Thanks for the ad(d): neoliberalism’s compulsory friendship

It is therefore important to track the popularity of these sites in tandem with the growth of more work-specific, professional sites such as LinkedIn.com and those (like Doostang.com or Zubka.com) that combine the two functions of friendship, cash payment and job opportunity. Not only do you invite friends to join these sites, they have the capacity to mine the address books in email programs on your computer so that any contact made over time can be notified of your profile. Here the cloudy distinction between “contact” and “friend” perpetuated by office software packages can be seen to play out in an unfolding set of encounters. In online communities, any and all relationships become part of the CV for which you are judged, and the testimonials of “contacts” are central to maintaining status.

In this way, what is most notable is the extent to which these sites reproduce offline culture rather than threaten or oppose it. Yet the precociousness they encourage from users - the self-reflexivity required to broadcast oneself and the literacy of being able to distinguish “friends” who share similar characteristics - indicates the new environment young people are facing. For what is perhaps most disturbing about social networking sites is the way they allow “friendship” to become synonymous with labour: both involve constant attention and cultivation, the future rewards of which include improved standing and greater opportunity. The amount of effort and time required to perform and display oneself, the various genres of managing presence, from Facebook’s status updates to Twitter’s "what are you doing?" seals the mutually constitutive bond of connectedness and desirability.

In this situation, our efforts to protect young people online are surely misplaced unless we develop more sophisticated ways of preparing them for the emerging employment context of the networked society.

The amount of time currently being spent chatting and reciprocating presence online might be better spent reflecting on the shared fate of knowledge work, which is increasingly defined by the hollowing out of hierarchies in white collar jobs, and hence the end of the kind of occupational security that middle-class college graduates might once have trained for.

On a local level, this is the growing phenomenon of “management empathy”, where everyone at every level of the workplace now experiences the same budgetary pressure from faceless suits. On a global level, the hollowing out of hierarchy comes in the practice of skills and knowledge transfer across countries according to the needs of global business, when those with jobs in the West end up training others who will be hired by the same firm at a cheaper rate to replace them. In these circumstances, making friends, like with like, in cultural and regional vacuums actually seems the worst kind of preparation for building the alliances necessary to combat this wider structural trend.

Capitalism may have finally managed to produce an atomised workforce that has no aspirations for living wage claims because overwork has been normalised and an all-seeing screen binds together our public and private identities. It is this reality that young people are preparing for as they learn to “broadcast themselves” online. But those of us concerned about their future must help them realise that while the friendships they treasure on social networking sites may be premised on a form of loyalty, the workings of capital and labour hire under neoliberalism most definitely are not.