Loss of the Social, Return of the Private: Compromising Public Failures in the Age of Boudoir Surplus
Abstract:
Driven by the idea to explore the relation between the libraries’ capacities to redesign online public life and tought provoking exemplification of consequences induced by cybernetic totalitarianism I contend that unique expertise of librarians should be found in the domain of active transmission of knowledge accros and through barriers of communicative capitalism. For that reason I borrow McKenzie Wark’s sintagm „social boudoir“ (showing that the extension of the „social“ did not expand the factory across digital domain but the „frictionless sharing“ of privacy) and Matteo Pasquinelli’s insights on how algorithmic extraction of „network surplus value“ exploits social relations in order to illustrate dangers of technological fetishizm. Tackling this task through the prism of biopolitical control (dataveillance) I argue that librarians need to admit a „public failure“ in fostering digital technologies and repoliticize their identity for safeguarding their users capacities to cope with literacy demands of the 21st century.
Mario Hibert (1975) is an assistant professor at the University of Sarajevo, Faculty of Philosophy, Department of Comparative Literature and Librarianship. He teaches library science for almost ten years and holds a doctoral degree in information and communication sciences (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia), has a Master’s Degree in Human Rights and Democracy from the Center for Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Studies, University of Sarajevo, and BA in Comparative Literature. He explores the critical issues of librarianship, networked society, and information ethics. Co-founder and former selector of the Documentary Film Festival on Human Rights “Pravo Ljudski” and the author of a book of poetry “Judas’s Toys,”