Digital uses prepare and maintain the social acceptability of hyperconnectivity data monitoring. This acceptability opens up to a renunciation that is inscribed in the heart of contemporary digital culture, which allows uses through negotiations. From this ambivalence of uses, in this chapter, we will explore the concept of negotiated renunciation (Vidal, 2010). To do this, it is first necessary to intensify the knowledge of the uses at the base of the renunciation and the negotiations of the users in touch with digital hyperconnectivity.
The notion of use must be updated, given the need to update the frameworks to analyze digital technologies, particularly information and communication technologies, in their development conditions, not only from a technical perspective, but also from economic and political perspectives. As discussed, the social appropriation of digital technologies must be retained to analyze uses in economic environments based on the instrumentalization and the commercialization of traces and connection data on multiform networks. Social interactions, while being diversified, indicate conformity with the Internet network’s standards of use, in particular, in its media and economic appropriation.
Would it not be illusory to consider the freedom of decision and expression through DICT, since the constraints are internalized and a priori limit freedoms, leading us to act in a determined manner? Users can, however, master (at least partially) the frameworks of these constraints, leading to the pleasure of the experience1, which engages the emancipation of the “mind-numbing logic” of cause and effect since “emancipation opposes their dissociation” (Rancière, 2008, p. 20). Emancipation, with regard to the prescriptions and the execution of the plans designed by the designers and distributors of the technologies, makes it possible to abolish the distance2 between passive reception (spectator) and creative action (actor)3.
Identifying the uses is thus essential for a number of businesses and institutions, whether commercial or not, which carry usage studies4 that refer most often to uses and ergonomics, more frequently to consultation statistics, to confirm their orientations in terms of digital strategy, in order to produce discourses linked to activity and the involvement of consumer-users. However, before considering active5 users with interactive technologies, by exceeding functionalities, it is necessary to remember the fact that users rely on a social imagination, which gathers the individuals considered in a collective and individual autonomy, allowing DICT to be integrated in their daily lives, until they can no longer be detached, in short, in a voluntary non-disconnection.
Tracing the emergence of the notion of use is enlightening. It is with the functionalist current of uses and gratifications that the notion of use emerged in the 1960s. People want to know less about what the media does to individuals, and more about what media people do, which breaks with the effects paradigm. In the 1960s, reception studies began to develop, as well as cultural studies, for example, with a British research project from the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham. This work recognizes a form of receiver autonomy in relation to the media and their resisting capacity, while adopting a critical approach to the process of dominance for the majority of receivers. Even in the 1960s, diffusionism6 regarded users as consumers who, following their interest, adopted innovations. They are classified into five categories: innovators, early adopters, early and late majorities and refractories. This model focused on describing the diffusion and circulation of innovations in society. The postulate, anchored in a technical and economic determinism, is centered on a rational consumer with freedom of choice. The diffusion theory offers a linear approach to technology diffusion, which is used to develop marketing strategies based on the growth phases of the technical innovation market. In the late 1960s, the sociology center of innovation, with the arrival of Bruno Latour in the early 1980s, focused on the negotiation process, the concessions between actors to design technical innovations (Akrich, 1993; Akrich, Callon and Latour, 2006; Latour and Woolgar, 1988). The concept of translation, which takes into account use in the design process, was thus elaborated when information and communication technologies based on computers and telecommunications were developing, an important phase when we think of a hyperconnected society. In the 1980s, in France, the sociology of uses emerged (Jouët, 2000, pp. 487–521), focusing “straightaway […] on the technologies of information and communication”7. From the 1990s to the first decade of the 21st Century8, this field analyzed social uses, the appropriation process of DICT (successively the computer, the videotex, the mobile phone and the Internet) and the dialogue between supply and evolution of uses (Perriault, 1989), without discrediting the weight of the offer before ruses and tactics (Certeau, 1990). The work deals with inventions, negotiations with prescriptions and meanings of uses. In a rejection of the technicist perspective, yet considering the uses as additional activity contrary to the current hyperconnected situation, several issues address social autonomy, the transformations of society, with the rise of individualism, while analyzing new forms of sociability.
Freedom of use thus constitutes a dominant ideology in society, but the economic appropriation of the Internet and digital media opens up to a media and commercial conception of uses. A certain control of the prescriptions of uses is then engaged by composing with opposition, in particular, to online advertising. As a result, companies are repositioning themselves to consider digital culture and appropriation that escape the radio-based media logic, and in the 2010s, strategies of prescription-masking emerged, valuing freedom, user power and creativity. However, the prescriptions are included in the paradigms relating to the uses of the DICT referring to activities, expressions and productions of individuals within the framework of a social emancipation, in parallel with determinations. Thus, in a negotiated renunciation9, the behaviors evolve according to an acceptance of the prescriptions in exchange for data and digital services. These negotiations are implemented through the same interactive technical devices that carry the objectives of diffusion and prescription (prescription by design) of the designers and suppliers. These negotiations are reflexive uses, which allow the users to act with omnipresent machines.
The analysis of the uses of digital devices makes it possible to identify new distribution methods and new prescriptions, including those from the users. These prescriptions indicate recommendations, as well as the relationship with data and content. This context of use sheds new light on innovations, in terms of prescriptions, in order to analyze digital practices and culture, of which both users and professionals are driven primarily by diffusion. A prescription regime of a new kind, beyond emission/reception, makes it possible to address the fact that interactive uses maintain prescription and contribute to the formation, maintenance or adoption of the prescription by algorithm. Instead of freeing themselves from it, users renounce and accept them via mediations and renewed forms of diffusion specific to hyperconnectivity. The latter take the form of a liberation inscribed in the paradigm of empowerment of individuals thanks to digital networks, within the framework of a certain lure organized by professionals to serve their interests. Thus, there is a multiplication of the prescriptions, thanks to Big Data and metadata contributing to the implementation of linked data, in the name of the adaptation of content in connection with the calculated consultations (except responsive design), as if the machines controlled the matching between supply and demand.
Work within the field of cultural industries emphasizes a conception of supply that structures uses, but media practices are not simply responses to impulses of supply. The critical posture that analyzes the relationships of power and domination within societies should certainly be retained from this field of research10, because indeed there is no symmetrical relationship between designer and user. However, the works in this field of research are rarely linked with those on uses and resistances, or with the users’ criticism, however limited, all the more in a context of technological sophistication, hyperconnectivity and inequalities of DICT access and uses. Combining work on the industrialization of culture and communication and that on uses is full of lessons on these said uses, recovered in the very conception of technologies. It is important not to overestimate the autonomy of individuals by their subject uses to economic logic and not to underestimate the role of structures. In other words, the dominant economic strategies in the fields of culture and communication are to be considered, without neglecting the empirical approach. This posture leads us to think dialectically of uses subject to economic logic, but at the same time of negotiations in the context of these logics.
In this second decade of the 21st Century, DICTs are socially accepted thanks to the belief in the “facilitation” of communication, production and access to information, and liberation from constraints, while at the same time creating new ones. However, it is important to go beyond the linear approach, which needs this situation to open up to representations dominated by social structures, in order to include it in a social diversity and in diverse subjectivities, so that the influence of individuals cannot be complete. However, digital environments, at all times and places, in society are imposed on individuals who accept and use them, often under pressure11, in their personal and professional lives and in their social, professional and private activities. Yet, the coercive power of a normative society, which imposes norms, does not preclude the debating of digital technologies and the criticism of the injunctions of a digital economy and an invading equipped environment, claiming transparency instead of opacity.
Social computerization, which also concerns organizations, supports concrete relations with technologies that come mostly in the form of machines with interfaces of operation combination, participating in a technological culture and within a sociotechnological rationality. Technological performance is then part of a use of media and technologies that indicate to users the place they can, or even must, occupy as actors of a “digital society”. The users thus increase their technical and ergonomic skills, which maintain their feeling of gaining power in the process of digital mediation. In an immediacy of the interactions between individuals and their environment, the norms of which are incorporated as habitus (Bourdieu, 1980a, Bourdieu, 1980b, p. 134) and frameworks (Goffman, 1991), their experience infiltrates all activities. Thus, the digital skills are confirmed and enriched by composing a digital culture. The operating modes interweave with the representations of the devices deployed by users, a concept also to be questioned.
The transition from a concept of receptive audience to active users is concomitant to the development of the concept of interactivity, which marked the construction of a hyperconnected society. As mentioned, the receiver figure evolved in the 20th Century tracing a scale ranging from the receivers subject to the messages emitted, according to the limited effects theory (Katz, 2009, pp. 47–67), to the hyperactors considered amateurs12, despite their much valued experience. The amateur is as much a user with multiple skills as the enthusiast with no specific skill, but a frequent consumer, like the Internet users visiting video platforms or those using peer-to-peer networks to download files, or even smartphone users, which have become ultra-light computers equipped with applications. The digital industries offer users mass customization based on a conception of interactivity as personalization. The user can then pick from the offer that makes all productions of the mind and of consumption accessible, building on reproducibility and dematerialization. The users are considered here as the ultimate unity of freedom, since they would be the pilots of the innovation, which would be realized by usage. The contribution of the sociology of innovation that developed the concept of inscription of uses, thought and stabilized by designers, of technical objects would be, according to this determinism, removed, insofar as the enlightened amateur is considered freed from all constraints thanks to interactivity. At the beginning of the 21st Century, the figure of the amateur tended to impose itself, since the user-amateurs have the power to test, experiment and influence, thanks to their force of reputation produced13, on adjustments and developments, or even to provoke innovations in the context of rare horizontal uses (Hippel, 2007, pp. 293–315). According to this conception of the users’ quality, the users have become able to manufacture (to become the makers) in fablabs and other “third places”, such as co-working spaces, where they have become creative heroes and entrepreneurs ignoring intermediaries. Yet, what can be observed? Inequalities are omnipresent, and power and domination relations are very real.
From the evaluations inscribed in an updated functionalist idea of the limited impact of messages and influencers to those inscribed in a culturalist idea highlighting the capacity of users to select and decode the messages diffused according to their diversity and context, research has gone from the effects theory to a critical sociology of the media14, via cultural studies and their survival by multiple declination. The users, with their power of opposition and negotiation in the relations with the issuer, adapt content through cultural interpretation (Mattelart and Neveu, 2003) despite unequal positions between users and issuers. As early as the 1990s, users have been thought of as individuals acting on content. They build meaning and become “co-authors” of sequences and associations of data online, thanks to their hypermediated paths that are increasingly traced. The empowerment of users thus joins the great story15 of the end of the 20th Century. A majority of the current research on digital technologies also leans toward a design of a user-free concept of all experiences aiming at an auctorial function in content, which can act freely with software and applications, masking complexity thanks to recent intuitive interfaces. This user would then invent a collaborative and participative dynamic. This social recognition, reinforced by the dominant discourses, of the performance of the use of multiform computers connected to the Internet consolidates the feeling of action, echoing hyperconnectivity.
To define the user figure, it is also essential to work both on the channels of media and Internet use, and on everyday life habits,16 bringing together group and affinity dynamics. Indeed, the extension of the meanings of distance communication and of information mediated with new information and communication devices based on interactive digital technologies tends to change the way the users think of themselves in a context of international networks. However, it must be remembered that users cannot be considered outside of a sociocultural context in which practices fit. Computer interactivity offered by online services nevertheless allows user interventions in the same way, since the participation framework provided by the issuers is identical on global platforms. Sometimes, participation is considered as alternative, even subversive (piracy, artistic creation), but institutions, destabilized, are led to deploy strategies adapted to these uses, so as to lead the vast majority to planned mediation. Some opposition will persist anyway. In both situations, access to digital networks gives the users the opportunity to assert a new form of distinction17, based on their digital culture, which is currently being spread by the new touch screen devices that lead users to opt for readjustments specific to the paradigm of permanent technological innovation, at the heart of mainstream networks. Statistics show increasing Internet users and application users, through a policy supporting digital development in the second half of the 1990s, with digital public spaces and other places of public Internet and digital access, which were intended to transmit knowledge and skills in this area and played a discreet but effective role. Henceforth, the new public spaces, still necessary to support the growing digital culture, are called third places18, joined by the less well-known living laboratory environments; libraries and other places of mediation engaged in digitization policies.
Access to digital experiences generally generates a virtuous circle to consolidate a powerful self-image, sometimes even supporting an entrepreneurial approach. However, this situation can also come with a feeling of frustration, either in terms of cultural ignorance or in terms of technical limitations19. However, very popular games20 and applications attract users thirsty for ergonomic comfort to enter playful scenarios encouraging action. The imagination relative to the potential of interactivity propagated by discourses, which are themselves propagators of utopias, pronounced or embodied in technical objects (Flichy, 2001), acts as a driving force to feel free to play, gather information, exchange more and enjoy, thanks to the digitization of all types of content and (potentially) to constant updates that punctuate the (equally constant) connection. A feeling of efficiency and of belonging to the great project of technological innovation is felt by the users, with interfaces that pretend to enable content and service manipulation at will. When websites are deemed experimental and original, such as artistic sites, Internet users, who do not give up despite the destabilization of their bearings and habits of use, also claim a position as explorers of new tracks on a reticular territory. However, being part of an unprecedented framework of use or even of illegal exchanges on peer-to-peer networks21 does not always imply being a hyperactor, especially when audiovisual culture steps in during consultations, when the interpretation of a proposal leads to being immersed without functional intervention. Thus, Internet users seek a position of reading, visualization and enjoyment, while claiming they want a consultation in sound and image, without being in moments of passivity. Each user may be different depending on his/her mood or availability. It is thus possible to adopt an interactive approach at one moment and to not want to intervene at another, engaging the reconciliation between critical attitude and enjoyment of the show or content flow (Benjamin, 2003).
When users adopt a critical attitude, they demonstrate that they are not subjugated by technology, even if they claim to be destabilized, astonished or if they claim power with interactivity, which can become a constraint, in a paradoxical feeling of freedom of use. In fact, to overcome the constraint, while mixing in the pleasure of interactivity, users, driven by the representation of digital networks as a “territory” of possibilities, experience emotions, while drawing from the memory of their past emotions, during their cultural practices (exhibitions, cinema, video games, literature, etc.). The appropriation of digital technologies indeed leads to interactions of computing, telecommunication and audiovisual and cultural practices22, which open up to manipulations of hypermediatized content, ideally offering multiple pathways to draw personalized paths and readings23. In doing so, the posture regarding computers refers to industrial cultural consumer products.
As a result, users are composing and entering into a slow process of transformation of access to digital services and content, in order to find or invent meaningful experiences in their lives. The utopia of user power, thanks to their participation in mediation, indicates a will to appropriate online content differently without making possible the will of appropriating the means of production by the users as it is operated by issuers24. They express themselves on digital social networks – to keep in touch with the network of “friends”25, “fans” or members of professional “communities”, which would otherwise be lost – or on institutional websites providing moderation of user interventions, which form new relationships with content, including participatory and contributory situations. The screen thus presents itself as an interface of a variety of content, cultural, educational, commercial, entertaining, administrative or professional, and of a participative fervor. Also called Web 2.0, this participatory Web has revived the Internet’s economy over the last 12 years, yet it does not prevent a distribution of inequalities in terms of publication. Indeed, being mainly receivers of multimedia objects, Internet users follow an online movement, with a minority engaged in publication and another even more restricted minority, which develops, in an impulse (that seems altruistic), the software or online spaces enabling the circulation of non-institutional content on the network. However, all these expressions are the object of an industrialization of communication. Nevertheless, actions on a network such as the Internet are part of a great tradition of human reciprocity, with its obligations and duties, including donations26 sometimes, considering that a donation also faces a standardization process, which comes with recovery or adaptation of online inventions. Internet users thus participate in the maintenance of the media system, which supports the capitalist system and social relations. Users, who invest their time and skills in the purchase of hardware, software and telecommunications, talk to each other on the Internet (Tisseron, 2001) with seemingly nothing to hide27, in a (remarkably) transparent society.
From the concepts of users, uses and interactivity, it should be remembered that these have marked an epistemological turning point, in the way of considering research on media and DICT, even in the way of considering social sciences, which seize information and communicational objects in society. Information and communication sciences occupy a preponderant place in the framework of this dynamic of hyperconnectivity analysis, and go beyond functions and effects, in reference to a thesis by Wright Mills (2006) as early as 1959. By inscribing this analysis in a critical perspective, this work will opt for empirical studies of uses, which go beyond satisfaction to reach the ambivalences and meanings of use, following a sociopolitical posture opening up to the concept of negotiated renunciation.
This commitment, between empirical and conceptual approaches for a critical posture, supports the analysis of uses, being the object of a renunciation by users of some of their freedoms in order to seize technologies and digital services with which they negotiate. They are indeed authors, through their resistance, bypassing, or even misappropriation, using digital features, via their skills and experiences, and deploying a critical posture thanks to the meanings of uses. Negotiated renunciation thus also takes into account the prescription of interactive technologies disseminated in society and the misconduct28 of users (most often) aware of their renunciation in the domestic sphere, at work, during their communicational, cultural and mobility practice.
The freedom to act in a hyperconnected society should thus not be denied, even if technologies are increasingly at the service of the economy on the lookout for their uses. Hence, the concept of negotiated renunciation makes it possible to grasp the ambivalence of digital uses and proves to be relevant when considering the dialectics of the compliance of user-subjects with the technical system29 and social appropriation.
This concept also helps to put the notions of use and interactivity into perspective. It is often about power without discussion from the moment when users seize technologies, as actors of digital devices. Thus, far from being linear and tidy, the appropriation process of interactive and interconnected technologies is changing. In other words, the situations of use multiply and renew themselves, interweave, differ from or elude more or less to the designers’ logic, making it impossible to predict all the uses of technological devices30. This complex dynamic probably explains why users encountered during the field studies feel like they negotiate31 with the designers thanks to their devices, caught in a “chaotic process” due to negotiations, in terms of resistance and opposition, or even protest, with established conventions and to limit their monitoring.
“Negotiated renunciation”, resulting from a work to conceptualize more than 10 years of field studies, simultaneously takes into account the injunction of digital technologies disseminated in society and user misconduct, aware of their submission32 to DICT in the domestic sphere, at work and in mobility. This concept takes into consideration two forces that seem to oppose each other: to be acted on and to be an actor. Indeed, empowerment through digital and reticular technologies updates the issue of prescription, understood as imposing knowledge and skills on individuals, which would allow them to empower themselves. This prescription is intimately linked to mediation policies, since it involves giving standardized answers to individual requests. The prescription is of a deeply contractual nature, inasmuch as the individual must agree to give up some of his/her liberties if he/she wants to acquire new ones. When this renunciation is repeated enough times, especially in the context of technical processes, relations of domination are established between technical systems, driven by the economic sphere and now increasingly by the administrative sphere with digital teleservices, and individual users, or even associations or collectives. This case is a prescription translated within informational, communicational and transactional devices, which are part of the hyperconnection context. However, the terms of the exchange are not always adapted to each situation of use experienced and they sometimes lead to misunderstandings. By being lost, unable to be understood, to express what is experienced, to correct the human/machine dialog, users decide to lose some elements gathered during their consultations; for example, they might give up not only the possibility of consulting all the content but also the way the designers had planned its uses. This renunciation is not necessarily regretted by the users, who consider it as a means of freeing themselves from the numerous social constraints and as a decision allowing for a better position in connection with the feeling of “being able to do everything”.
To consider this dialectic, we must remember the industrialization of culture, communication and social interactions, while referring, as is proposed here, to the sociology of everyday life33. As early as 1981, Henri Lefebvre34 identified the issues of power and domination in everyday life with the arrival of “technological innovations”35. However, several questions must also be addressed, especially the strategies of economic actors seeking to structure the uses, without concern for the wealth of appropriation (Massit-Folléa, 2002). Appropriation, discussed in Chapter 3, is a complex process to analyze, requiring both quantitative and qualitative approaches, which cannot be reduced to access or to the characterization of user-consumers and their uses, as tiny as they may be. Uses are formed through permanent adjustments in everyday life, at the very heart of domination relations. These adjustments, evidence of user negotiations, are the result of economic, political and individual actors, sometimes even grouped together36. They all have specific goals and powers.
To further the exploration of negotiated renunciation, which seeks to define modalities, by renunciation, of the recording of the negotiations of users/actors of the traceability of hyperconnected data, the terms composing it should first be defined.
The term “negotiated” refers to the work on cultural industries and cultural studies, which will be cross-analyzed here. The first field of research marks social uses as belonging to “a social dialectic, a negotiated construct”37. Indeed, “at the beginning and throughout the process of implementation and generalization of a technology, we are dealing with uses and not with real social uses38. These uses should only be considered as ‘contributions’ to the formation process of uses”39. Here, “negotiated” refers to a “dialectical adjustment process between mass production and consumption”40.
The term “negotiated” can also be linked to the work on the active reception of cultural content, as has been developed within current British cultural studies research, mentioned previously. From questioning the culture and power related to the reception of the media and productions of the cultural industries, Stuart Hall (1994, pp. 27–39) has deployed an analysis model based on the notions of “coding” and “decoding” and, in particular, “negotiated decoding”, a blend of opposition and adaptation. The receiver partially modifies the meanings of the message. He/she accepts the message conveyed, but adapts it or opposes it in a limited way. Stuart Hall notes that dominant decoding is the most common and considers that power is omnipresent. However, mass culture is not considered as directly alienating. Indeed, negotiation stems from a critical posture41, intersecting work in the political economy of communication, which questions the processes of production and distribution, the reproduction modalities of the domination structure (Garnham, 2006).
This dialectical and critical posture toward negotiated uses of digital technologies is also mobilized through renunciation, which marks unequal power relations between users and manufacturers (IT and telecommunications, on the one hand, and cultural content producers, on the other), without denying the uses in terms of negotiations, as we conceptualize them based on years of field studies. Following the example of Mattelart and Neveu (1996), attention should be paid to the criticism of ethnographic works inscribed (especially after the first founding movement of cultural studies42) in a movement focused on active subjects and free to select following self-assessed needs. However, we know all the flexibility and scope of the user’s “freedom” and their great ability to decode cultural products, while the relations to culture remain unequal. Richard Hoggart has worked on the influence of the media on popular culture while denouncing the tendency to overestimate it and remaining wary of the tendency to industrialize culture43. As a result, he considers, in particular, the working-class alienated by mass media, but by working on popular press, he notices that his reading is not the subject of a passive reception; that it shows circumvention, inventions and resistance. Thus, Hoggart44 speaks of a working class culture, which seeks to distance itself from living and working conditions. He notes the importance of the household, of the neighborhood, which plays a role in the reception of media in everyday life. In a post-Marxist perspective, culturalist researchers believe that history rests on social struggles that have since been transformed and that it is important to work on everyday practices of resistance to the capitalist system, embodied here by the technologies of hyperconnectivity. The work thus simultaneously addresses media practices and practices in everyday life, taking into account social and cultural contexts. However, it should be noted that there are limits to research that takes the point of view of the user-actor in order to study the construction of the relation between the user and the media. The social and cultural origins of the founding researchers of cultural studies45 can explain this axiological choice to suppose that the individual can live singular experiences outside of all determinisms. It is true that their work seems to promote popular culture. Nevertheless, the originality of this current of research remains marked by work centered on ordinary lifestyles and cultural identities. When cultural studies focus on working on negotiated decoding in reception, they refer to the power of opposition and adaptation of the users able to determine the meanings of the messages.
More recently, the work on Internet use has highlighted negotiations as being the traces of individuals’ activity, who communicate on electronic networks (Barats, 2013; Cardon, 2008, pp. 93–137). This indicates the meaning given to the term “negotiated” in cultural studies, namely the challenge of encoded meaning or even personal and collective meanings. With regard to digital uses, technical skills (from ergonomic and cognitive points of view) support negotiation, in terms of interactivity between functionalities (those made available by the provider) and reference frameworks for the user, who seize the same technologies to publish, manufacture and broadcast on the digital industry’s platforms. This work’s analyses make it possible to put into perspective the power of users of digital technology, yet without removing it. This is why negotiation can be articulated with renunciation.
Renunciation refers to the subjection to market forces, which creates and organizes constraints, inequalities and satisfactions for its subsistence. The uses are thus at the heart of appealing marketing techniques. These techniques must make the users accept the processing of personal data and connections or downloads for the establishment of personalized services or the provision of publication spaces in which even the criticism of these strategies is possible. Renunciation thus takes place when the users let the companies (media, search engines, access providers, online services, advertisers, etc.) track their activities and their content, to obtain, in return, in a negotiated way, Internet services (digital social networks, publishing software, e-mail clients, search tools, information and resource sites) or other local networks. To a certain extent, the users give up some of their freedoms and rights to obtain others, more exactly presented as such. Freedom, at the heart of renunciation, would be housed in services (free and payable) offered on a market of information, communication and social interaction. However, the user’s freedom cannot be limited to negotiation with the technologies and the content, derived or vectorized by the industry.
Étienne de La Boétie’s “speech of voluntary servitude”, to further the reflection on the term “renunciation”, shows a great entanglement between uses and power. According to La Boétie, there would be servitude, consent and tyranny, either out of habit or by a chain of interests to submit to tyranny to be part of the network and thus make tyranny “enslave subjects one by another” (La Boétie, 1995, p. 40). Power would therefore be permanent and everywhere to maintain “voluntary servitude”.
Renunciation can still refer to “consent”46. However, renouncing does not require (consent under) threat, as there would be conditions. The term “consent” would include accepting under conditions, under duress, yet it is the nodal point with renunciation, which refers to constraint without preventing the sometimes inventive, bypasses, of those who renounce.
To define the term “renunciation”, it must also be remembered that renunciation occurs when, on the one hand, there is awareness, or at least understanding, of the partial and continuous alienation by the user and, on the other hand, when there is, at least to a certain extent, critical will and resistance to this condition. Indeed, when there is discernment of determinisms and prescriptions, there is a possibility of action. It can also be considered that the experience of use can break with a “low level of technology” and de facto with “technological alienation” (Lefebvre, 1961, p. 211). Would it mean considering that uses with much less skill are more subject to renunciation and partial alienation? When there is, moreover, a certain critical will toward the forms of alienation, renunciation can intervene as circumvention and action, by a series of negotiations. Nevertheless, can renunciation be considered when there is agreement by compromise with technology? Indeed, renunciation cannot be thought in such contexts of use47. However, compromise is somehow like negotiation and we can thus go back to renunciation as long as there is negotiation. What seems tautological here, while bearing in mind that negotiation evolves on renunciation’s territory, meets the dialectical stance necessary to analyze the complexity of renunciation, much less studied than that of negotiation.
Exploration to define both the terms “renunciation” and “negotiated” leads to this concept as a contribution to articulately analyze the processes of industrialization and commodification of culture, information and communication and practices of daily life, in which digital information and communication technologies are intensively integrated, joining the framework of hyperconnectivity. Indeed, everyday life, as a place of transformation and continuity (Lefebvre, 1981, p. 49)48, is crossed by what Henri Lefebvre calls “technological modernism” (Lefebvre, 1981, p. 52). In fact, the question of uses in a double dimension, micro and mesosociological (uses, practices and representations of technical objects) and macrosociological (cultural matrices and sociopolitical contexts)49, must be considered in this dialectic.
After having developed a reflection on the economic issues (Chapters 1 and 2) and then social issues (Chapters 3 and 4) of hyperconnectivity, this work will now continue by studying environmental issues. However, before that, it seems useful to very briefly review the results of the analysis conducted so far. The creation of an industrial offer accompanied by diversified services has contributed to a globalization of connection and to the diffusion of content by communication industrialists. The diffusion of uses on a planetary scale and their proliferation cannot be understood without taking into account three main characteristics: (1) a mode of access and use proposing free services to the users of these sociotechnical devices; (2) a method of indirect financing relying on two specificities, the sale of advertising spaces and the valorization and marketing of personal data and (3) a mode of activation, the unbridled, if not productivist, solicitation of all, industrialists, communities and users. This socioeconomic model, described as a model of “hyperconnectivity”, results in unprecedented data production, display and circulation that also favors unparalleled social surveillance and control. In the configuration studied, the State accompanies and stimulates the digital economy. Only the necessary injunction of hyperconnectivity enables the longevity of the socioeconomic model, favoring a hyperconnective use of the connection, which in turn leaves more traces of personal data. As the freedom to act, publish, exchange and express oneself extends, the social control extends as well by feeding on the technical traces, the content left by the Internet users by connecting, while navigating, and the assiduity consented to appear, to reveal themselves voluntarily. Given the importance of these devices in relational, communicational or sociability practices, it is important to understand the main social and environmental (i.e. ecological) issues. It is not about addressing and listing all the social and environmental issues, but about focusing only on those of importance related to this hyperconnectivity, from its “rematerialization”.