HIST 4420 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Coding Technologies, Videotelephony, Ebay
Chapter 1. Engineering Sociality in a Culture of Connectivity.
- People use tactics to negotiate the strategies that are arranged for them by organization/
institution. That is what happened with the development of social media platforms and
the apps built on top of them. Users negotiate whether and how to appropriate them in
their habits.
- Social media platforms have altered the nature of private and public communication.
- Myspace (2003), Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005) etc., began to offer web tools that
sparked old and new online communication tactics.
- Most organization operating these platforms aimed at penetrating a particular online
activity with their coding technologies, and their brand name would become the marker
for a specific mediated activity.
- Brands such as Twitter, YouTube, and Skype have become synonyms for microblogging,
video sharing, chatting, and videoconferencing.
- There are various types of social media: a major type involved what is called “social
network sites” (SNSs). These sites promote interpersonal contact (Facebook, Twitter). A
second category concerns itself for “user-generated content” (UGC): they support
creativity; foreground cultural activity etc., (YouTube, Wikipedia); next is the category of
trading and marketing sites (TMSs): these sites aim at exchanging products or selling them
(Amazon, eBay). Another distinctive category consists of play and games sites (PGS)
(Angry Birds).
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Making the Web Social: Coding Human Connections
- In the early 1970s, computers had a dubitable reputation as instrument of control wielded
by Orwellian bureaucratic governments or by giant corporations.
- In the late 1970s, computers began to be seen as potential instruments of liberation
rather than oppression.
- Apple computers (1984) showcased the Macintosh as a tool for user empowerment;
company as a rebel – Mac customers as a denizen of the counterculture.
- Irony: Macintosh was a closed and controlled system; created image of working in the
interest of the public good.
- In 1991 with the invention of World Wide Web users constructed a new public sphere,
outside corporate control.
- Commercial developers like Google and Amazon incorporated Web and replaced dot.
communism by dot. commercialism.
- When new interactive platforms entered the scene, they promised to make culture more
“participatory”, “user centered” and “collaborative”.
- Bruns – a new class of “producers” – creators who were also users and distributors.
- Wikipedia was held up as a model of collaboration of selfless users who collectively
developed a unique product for the common good by exploiting a communal space.
- What meaning developers impute to their platforms’ goals and functions? – the word
social associated with the media implies that platforms are user centered and that they
facilitate communal activities; just as the work “participatory” emphasizes human
collaboration.
- By the same token, social media are automated systems that engineer and manipulate
connections. To recognize what people, want and like, Facebook and other platforms
track desires by coding relationships between people, things and ideas into algorithms.
- The meaning social encompasses both (human) connectedness and (automated)
connectivity.
- Companies tend to stress the first meaning (human connectedness) and minimize the
second meaning (automated connectivity).
- On the basis of detailed knowledge of people’s desires and likes, platforms develop tools
toc relate and steer specific needs.
Making Sociality Salable: Connectivity as Resource
- Companies like to present themselves as pioneers of a joint public-private endeavor.
- 2000-2005, most platforms thrived on the enthusiasm of users as they ran and operated
their new virtual spaces, which were often regarded as experiments in online citizenship
and a reinvention of the rules for democratic governance.
- The peaceful coexistence of market and nonmarket peer-production gave social media
platforms the image of being alternative spaces, free from corporate and government
constraints.
- In the early years of YouTube and Wikipedia, user communities invested much time in
keeping their channels clean from pollution by filtering out pornographic and racist
content. It worked while platforms were small and uniform in their user base.
- Many platforms later were taken over by bid media corporations; the owners remained
cautious about exposing their profit motives to user communities; they kept nourish the
image of platforms as peer-production struggles that put users before profits.
- Ten years after capitalism took over social platforms, Wikipedia is an uncomfortable
reminder of what the Web could have been.
- 100 biggest social media platforms are run y corporations who think of the Internet as a
marketplace first and a public forum second.
- Boundaries between private and public space have become fuzzy.
The Ecosystem of Connective Media in a Culture of Connectivity
- Social media constitute an arena of public communication where norms are shaped, and
rules get confused.
The Participatory Condition: An Introduction
- The Participatory condition names the situation in which participation – being involved in
doing something and taking part in something with other – has become both
environmental (a state of affairs) and normative (a binding principle of right action).
- Participation is a general condition in which many of us live or seek to live.
- There is no place or time in human history where and when people did not participate by
living together and acting in the world.
- Participation is, after all, the relational principle of being together in any civilization,
society, or community. However, the fact that we have always participated does not
mean that we have always lived under the participatory condition.
- The generalization of participation is generally associated with the development and
popularization of so-called digital media, especially personal computers, networking
technologies, the Internet, the World Wide Web, and video games.
- The expansion of participation as a relational possibility has become manifest in the
variety of fields media participation embraces, including participatory democracy, citizen
journalism, social media communication, digital design, gaming etc.
- Participation is the promise and expectation that one can be actively involved with others
in decision-making processes that affect the evolution of social bonds, communities,
systems of knowledge, and organizations, as well as politics and culture.
- The possibilities of communication are linked to social change. Possibilities represent
desire, they also can be understood as rhetoric, as a set of empty habits, or failed
opportunities.
- This tension between the promises and impasses of participation, its hopes and
disappointments, its illusions and recuperations – is at the forefront of recent social,
cultural, and political assessments of participation in relation to new media.
Participation as Interpellation
- Our expectations to participate are matched with expectations that we will participate.
- Participation has become a measure of the quality of our social situations and
interactions;
- Participation is normal; a lack of participation seems suspicious, strange and
disappointing – an impoverishment of democratic forms of citizenship which normally
involve “equality as participation.”
- Participation has become a valuable social, political, and economic resource.
- The participatory condition names a particular instance of interpellation, the process
whereby we become the subjects we are by responding to the hail of ideological
formations that structure our social environment.
- Participation has evolved into a leading mode of subjective interpellation;
o Individual recognizes itself as a subject through ideology;
Document Summary
People use tactics to negotiate the strategies that are arranged for them by organization/ institution. That is what happened with the development of social media platforms and the apps built on top of them. Users negotiate whether and how to appropriate them in their habits. Social media platforms have altered the nature of private and public communication. Myspace (2003), facebook (2004), youtube (2005) etc. , began to offer web tools that sparked old and new online communication tactics. Most organization operating these platforms aimed at penetrating a particular online activity with their coding technologies, and their brand name would become the marker for a specific mediated activity. Brands such as twitter, youtube, and skype have become synonyms for microblogging, video sharing, chatting, and videoconferencing. There are various types of social media: a major type involved what is called social network sites (snss).
