Freunde zählen. Das Private im Format eines aufgespeicherten Verrats

Abstract

Andrea Sick

Counting your friends. The private formatted as stored treason (Verrat)

A steadily expanding network including websites such as Facebook, StudiVZ, Youtube,

Xing, and especially Twitter and similar microblogs serves to make and publicize friends, store communications created by the spilling of intimacies, multiply references and enable evaluations. In this realm, the media society reproduces secrets that circulate in a loop of endless repetition. Friendship turns into a sign of attention and the number of friends turns into a measure of successful networking. Building on André Gorz’ concept of the traitor and Walter Benjamin’s concept of the destructive character, we’ll raise the question under which conditions tattling and twittering turn into preconditions and functions of treason. Within the reproductive circuitry of the social network, these mechanisms of “telling it all” constantly move references, leading to an interleaving of previously established spheres of public and private life that can be termed stored treason. This inevitably raises the question of how to read, interpret and sort the collected data.