Communication Matters

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 ...