Social Media and the Competition to be the New Ecology for Key Social Functions: Rationalization and the Threat to Social Rationality

A growing and worrying trend in the contemporary age, is how small groups of individuals are trying to create internet-based platforms that attempt to be the ecology in which a key social function is fulfilled. Whether this task, be the searching of online data á la Google, personal communication and presentation of self á la Facebook and its subsidiaries, the distribution of professional information across large networks á la Twitter, or of job searching á la LinkedIn, in a world of complexity in which limited attention is possible to any one task, and of data-based economies of scale, there are powerful first-mover advantages. By providing rigid and instrumentalized templates for social communication, these firms are achieving ‘deep interventions’ based on the form or template in which the content of communication is placed. This competition between internet-based platforms to serve as the unceasingly used ecology for key social functions poses a particularly pernicious set of dual threats. On the one hand, as the Frankfurt School highlighted in a different context, these attempts to enforce set templates for public communication threaten to undermine the diversity of modes of social communication. On the other hand, the proliferation of different internet-platforms that aim to serve as the ecology for a key means of information collection and communication threatens to further intensify concerns that Luhmann articulated regarding how independent subsystems undermine the possibilities of an overall social rationality. In an age of accelerated ‘churn’ within and between social media platforms trends towards intensified instrumental rationalization of social life and intensified undermining of social rationality raises its head in particular stark terms.