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Ashes to ashes, digit to digit: the nonhuman temporality of Facebook’s Feed

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Abstract

This article examines how Facebook’s Feed, its dynamic user interface, incorporates and refashions the capacity to temporalize cultural material and experience that has classically been attributed to subjectivity. I problematize the ambiguous historicity of digital culture across the experience of the ordinary that it produces by arranging the subjective time and ‘ruined’ bits of cultural material into algorithmic timelines. Drawing on recent media theory, I underscore the irreducible alienness of algorithmic temporalizations, which undermine habitual normalization. I show subjectivity moves beyond identity and narrative closure through an unconscious affective investment in extremely popular algorithmic timelines.

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Notes

  1. The concept of social time belongs to Durkheimian tradition in sociology (Zerubavel 1985). In conceiving sociality of time, it puts the accent on the schedules, calendars, and holidays—on the normative order of time. This is in dissonance with the historical materialist school of thought in sociology whereby time is theorized dynamically in concrete practices of production of social life emphasizing the labor-time from which other central concepts are derived such as surplus, exploitation, and Capital as accumulating, circulating dead labor-time (Marx 1992)

  2. Facebook requires individual accounts to be opened under birthnames, used school, family and work affiliations to suggest and grow its network. Thus, against opening up the culture of anonymity, this strategy targeted inheriting historical load of sociality, its established links.

  3. This definition is useful but also limited in its economization of politics. It emphasizes exchange, circulation, and trade more than oppression, domination, and violence. A tension, recurring in theory, especially in the conceptualizations of the formation of subjectivity. Foucault’s lectures in the late 1970s where he explored politics in terms of warfare and in terms of neoliberalism are useful insofar as he attends to the irreducible heterogeneity of these two approaches. See Society Must Be Defended through Security, Territory, Population to Birth of Biopolitics.

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  1. Sociology, The City College of New York, 160 Convent Ave, New York, NY, 10031, United States

    Talha Işsevenler

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Işsevenler, T. Ashes to ashes, digit to digit: the nonhuman temporality of Facebook’s Feed. Subjectivity 30, 373–393 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41286-023-00173-8

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