Chapter 17

Publicized privacy

Social networking and the compulsive search for limits

John Sloop and Joshua Gunn

 

Drawing on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s (2000) account of the shift from a disciplinary society to the society of control, Jodi Dean offers a provocative explanation of contemporary public behavior (2009, p. 65). Given some of the symptoms of the shift described by Hardt and Negri – a dissolution of the nuclear family, unions, schools, neighborhoods, and the rise of virtualities that create fluid, hybrid, and mobile imaginary identities – Dean finds contemporary subjects who increasingly lack self-control, “in part because they lack a strong sense of self that arises through discipline, and … look outside themselves for some ...

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