Article

Journal of Consumer Culture

2015, Vol. 15(1) 2847
Social media, ! The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1469540513493201

dispositives: New joc.sagepub.com

mechanisms of the
construction of
subjectivity
Melita Zajc
University of Maribor, Slovenia

Abstract
This article addresses the issue of social media from the perspective of prosumption.
The term social media has recently replaced the descriptive discourse on new media
and communication technologies. This change implies that, from among the various uses
of new media and communication technologies, one use has prevailed. There is no
consensus about the exact meaning of the term social media and several scholars still
prefer the descriptive approach. The concept of prosumption, which claims that with
the rise of digital technologies the barriers separating production from consumption
have disappeared, might explain the distinctiveness of social media. This article explores
this idea and expectations about the social potential of merging production and con-
sumption in social media by focusing on the issue of audience participation. First, it
traces various understandings of agency and subjectivity in the historical conceptions of
the audience within media and communication studies. Second, it argues for a concep-
tual approach to the issues of agency and subjectivity. It proposes the concept of the
dispositive as that which simultaneously addresses historical and conceptual issues,
presents its implications for the interpretation of social media, and argues for the
suitability of the theory of the dispositive for conceptualizing the social potentials of
social media.

Keywords
social media, prosumption, dispositive, audience studies, subjectivity, new
communication technologies

Corresponding author:
Melita Zajc, University in Maribor Smetanova, 17 Maribor, 2000 Slovenia.
Email: melita.zajc@gmail.com
Zajc 29

Introduction
The syntagm social media has entered the vocabulary of the general public and
social media scholars (Jurgenson, 2012; Woermann, 2012). This is a sign that one
single use has prevailed from among the various uses of digital media and com-
munication technologies. Many scholars are exploring the distinct features and
signicance of this use. This article assumes that the distinctiveness of social
media is best explained by the notion of prosumption. The appropriateness of
the notion of the consumer for media audiences has been contested (Meikle and
Young, 2012); however, prosumption also implies an emphasis on production.
The active participation of media audiences in the production of media content
has been the ideal of communication and media scholars for decades. During the
primacy of press and electronic media as mass media, audience participation in
content production has remained an unachieved ideal. New digital media and
communication technologies, within their present use as social media, appear to
enable the fulllment of this ideal. Deliberation regarding the social potential of
the active roles of social media users as content producers is a key issue in
contemporary media and communication studies. Critical approaches that
argue against simplied appraisals of these liberating potentials and point to
the constraining and exploitative potentials of social media are imperative, but
the idealized understanding of the social subject as an autonomous agent and the
source of meaning needs to be avoided in particular. Following several scholars
(Caraway, 2011; Hay and Couldry, 2011) demands for the acknowledgment of
diversity and historical specicity when considering the potentials of social media,
this article introduces an approach that permits simultaneous considerations of
conceptual and historical issues. This approach is provided by the concept of the
dispositive. It is argued that the concept of the dispositive avoids idealizing both
the absolute autonomy and complete constructiveness of the social subject. It also
avoids separating technology from society when considering the social potentials
of technology. The epistemological advantages and main features of the concept
of the dispositive are demonstrated by conceptions of the dispositive of power
and the dispositive of the cinema. Exploring the dierences between social media
and the dispositive of the cinema, and relying on the insights of empirical studies
by contemporary social media theorists, ve distinctive features of the dispositive
of social media are dened: the prevalence of subject position, the arbitrariness of
physical position, the highly structured online self, the importance of individuals
activities and the individual as the sole bearer of authenticity. The acknowledg-
ment of social media as a new, specic dispositive may challenge the current
understanding of media in terms of convergence, in which old and new media
interact in even more complex ways (Jenkins, 2006: 6). This article demon-
strates how the concept of the dispositive may be theoretically fruitful for explor-
ing contemporary uses of media and communication technologies without
separating society and technology, by simultaneously considering continuity
and change. In particular, it is demonstrated how the enabling and constraining
30 Journal of Consumer Culture 15(1)

potentials intertwine within the dispositive of social media, thus providing new
bases and initiatives for future investigation.

Social media and prosumption

Kaplan and Haenlein (2010: 61) dened social media as a group of Internet-based
applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web
2.0, which allows the creation and exchange of user-generated content. They
further identied six dierent categories of social media: collaborative projects
such as Wikipedia, blogs and micro blogs such as Twitter, content communities
such as YouTube, social networking sites such as Facebook, virtual game worlds,
and virtual social worlds. The authors themselves (60) reported that this is a
changing eld. Even at present, many scholars prefer the descriptive approach.
Instead of using the term social media, they list those new media and communi-
cation technologies that respond to their research interests. In her latest book on
the contemporary use of new technologies, Turkle (2011: 1819) focuses on
robotics, networks with virtual words, computer games, social networks, and
mobile devices. Beer and Burrows (2010: 5), who have discussed participatory
web cultures, have focused on development within the following areas: social net-
working sites, collaborative texts, blogs and micro-blogging, archive sites where
users contribute and organize the content, and software mashups and visualiza-
tions. Other scholars prefer to refer to individual services such as social networking
sites (Boyd, 2007, 2010), Twitter (Marwick and Boyd, 2010) or personal blogs
(Chia, 2012). More frequently today, social media scholars (Jurgenson, 2012;
Woermann, 2012) refer to social media without further specication.
Regardless of the various approaches, scholars seem to agree on one distinct
feature of social media, which is audience participation in the production of media
content. In the words of Lessig, whereas mass media were read only, social
media could be both read and write (2004: 37). Active participation in produc-
tion is not limited to communication; it is part of a more general process of merging
production with consumption. Ritzer (2008) has analyzed the fast food industry, in
which the consumer is also a producer of the meal, and listed other similar exam-
ples such as pumping ones own gasoline at the lling station or being involved in
amateur pornography. In contrast to the central tendency by classical theorists to
clearly distinguish between production and consumption, Ritzer (2010: 10) has
demonstrated that there has always existed a continuum between production and
consumption and that we should have always been focusing on prosumption.
Today, however, a signicant change has taken place and we have become a pro-
sumer society. Production and consumption have become subordinated to pro-
sumption as they both presume and encompass prosumption, and because
prosumption itself has become increasingly prominent (Ritzer, 2010: 11). Ritzer
pointed to two crucial features of this new situation; one related to technology, the
other to subjectivity. First, the fusion of production and consumption was previ-
ously limited by material realities. Today however, with digital network
Zajc 31

technologies, particularly broadband, enabling fast exchanges of large amounts of

data, the material obstacles that separate production and consumption have vir-
tually disappeared. Social media can be regarded as a privileged realm of this
fusion, because broadband technologies have provided the material conditions
for audience participation in media content production, for the emergence of
user generated content, and for media in which users consume content as they
create it and vice versa. As media history has shown, media with proper names,
for example lm or television, have only developed when, among various uses
of certain communication technologies, one has prevailed. The fusion of produc-
tion and consumption seems to be this special use, which has prevailed among
various uses of digital communication technologies and which makes social
media distinct media. This is also the understanding of social media employed
within the context of this article. By social media, I refer to the use of digital
network technologies, in which creation and consumption of the mediated content
take place simultaneously and are performed by the same persons. The main goal
of this paper, however, is not to dene what social media are, but to explore how
they can be conceptualized in relation to their use and to their role within society.
The merging of consumption and production in social media brings to the fore
the issue of media audience activity. The signicance of this change has been
perceived dierently, and interpreted in opposing terms as either positive or nega-
tive. Ritzer provided a way to overcome these oppositions when he claimed (2010:
1415) that, in prosumption, consumers are producing themselves and
workers. . . consume them during a workday, thus acknowledging both the
enabling and constraining potentials of prosumption. This is his second point,
relevant for this study, and calls for a more complex approach towards conceptua-
lizing the production of subjectivity within contemporary societies, and the media
in particular.

Media and the social subject

Traditional communication studies focused on collectivities and social formations,
and their key objects of study were the public (Habermas, 1989) and imagined
communities (Anderson, 1991), whereas individuals and the more general issues
of agency and subjectivity were of minor concern.
A more substantial acknowledgment of the issue of subjectivity in communica-
tion has been provided by British cultural and media studies scholars. Hall (1974)
demonstrated that individual members of audiences can understand mass media
content dierently from the intentions of producers, and he directed media research
towards analyzing the activities of audiences as readers and users of the medium.
The idea of the mediated active participation of individual citizens within commu-
nal life was developed within the notion of the right to communicate, as an
audience-oriented alternative to the idea of freedom of the press. Williams (1976)
dened the right to communicate as active participation and free contribution of all
members of society, and claimed that this was a basic principle of democracy.
32 Journal of Consumer Culture 15(1)

The prime addressee of Williams argument was public media, yet it was mainly
developed within alternative and community media (Branwyn, 1997). Mass media,
whether commercial or public media, never succeeded in bringing this potential of
public communication to life. A signicant shift from audiences that were passively
consuming media content (or, in the best case, transformed given media content
within fan communities) to audiences that actively participate in the production of
content, took place with social media. The understanding of this new kind of
audience has remained vague to the present day. Meikle and Young (2012: 10)
supported Rosens (2006) denition of the people formerly known as the audi-
ence. The main uncertainty regarding the people formerly known as the audi-
ence relates to the degree to which they freely perform their activities, because
several scholars doubt that audience participation is, by itself, empowering.
One group of critics has focused on limitations. Manovich (2008) pointed to the
fact that a signicant percentage of user-generated content within social media
either follows the templates and conventions set up by the professional entertain-
ment industry or directly re-uses professionally produced content. Jenkins (2009:
125) warned against idealizing the utopian possibilities of YouTube, because access
to it is uneven and promotes majoritarian logic that hides minority perspectives.
Other groups of scholars have directly criticized the active role of the audience in
social media, similar to critics of prosumption (Zwick et al., 2008), who saw the
participation of consumers in production as a sign of a new form of power (183),
which exploits the autonomous creativity of the masses as a new source of surplus
value for capitalists. Andrejevic, Cohen and Van Dijck (in Caraway, 2011: 694) all
pointed to various ways in which media owners seek to exploit the eorts of social
media users. Van Dijck (in Caraway, 2011: 698) has argued that within social
media, the role of audiences has been expanded to the production of content
and the generation of personal information for use within aggregated marketing
data. Volcic and Andrejevic (2011: 601) have further pointed to the strategies for
mobilizing the population as a means of lateral and participatory message trans-
mission by private consultants and a neo-liberal state within nation branding.
Caraway (2011: 694), however, has expressed doubts and called for the acknow-
ledgement of diversity, because the harnessing of free labor to the logic of accu-
mulation is a contingent, contradictory and contested process. Hay and Couldry
(2011: 481) have claimed that these discussions are based on a generalized under-
standing of democracy, and they fail to question how media institutions and con-
sumption or media citizenship matter within a robust, complex, and contradictory
sense of current historical circumstances.
In order to acknowledge historical circumstances, what is rst needed is a move
away from the notion of a subject as an autonomous agency and the source of
meaning. I propose reconsidering the notion of subjectivity, and the processes of
construction of subjectivity, before considering the social potentials of social
media. Hay and Couldry (2011: 476) have argued that media studies regard the
subject as occupying a historically situated, unstable, provisional and dynamic
position, whereas lm studies relies on ahistorical ideological criticism. However,
Zajc 33

it was lm studies that developed the conceptual tool for analyzing the historical
process of the construction of subjectivity. This tool is the concept of the disposi-
tive. It is suitable for grasping the ambiguities of the present situation within social
media, because it allows the simultaneous consideration of historical and concep-
tual aspects regarding the construction of subjectivity.
Consideration of diversity and historical specicity is insucient to explain the
social potential of social media. After decades of talk about the new digital media
and communication technologies, today it has become common to refer to these as
social media; this indicates that, among the multiple, various, heterogeneous uses,
one use has prevailed. Any attempt to understand the particular features of this
prevailing use demands that the conceptual approach also be applied. In addition,
when considering the social aspects of technology, one necessarily faces the prob-
lem of separating technology from society (Sigaut, 1994; Williams, 1990), or the
problem of digital dualism (Jurgenson, 2012) as it was dened in relation to
social media. The dispositive, as a concept that allows for the simultaneous con-
sideration of various processes and qualities, also enables the consideration of
technology in the context of its use, without separating it from society. The prin-
cipal point of the dispositive where simultaneous considerations of the conceptual
and the historical, of technology and society, converge is the focus on
subjectivity.

The dispositive
The concept of the dispositive is intrinsically connected with the work of Michel
Foucault and his critique of the traditional conception of the human subject within
philosophy and the humanities. It was founded in his early archeological explor-
ation of the emergence of the human sciences. In The Order of Things, rst pub-
lished in 1966 (Foucault, 1970), he showed that the notion of man itself was
developed as the object and subject of knowledge. He declared the end of man
(1970: 387) and claimed that the subject must be stripped of its creative role and
analyzed as a complex and variable function of discourse (in Taureck, 1997: 22).
This claim was often contested, for example, by the argument that people, not
structures, make history (Goldman, in Taureck, 1977: 22). Foucaults argument,
however, was not an outright rejection. As Lacan emphasized, the force of
Foucaults argument was the stress of the dependence of the subject on the signier
(in Taureck, 1997: 22). Several other disciplines largely conrmed this point.
Structural linguistics demonstrated how the subject is dependent on language,
Marxism pointed to subjects dependence on social structure, and Lacanian psy-
choanalysis proved that subjects autonomy is limited by the unconscious. In short,
the self was decentered in various ways (Dean, 1992), and all contributed to the
idea that the self no longer masters the world through its reason but is mired in and
constituted by culture.
The idea of subjectivity as constructed brought about its apparent opposite
namely, the idea that individuals themselves can take part in constructing their
34 Journal of Consumer Culture 15(1)

subjectivity (Turner, 1994). The recognition that the self is not a given entity indeed
implies that it can also be transformed by individuals themselves. However, this
process is not arbitrary, and, as Foucault himself explained, it is not enough, to
agree at one time with those that claim the subject is radically free, and then with
others that it is determined by social conditions (in Taureck, 1997: 2122). The
main issue remains the degree to which the construction of subjectivity is deter-
mined by forces beyond an individuals reach, be it history, ideology, social struc-
ture, signifying practice, or any other power system; or, more probably, a complex
fusion of all of these.
The concept of the dispositive is especially suitable for dealing with this issue
because it allows for the simultaneous consideration of conceptual and historical
matters relating to the construction of subjectivity. This has been neglected, par-
ticularly within the English-speaking world, which for a long time equated the
dispositive with the apparatus. The concept of the dispositive was initially devel-
oped for the cinema in the form of le dispositif cinematographique. The English
translation of this concept was the cinematic apparatus, which obscured the fact
that the dispositive diers signicantly from the apparatus as conceived by
Althusser (1971) in his theory of the ideological state apparatuses exactly because,
contrary to the apparatus, it calls into question the individual, historical speci-
cities and varieties.

Dispositives of power
Foucault dedicated a vast amount of his work to exploring historical varieties
regarding the processes of constructing subjectivity. Recently, several scholars
have shown (Agamben, 2006; Bussolini, 2010; Deleuze, 2007) that the notion of
the dispositive (French le dispositif) is central to these endeavors. English trans-
lators of Foucault initially translated le dispositif as apparatus. There are, says
Bussolini (2010), good reasons why translators have chosen to use apparatus for
dispositif; yet there is growing cause for evaluating the specicity of each con-
cept. Foucault himself made a clear distinction between the two. Whereas appar-
atus is more state-centered and instrumental, the dispositive relates to more
complex and subtle power procedures.
Contemporary scholars (Agamben, 2006; Deleuze, 2007) who have demonstrated
renewed interest in Foucaults concept of the dispositive have claimed that it
occurred at a specic time in his thought; namely, from the mid-1970s onwards. It
is therefore most likely that Foucault developed his notion after Jean Louis Baudry
wrote his rst article on le dispositif cinematographique in 1970 (1986a). In the
following sections, the signicance of this concept for cinema theory and for social
media are presented in detail. Foucaults approach helps, rst to explain the epis-
temological advantages of the concept, and second to place the discussion of the
social potentials of social media within the context of (political) power.
Foucault and Baudry both used the dispositive to dier from the more static
concept of (Althussers) apparatus. They used it as an analytical tool, to grasp the
Zajc 35

dynamic coexistence of the conceptual and historical within contemporary pro-

cesses of subjectivation, to account for the implicit powers of the mechanism,
and in order to grasp the possibility of resistance. For Foucault, the dispositive
was a tool for analyzing a multiplicity of forces in movement, in particular for
thinking about power within a perpetually dynamic social eld.
In Discipline and Punish, published in 1975 (1984), Foucault presented the pan-
opticon, a model of prison architecture envisioned by the English philosopher
Bentham in 1791, as a model of how power is exercised within modern societies.
He stressed the autonomy of the mechanism, pointing to the fact that it needs no
operator and, in this sense, power resides in the machine itself. As far as the
operator is concerned, modern dispositives of power function by themselves and
the power is disindividualized. Yet, they can function in this way exactly because,
on the other hand, the power is individualized. Modern dispositives of power need
no operator because smooth functioning is guaranteed by the subjects themselves.
When Foucault explained in The eye of power (1991: 41) how he rst came
across the idea of a panopticon-like device, he argued that the people that con-
structed such devices faced a particular problem. They wanted to establish control
that was at the same time global and individualizing. The individuals, who would
all be seen from one point would, at the same time, be carefully separated one from
another. For Foucault, individualization is a mode of subjection to power. As
Rabinow (1984: 19) put it, the prisoner becomes ones own guardian. This
individualizing aspect of power gained even more importance in Foucaults later
work, where he used the notion of government in order to explain how power
functions in modern societies. He saw power (1982: 221) not primarily in political
structures, but in the way in which the conduct of individuals or of groups might be
directed, not only in the forms of political or economic subjection, but also in the
area of the singular mode of action. . . which is government.
Foucault warned against envisioning power as that which looks only at the
interests of totality or a class or a group among the citizens. Power is both totaliz-
ing and individualizing. Never, I think, he claimed (1982: 213), in the history of
human societies. . . has there been such a tricky combination within the same pol-
itical structures of individualization techniques, and of totalization procedures.
Social media, perhaps more than any other dispositive, proves how thoroughly
individualizing mechanisms of construction of subjectivity might be.
Nevertheless, these same processes are also the sites of resistance. Foucaults
celebrated claim that the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to
refuse what we are (1982: 216) remains focused on processes of subjectivation. His
demand that we have to promote new forms of subjectivity through refusal of this
kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries (1982:
216) resonates in the work of contemporary scholars that re-acknowledge the rele-
vance of the concept of the dispositive. They see the dispositive as crucial for
discerning the possibilities for resistance and for the development of new subjectiv-
ities. In Quest-ce quun dispositif? (2007), Deleuze stated that productions of
subjectivity escape the powers and knowledge of some dispositives in order to
36 Journal of Consumer Culture 15(1)

re-invest themselves in the powers and knowledge of other dispositives. We belong

to dispositives and we operate within them, as that which we have been, that which
we are no longer, and that which we are becoming. This future to be, our becoming,
is open to change. Lines of creativity are part of dispositives, and they enabled
Deleuze to predict the development of resistance in the forms of new kinds of
subjectivation.
In Che cose un dispositivo? (2006), Agamben claimed that today dispositives
are more numerous than ever. According to Agamben, a dispositive can literally be
anything capable of catching, directing, forming, controlling, and providing ges-
tures, knowledge, opinions, and discourses of living beings. Even so, Agamben saw
the possibility for new forms of subjectivity that could resist the subjectivizing
eects of these dispositives. The more dispositives enter into everyday life, the
more the power is confronted by some elusive element. The more subjected to
power it is, the harder it is to catch. It is imperative, Agamben claims, to develop
counter-dispositives and bring them into common usage.
The cell phone is one empirical example of a contemporary dispositive that
Agamben proposes, yet in general the authors are reluctant to cite particular
objects because the dispositive is a much broader concept. It refers to a sort of
technical assemblage that involves individual persons. This is exactly at the core of
the concept of the dispositive of cinema.

Le dispositif cinematographique
The French lm writer Jean-Louis Baudry developed the idea of the cinema as le
dispositive cinematographique in his essays titled Ideological eects of the basic
cinematographic apparatus (1986a) and The apparatus: Metapsychological
approaches to the impression of reality in the cinema (1986b). The rst article
was initially published in the magazine Cinethique under the title Cinema: Eets
ideologiques produits par lappareil de base in 1970, and the other was published
in 1975 in Communications with the title Le dispositif: Approches metapsycholo-
giques de limpression de realite. The translation, using the same English words,
the apparatus, for the two dierent terms, lappareil and le dispositive,
greatly inuenced the reception and academic debate of Baudrys theory.
It became known (Rosen, 1986) as the theory of the apparatus and this naming
directly associated it with Althussers (1971) ideological state apparatuses. The
theory of the apparatus was often understood as another variant of media manipu-
lation notion as developed by critical theory (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002) and
was one of the grounds for claims about the ahistorical nature of lm studies (Hay
and Couldry, 2011: 476). I claim that Baudry employed the concept of the disposi-
tive to dier from the notions of media as totalizing apparatuses (such as ideo-
logical state apparatuses and media manipulation), and to stress, similarly to
Foucaults dispositive of power, the simultaneity of totalizing and individualizing
procedures within the cinema. This point also connects the notion of the dispositive
with Ritzers conception of prosumption (2010: 1415) as that in which consumers
Zajc 37

are producing themselves (individualizing movement) and workers. . .consume

them during a workday (totalizing movement).
The theory of the apparatus (Rosen, 1986: 282) asked about subject eects
specic to the cinema. It pointed to two regimes of subject construction: one of the
apparatus itself, and the other of signifying processes, especially those of narrative.
Baudry was the most inuential writer on dispositif cinematographique. His rst
essay launched research on psychological mechanisms at work within the cinema
and inuenced Christian Metzs (1982) conception of primary cinematic identica-
tion. In his account of double identication, Baudry asserted that for people in the
cinema to identify with the ctional persons on the screen they must identify with
the mechanism of representation. Secondary identication derives from the char-
acter portrayed as a center of identication, whereas primary identication permits
the appearance of the second and places it in action. Within the cinema, asserted
Baudry (1986a: 295), the spectator identies less with what is represented, the
spectacle itself, than with what stages the spectacle. . . obliging him to see what it
sees. For viewers to identify with the characters on the screen (secondary identi-
cation), they must identify with the mechanism of representation (primary
identication).
Nonetheless, the stress on the mechanism, as the apparatus, does not explain
how people watch movies. In other words, this is not yet le dispositif. Baudry
explicitly claimed that he was interested in the particular conditions of production
and distribution in contemporary media. He was critical (1986a: 287) of the
common concern regarding media content but lack of concern about their technical
basis. Central for Baudrys generation of lm theorists (Rosen, 1986: 281) was the
question of possible opposition to the dominant use of cinema. Today, scholars
(Carpentier, 2011: 519) have dened several aspects of audience activity where
oppositional practices might occur: participation in media production, participa-
tion in society through the media, and interaction with media content. When
Baudry wrote his essays, these possibilities were limited to participation in society
through the media and interaction with media content. Baudrys writing can be
regarded as an attempt to conceptually account for expansion of these possibilities.
In his second essay, Baudry (1986b) compared the cinema with Platos cave and
with a dream, two situations that require a specic state of the human body.
In Platos cave, the hypothetical human person has been chained since birth; in a
dream, a person sleeps and is immobile. Cinema is neither Platos cave, nor
a dream. The point Baudry was making was that both of these situations provide
simulations of reality, and they do so by constructing the place for the subject. The
same happens within the cinema hall. The famous impression of reality in the
cinema does not depend on what is being represented on lm. The cinema does not
simulate reality; it simulates the conditions of the subject.
Although the English translation equates both lappareil and le dispositif
with the apparatus, Baudry (1986b: 316) himself explicitly claimed that one
diers from the other. He proposed distinguishing the basic cinematographic
apparatus, lappareil de base, which concerns the ensemble of the equipment
38 Journal of Consumer Culture 15(1)

and operations necessary for producing and screening a lm, from le dispositif,
which concerns screening and includes the subject to whom the projection is
addressed. Unlike lappareil, le dispositif simultaneously pertains to the
apparatus and its addressee.
The use of media is not limited to a process of establishing an imaginary subject
position, unifying and totalizing. Le dispositif (Baudry, 1986b: 317) concerns
projection and. . . includes the subject to whom the projection is addressed.
Within le dispositif, the subject is not only simulated, but also included. It is
not only a simulated point of view that one must adopt to recognize the represen-
tations, to take them as reality, the ahistorical subject of ideological interpela-
tion; it is also the actual spectator as a condition of the ow, of the duration of
these representations, the historically situated, unstable, provisional, and dynamic
subject. As Jean-Louis Schefer (in Zajc, 1999: 13) put it, the actual spectator is the
one that guarantees that in the cinema the imaginary life of the protagonists, their
emotions, their adventures, last by someone.
Le dispositif pertains to both a hypothetical subject position and the actual
person; to the (imaginary) spectator and to the (real) viewer. Exactly because of
these features, the concept of le dispositif provides the means for understanding
contemporary media within their use, as a situation and as a setting, which both
constitutes and includes the subject. What is constituted is an imaginary subject
position, a simulated point of view that one must adopt in order to recognize
representations and that all spectators/users share. What is included is the individ-
ual, the concrete, living person, and every single cinema-goer to whom the disposi-
tive assigns a distinct place within the setting.
The dispositive, as a single concept, permits simultaneous consideration of both
the subject and the individual, both the passive subject of ideology and the active
maker of ones own history. In the dispositive, the subject is contingent and
autonomous at the same time. The dispositive (Zajc, 1999) makes possible the
distinction between the subject position that the dominant use of media technology
prescribes to any user and the creative practices of individual users with their
histories, memories, expectations and desires, which can generate alternative and
oppositional uses. In this, the dispositive accounts for the peculiar feature of any
media technology; namely, that its social dimension rests on individual use. This
feature, which is particularly pronounced in social media, directly poses the fol-
lowing question: if individual practices are part of social use, are oppositional
practices possible at all?
In broader political terms, it was Foucault who provided an armative answer.
As can be seen above, contemporary scholars renewed interest and further explor-
ation regarding the dispositives of power conrmed Foucaults perspective and also
provided fresh analysis of the workings and potentials of dispositives within con-
temporary societies. Based on their insights, and relying on the ndings of recent
empirical studies on social media, the following section compares social media with
the dispositive of cinema in order to outline the main features of the dispositive of
social media.
Zajc 39

Social media as a dispositive

The concept of the dispositive shifts attention from media contents to the material
practices of media use, and oers the possibility for these practices to be
approached conceptually. A prominent example is the fact that the same lm is
perceived dierently if viewed in a cinema than on television. Cinema and television
are two dierent dispositives. Because the term social media is used for what was
not long ago described as new media and communication technologies, it can be
assumed that a new dispositive is being developed: the dispositive of social media.
Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) approached the use of social media descriptively
and carefully described their users. These users are willing to work in groups and let
the results be modied and transformed, as in Wikipedia; eager to evaluate and be
evaluated, as in blogs; capable of recording, displaying, and reecting on their lives
and intimate experiences, as in YouTube and Flickr; open to communication and
new initiatives, as in Facebook; and inventive and creative, as in Second Life; but
also submissive and obedient, as in World of Warcraft. The well known features of
digital technology also play a role within social media: one (Manovich, 2002) is
liquid materiality, and the other (Hayles, 1993) is the fact that presence and absence
are replaced by pattern and randomness. This list is incomplete, yet that is the
nature of descriptions.
Considering social media conceptually, as a dispositive, one can see that it sig-
nicantly diers from the dispositive of cinema. For the purpose of this analysis,
I propose classifying the dierences into ve major groups: (1) Prevalence of sub-
ject position, (2) Arbitrariness of physical position, (3) Highly structured online
self, (4) Importance of individuals activities and (5) The individual as sole bearer of
authenticity.

Group 1: Prevalence of subject position

Unlike the dispositive of the cinema, in social media, subject positioning prevails.
In the cinema, claimed Baudry, the impression of reality does not depend on
what is being represented on lm, because the cinema simulates the conditions of
the subject, and not reality (1986b). Indeed, cinema audiences can enjoy fantasies
and realist narratives alike. In social media, this takes on a new meaning. The
role of simulation of reality has been completely taken over by a simulated pos-
ition for the subject. Even the socializing element of social media is a result of
this simulated subject position; for example, with the use of smart phones, people
simultaneously socialize on and o screen. In the case of cinema, subject pos-
itioning is achieved by the mechanical work and optical mechanisms of the cam-
eras and projectors, and is subjected to realistic representations. Social media
content evades the restraints of mimicry. Subject positioning in social media is
provided by technical mechanisms and software programs. Recent empirical
research on social media has shown the importance of technical aordances of
40 Journal of Consumer Culture 15(1)

the online context for self-presentations (Ellison et al., 2011: 48). Research on
eBay has pointed to the importance of the possibilities for changing subject
positions (Denegri-Knott and Molesworth, 2010). The authors have even pro-
posed (73) that the ability to engage its users in pleasurable forms of browsing
and daydreaming this equates with subject positioning within the dispositive
was the reason for eBays initial popularity.
The construction of the subject position is not limited to social media platforms;
just as in the cinema, o-line products and activities play a signicant part in it. In
an interesting analysis of the subject positioning of contemporary bloggers, Chia
has shown that the realities faced by quotidian bloggers dier signicantly from
empowerment rhetoric. Yet, regardless of the instructions in manuals and reports
on pro-bloggers, the majority of them favor social to monetary compensation for
their production of content (Chia, 2012: 434).

Group 2: Arbitrariness of physical position

Within the dispositive of cinema the individual person is physically obliged to
take a prescribed place within the cinema hall, being simultaneously an individual
person and the site of identications with ctitious beings within the virtual world
of the narrative. In the dispositive of social media, the physical position of the
individual user has no inuence on its eective use. To a large degree, this is also
a matter of the technical and software elements of social media. Thus, the mater-
ial indicators of this feature are the rising importance of cloud storage, on the
one hand, and the proliferation of mobile devices that enable the use of social
media platforms, on the other. Because this arbitrariness is integrated into a
technical system, it also accounts for the particular features of social media com-
munication. For example, it explains the involvement of non-human agents in
communication (Turkle, 2012) such as bots, intelligent agents and similar forms
of online automation (Manovich, 2002), but also phenomena like an imagined
Twitter audience (Marwick and Boyd, 2010) and the tension between broad-
cast and personal communication that Meikle and Young attribute to social
media (2012: 68). The authors claim that with social media, it is no longer
always clear, whether we are being addressed as someone or anyone (72),
yet they assume that this is a transitional phase. From the perspective of social
media as a dispositive, this is a consequence of arbitrariness regarding the phys-
ical position of the user. It may cause discontent, such as Turkles (2012) warning
that people feel more comfortable with machines than with each other.
Frequent violations of privacy in attempts to control the physical whereabouts
of social media users testify to a larger, systemic discontent relating to such
arbitrariness.
However, this is a distinct feature of the dispositive of social media and it is
unlikely that it will change. It can, however, mark the point where the struggles for
the empowering potentials of social media might take place.
Zajc 41

Group 3: Highly structured online self

The split between the media user and the users representation within the media
remains. Within the dispositive of social media, it is generally dened as oine and
online identities. Online identities, moreover, vary more than ever; they can be
completely dierent from, but also equal to the oine self.
The rst internet generations (Turkle, 1995) explored the possibilities of creating
their online selves. The rst inhabitants of virtual worlds enthusiastically played
with identities, starting with the notorious middle-aged psychiatrist who pretended
to be a handicapped woman online (Stone, 1995). In contemporary massive multi-
player online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft (Blizzard
Entertainment, 1994) for example, in which individual players participate via fan-
tastic creatures as their avatars, the choices are more structured. Even more limit-
ing is the option to be the same person from proles on Facebook and other
social networking sites to the authors of blogs and Wikipedia entries to participants
on forums. Unlike the users of the rst generation, who pretended to be someone
else online, contemporary users of social media are faced with the challenge of
pretending to be themselves.
This split of a users online identity may seem comfortable. It explains the
apparently unreasonable willingness of some social media users to nd pleasure
in their own, mostly unpaid, work, as documented for example in Chias (2012)
study on bloggers. It also accounts for the extraordinary ease of some social media
users, such as game players, in identifying with negative creatures. Controversial
role-playing games, such as Super Columbine Massacre (Danny Ledonne, 2005),
take advantage of this feature. They are socially and politically challenging exactly
because they create a contrast between the identity of the player and his or her
avatar, thus providing space for reection.
The split is even more obvious when the role is that of oneself. The experience of
constructing oneself for others is not new. Users know it from their plural social
identities in their oine lives. It still is a particular task because the users are
completely detached from their physical selves, thus they actually need to write
themselves into being (Boyd, 2010: 42).
The pressure of constantly creating oneself for others might also explain why
some users of social media are eager to share intimate information about them-
selves. In the absence of what one has at disposal oine, including ones own body,
this is a convenient way of representing ones self. The notion of prole as prom-
ise, developed by researchers of online dating sites (Ellison et al., 2011), further
indicates that there is always a signicant degree of discrepancy between peoples
online proles and the way people perceive themselves. Contemporary empirical
research also shows that identities developed online inuence the oine identities.
In her research on the US-based community of people that believe that they were
born in incorrectly-abled bodies, Davis (2012) showed how in their online activities
they simultaneously prosume their own transabled identities, and construct trans-
ableism as a culturally available identity category not only online, but also oine,
42 Journal of Consumer Culture 15(1)

legitimizing a transabled identity in a highly material way (613). Woermann

(2012), when studying people involved in freeskiing, a sport subculture similar to
snowboarding, also observed that social media became integral to the practice of
freeskiing itself. The role that visual media historically played in dening the ways
people ski (625) has been amplied by social media to such a degree that it is on
the screen that freeskiers increasingly determine the quality and meaning of what
has happened on the slopes (2012: 632), showing that the highly structured online
self is not limited to the screen.

Group 4: Importance of individuals activities

Rheingold (2000) explained that people eagerly built virtual communities because,
increasingly, more informal public spaces have disappeared from peoples real lives.
Participation in online communication is thus, in a way, a social necessity. As a
fusion of production and consumption, social media rely on individuals that pro-
duce by consuming and consume by producing. This also diers from previous
media dispositives. Cinema prescribes complete immobility for its viewers. The
television audience is mobile, yet remains passive. The use of social media does
not require a particular conguration of the users physical space; however, it
depends completely on the activity of individual users. They are the ones who
ensure content. The individual, required by the dispositive of social media, is
active by default. This makes users vulnerable; for example, the content they
create and personal data they provide might be explored for commercial interests.
However, they cannot retreat, and this aspect of their vulnerability might also
provide the main source of their social and political power.
Transableism and freeskiing exist mostly in the activities of members as
social media users. The oine activism in transableism is part of online discussions,
but online discussions also motivate activism within material life. The production of
videos to be published on YouTube and other social media is, similarly, the
most signicant part of freeskiing, symbolically and materially. Another
telling example is the study of eBay users (Denegri-Knott and Molesworth,
2010), showing precisely how the activities of eBayers that constantly oer new
objects for sale provide the unpredictability by which eBay stimulates the desire to
consume.

Group 5: The individual as sole bearer of authenticity

The authenticity of social media content is not determined in advance, as is the case
with mass media. Social media content is created by the users, and therefore the
users as individual members of a community of users are also the ones who
evaluate the credibility and reliability of this content. Because this relates to the
origin of content, the term authenticity is used. As one of the most pressing
issues of contemporary media landscapes, it demands a separate exploration. In the
context of this article, its consideration is limited to the most distinct traits from the
Zajc 43

conceptual perspective. In the case of the dispositives of cinema and television,

there are several elements that indicate the level of authenticity, starting with the
distinction between the cinemas of Georges Melies and the Lumiere brothers; that
is, the foundation for the division between ction (Melies) and documentary
(Lumiere) cinema, and the division between entertainment and serious media.
Institutions such as editors and journalists, as well as narrative conventions and
lming or editing techniques, help mass media clearly indicate what should
be taken as truth and what not. In digital networked media, the notions of
authenticity themselves become complicated (Boyd, 2010: 5253), because acts
and information are not located in a particular space or time. Code, text, images,
and videos can be easily modied when they have the form of bits. Alterations of
content, claims Boyd, can be functional, aesthetic, political, or deceptive (2010: 53).
There is no institutional warranty of authenticity, and there are no more or
less reliable media. It is the users themselves that detect and evaluate alterations,
on the go.
Features of individual social media such as Twitter, Facebook or eBay indicate
that, unlike mass media, they do not dier according to truth or authenticity.
The reliability of Wikipedia is based on highly structured processual regulations,
and its truth is subject to change, not given or guaranteed. There are sev-
eral indicators that the uses of other social media also include the skills for dealing
with the issue of authenticity; thus between Wikipedia and less truth-oriented social-
media there is a continuum, not a clear divide. For example, studies of
YouTube (Burgess and Green, 2009) revealed that the users developed particular
skills for evaluating the authenticity of the published content. Authenticity is an
important issue in self presentations; for example, on online dating sites (Ellison
et al., 2011).
Bloggers also may prefer the positive reactions and trust of their audiences to
monetary compensation (Chia, 2012), and maintaining authenticity proves to be
one of the key techniques of Twitter users (Marwick and Boyd, 2010). Active
involvement in production puts the users in a position of authority and challenges
the notions and functioning of authority within media, starting with the question of
the truth, which has always been subject to the relations of power.
These ve major groups of attributes prevalence of subject position, arbitrari-
ness of physical position, highly structured online self, importance of individuals
activities and the individual as sole bearer of authenticity distinguish the social
media dispositive from other media dispositives, such as the cinema dispositive.
They demonstrate that there is no unambiguous answer to the question of the
social potentials of social media. As separate features, they enable a more detailed
investigation of the liberating and exploitative potentials of social media and con-
tribute to the awareness of the general ambiguity of the issue. The raised import-
ance of individual participation conrms Foucaults announcement of growing
individualizing features of power in contemporary societies. The role of the indi-
vidual as the bearer of activity and of authenticity provides for the individuals
transformations in time, which according to Deleuze (2007) might enable the
44 Journal of Consumer Culture 15(1)

formation of novel forms of subjectivity. Last but not least, the growing respon-
sibilities of individual users, in opposition to institutions, open up new spaces for
interactions and the development of (in the words of Agamben, 2006) common
usage.

Discussion
How does this analysis contribute to the understanding of the social potentials of
social media? As has been shown, social media might be a sign that certain
constants have developed within the changing eld of new media and communi-
cation technologies. In spite of contemporary scholars (Jenkins, 2006; Meikle
and Young, 2012) consensus that the early talk about revolution should be
replaced by a more appropriate concept of convergence in which old and new
media interact in even more complex ways (Jenkins, 2006: 6), a change seems
to have taken place in which communication, mediated by press and electronic
media, has been signicantly transformed. Prosumption, understood by Ritzer
(2010) as the simultaneity of production and consumption, might be such a
constant, yet this calls for further exploration, not least because the appropriate-
ness of the term consumers has been contested for the media audience (Meikle
and Young, 2012: 109). The critical point of departure of this paper was that,
rather than asking what social media are, the focus should be on exploring how
they can be conceptualized in relation to their use. The tradition of audience
studies within communication and media studies testies to aspirations for a
desired ideal of audience participation, an ideal that seems to have reached its
fulllment within participatory practices of social media. The scholarly commu-
nity appears to be divided with regard to this fulllment. The conceptual
approach, based on the notion of the dispositive, shows that diverging processes
can indeed take place within the same media use.
This approach oers a more complex insight into the use of social media. It does
not provide a one-sided answer about the potentials that social media oer for
more substantial participation in political processes, in the interpretation of media
texts, and in media production. The concept of the dispositive as a tool for con-
ceptualizing the mechanisms for the construction of subjectivity leads to the
acknowledgement that social media are one such mechanism, and that this mech-
anism, more than ever before, depends on individuals and their active participa-
tion. Nevertheless, the same mechanisms that facilitate subjection to power also
oer opportunities for resistance.
Actual developments within the use of social media prove that social media may
be the site of resistance to established power relations. The focus on the dispositive
as a particular mode of subjectivity construction makes possible a more detailed
analysis of the functioning of social media within contemporary power relations,
and also more detailed insight into those processes within the dispositive of social
media, where the possibilities of resistance may reside.
Zajc 45

Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their comments
that greatly contributed to improving the nal version of the article.

Funding
This research received no specic grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial,
or not-for-prot sectors.

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Author Biography
Melita Zajc is currently teaching Media Communication at the University of
Maribor. Her research interests focus on social aspects of technologies, in parti-
cular new media and communication technologies, visual culture and lm theory.