What’s So Social About Social Media?

[flamingdem]

Last edited Sun Mar 2, 2014, 03:21 PM - Edit history (1)

http://www.publicbooks.org/nonfiction/whats-so-social-about-social-media?utm_content=buffer6a2fe&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

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The forms of sociality we experience online, Van Dijck argues, are different in quality and in kind from the social exchanges we have in offline interaction. Online exchange may amplify and accelerate social connections, but we should question what kind of public space social media platforms create. Our everyday activities on the Web are “coded by technology,” and made “formal, manageable, and manipulable,” qualities that clearly benefit the platforms’ owners more than their users. Lest we forget (though it is getting harder and harder to do so), 98 of the 100 most popular Web 2.0 platforms are corporate-owned,3 a proportion with hardy roots in industrial capitalism. This fact is central to Van Dijck’s argument, and it is for this reason she proposes we rename social media “connective media,” underlining both an absence and a presence: the increasing absence of the “social” as previously understood, and the increasing presence of the value system of connective media across the Web. This value system is a Trojan horse, wheeling in the ethos of profit and market dominance via the celebration of sociality.

Consider, for example, Facebook’s treatment of “sharing.” It’s worth noting that there is not a single negative connotation to the general concept of sharing, a point not lost on Mark Zuckerberg. While sharing for many of us conjures up a notion of camaraderie or at least equity, online this term now signals that our desire to communicate can be distributed and made profitable by other companies. For Facebook, the second definition is the incentive that drives the first. As of 2007, Facebook provides APIs (application programming interfaces, or software standards) to third-party companies, allowing these companies to integrate Facebook into their sites. We’ve all seen the little “share this” buttons on news pages, blogs, and shopping websites. What these icons really indicate is that Facebook is no longer a platform but an ecosystem whose infrastructure and ethos are filtered throughout the Web. “Sharing” now refers not only to what you do with your friends on Facebook but also what you do online outside Facebook. When you “share” your status update, a photo, a news story, et cetera, on Facebook, you are also “sharing” this data with a multitude of third-party companies, who get to “share” in the potential economic benefits of your freely provided information.

In the Facebook ecosystem, sharing online is better understood as a quantity than a quality. What you share matters far less than that you continue to do so, because the more information you share, and the more people you share it with, the more Facebook’s shares accumulate value for their owners. If this isn’t paradoxical enough, Facebook has another spin on the notion of sharing. Because of Facebook’s current social media dominance, many websites that want to stay in business have no choice but to adopt Facebook’s “share this” button, further reinforcing the Facebook ecology. This is what Van Dijck means when she says that Facebook “steers” sharing. It manipulates the act and the implications to the point that not sharing becomes socially and economically impossible. The limitations of online liberalism are drawn not by conventional barriers to participation rooted in social stratification but by corporate media owners’ technocultural requirements for participation.
Another drawback to “social media” is that it gives a role to media that is both too small and too large to account for what it actually does in our lives.

[raccoon]

1. Bookmarked to read later. nt