Neoliberal capitalism underlies how social media organize social status

Evidence

Although freewheeling creativity, rebellion, and non-hierarchical communality still exist online, they are dwarfed by social media applications that transform “social graphs,” the web of digital connections around a single user, into networks of personal brands contending for the very real benefits of high online status. These changes are deeply rooted in contemporary consumer capitalism, specifically the philosophy of deregulation and privatization known as “neoliberalism.” — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 20

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to foundational-text goal: neoliberalism-as-subject-formation links to Foucault-adjacent analyses of governmentality in other readings. — connects to: Social media reduces human relationships to quantified status displays that reinforce inequality — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 205; Tech culture encodes status hierarchies that shape the social software it builds — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 19; Social media self-presentation is a technology of self-governance under neoliberal capitalism. (+6 more)
• DEFINE: Establishes the book’s operative definition of neoliberalism as market logic infiltrating everyday social relations.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 20

Broader Connections

• Social media self-presentation is a technology of self-governance under neoliberal capitalism. #expands (0.95)
• Social media’s design rewards visibility and self-promotion with social status. #expands (0.85) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 39
• Social media promotes an ideal of privatizing the self into corporate form #expands (0.85) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 354
• Neoliberalism generalizes the enterprise form across the entire social body #expands (0.75) — Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 823