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“What the ‘social’ in today’s ‘social media<\/a>‘ really means[?]<\/p>\n … It seems that social media<\/a> solves the organisational problems that the suburban baby-boom generation faced fifty years ago: boredom<\/a>, isolation, depression<\/a>, and desire. … The social … is reanimated as a simulacrum of its own ability to create meaningful and lasting social relations.<\/p>\n … Historical subjects, once defined as citizen<\/a> or members of a class possessing certain rights, have been transformed into subjects with agency, dynamic actors called ‘users’, [or] customers … The social no longer manifests itself primarily as a class, movement or mob … Nowadays, the social manifests itself as a network. …<\/p>\n The institutional<\/a> part of life is another matter, a realm that quickly falls behind, becoming a parallel universe. It is tempting to remain positive and portray a synthesis … between the formalized power structures inside institutions and the growing influence of informal networks.<\/p>\n But there is little evidence of this … The PR-driven belief that social media will, one day, be integrated, is nothing more than New Age optimism in a time of growing tensions over scarce resources. The social, which used to be the glue for repairing historical damage, can quickly turn into unstable, explosive material.<\/p>\n … The term ‘social’ has effectively been neutralized in its cynical reduction to data porn. …<\/p>\n We will end up in an antisocial future, characterized by the ‘loneliness<\/a> of the isolated man<\/a> in the connected crowd. Confined inside the software cages of Facebook<\/a>, Google, and their clones, users are encouraged to reduce their social life to ‘sharing’ information<\/a>. … Programmers<\/a> these days loosely glue everything together with code. Connect persons to data objects to persons. That’s the social today.”<\/p>\n