Paško Bilić, Ph.D, senior research associate from the Department for Culture and Communication (IRMO), is the author of an article entitled ‘Frankfurt School Legacy and The Critical Sociology of Media: Lifeworld in Digital Capitalism’ in the journal Critical Sociology, indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus databases ranked in the first quartile in the field of sociology.
The article is part of a double special journal issue edited by Paško Bilić and Thomas Allmer from University of Paderborn, Germany entitled ‘Critical Sociology of Communications and Media: Theoretical Contributions to a Disconnected Field’. Selected special issue articles will first be published online as single articles and as a full double issue in July 2024. An expanded special issue edition will be published as an editorial book for the prestigious international publisher Brill in the ‘Studies in Critical Social Sciences’ series in late 2024.
Abstract:
Just as the Frankfurt School responded to the radicalisation of the working class in Germany and the rise of post-war consumerism in the United States, today, we are confronted by platform monopolies, automated hyper-consumption and technological control. Critical approaches to digital media have exposed the structural coupling of Internet use and capital accumulation for almost two decades. However, many authors building on this tradition can struggle to understand how online social interaction is controlled beyond the worn-out critique of false consciousness or beyond conceptualising all digital activity mediated by data as labour. This paper will attempt to theoretically untangle the Marxian ontology of labour and the Frankfurt School-inspired critique of everyday life. This is not just theoretical nit-picking. Society becomes completely dominated if we accept no difference between wage labour and lifeworld activities. Each contains its internal struggles. The value form regulates both in different ways.
Article (open access) is available at the following link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08969205231201386
