IronyTwoPointZero

Irony 2.0

  Much of the critical thinking around web 2.0 has so far focused on issues of
  authorship and ownership, participation and consumption, the internet as public
  sphere, communication and community, the alienated labour of the creative industry
  worker, the commodification of information, opinion and taste. In short, a lot of
  the writing on the subject adopts a 'strategic' point of view, to use Michel de
  Certeau's distinction, rather than a 'tactical' one.

  [...]

  [The] critique of the confusion arising from the interfacing of technology and
  sociality is mirrored in the second complaint around the dissolution of the
  boundaries of work and leisure online. One not only experiences a new kind of
  alienation from the self (even if as a heightened, more real than real
  subjectivity à la 'i'ek) within this pseudo-community, but also a new kind of
  alienation from the fruits of one's labour. Postfordist or immaterial labour,
  which 'produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity',[6]
  to use Maurizio Lazzarato's terminology, has greatly expanded the creative industry,
  turning formerly artistic and even political activity into a leading sector of
  the job market, in a much rehearsed argument summarised by Paolo Virno: '[t]he
  dividing line between Work and Action, which was always hazy, has now disappeared
  altogether.'[7] The unwitting or unremunerated culturepreneurs of web 2.0 are
  thus victims of a false consciousness which, unlike the more traditional Marxian
  one, doesn't just turn them into passive consumers, but actually exploits their
  active resistance and creativity to generate profits and appropriate their output.
  Not only is 'the postindustrial commodity [...] the result of a creative process
  that involves both the producer and the consumer', but immaterial labor produces
  first and foremost a social relation'it produces not only commodities, but also
  the capital relation.[8] 

  [...]

  It is precisely because of the centrality of this activity to the production of
  content on web 2.0 that much of this criticism, with its focus on a truth to be
  uncovered about what is really going on, finds itself at an impasse. The challenge
  to authorship online far exceeds questions of ownership and exploitation, and to
  address it we need to look at the ways in which not just products but meanings
  are forged in this context.

  [...]

  The question that we are presented with is not one of uncovering the hidden system 
  of power relations that is duping us into being exploited. This is not a case of
  the users being used. Rather, we need to find a new language of critique that takes
  for granted the possibility that the truth is not out there and doesn't matter anyway,
  that there is no longer an ironic gap to be narrowed. Just as Walter Benjamin recognised
  that literature and theatre could no longer form the basis of a critique in the face
  of cinema, we need to ask what the performances we undertake and are subjected to online
  require of us politically. We are witnessing exchanges of information in which we may
  never know what an author might have intended, whether the person who posted the clip
  or set up the profile was joking or not, and we need to discover a new political praxis
  that acknowledges this interface as a valid form of communication, regardless of its
  instrumentalisation within an economic scheme. It is not that subversion can't happen
  under the noses of Murdoch et al, oblivious to users' manipulation of their spectacular
  technologies, but that the failed dialectic of subversion and hegemony, in which users
  don't know what they are doing and end up reinforcing or being co-opted by the system,
  is annihilated in the post-ironic sphere of web 2.0, where that knowledge is immanent.

Nota

O texto observa de forma interessante a necessidade das análises sobre a web 2.0 não se esgotarem meramente na dinâmica de poder, exploração e controle, mas também dar atenção à dinâmica de significados, especificamente a ironia dada entre o significados atribuídos por quem produz um conteúdo e o significado (muitas vezes díspare) que o mesmo conteúdo tem para terceiros, ao reinterpretarem-no. É dentro dessa ironia que o texto afirma ser possível estabelecer novas críticas e táticas de ação.

No entanto, é importante ressaltar que o texto tende a depreciar as análises de poder, exploração e controle. É certo que é possível fazer política dentro do que não foi completamente capturado (no caso, o amplo conjunto de significados que os conteúdos podem ter), mas também não se pode deixar de lado a luta que também pode se efetivar diretamente contra as estuturas de domínio da web 2.0. Escolher atuar apenas na brecha da ironia dos significados pode inclusive ser muito cômodo ao dar um embasamento teórico a um 'uso crítico' de ferramentas corporativas da web 2.0 e com isso esvaziar o debate da possibilidade das pessoas terem seus próprios meios de produção, distribuição e armazenamento.

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