interpellation in the era of social media

Interpellation is one of those tricky words that emerges, in my education, from the reading of Chris Weedon's "Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory." Borrowing from Louis Althusser's work, Weedon presents this concept, interpellation, as an ideological process of furnishing a subject for an individual to adopt through power-laden processes of hailing. In the context of Althusser's work, this would be the various functions of a state apparatus to officialize a person's status by any number of demographic categories and the more functional processes that a person goes through as a matter of ageing through the state. Interpellation is the functional front-end of that process. It's the 'hey you' the very act of language, verbal or written, which 'addresses' an individual in a particularizing way, which produces the kinds of subjectivity that a person assumes to be official for as long as this subjectivity is useful in conducting state-official business, economic affairs, and simply living at an address. It's these multiple and overlapping ways and functions of address, which establish a persistent functional subjectivity through which a person engages in the larger society. Weedon further clarifies that aside from the process of establishing a self- and other-recognition through interpellation, it is also a form of misrecognition, that is, the individual "assumes that she is the author of the ideology which constructs her subjectivity" (p. 30). This will be my jumping off point.

Social media allows individuals to engage with a larger whole of society in an interactive manner. A key to allowing this interactivity, one which sustains its glitter and draw for the individual, is the ways in which a layer of markup language coded onto the content a person shares affords that person the possibility of finding and being found as a result in a search query. The ideological component here results from a potential for 'leveling up' afforded by assuming one of any number of popular categories of existence. One can make or be the content within a vine of any topical significance to a certain strata of taste within the social media's user community. This always ground-level potential that any moment is pregnant with the possibility of becoming famous incentivizes individuals to engage as searchable categories within social media. This leads to two kinds of activity that I recognize. First it lends itself to a self-awareness that in any situation one could contribute to content that others may find entertaining or engaging in some other way. With that and the numeracy of views and the sheer content of interactive responses to what one posts registers by the individual poster as a form of fame. Secondly, this potential for fame has the potential for systematically distorting one's interest for engaging with a social media community through the inducements to become one of any specific trend-savvy categories in whatever context these operate. And with fame comes an added economic inducement to garner advertising dollars as one becomes a brand ambassador or simply a content generator for others' consumption. The power of 'leveling up' rests in this outcome of being a shareable and searchable information object within a visually represented social media space.

The upshot of this is simply that the potential for fame and for having the recognition of others reinforces the ontological condition of the searchable subjects for which an individual becomes, qua content. For example, if a woman gets hit by her boyfriend and she takes a picture of her bleeding nose and posts it on her social media for others to find, share, and spread she becomes content within an ever growing awareness of certain acts, which are categorically sorted, searched, and shared along the faultlines of their discretionary nature as data objects. This image could be one of many examples of #metoo or of #violenceagainstwomen or any number of trending meta-communicative content labels. And what this wider recognition does is carry the potential for crowding out forms of private individuality in dealing with the act depicted by allowing that wider recognition to be the louder voice naming the individual who had become content. This would be a hypothetical yet quite possible current example of that form of misrecognition that comes by way of interpellation that Weedon mentions above.

I grant that any one person may find solace from public recognition and at least intelligibility to a larger public in any one of the ready-made content labels, i.e., hashtags, that have currency in a social media environment. What I am trying to tease out is how the affordance of this social media space plus the possibilities afforded by search categories, which lend a sense of category-based ontology to the person posting their content under it, distort agendas for both being and sharing. For example, would a woman feel empowered to be abused by her significant other? Would she feel empowered to challenge others into shaming her? Do gender nonbinaries feel empowered to share their daily struggles through self-revelatory social media posts and even enhance their status as such? Do various racists and mass shooters feel empowered by available communities to engage in extreme acts of violence for the cause they feel they are forwarding? In other words, does social media afford, in the psychology of the individual, a chance for the effects of group polarization to take hold?

Let me explain.

The theory of group polarization posits that two underlying forces lead members of a group to act and think in more extreme ways than they would when alone. The first, social comparison, states that people in the presence of others use their perception of the values and beliefs of the group as a gauge and adapt their behaviors to appear more desirable to the group. The second, influence, should be self-explanatory. For the sake of acceptance and the positive regard of the group, the group can induce individuals to do and act in ways they wouldn't normally. While people are engaged in the time-delayed mediated environment of social media this does disengage some of the group dynamics at play in the theory of group polarization. Nevertheless, the perception of others and their acceptance is likely magnified to an nth degree by a perceived scope of an audience of millions and the potential of 'going viral' with a post. And so in a situation like this one must wonder how social media provides an acutely strong form of perceived pressure to conform to a, once again, perceived peer group. This would be yet another permutation of misrecognition caused by interpellation that Weedon mentions above.

I harp on the 'psychology' of web-based social interactions only to suggest that a majority of what happens on-line is purely cognitive, that is, in the 'heads' of individuals. It is their personal perceptions, their star struck feelings for a person talking directly to them, phone screen to phone screen--camera in; video stream out--on a nearly daily basis to a growing fan base that provides an empirical basis for what may be occurring. And any number of topics find a growing fan base for analysis and reactions to any number of things, from games, to vines, to memes, to songs, you name it. Social media may be recreating, in the atomized contexts of one-to-one consumption, the sharing of relevant information about the world from one to many but with a feeling of intimacy afforded by the medium and the consumption contexts.

In the past I have felt that everyone sinking into their glowing rectangle at the expense of the people around them was a pernicious undoing of our culture. I may have to rethink that technologically spun version of the rapture. After all, we are still engaging with others, just in systematically different ways and upon lines rarified by content specificity. Let's just consider that we're losing, potentially, an ability to engage with others a la carte as we increasingly interact in content dependent arenas with others.