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Personalization : a new political arithmetic?
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Day, Sophie, Lury, Celia and Ward, Helen (2023) Personalization : a new political arithmetic? Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, 24 (2). pp. 167-194. doi:10.1080/1600910x.2022.2098352 ISSN 1600-910X.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2022.2098352
Abstract
Scholarship on the history of political arithmetic highlights its significance for classical liberalism, a political philosophy in which subjects perceive themselves as autonomous individuals in an abstract system called society. This society and its component individuals became intelligible and governable in a deluge of printed numbers, assisted by the development of statistics, the emergence of a common space of measurement, and the calculation of probabilities. Our proposal is that the categories, numbers, and norms of this political arithmetic have changed in a ubiquitous culture of personalization. Today’s political arithmetic, we suggest, produces a different kind of society, what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls the ‘default social’. We address this new social as a ‘vague whole’ and propose that it is characterized by a continuous present, the contemporary form of simultaneity or way of being together that Benedict Anderson argued is fundamental to any kind of imagined community. Like the society imagined in the earlier arithmetic, this vague whole is an abstraction that obscures forms of stratification and discrimination.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
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Subjects: | H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HM Sociology J Political Science > JA Political science (General) Q Science > QA Mathematics |
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Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies | ||||||
SWORD Depositor: | Library Publications Router | ||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Social sciences -- Philosophy, Mathematics -- Moral and ethical aspects, Political science -- Philosophy, Individualism | ||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory | ||||||
Publisher: | Taylor & Francis | ||||||
ISSN: | 1600-910X | ||||||
Official Date: | 2023 | ||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 24 | ||||||
Number: | 2 | ||||||
Number of Pages: | 28 | ||||||
Page Range: | pp. 167-194 | ||||||
DOI: | 10.1080/1600910x.2022.2098352 | ||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 14 February 2023 | ||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 15 February 2023 | ||||||
RIOXX Funder/Project Grant: |
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