Sociologija 2019 Volume 61, Issue 4, Pages: 550-564
https://doi.org/10.2298/SOC1904550M
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Internet culture between reality and virtuality: Neoliberal challenge to Manuel Castells’ theory
Mlađenović Nikola
This paper explores internet culture as a system of beliefs and rules that
affect behaviour. Virtuality shapes culture through software accentuation of
some aspects of simbolically processed reality. Castells believes the first
wave of users arranged this symbolic mechanism. This paper focuses on the
techno-meritocratic culture or scientific establishment: primarily
neoliberal constructionism that influenced the network society’s
informationalist mode of development. By following Fritz Machlup’s notion of
knowledge, neoliberal scholarship increased the capacity of social
management through technology. Castells shows network society is based on
communication power: affective intelligence, political cognition or media
technology serve as cultural network-making techniques. Knowledge is
processed as Big Data and users are managed by computer assistance or
cognitive insight applications. The crucial aspect of informationalist
cybernetics is homophily, a criterion of similarity of users that receive
analogous Facebook, Netflix or Amazon suggestions. The role of
recommendation systems in construction of populism is discussed in second
part. It is shown populism is a phenomenon constructed through a virtual
network. Collective sense-making and cultural identity are informationalist
products of Big Data’s symbolic mechanism. In concluding discussion,
pre-digital social theories, like Bourdieu’s or Giddens’, are examined in
context of cultural virtuality.
Keywords: Manuel Castells, neoliberalism, sociology of internet, Big Data, Populism