Social media’s inward self-focus co-opts radical politics into personal reform

Evidence

Although this scene incorporates many of the countercultural, radical presuppositions of activist movements—that media consolidation limits diversity of opinions, that government should be transparent, that corporations should be responsible to their communities and customers, and so forth—it does so in a way that prioritizes personal reforms over structural change. The famous slogan of the second-wave feminist movement, “the personal is political,” emphasized that gender roles and discrimination played out in micro-interactions and personal choices, what Michel Foucault calls “capillaries of power.” When applied to the inward focus and self-monitoring encouraged by social media, the personal is antithetical to the type of large-scale structural change that these activist groups originally advocated. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 724

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the personal-is-political slogan, when applied to self-monitoring social media, becomes antithetical to structural change is a dense, paradigm-level reversal that inverts a core feminist insight.
• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s capillaries of power and to the author’s own earlier chapters on self-monitoring and the entrepreneurial self. — connects to: Zine-era ideals recur unchanged in social media discourse but lost their political charge — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 83; Social media tools can serve collective class consciousness beyond capitalist capture. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1592; Online radicalization recruits people by speaking persuasively to their personal anxieties — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 384
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘the personal is political’ was meant to reveal micro-politics, yet self-branding tools weaponize the phrase to dissolve collective action into individual optimization.