Organising the Now: A Stieglerian Perspective on the Organisational Powers of Social Media

“Searching for media implies thinking organizationally” (Beyes, 2018b). If this is so, then theories of organisation and organisation studies are intrinsically bound to theories of media and media studies and vice versa. In this paper, I ask: How does one look for processes of organising in contemporary digital media? Taking social media as an example of a dominant medium, I ask how social media platforms are involved in processes of organising and hence attain organisational powers. In this paper, I suggest that one potential way to explore the organisational powers of social media platforms is to think of social media in terms of “technics” and “tertiary retention” in the sense developed by the philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler. This requires an examination of how Stiegler’s notion of “technics” as a process of exteriorisation and his concept of “tertiary retention” as a third technical memory are related to processes of organising. By so doing, I hope to show the potential of Stiegler’s theory of technology, memory and time for organisation theory and, in turn, draw attention to the way in which organisation and organisational thinking are at the heart of Stiegler’s philosophy of technology. In prolongation of this reading, I point to three trajectories in which Stiegler’s conceptualisation of technology, memory and time can contribute to highlight and explore the organisational powers of social media.