Virtual intimacy: desire and ideology in virtual social networks

[Extract] There are few social phenomena in contemporary Western society whose magnitude can match the viral spread of virtual social networks (VSNs). Every minute of the day hundreds of new Myspace, Flickr, and Facebook accounts are set up throughout the world and users ready themselves to interact with the many millions already in operation. What characterizes the current tendencies of our consumerist society are not so much the industrial goods in the marketplace, nor the excess beyond use-values engendered by branding but the commodification of culture as such. In the network economy intangible ideas and images are being bought and sold rather than any physical embodiment of what they represent. Indeed, the embodied commodity seems at best secondary if not downright superfluous (Rifkin, 2001). At the same time, we hear loud voices from the academy and beyond requesting a radical rethinking of identities, social formations, and businesses as they move from physical structures to virtual rhizomic networks (Boltanski and Chaiapello, 2005; Flieger, 2005; Hayles, 1999)