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The Culture of Connectivity - Jose Van Dijck - Intro and Chapter 1


One of the adventures I've decided to take on during this course is an additional reading of a book titled: The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. The book is written by Jose Van Dijck (2013) with the aim to:

 "offer an analytical model to elucidate how platforms have become central forces in the construction of sociality, how owners and users have helped shape and are shaped by this construction; in other words, it wants to enhance a historical understanding of social media's impact on the everyday lives of families" (p.23).

She begins with an introduction of social media and defines it as a group of online applications, inspired by the ideology and foundations of Web 2.0, that focus on the generation of content by its users. The ideology behind Web 2.0 tech is focused on connectedness and a participatory culture. He identifies several types of social media: social network sites (SNS), user-generated content (UGC), trading and marketing sites (TMSs), and play and game sites (PGS). He says that the boundaries are not always clear and that sometimes they overlap.

Next, she begins by explaining how Web 2.0 started out primarily user motivated, but over the past decade larger corporations acquired the Web 2.0 platforms and shifted the democratic ideology. While on the surface, the corporations still promote these ideologies, they have also hybridized their intentions with the commodification of the user generated data that users, either knowingly or not, share with the company (behavioral and profiling data).

Following these, she moves on to his explanation of the (our?) culture of connectivity. She posits that in this culture, social media acts as communication through which norm are established and evolve. She then outlines several aspects of this culture that will be covered over the course of the book, that the culture is: "inundated by coding technologies whose implications go well beyond the digital architectures of platforms themselves," the "organization of social exchange is staked on neoliberal economic principles," and that "connectivity evolves as part of a longer historical transformation characterized by a resetting of boundaries between private, corporate, and public domains" (p. 20-21)

After reading chapter one, I am excited to continue this journey as I see connections with not only this course, but my big data/web analytics course I am currently taking, as well as other projects I am working on. The chapter does a solid job of establishing the direction and expectations of the book, and at this point I feel will be a useful resource as I continue my education into social media.

Source:

Van Dijck, J. (2013). The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford University Press.

Comments

  1. VanessaMay 16, 2020 at 8:42 PM

    I have that book. I'll be curious to hear your thoughts about whether van Dijck's classification system would be useful to invoke on the SSMS project given the unclear boundaries. Or should we not apply it to a specific tool/platform, but rather to a user's intent?

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