Self-production for attention substitutes for and erodes genuine social community.

Evidence

Producing is derived from the Latin verb producere, meaning presenting or making visible. Like the French produire it still carries the meaning of presenting. Se produire means “to play to the gallery.” The colloquial German expression sich produzieren probably has the same etymology. Today, we are constantly and compulsively playing to the gallery. This is especially the case, for instance, on social media: the social is coming to be completely subordinated to self-production. Everyone is producing him-or herself in order to garner more attention. The compulsion of self-production leads to a crisis of community. The so-called “community” that is today invoked everywhere is an atrophied community, perhaps even a kind of commodified and consumerized community. It lacks the symbolic power to bind people together. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 100

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the etymological roots of ‘producing’ as self-presentation, connecting Marx’s production to the influencer’s self-performance.
• XREF: Connects to the influencer as ‘the self becomes the firm’ thesis in the reader’s stated purpose — self-production here maps onto self-as-commodity. — connects to: Industrial attention farming displaced diverse attentional modalities with one mechanomorphic species — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 488