Critical Theory and Social Media

Thomas Allmer is Lecturer in Social Justice at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. His research focuses on critical theory and political economy of media and communication. He is the author of Towards a Critical Theory of Surveillance in Informational Capitalism (Peter Lang, 2012).

"Thomas Allmer's outstanding book is characteristic for the high relevance of critical theories and critical political economy of the Internet today. He elaborates in an impressive and astute manner an ideology and commodity critique of Internet privacy and surveillance as well as social media's political economy by making use of and actualising Marx and Marxist theory for the dialectical critique of twenty-first century digital capitalism. This book is an essential must-read for anyone who cares about the Internet and wants to know why we should (dis)like Facebook." -Professor Christian Fuchs, author of Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media, Digital Labour and Karl Marx, Social Media: A Critical Introduction, Internet and Society "In this book, Thomas Allmer has pulled off the difficult trick of combining a comprehensive re-reading of the relevance of the critical tradition to digital times with original research on internet users, to produce a provocative analysis of the contradictory potentials of new media and the forces shaping their deployment. By reconnecting discussion of privacy, connectivity and surveillance with fundamental underlying questions of emancipation and control it moves debate beyond the superficiality of much contemporary commentary to confront the complex entanglements of emerging media with prevailing patterns of inequality and power and the prospects for challenge and change. Anyone concerned with our possible futures needs to read it." -Graham Murdock, Professor of Culture and Economy, Loughborough University

• Introduction. Part I: Theoretical Foundations 1. Critical Theory and Dialectics 2. Critical Internet and Social Media Studies 3. Critical (Internet) Privacy Studies: Ideology Critique 4. Critical (Internet) Surveillance Studies: Commodity Critique Part II: Case Study 5. Traditional and Critical Research of Privacy and Surveillance on Social Media 6. Empirical Results: (Dis)Advantages of Social Media Part III: Techno-Social Revolution 7. Critical Theory, Dialectics, and the (Dis)Advantages of Social Media 8. Conclusion