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2007 Abstracts Stage 3

The Capitalism of MySpace

Jennifer Parry, 2007, Stage 3

Aims and Objectives • To being by establishing and exploring the shift towards Capitalism and more importantly, how and why it came about. • To show, through the work of Deleuze and Guattari, how MySpace is a product of Capitalism. • To illustrate how and why society has changed with the production of MySpace. Overview of Territory: MySpace is a social networking website which consists primarily of an interactive, user-submitted network of friends. The site consists of personal profiles with photos, music, videos, and blogs, attracting a billion page views every day. The company consists of over 106 million accounts and gains over 230,000 new registrations a day. MySpace is currently the fifth most popular English speaking website in the world, while 82% of online visits to social networking websites are made to MySpace. Key Change: The redistribution of labour with the move to the city saw a new emerging middle class with the bourgeois controlling the factories and their profit. The old hierarchy and values of the feudal system are replaced by money which operates as the universal source and bearer of all value. The emerging economic system of a world where money is the centre of social organisation is Capitalism. Capitalism creates desire in a fundamentally unpredictable way in a society where fortunes are made and lost. Through the use of marketing and advertising, Capitalism is able to unleash desire and channel it towards our fixation with money itself in a society structured around the capacity to earn. Philosophical Concepts To Be Explored • MySpace as a rhizome • Pre-personal desires • The processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization • The major and minor movements • Identity. Sources: The Key source for my investigation will be Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. In addition to this, I will refer to Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

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