Abstract
Advocating communicative action in online interactions has become a model for understanding the political aspect of new media technology. More interactions, more communication, and more traffic on social networks often stand as a form of Internet Democracy. This chapter questions a contemporary notion of the politics in the public sphere. This will be done by challenging Manuel Castells’ view on the politics of social networks firstly, followed by a discussion on a Habermasian notion of communicative action and the power of communication, and finally Hardt and Negri’s notion of the multitude which substitutes both politics and communication. This theoretical context functions as an abstract for the questions proposed in The Onlife Manifesto: Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era. The material and materialistic sphere, on the other hand, brings antagonisms and conflicts into the picture (the notion of Laclau and Mouffe’s understanding of the antagonism). Taking on a materialistic approach replaces the matters of the declarative political pluralism and tolerance, communication, and interaction with focus on the conditions of the production of the new media social reality.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Habermas did detect major processes in contemporary capitalism, such as “scientification of politics” or new zones of class fight. Conversely, he did not manage to circumvent the Marx’s fundamental discovery of the nature of the progress in the capitalism that is driven by the imperative of surplus value, i.e. the class fight. Habermas believes that public sphere is a sphere where conflicts can be resolved, and later, conclusions of public debates can be implemented on the matter of material forces of production, i.e. technology.
References
Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation). Lenin and philosophy (pp. 127–194). New York and London: Monthly Review Press.
Benjamin, W. (1968). Theses on the philosophy of history. Illuminations (pp. 253–264). New York: Schocken Books.
Broadbent, S., & Lobet-Maris, C. (2015). Towards a grey ecology. In L. Floridi (Ed.), The onlife manifesto (pp. 111–124). Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London: Springer International Publishing.
Castells, M. (1996/2000). The rise of the network society. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Castells, M. (2009). Communication power. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ess, C. (2009). The onlife manifesto: Philosophical backgrounds, media usages, and the futures of democracy and equality. In L. Floridi (Ed.), The onlife manifesto (pp. 89–109). Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London: Springer International Publishing.
Deleuze, G. (1990/2003). Post–scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle, In Pourpalers, 1972–1990 (pp. 216–223). Les Éditions de Minuit. http://www.lesediti-onsdeminuit.fr/.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus. Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Dusek, V. (2006). Philosophy of technology, an introduction. Oxfort UK: Blackwell Publishing.
Floridi, L. (2015a). Commentary on the onlife manifesto. In L. Floridi (Ed.), The onlife manifesto: Being human in a hyperconnected era. Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London: Springer International Publishing.
Floridi, L. (2015b). Introduction. In L. Floridi (Ed.), The onlife manifesto: Being human in a hyperconnected era (pp. 1–7). Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London: Springer International Publishing.
Galloway, A. R. (2004). Protocol: How control exists after decentralization. Leonardo Books.
Habermas, J. (1971). Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’. Toward a rational society (pp. 81–123). London: Heinemann Educational Books.
Habermas, J. (2004–2006). The theory of communicative action (Vol. 1–2). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hansen, M. B. N. (2004). New philosophy for new media. The MIT Press.
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology. Basic writings from being and time (1927) to the task of thinking (1964) (pp. 287–317). New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London: Harper & Row Publishers.
Kurzweil, R. (2005). The singularity is near.viking.
Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and socialist strategy. Towards a radical democratic politics (2nd ed.). London/New York: Verso.
Latour, B. (2005). An introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Lebowitz, M. A. (2015). The socialist imperative. From Gotha to now. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Marx, K. (1976). Capital. A critique of political economy (Vol. 1). New York: Penguin Books.
Marx, K. (1971). Grundrisse (D. McLellan, Ed. and Trans.). New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London: Harper & Row, Publishers.
McSherry, C. (2011). Disastrous IP legislation is back—And it’s worse than ever, October 26. In Electronic frontier foundation. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/disastrous-ip-legislation-back-–-and-it’s-worse-ever.
Manovich, L. (2002). The language of new media. Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Murphie, A., & Pots J. (2003). Culture and technology. Palgrave Macmillan.
Poster, M. (1996). Cyberdemocracy: Internet and the public sphere. In D. Porter (Ed.), Internet Culture. New York: Routledge.
Postman, N. (1993). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology, New York: Vintage Books.
Rehmann, J. (2013). Theories of ideology, the powers of alienation and subjection. Leiden/Boston: Brill.
Serres, M. (1982). The parasite. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Simon, J. (2009). Distributed epistemic: Responsibility in a hyperconntected era. In L. Floridi (Ed.), The onlife manifesto: Being human in a hyperconnected era (pp. 145–160). Springer Cham Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London: Springer International Publishing.
Shirokov, M. (2009). Textbook of Marxist philosophy, prepared by Leningrad Institut of Philosophy. London: Camelot Press; Marxists Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/sections/britain/subject/left-book-club/1937/textbook/index.htm.
Smith, T. (2017). Beyond liberal egalitarianism. Marx and normative social theory in the twenty-first century. Boston: Brill Leiden.
Stiegler, B. (1998). Technics and time. The fault of epimetheus (Vol. 1). Stanford University Press.
Tan, L. (2010). The pirate bay. Countervailing power and the problem of state organized crime. In CTheory. http://ctheory.net/the-pirate-bay-countervailing-power-and-the-problem-of-state-organized-crime/.
Tuman, M. (1992). Word perfect: literacy in the computer age. Pittsburg: Pittsburg University Press.
Žižek, S. (2009). First as tragedy, then as farce. London/New York: Verso.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Peović Vuković, K. (2019). Communicative Action in the Light of the Onlife. In: Otrel-Cass, K. (eds) Hyperconnectivity and Digital Reality. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24143-8_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24143-8_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-24142-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-24143-8
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)