Nefemerides in the Seanet. Escape of Emotions from the Post-privacy Cage

Abstract

Industrial society and powers which controlled that society are no more. Instead, there is a Seanet and an Empire, a new form of web power, which strives to control it by producing symbols, needs and identities. Through its agency — a rapidly weakening state — the Empire pushes the Seanet into the cage of post-privacy. In the post-private society the distinction between the private and public disappears which leads to the subordination of emotions to a new refined digital form of control. It is possible to escape from the overwhelming post-private control — through the nephemerides (new noninstitutional forms of net social life), desertion, and positive trolling. The text should be placed in the theoretical model that — out of lack of alternatives — might be called evolutionary net neomarxism. The article offers a reconstruction of the problem of love as a subject in sociology and the typology of contemporary approaches to it. The first part discusses the following themes: representation of love in classical sociology based on the works of Max Weber; its gradual exclusion from the list of legitimate sociological subjects and the reasons for its return into that sphere. The second part presents the typology of contemporary sociological understandings of love and reconstructs sociobiological theories and conceptions of Pierre Bourdieu, Niklas Luhmann and Zygmunt Bauman.