Consuming Memory: Towards a Conceptualization of Social Media Platforms as Organizational Technologies of Consumption

In the last decade, social media platforms have expanded and proliferated, bringing with them a range of new digital activities and functions, including to ‘like’, ‘share’, ‘filter’, and ‘scroll’ through images, videos, and text. These activities have become such routine practice as to permeate many aspects of individual, social, and organizational life. This dissertation frames this all-encompassing positioning of social media platforms and the ensuing technological reproduction and circulation of experiences and memory in terms of consumption. The dissertation builds on the proposition that the particular technological organization of such platforms requires a theoretical and conceptual attention to the nature of the objects produced and consumed on and through these platforms and ultimately a reconceptualization of the concept of consumption. As such, this dissertation presents a reconceptualization of consumption through a reading of Jean Baudrillard’s theory of consumption, Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of technology, memory, and time and an analysis of various features of the Instagram platform. The dissertation argues for a conception of social media platforms as organizational technologies through which individual and social experiences themselves become primary and generalized objects of consumption. As such, the dissertation proposes to consider social media platforms to be organizational technologies of consumption, and contribute to the conceptualization of consumption as recast by such new technologies of organizing.