Social Media: A Critical Introduction by Christian Fuchs

Author:Christian Fuchs [Fuchs, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies
ISBN: 9781446292983
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 2013-12-05T14:00:00+00:00

One should think about Google in terms of commodity logic and ideology, but at the same time one should see how, from this very logic, potential alternatives emerge. Karl Marx stressed that the globalization of production and circulation necessitates institutions that allow individuals to inform themselves about complex conditions. He said that “institutions emerge whereby each individual can acquire information about the activity of all others and attempt to adjust his own accordingly” and that these “interconnections” are enabled by “mails, telegraphs etc.” (Marx 1857/1858, 161). Is this passage not the perfect description of the concept of the search engine? We can therefore say that Larry Page and Sergey Brin did not invent Google, but that rather Karl Marx was the true inventor of the search engine and of Google. But if Marx’s thinking is crucial for the concept of the search engine, shouldn’t we then think about the concept of a public search engine?

What could a public search engine look like? Google services could be run by non-profit organizations, for example universities (Maurer, Balke, Kappe, Kulathuramaiyer, Weber and Zaka 2007, 74), and be supported by public funding. A service like Google Books could then serve humanity by making the knowledge of all books freely available to all humans without drawing private profit from it. A public search engine does not require advertising funding if it is a non-profit endeavour. In this way, the exploitation and surveillance of users and the privacy violation issues that are at the heart of Google could be avoided. Establishing a public Google could lead to the dissolution of the private business of Google. This may only be possible by establishing a commons-based Internet in a commons-based society. Doing so will require the first steps in the class struggle for a just humanity and a just Internet to be taken. These include, for example, the suggestion to require Google by law to make advertising an opt-in option and to surveil the surveillor by creating and supporting Google watchdog organizations that document the problems and antagonisms of Google. Google’s 20% policy is, on the one hand, pure capitalist ideology that wants to advance profit maximization. On the other hand, it makes sense that unions pressure Google to make the 20% of work time really autonomous from Google’s control. If this could be established in a large company like Google, then a general demand for a reduction of labour time without wage decreases would be easier to attain. Such a demand is a demand for the increase of the autonomy of labour from capital.

Another Google is possible, but this requires class struggle for and against Google in order to set free the humanistic (cognitive, communicative, co-operative) potentials of Google by overcoming its class relations.

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