Social Anxiety

Abstract

This chapter explores the contactless contact of our productive social media interactions alongside the isolation and fragmentation of cognitive labour. It is argued that social media has allowed us to migrate interactions to screens such that we can maintain contact without the spontaneity and risk of proximate encounters. At the same time, remote working and alternative officing practises constrain workers into forms of networked communication that lack the thickness required for empathy and solidarity, stripped of the unsaid and the ambiguous in order to allow for efficient exchange of brute information. The sort of certainty and control we can achieve in social interactions originate from the same source as our precariousness and loss of autonomy at work: the circuits of communicative capitalism.