The Self–Other Topology: The Politics of (User) Experience in the Like Economy

This chapter will argue that the politics of experience R.D. Laing described back in the 1960s have been dramatically intensified by social media networks, and continues, as Laing did, to test assumptions about the discreteness of the self/other relation. It further contends that this escalation of mediated social connectivity in the 21st century becomes manifest in two specific ways, both of which challenge a self-concept widely understood as a phenomenal self-experience (structured through representations of the external world experienced from a first-person perception). Firstly, the chapter observes how Laing’s alienating politics of experience now arises from new kinds of commodity production focused increasingly on shared experiences. Secondly, it challenges the conventional, yet problematic, split between the psychological experience of self (the so-called inner world of experience) and the shared social self (the experience of the outer world) in ways that Laing only hints at.