On Digital Recognition

June 18, 2021 timothywstanley@me.com

The challenge for social movements is how to update Fraser’s perspectival dualism for an age in which the platform is becoming a dominant distributor of both reward and mutated forms of recognition. Few movements can afford to abstain entirely from the reputation economy. A lesson from Black Lives Matter is that social media’s accumulation of reputational capital can be harnessed towards longer-standing goals of social and economic justice, as long as it remains a tactic or an instrument, and not a goal in its own right. Campaigns may trigger or seize reputational bubbles that spread at great speed—#MeToo is an example—and potentially burst soon after, making a political virtue of the ability to shift movements into other spaces, including the street. The quest for recognition is more exacting and slower than that for reputation, and appreciating this distinction is a first step to seeing beyond the cultural limits of the platform, towards the broader political and economic obstacles that currently stand in the way of full and equal participation.

William Davies, “The Politics of Recognition in the Age of Social Media,” newleftreview.org/issues/ii128/articles/william-davies-the-politics-of-recognition-in-the-age-of-social-media. Interesting summary of the challenge of political recognition today that rightly identifies the need to think past the paper mentalities of print culture in Habermas’s account of the public sphere. Davies’ concluding critiques are probably both needed at once in my view. That is, both the internalist work within the semiotic system of surveillance capitalist digital platforms to identify inequalities, as well as the externalist innovation of new platforms and explicit connection to existing democratic institutions. In any case, this is one of the debates of our times it seems to me, and interesting to see someone connecting this genre of political philosophy to everyday life issues.