for Globalization

With the advance of the internet, sharing information, creating content, and
reaching people around the world using media creates the world become easy and
reachable. In a similar context, Asur & Huberman (2010 p. 492) stated that “Social
media has exploded as a category of online discourse where people create content,
share it, bookmark it, and network at a prodigious rate”. Therefore, when it comes
to the question “Is media the world’s biggest fetishism for globalization, and
people need to consider how social media is involved in their life interactions?
However, according to a 2010 Retrevo survey, people’s interactions with social
media applications do indeed border on addiction. Retrevo found that nearly 50%
of respondents under age 25 checked their social media accounts after they go to
bed or soon after waking up. A full 56% of social media users check their accounts
at least once a day while over 40% said that they didn’t mind being interrupted to
check a status update. The rigorous academic study of social media addiction
seems to have been largely unexplored. However, social media addiction appears
to fall within the category of general Internet addiction, which is characterized as
an impulse control disorder. This disorder is more likely at the age of 35 and is a
gradual onset (Shaw & Black, 2008). Symptoms can include excessive time spent
using the technology to the detriment of other responsibilities and can lead to
dependence, obsessive thoughts, and withdrawals. Yet despite these characteristics,
there is still debate as to whether Internet addiction is even a true pathological
condition (Davis, 2001; Song, Larose, Eastin, & Lin, 2004).

Despite the way how people use social media is increasing its portions day by day.
While it may be a stretch to claim a pathological addiction to social media, the next
question to ask is, are we slaves to social media? Moreover, the word fetishism in
this context is more about how users consume media. Moreover, with the mass of
social media today, we also need to be aware of the new system on how capitalism
danger lurks behind its increasingly significant portions.

To understand how social media can be seen throughout Marxist ideology. We

have to detail Marx’s ideas of species being, such as commodity fetishism. Marx,
like many philosophers, had thoughts on the nature of humanity; what life meant to
humans, and how to achieve the things that we want. According to Marx, humans
sought a type of self-actualization, a self-full-filament of social and individual
consciousness and awareness that he termed species being (C, 1988; Marx, 1975).
Though, unlike other theorists contemplating the goals of humanity, Marx’s basis
for determining the actualization of our species being was tied to the outputs of our
work and production. More specifically, our happiness is tied to the fulfilling work
and production of goods and services that meet our individual and social needs and
that the producers of those goods and services are also the consumers of those
creations (Marx, 1975).

“In these two respects, then, the worker becomes a slave of his object; firstly, in
that he receives an object of labor, i.e., he receives work, and, secondly, in that he
receives means of subsistence. Firstly, then, so that he can exist as a worker, and
secondly as a physical subject. The culmination of this slavery is that it is only as a
worker that he can maintain himself as a physical subject and only as a physical
subject that he is a worker” (Marx, 1975, p. 3). Commodity fetishism, something
Marx attributes to a larger distortion called false consciousness, is where people
attribute social relations or phenomena as being properties of and between objects
or products (C, 1988). These social relationships are fundamental to commodity-
producing systems, “it is the social relations of production which govern the way
how objects enter the economic process” (C, 1988, p. 43). Obvious examples of
commodity fetishism are things like cars and jewelry; items that some feel impart a
sort of prestige or enviable feeling in others. Indeed, many people could be said to
be dominated by their commodities (Klayman, 2011; Tran, 2010).

Another argument is about how social media is the new platform for capitalism.
According to Brandon “The new labor power is the time and intellectual content
provided by those people. The new capitalists are the owners and marketers of the
social networks that profit off the labor power of the masses (2015). Moreover, to
simplify this concept Brandon explains that in Marx’s traditional cycle there are,
the proletariat, labor power, and commodities, then followed and controlled by
capitalists. This cycle mostly contains similarities to how Information age cycle.
Begin with, social media users, intellectual time, and labor, resulting in social
media and control by network owners and marketing companies. Specifically,
Marxist thought about capitalism as elaborated by David Harvey (2010). To obtain
an understanding of capitalism and society, we also need to understand related
issues on space and geography as well as time, such as work time and the theory of
work value. Although not specifically called techno-skeptics, Harvey criticized the
cellular media for promoting images that manipulate people’s needs and create
fake Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 558
242 awareness (Harvey, 2010). Rather than asking users for their contributions,
capitalist mobility enables corporations to make people work almost any time and
anywhere, which breaks the boundary between spare time and the workforce under
the exploitative conditions of mobile phone production in international divisions of
work capitalism.

Discussion of communication facility based on Marx’s works analyzed this issue as

a spatial attribution. Information and communication technology, including
computers, play an important role in the acceleration of commodity space-time
circulation (Harvey, 2010). Computers and digital networks are not only organizers
of data and information circulation, they also serve as tools to produce information
products. Computers and digital networks have become internal and external
platforms for communication companies. Whereas vehicles transport people,
computer networks transport product information and communication waves. A
computer is a universal engine that is used as a production, circulation, and
consumption tool.

Moreover, it is easy to see the level of fascination certain segments of society have
with social media. Social media communications have taken the place of several
once strictly human-to-human interactions and brought them online. While we
might think that this level of abstraction would lessen the emotional impact of
social-media-based communications (and much of it has [Turkle, 2011]), reality
has proven otherwise. From teens committing suicide from cyberbullying (CSB
News, 2010; Oliver, 2010) to couples ending real relationships over Facebook
status updates ("Teaching Kids How to Break Up Nicely," 2011), social media has
a very real impact on us and we often appear to attach very real attributes to the
“product outcomes” of others. As stated above, this can be explained by the real
meta-level social connections created by our “outputs” through social media.
Indeed, these kinds of attributions are expected, for the outputs owned by the
proletariat in the social media model are intimately emotional by nature.
Though, what if the other outputs? The outputs used by social media sites
themselves exploit the worker’s intellectual labor. Here too, we can see an
exploitive relationship through the use of highly visible measures like popularity
indexes and featured users/posts/news (when generated from proletariat intellectual
labor). Now, voting and popularity measures are fundamental to many useful
functions of online and social spaces. There already exists an explosion of
information available online and the very real problem of information overload is a
difficult one to solve (Pariser, 2011). However, voting systems are also
fundamental to furthering commodity fetishism in social media. They create a drive
for popularity that in turn promotes further input of free intellectual labor power to
compete. We can see this with the number of friends that counts on Facebook
(Marrin, 2010) and followers on Twitter (Smart, 2010. Additionally, because it
promotes the proletariat user base to attribute false notions of meaning to these
numbers, the bourgeoisie has again fooled the proletariat into willfully contributing
to their commodification (Brandon 2016).

Therefore, we can see that the commodity provides by the media is the reason why
user-consuming behavior becomes a serious dilemma to concern. There is no such
thing that could only be seen from a point of perspective. It is concisely true that
social media tempt us to explore more about its user, but the role which media
brought to us is significantly immense. According, to the inventor of the World
Wide Web, Tim Berners Lee, has always been committed to social welfare and
imagined the web as a "universal medium" for information sharing, i.e., a form of
media that was not primarily defined by commercial interests (Berners-Lee, 2014).
The newer forms were no longer based on hypertext networks, but rather on the
coproduction of information, social networks, and utilization of the collective
intelligence of its users to Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities
Research, volume 558 245 create value. "Participation," "interactivity," and "user-
generated content" are terms used in business, popular publishing, and academics
to determine these later developments in web technology. Moreover, with fast-
spreading information nowadays the potential of new technologies for interactive
features has offered unprecedented possibilities for user involvement, creativity,
and collaboration. Nonetheless, this system is still far from democratic because it
does not offer opportunities for collaboration between owners and web users. Web
2.0 technology strengthens new forms of capitalist exploitation and supervision
(Fuchs, 2007). Veronica Barassi (2015) argued that the digital discourse around
Web 2.0 works as a form of capitalist justification and legitimacy as well as an
amplifier of the new spirit of capitalism.

In short social media is the way how people connect through the network.
However, With Marxist ideologies, we can see through and understand how trends
and social media applications nowadays in modern life affect. Therefore, ideally,
the argument describes in the introduction and thesis contains mildly critical and
even conspiratorial. On the other way, it is always important for us to be captious
toward technological and social progress. In this case, this argument is attempted to
show that the Marxist ideologies of exploitation and domination are alive and well
if not well concealed, under the guise of new technology (Brandon 2015).
Although the character and the performers may have drastically changed, the story
itself has indeed almost the same and disguise differently.
References:

Ching, Brandon, C. (2015). Marxian Alienation and Commodity Fetishism in Social

Media

Eisner, A. (2010). Is social media a new addiction? Retrevo [Web page]. Retrieved
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Shaw, M., & Black, D. W. (2008). Internet Addiction: Definition, Assessment,

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Davis, 2001; Song, Larose, Eastin, & Lin, 2004 Internet Gratifications and Internet
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Critique https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.8.4.0590?seq=1
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Teaching Kids How to Break Up Nicely. (2011, August 8). The New York Times,

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Berners-Lee, 2014 Recognise the Internet as a human right, says Sir Tim Berners-
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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277845586_Google_Capitalism

Veronica Barassi 2015 Activism on the Web: Everyday Struggles against Digital
Capitalism