ABSTRACT
Over recent decades, social media sites have transformed media, communications, politics and society, leading to a great deal of disquiet, and even occasional moral panics. These are paralleled by digital hiring platforms – LinkedIn, Xing, JobCase, Vidadeo, etc. – which disrupt, reconstitute and technologise the labour market. While scholars have critiqued the algorithmic biases, economic exploitation and governmental character of these platforms, here the concern is how they transform the ‘social’. After problematising the term ‘social’, the chapter turns to the work of Serres on the parasite, the disruptive form which ‘takes without giving’ yet transforms relationships. Interestingly, these platforms initially lure users with a ‘free ride’ of visibility and profile, but profit from data and attention given freely, so that the position of host and parasite is reversed, and recruiters pay platforms for access to this data. More importantly, the diffuse consequence of these datafied ‘network’ of nodes and connections by algorithms is the cultivation of instrumental and competitive individualism for users, effectively the technologisation of the social as a resource to be leveraged.
