Social media has come to deeply penetrate our lives: Facebook,
YouTube, Twitter and many other platforms define many of our daily
habits of communication and creative production. The Culture of
Connectivity studies the rise of social media in the first decade
of the twenty-first century up until 2012, providing both a
historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of major
platforms in the context of a rapidly changing ecosystem of
connective media. Such history is needed to understand how these
media have come to profoundly affect our experience of online
sociality. The first stage of their development shows a fundamental
shift. While most sites started out as amateur-driven community
platforms, half a decade later they have turned into large
corporations that do not just facilitate user connectedness, but
have become global information and data mining companies extracting
and exploiting user connectivity. Author and media scholar Jose van
Dijck offers an analytical prism to examine techno-cultural as well
as socio-economic aspects of this transformation. She dissects five
major platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia.
Each of these microsystems occupies a distinct position in the
larger ecology of connective media, and yet, their underlying
mechanisms for coding interfaces, steering users, and filtering
content rely on shared ideological principles. At the level of
management and organization, we can also observe striking
similarities between these platforms' shifting ownership status,
governance strategies, and business models. Reconstructing the
premises on which these platforms are built, this study highlights
how norms for online interaction and communication gradually
changed. "Sharing," "friending," "liking," "following," "trending,"
and "favoriting" have come to denote online practices imbued with
specific technological and economic meanings. This process of
normalization, the author argues, is part of a larger political and
ideological battle over information control in an online world
where everything is bound to become social. Crossing lines of
technological, historical, sociological, and cultural inquiry, The
Culture of Connectivity will reshape the way we think about
interpersonal connection in the digital age.
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