CHAPTER 1

Engineering Sociality in a Culture

of Connectivity

1.1. INTRODUCTION

Meet the Alvin family. Pete is a 45-year-old biology teacher whose hobby is
paragliding. He has a Facebook page, although lately he has been negligent
in maintaining his network of “friends.” Through Linkedln, Pete keeps up
his professional profile and occasionally hooks up with other members
from the national teachers union. An early adopter of social media, he
became an enthusiastic contributor to Wikipedia in 2004, and still adds
infrequent entries about his specialty, lizards, to the online encyclopedia.
Pete also used to be a member of a paragliding group on YouTube, which,
back in 2006, actively communicated via short videos of spectacular glides;
the group later dissipated, and he only sporadically checks the site for
interesting glides. Pete’s wife Sandra is a former journalist who now makes
money as a freelance publicist specializing in food. She has over 8,000 fol
lowers on Twitter and keeps an elaborate blog that also serves as her per
sonal public relations site. An active family of “netizens,” the Alvins order
books via Amazon and download music via iTunes; Sandra uses Skype to
have video chats with her brother in Hong Kong; their 16-year-old daugh
ter Zara is a fanatic Facebook user—456 friends right now—and she also
uses Pinterest for “pinning” and sharing photos; and their 12-year-old son
Nick is a devoted gamer, who has recently discovered CityVille, a social
network game developed by Zynga.
The Alvins represent a middle-class family in an average American town
in the year 2012. Over the past decade, their professional and personal lives
have gradually become inundated with social media platforms. Platforms
 like Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, and man
y others enable people like the
Alvins to make connections by sharing expr
essive and communicative con
tent, building professional careers, and enjo
ying online social lives. In fact,
the widespread presence of platforms drives peop
le to move many of their
social, cultural, and professional activities to
these online environments.
Teenagers like Zara Alvin cannot imagine a life with
out Facebook, and San
dra has become primarily dependent on Twitter
for maintaining customer
relations. Pete, however, has become less activ on—
e and more critical of—
the sites he used to frequent several years ago.
Now multiply the Alvins. Every single day, milli
ons of individuals inter
act through social media. In December 2011, 1.2
billion users worldwide—
82 percent of the world’s Internet population over
age 15—logged on to a
social media site, up from 6 percent in 2007.1 With
in less than a decade, a
new infrastructure for online sociality and creativity
has emerged, pene
trating every fiber of culture today. Social med
ia, roughly defined as “a
group of Internet-based applications that build on
the ideological and tech
nological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the
creation and exchange
of user-generated content” (Kaplan and Haenlein
2010: 60), form a new
online layer through which people organize their lives.
Today, this layer of
platforms influences human interaction on an indiv
idual and community
level, as well as on a larger societal level, while the
worlds of online and
offline are increasingly interpenetrating. Originally,
the need for connected-
ness is what drove many users to these sites. Whe
n Web 2.0 first marshaled
the development of so-called social media, in the
early years of the new
millennium, participatory culture was the buzz
word that connoted the
Web’s potential to nurture connections, build com
munities, and advance
democracy. Many platforms embraced this rekin
dled spirit when they
started to make the Web “more social.”
-

With the rapid growth of social media platforms

came the incorporation
of sites by existing and new information com
panies. Companies often
appeared less interested in communities of users
than in their data—a by
product of making connections and staying conn
ected online. Connectivity
quickly evolved into a valuable resource as engi
neers found ways to code
information into algorithms that helped brand
a particular form of online
sociality and make it profitable in online markets—
serving a global market
of social networking and user-generated content.
Large and influential plat
forms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Link
edin exploded in terms
of users and monetizing potential, alongside coun
tless smaller profit and
nonprofit sites. As a result of the interconnectio
n of platforms, a new infra
structure emerged: an ecosystem of connectiv
e media with a few large and
many small players. The transformation from netw
orked communication to

[4] The Culture of Connectivity

“platformed” sociality, and from a participatory culture to a culture of
connectivity, took place in a relatively short time span of ten years.
This chapter’s argument focuses not on a descriptive account of how
social media affected one family, but on the need for a critical history of the
rise of social media. Such a history is needed to comprehend current ten
sions in the ecosystem in which platforms and ever-larger groups of users
operate. By exploring technical, social, economic, and cultural perspectives
on social media, we can elucidate how recent changes in our global media
landscape have profoundly affected—if not driven—our experience of
sociality.

1.2. FROM NETWORKED COMMUNICATION

TO PLATFORMED SOCIALITY

The invention of the World Wide Web in 1991, when Tim Berners-Lee man
aged to connect hypertext technology to the Internet, formed the basis of
a new type of networked communication. Weblogs, list-servers, and e-mail
L
services helped form online communities or support offline groups. Until
the turn of the millennium, networked media were mostly generic services
that you could join or actively utilize to build groups, but the service itself
would not automatically connect you to others. With the advent of Web
2.0, shortly after the turn of the millennium, online services shifted from
offering channels for networked communication to becoming interactive,
two-way vehicles for networked sociality (Castells 2007; Manovich 2009).
These new services, which opened up a myriad of possibilities for online
connections, were initially perceived as a new global infrastructure, like
water pipes or electricity cables, analogues to the Web itself.
It is a truism to say that media have historically coevolved with the pub
lic that uses them, as well as with the larger economy of inscription. The
world’s complex constellations of media, in the view of Lisa Gitelman,
should be conceived as the “socially realized structures of communication,
where structures include both technological forms and their associated pro
tocols, and where communication is a cultural practice, a ritualized colloca
tion of different people on the same mental map, sharing or engaged with
popular ontologies of representation” (2008: 7). Over the past two centu
ries, media technologies matured as part of everyday social practices.
Generic technologies like the telephone and the telegraph developed in con
junction with communicative routines or cultural practices, such as chat
ting on the phone or sending short messages over the wire. As a medium
coevolves with its quotidian users’ tactics, it contributes to shaping people’s

ENGINEERING SOCIALITY IN A CULTURE OF CONNECTIVITY [5]

 everyday life, while at the same time this mediated sociality becomes part
of society’s institutional fabric. Media histories and archaeologies provide
ample evidence of this complex coevolution, relating technologies to users
and organizations to infrastructures (Winston 1998; Kittler 1999; Zielinski
1999; Marvin 1988).
With Web 2.0 maturing into a functional infrastructure, users moved
more of their everyday activities to online environments; these activities
were not simply channeled by platforms, but programmed with a specific
objective. This move shifted the emphasis from providing a utility to pro
viding a customized service—a transformation akin to the change from
delivering water through pipelines to distributing bottled Evian water or to
a water-filtering system. Whereas before, websites were generally operated
as conduits for social activity, the new platforms increasingly turn these
conduits into applied services, rendering the Internet easier to use but more
difficult to tinker with. Social media platforms, as they are now commonly
called, epitomize the larger conversion from all-purpose devices to linear
applied services—a development that Jonathan Zittrain (2008: 104—7) has
persuasively touted as “appliancization.” When companies started to build
their platforms on the generic Web 2.0 infrastructure, they often presented
themselves as utilities transmitting communication and information data.
But even if many big platforms still want people to think of them as such,
this layer of applied platforms is anything but a neutral utility exploiting a
generic resource (data): they built on the “ideological and technological”
foundations of Web 2.0, as Kaplan and Haenlein suggest in the definition
quoted above.
Indeed, most Web 2.0 platforms started out as indeterminate services
for the exchange of communicative or creative content among friends.
These services often emanated from community-bound initiatives—a
group of college students, photo aficionados, video enthusiasts—who
adopted a specific niche of online interaction and developed a mediated
routine practice. It is a common fallacy, though, to think of platforms as
merely facilitating networking activities; instead, the construction of plat
forms and social practices is mutually constitutive. Sociality and creativity
happen while people are busy living their lives. Michel de Certeau, in The
Practice ofEveryday Life (1984), proposes that people use tactics to negotiate
the strategies that are arranged for them by organizations or institutions.
That is precisely what happened with the development of social media plat
forms and the apps built on top of them: users “negotiate” whether and
how to appropriate them in their quotidian habits.
Many of the habits that have recently become permeated by social media
platforms used to be informal and ephemeral manifestations of social life.

[6] The Culture of Connectivity

.
Talking to friends, exchanging gossip, showing holiday pictures, scribbling
notes, checking on a friend’s well-being, or watching a neighbor’s home
video used to be casual, evanescent (speech) acts, commonly shared only
with selected individuals. A major change is that through social media,
these casual speech acts have turned into formalized inscriptions, which,
once embedded in the larger economy of wider publics, take on a different
value. Utterances previously expressed offhandedly are now released into a
public domain where they can have far-reaching and long-lasting effects.
Social media platforms have unquestionably altered the nature of private
and public communication.
From the late 1990s onward, Blogger (1999),Wikipedia (2001), Myspace
(2003), Facebook (2004), Flickr (2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006),
and a wide array of ensuing platforms began to offer web tools that sparked
old and new online communication tactics. Most organizations operating
these platforms aimed at penetrating a particular online activity with their
coding technologies, and, ideally, their brand name would become the
marker for a specific mediated activity. Brands such as Twitter, YouTube,
MSN, and Skype have become synonyms for microblogging, video sharing,
chatting, and videoconferencing—novel communicative interactions these
platforms either co-developed or helped redesign. The pinnacle of a com
pany’s success in permeating a social activity is when a brand turns into a
verb. The earliest example of such coding and branding phenomena in the
online world is the evolution of “googling,” now a synonym for online
search. Googling, following Gitelman’s definition above, could be called a
“ritualized collocation” that developed in a “larger economy of inscription.”
Online searching—for example, looking up the meaning of a word, check
ing for the latest movies, or finding a specific scholarly source—has become
part of an everyday routine. Simultaneously, this routine nested itself in
the heart of a larger online economy of inscription, where search engines
form the valves of content distribution. Few platforms have reached the
stage where their brand has turned into a verb; at this point in time, “skyp
ing” and “tweeting” perhaps come closest.
2
Evidently, social media platforms, rather than being finished products,
are dynamic objects that are tweaked in response to their users’ needs and
their owners’ objectives, but also in reaction to competing platforms and
the larger technological and economic infrastructure through which they
develop (Feenberg 2009). In the year 2000, the Web that would come to
sustain online sociality and creativity was still a vast unexplored territory,
where boundaries between different mediated activities had yet to be
demarcated. It was a new frontier, a bonanza where rules and laws from the
“old” territories no longer applied and new ones had not crystallized yet.

ENGINEERING SOCIALITY IN A CULTURE OF CONNECTIVITY [7]

 The earliest cultivators of this new land were search engines, browsers, and
web directories; of the many search engines that sprang up around the turn
of the mifiennium, Google Search—including its many specialized services—
has emerged victorious, leaving a few small engines trailing 3 behind. Like
web browsers, search engines tend not to be presented as applications built
to search, navigate, and connect information on the WWV, but they are
conspicuously equated to the Web itself.
4 Over the past decade, there has
been an unprecedented proliferation of social media platforms as each one
of them tried to occupy the largest possible chunk of this new terrain.
Whereas some have succeeded (Facebook, YouTube), others have waxed
and
waned (Flickr, Myspace), and yet others have quietly disappeared (remem
ber Xanga?). On top of this layer, millions of application program interfa
ces
(APIs) and services have been built that depend on the services of Facebo
ok,
Google, Twitter, and so on, for their success, and new ones emerge
every
day. The entire ecosystem of interconnected platforms and applications
has
been in flux and will remain volatile for some time to come.
While it would be virtually impossible to inventory all platforms
and
their individual evolutions, it makes analytical sense to distinguish variou

I
s
types of social media. A major type involves what is called “social
network
sites” (SNSs). These sites primarily promote interpersonal contact, whethe
r
between individuals or groups; they forge personal, professional,
or geo
graphical connections and encourage weak ties. Examples are Facebo
ok,
Twitter, Linkedln, Google+, and Foursquare. A second catego concer
ry ns
sites for “user-generated content” (UGC): they support creativ
ity, fore
ground cultural activity, and promote the exchange of amateur
or profes
sional content. Well-known UGC sites are YouTube, Flickr,
Myspace,
GarageBand, and Wikipedia. On top of these, we can add the catego

“I
ry of
trading and marketing sites (TMSs): these sites principally aim
at exchang
ing products or selling them. Amazon, eBay, Groupon, and Craigs
list come
to mind as noteworthy examples. Another distinctive category consis
ts of
play and game sites (PGS), a flourishing genre with popular games
such as
FarmVille, CityVille, The Sims Social, Word Feud, and Angry
Birds. This
classification of social media platforms is far from exhaustive,
and integrat
ing the various types into a single book-length argument would
be undoa
ble. For this reason, I will focus primarily on SNS and UGC sites
here as the
main grounds on which online sociality and creativity have develo
ped.
Important to add here is that there are no sharp boundaries
between
various platform categories because carving out and approp
riating one or
more specific niches is part of the continuous battle to domin
ate a segment
of online sociality. Facebook, whose prime target is to promote
social net
working, also encourages its users to add creative products such
as photos

[8] The Culture of Connectivity

.
or short videos. YouTube, a site primed to generate creative content by
users, can also be considered a social network site because communities
share specific postings (e.g., anime videos). Despite Google’s keen attempts
to turn YouTube into an SNS, it has remained primarily a site for UGC,
prompting the search company to start its own social networking service,
Google÷, in May 2011. Meanwhile, Facebook and Google try to expand
their existing platforms with commercial and game services through part
nerships and takeovers, making them also major players in the TMS and
PGS branches.
Sharply delineating various types of social media platforms is impossi
ble, and yet identifying their objectives is key to understanding how plat
forms build different niches of sociality and creativity or, for that matter,
commerce or entertainment. What we have seen over the past ten years is
that many platforms started out in one particular domain (e.g., online
search or social networking) and gradually encroached upon each other’s
territory while trying to contain users inside their own fenced-off turf.
Therefore, it is instructive to track how a few rapidly growing platforms
began to dominate online sociality, occupying as many niches as possible.
Google and Facebook each conquered a sizable chunk of this layer, to such
an extent that new developers are increasingly dependent on these plat
forms for building new applications. We can only gain insight into the
mutual shaping of platforms and apps if we view them as part of a larger
online structure where every single tweak affects another part of the sys
tem. Or, to put it more in general terms, the online ecosystem is embed
ded in a larger sociocultural and political-economic context where it is
inevitably molded by historical circumstances.

1.3. MAKING THE WEB SOCIAL: CODING HUMAN CONNECTIONS

To get a better sense of the ecosystem’s emergence, we need to go back a bit

further in history. In the early 1970s, computers and information technol
ogy had a dubitable reputation as instruments of control, mostly wielded
by Orwellian bureaucratic governments or by giant corporations. The coun
terculture, born in the 1960s and matured in the early 1970s, paired values
of community and collectivity with the imperative of personal freedom and
empowerment—values that clashed with lingering associations of oppres
sion and compromised individuality still hovering around information
technology. It was not until the late 1970s when computers began to be
seen as potential instruments of liberation rather than oppression. In a
lucid account of the gradual convergence of the counterculture with “geek”

ENGINEERING SOCIALITY IN A CULTURE OF CONNECTIVITY (91

 cyberculture, Fred Turner has demonstrated how visions of computer
networks gradually became linked to visions of “peer-to-peer adhocracy”
and “expressions of the true self” (2006: 3). A famous ad campaign for
Apple computers in 1984 showcased the Macintosh as a tool for user
empowerment, casting the company as a rebel amid powerful computer
industries and, by implication, positioned the Mac customer as a denizen
of the counterculture. The ultimate irony of this promoted image, as
pointed out by biographer Walter lsaacson, was that the Macintosh was a
closed and controlled system, “like something designed by Big Brother
rather than by a hacker” (2011: 162). But the rebel-geek image of working
in the interest of the public good rather than in the interest of Big Money
or Big Government was a significant precursor to the communal spirit later
adopted by advocates of web culture.
The invention of the World Wide Web in 1991 gave a new impetus to the
liaison between geek culture and counterculture. As the WWW consortium
began to build a global standardized infrastructure, communities of enthu
siastic users began to churn out applications for the Web. The period when
users purportedly helped construct a new public space, outside corporate
control, only lasted a few years, however. Commercial developers like
Google, AOL, and Amazon, at the turn of the millennium, incorporated
the Web 1.0 and, virtually overnight, replaced dot.communism by dot.
commercialism. However, the spirit associated with egalitarianism and
community cocooning was rekindled in the early 2000s with the advent of
Web 2.0. The growth of social media platforms was (and still is) often
innocuously conflated with the rise of Web 2.0, and the participatory
potential of social media was sometimes erroneously attributed to the
Web’s technological design. Its built-in capacity for two-way communica
tion supposedly rendered online media infinitely more democratic than
the old (one-way) media.
5 Words like “interactivity” and “participatory”
described Web 2.0.’s potential to “talk back” and send messages instantly,
whereas previous media had wielded power over their one-way publishing
or broadcasting channels.
When new interactive platforms entered the scene, such as Blogger, Wiki
pedia, Facebook, and YouTube, they promised to make culture more “partici
patory,” “user centered,” and “collaborative.” Between 2000 and 2006, quite a
few media theorists claimed that Web 2.0 applications exponentially
enhanced the natural human need to connect and create, and they declared
early victory for the user. Henry Jenkins in 2006 welcomed us to the world of
convergence culture, a world “where old and new media collide, where grass
roots and corporate media intersect, where the power of media producer and
the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways” (2). Media

1101 The Culture of Connectivity

theorist Axel Bruns (2008) hailed a new class of “proclusers”—creators who
were also users and distributors. Wikipedia was recurrently held up as a
model of collaboration of selfless users who collectively developed a unique
product—an ever-expanding online encyclopedia—for the common good by
exploiting a communal space. The year 2006 turned out to be the apex of user
euphoria when Time magazine selected “You” as the Person of the Year,
trumpeting the world-changing potential of connected users: “It’s a story
about community and collaboration. about the many wresting power from
. .

the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only
change the world, but also change the way the world changes.”
6 For many
early adopters, belief that Web 2.0 was a communal and collaborative space
inspired their endeavors to build platforms, and echoes of this early idealistic
spirit resound to this day.
To some extent, the triumph of users over conventional mass media
proved to be justified, as Web 2.0 offered unprecedented tools for empow
erment and online self-communication, but outsized expectations nour
ished a premature winning mood among the web idealists. Perhaps a
symbolic rebalancing of Time’s earlier veneration of the user was the desig
nation, four years later, of Mark Zuckerberg as Time’s Person of the Year.
7
When Facebook’s CEO in 2010 took over the badge of honor from “You,” he
promised to make the world more open and transparent, echoing the uto
pian spirit that had previously galvanized users. Platform owners eagerly
adopted similar rhetoric in their corporate mantras and promotional slo
gans, such as “Do no evil” (Google), “Making the Web more social” (Face-
book), and “Share your pictures, watch the world” (Flickr-Yahoo). Web
companies tirelessly underscored their company’s mission to benefit the
common good. Zuckerberg has repeatedly stated that Facebook “wants
people to find what they want and connect them to ideas they like online.”
8
Today social media companies still seem eager to align the benevolent halo
of early web technology with their “alternative” corporate ethos.
Rather than simply accepting or rejecting this ethos, I am interested in
deconstructing what meanings developers impute to their platforms’ goals
and functions—meanings that peculiarly reflect rhetorical attempts to
absorb utopian Web 2.0 connotations into corporate missions. The very
word “social” associated with media implies that platforms are user cen
tered and that they facilitate communal activities, just as the term “partici
patory” emphasizes human collaboration. Indeed, social media can be seen
as online facilitators or enhancers of human networks—webs of people
that promote connectedness as a social value. Individuals’ ideas, values,
and tastes are contagious and spread through human networks, but these
networks also affect what individuals do and think (Christakis and Fowler

ENGINEERING SOCIALITY IN A CULTURE OF CONNECTIVITY [111

L
 2009). By the same token, social media are inevitably automated systems
that engineer and manipulate connections. In order to be able 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 of “social” hence seems to encompasses both (human) con
nectedness and (autoated) connectivity—a conflation that icu1tivated
by many CEOs—and its deliberate ambiguity will play a major role in the
further elaboration of this book’s argument.
Companies tend to stress the first meaning (human connectedness)
and minimize the second meaning (automated connectivity). Zuckerberg
deploys a sort of newspeak when claiming that technology merely enables
or facilitates social activities; however, “making the Web social” in reality
means “making sociality technical.” Sociality coded by technology renders
people’s activities formal, manageable, and manipulable, enabling plat
forms to engineer the sociality in people’s everyday routines.
9 On the basis
of detailed and intimate knowledge of people’s desires and likes, platforms
develop tools to create and steer specific needs. A button that shows what
your friends watch, hear, read, and buy registers your peers’ tastes while
concurrently shaping them. Users, in general, also tend to emphasize
human connectedness when explaining a platform’s value in their lives.
Facebook helps its members to make and maintain contacts, but for many
ordinary users it is difficult to recognize how Pacebook actively steers and
curates connections. Moreover, it is far from transparent how Facebook
and other platforms utilize their data to influence traffic and monetize
engineered streams of information. And yet connectedness is often invoked
;t\’ as the pretense for generating connectivity, even now that data generation
has become a primary objective rather than a by-product of online sociality.
Besides the term “social,” concepts like “participation” and “collabora
tion” get imputed a peculiar new meaning in the context of social media.
Users of content are supposedly “collaborators” who “co-develop” creative
products and thus enrich communities. Notions of community and group-
think abound in the rhetoric of platforms, and their echoes resounded par
ticularly during the years 2004 to 2007. Indeed, many platforms, such as
YouTube and Flickr, started out as community initiatives; they were carried
by a group of video buffs and photo fans, respectively, eager to share their
creative products online. After their takeover by Google and, in the latter
case, Yahoo, the sites’ corporate owners kept nurturing the image of col
lectivity and user-centered operation long after their strategies had trans
mogrified to the commercial realm. Photographic and video content
became instrumental to the automated collection of data about meaning
ful social relationships, propelled by such questions as, Who shares which

[12] The Culture of Connectivity

., gzkT

. ‘.

-. . -S
 images with whom? What images or videos are popular among which
groups? Who are the leading tastemakers in these communities?
A similar conflation of human connectedness and automated connec
tivity happens when social activities are translated into algorithmic con
cepts. In the offline world, people who are “well connected” are commonly
understood to be individuals whose connections are gauged by their quality
and status rather than their quantity. In the context of social media, the
term “friends” and its adjunct verb “friending” have come to designate
strong and weak ties, intimate contacts as well as total strangers. Their sig
nificance is commonly articulated in one indiscriminate number. The term
“followers” has undergone a similar transformation: the word connotes
everything from neutral “groups” to “devotees” and “believers,” but in the I.
context of social media it has come to mean the sheer number of people
who follow your twit stream. From the technological inscription of online
sociality we derive that connectivity is a quantifiable value, also known as
the popularity principle: the more contacts you have and make, the more
valuable you become, because more people think you are popular and
hence want to connect with you.
What goes for people also holds for ideas or things that can be “liked”:
likability is not a virtue attributed consciously by a person to a thing or
idea, but is the result of an algorithmic computation derived from instant
clicks on the Like button.’° However, there is no quality assessment built
into these buttons: online quantification indiscriminately accumulates
acclamation and applause, and, by implication, deprecation and disap
proval. The choice for a “like” button betrays an ideological predilection: it
favors instant, gut-fired, emotional, positive evaluations. Popularity as a
coded concept thus not only becomes quantifiable but also manipulable:
boosting popularity rankings is an important mechanism built into these
buttons. People who have many friends or followers are touted as influen
tial, and their social authority or reputation increases as they receive more
clicks. Ideas that are “liked” by many people have the potential of becoming
trends. Friending, following, and trending are not the same functions, but
they derive from the same popularity principle underpinning the online
economy of social media.
Key terms used to describe social media’s functionality, such as the
“social,” “collaboration,” and “friends,” resonate with the communalist jar
gon of early utopian visions of the Web as a space that inherently enhances
I
social activity. In reality, the meanings of these words have increasingly

I been informed by automated technologies that direct human sociality.

J
Therefore, the term “connective media” would be preferable over “social
media” What is claim e”social” is in fact the result of human input
/
ENGINEERING SOCIALITY IN A CULTURE OF CONNECTIVITY [13]
shaped by computed output and vice versa—a sociotechnical ensemble
whose components can hardly be told apart. The norms and values sup
porting the “social” image of these media remain hidden in platforms’
technological textures. Not coincidentally, the same assumptions support
ing the goal of making the Web more social—or, if you wish, of making
sociality more technical—also support the ideology of making online
sociality salable.

1.4. MAKING SOCIALITY SALABLE: CONNECTIVITY AS RESOURCE

Mark Zuckerberg’s promise to “make the Web more social” is inextricably

intertwined with his professed desire to “make the world more transpar
ent.” Essential to the narrative of the social Web rendering a transparent
world was the implied assumption that if users proffer their true identity
when sharing personal data, platforms, for their part, would also carry a
12 The rhetoric of transparency and
robust ethic of openness and sharing.
openness was supposedly rooted in and certainly inspired by the rhetoric
of community-based online sociality, which flourished during the first six
years of the new millennium. Most of these online groups, though, pre
ferred to conduct their activities in a noncommercial, public space where
they could communicate free of government or market constraints. When
corporations took over online platforms, they were eager to co-opt the
rhetoric and spice their corporate image with values more commonly
attributed to the public sector. Indeed, companies liked to present them
selves as pioneers of a joint public-private endeavor.
Legal and economic scholars further advanced these hybrid ideological
foundations. The networked information environment, as Yochai Benkler
asserted in 2006, would give rise to a flourishing nonmarket sector of
information and creative production. Web 2.0 strategies challenged both
market and state economies as they enabled the development of a coopera
tive nonmarket, peer-production system that served communicative and
creative needs through networks of like-minded individuals. This “net
worked public sphere” was fundamentally different from the existing
public sphere and would “emerge alongside the commercial mass-media
markets” (Benlder 2006: 10, emphasis added). Inline with media theorists’
assessments at that time, we can discern a victorious appraisal of Web 2.0’s
potential to promote community over commerce, or, at the very least,
afford their peaceful coexistence. Among many examples of cooperative
endeavors, Wikipedia stands out as the poster child for the networked pub
lic sphere—a model of nonprofit, nonmarket peer production emerging

[14] The Culture of Connectivity

-VI
 0
t t7

alongside commercial encyclopedic products, rather than in competition

with them.
Between 2000 and 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, as divined by Benkler, gave social media plat
forms the image of being alternative spaces, free from corporate and gov
ernment constraints, where individuals could pursue their communicative
and creative needs and could regulate their own social traffic. In the early
years of YouTube, Wikipedia, and Flickr, user communities invested much
time and effort in keeping “their” channels clean from pollution by filtering
out pornographic and racist content. The promise of self-regulation and
community-supported surveillance worked well as long as the platforms
were relatively small and uniform in their user base.
As user bases began to explode after 2005, the investment required of
users became too big, and the focus of most platforms was diluted. At the
same time, many platforms were taken over by big media corporations or
were otherwise incorporated; the spirit of “nonmarket peer-production”
soon dwindled. During the ensuing years, between 2005 and 2008, corpo
rate owners remained cautious about exposing their profit motives to user
communities, and in many instancekept nourishing the image of plat- v
forms as peer-production structures that put users before profits. Because
user bases were still immersed in a participation spirit, platform manage
ment had to walk a tightrope between a growth scenario—luring more cus
tomers to sites—and pleasing its original, often assertive, users, who were
keenly aware of the value they added to the site’s market position (Clemons
2009; Potts 2009). The development of business models, balancing user par
ticipation against for-profit strategies, posed a real challenge to the digital
media industry (Vukanovic 2009). A corporate management demanding
returns on investment faced the risk of being confronted by user protests or
boycotts. Platforms had to navigate between Silicon Valley’s venture capital
ist culture, which pushed for quick turnovers and speedy IPOs, and the orig
inal participatory spirit, which had caused the platforms to grow in the first
place. The safest strategy for many managers seemed to be expeditious
growth while conducting careful experiments with monetizing schemes.
Tapping into academics’ celebratory rhetoric of a new public sphere
of nonmarket collaboration, business managers and marketers glorified
the potential of mixed public-private entrepreneurship by absorbing
Wikipedian-style peer-production into their for-profit business models.
More precisely, they borrowed one parficular element of Wikfpedia’s

ENGINEERING SOCIALITY IN A CULTURE OF CONNECTIVITY [15]

 1v ‘l’L’ t.tLLV

innovative model—user participation—squeezing it into a for-profit busi

ness and corporate governance structure. “Wikinomics,” an Internet busi
ness concept launched by economists Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams
/ (2006), fostered the immanent merger of the market and nonprofit sector
in a networked information 3 environment.’ They applauded Google and
Yahoo for creating “new public squares, vibrant meeting places where your
customers come back for the rich and engaging experiences”; echoing the
slogans of credit card companies, the authors significantly add: “Relation
ships, after all, are the one thing you cannot commoditize” (Tapscott and
Williams 2006: 44).
Perhaps ironically, commoditizing relationships—turning connected-
ness into connectivity by means of coding technologies—is exactly what
corporate platforms, particularly Google and Facebook, discovered as the
golden egg their geese produced. Besides generating content, peer produc
tion yields a valuable by-product that users often do not intentionally
deliver: behavioral and profiling data. Under the guise of connectedness
they produce a precious resource: connectivity. Even though the term “con
nectivity” originated in technology, where it denotes computer transmis
sions, in the context of social media it quickly assumed the connotation of
users accumulating social capital, while in fact this term increasingly
referred to owners amassing economic capital. Ten years after its start,
Wikipedia is perhaps an uncomfortable reminder of what the Web could
M have been, as it is currently one of the few main sites that have not been
tL--’vt co-opted by big business. A quick look at today’s palette of the 100 biggest
social media platforms reveals that the overwhelming majority (almost 98
percent) are run by corporations who think of the Internet as a market
place first and a public forum second—Wikipedia being the most notable
4 And yet the rhetoric of a new public sphere was (and still is to
exception.’
some extent) gratefully appropriated 1 y usineés to salvage the virtues
of the corporate sphere. An endorsed fusion of nonmarket and for-profit
principles breathes the spirit of public collectivism, a spirit espoused by
those who regard the Web’s technical infrastructure as an opportunity for
opening up unimpeded social space.
Not surprisingly, the rapid rise of social media has also triggered a
standoff between social media adepts and staunch critics in academic cir
cles. On the one hand, we find early enthusiasts who, in Benkler’s and
Jenkins’s footsteps, rejoice at the potential of Web 2.0 to empower users to
wield their new digital tools to connect and create, while developing a new
public sphere or a fused public-corporate sphere in the process. Social sci
entists and journalists have argued that social media open up a new private
sphere or are at least an exciting experiment in mixing private and public.

[161 The Culture of Connectivity

 For instance, communications scholar Zizi Papacharissi (2010) argues that
social media platforms have introduced a space where boundaries between
private and public space have become fuzzy, claiming that this imprecision
opens up new possibilities for identity formation. Jeff Jarvis (2011) also
cheers the ambiguity; he attributes its redeeming potential to Facebook’s
and other sites’ ideal of openness and connectedness.’
5
On the other end of the spectrum, we find two types of detractors. Political
economists assailed the incorporation of social media, labeling them as failed ()
experirrents in democratic participation or dismissing them as dependent on
a naive belief in the possibility of developing a new or alternative public
sphere alongside the existing public, private, and corporate spheres (Milberry
and Anderson 2009; de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford 2005; Skageby 2009). The
incorporation of platforms, some critics contend, hampered the development
of Web 2.0’s full potential as an instrument for participatory culture, self-
regulation, and democracy. Instead, commercial platforms introduced new
modes of surveillance, bartering privacy for the accumulation of social capital
(Cohen 2008; Haythornthwaite and Kendall 2010). Other critics of platforms
object to users’ being doubly exploited, both as workers—deliverers of data to
UGC and SNS platforms—and as consumers forced to buy back their own
processed data by relinquishing privacy (Terranova 2004; Petersen 2008).
More profoundly, some observe that the selling of privacy maybe mistakenly
viewed as the natural consequence of users’ eagerness to connect and pro
mote the self, rather than being understood as the corollary of a political
economy deeply rooted in audience commoditization (Fuchs 2011a).
In addition to adepts in political economy, a number of legal experts and
consumer groups have censured Facebook and other plat for viola
tion of privacy laws as they cultivated their newfound digital territory. Off
setting the benign rhetoric of fading or fuzzy boundaries, courts and
lawyers often recognize a sharp dichotomy between private and public in
their affidavits when taking on cases against new media corporations.
Legal scholars have called for a recalibration of traditional juridical con
cepts in response to social media platforms deliberately exploiting the fis
sures of virtual space (Solove 2008; Nissenbaum 2010; Grimmelmann
2009). Privacy experts consistently defend the boundaries between pri
vate, corporate, and public space to protect the rights of citizens against
platform owners’ calls for more “transparency”—a term that often appears
to apply to users only. Although my argument takes a nonjuridical perspec
tive, I share legal experts’ concerns about privacy in social media.
As often happens with debates on contentious and multifaceted phenom
ena, the issue gets mired in a myriad of polarized debates. Over the past
decade, connective media have often been framed as a confrontation

ENGINEERING SOCIALITY IN A CULTURE OF CONNECTIVITY [171

 between users and owners. Time magazine’s triumphant dictum about the
“many wresting power from the few” had it backward; according to some,
the new media were about the “few (platform owners) wresting control from

I the many.” Even though I sympathize with the criticism of political econo
mists that a forfeiture of privacy is a direct result of social media’s commod
itization, I often find the users-versus-owners standoff to be unproductive
as an explanation. The resulting picture is mostly one of victims versus per
petrators, of the powerless versus the powerful. Obviously, social media
services can be both intensely empowering and disturbingly exploitative;
sociality is enjoyed and exercised through precisely the commercial plat
forms that also exploit online social activities for monetary gains.
Going back to the Alvin family, introduced at the beginning of this chapter,
we can see these two profoundly different views on user agency mirrored in
Pete and Sandra. Sandra represents the many users for whom social media
platforms provide a means not only of pleasure but of profitable business:
Blogger has been instrumental to her blog-publishing activities, and without
Twitter and Facebook, she would not have had an extensive network of follow
ers and friends through whom she acquires paid assignments. Like many
(mostly young) entrepreneurs, she is taking advantage of those platforms that
monetize connectivity, while taking their sometimes-obscure commercial
strategies for granted. Pete Alvin exemplifies those users who are disappointed
with mainstream platforms taking over the community spirit they initially
cherished and nurtured. He feels uncomfortable giving away so much personal
information while gaining little transparency in return. The perspectives San
dra and Pete represent are driven by different ideologies or worldviews; how
ever, they are not mutually exclusive or incommensurate. Users can enjoy
connective media and still be critical of their functioning, for instance by tak
ing a vocal stance on privacy issues or data control. Users are citizens as well as
consumers, professionals as well as assertive voters. Platform owners and app
developers are producing agents and social forces; they can exercise economic
and political power to change or sustain existing hierarchies and deploy their
technologies to do so. In sum, the heterogeneity of actors warrants a treatment
of sociality more complex than that of simply confirming the standoff.

1.5. THE ECOSYSTEM OF CONNECTIVE MEDIA IN A CULTURE

OF CONNECTIVITY

Academic discussions on social media generally mirror public debates,

often zooming in on breach of privacy laws, the assessment of viable busi
ness models, and an analysis of users’ pleasures or of their exploitation.

[18J The Culture of Connectivity

 Although these debates are all valid and highly relevant, the aim of this
book is to focus not on privacy or commoditization as such, but on the
historical and cultural convolutions underpinning these tensions. In explor
ing the short but rich history of social media platforms and the online
sociality that came along with their evolution, I want to expose the chang
ing cultural norms and values on which these legal and economic challenges
are staked, as well as the technological, ideological, and socioeconomic
structures through which they are wagered. Privacy and commercialization
concerns are emblematic of the larger battle for control over personal and
collective information. Who can own someone’s profiling and behavioral
data? Who is allowed to interpret, aggregate, and sell information derived
from personal data? How do various platforms infiltrate everyday commu
nicative and creative habits, and what power do users and owners have to
shape online sociality?
16
Social media constitute an arena of public communication where norms
are shaped and rules get contested. Norms, as Michel Foucault (1980) has
theorized, constitute the social and cultural cement for grounding laws and
legal regulations. The power of norms, in the area of sociality, is much more
influential than the power of law and order. Contemporary methods of
power are methods whose “operation is not ensured by right but by tech
nique, not by law but by normalization, not by punishment but by control”
(Foucault 1980: 89, emphases added). In less than a decade, the norms for
online sociality have dramatically changed, and they are still in flux. Pat
terns of behavior that traditionally existed in offline (physical) sociality are
increasingly mixed with social and sociotechnical norms created in an
online environment, taking on a new dimensionality.’
7 For instance, the
norms for “sharing” private information and for accepting personalized
advertisements in someone’s social space were very different in 2004, in
the early stages of Web 2.0 space, than in 2012. Changes were implemented
gradually, and while users got habituated to new features, the norms for
privacy and accepting monetization were stretched accordingly. It is pre
cisely these changes I am interested in: how they occur through specific
platforms and how they affect online sociality as such.
Normalization occurs detectably, through various levels of adjustments,
including technology features and terms of use. But it mostly happens
imperceptibly, through gradual transformations of user habits and chang
ing levels of acceptance. In addition, norms are diffuse, as they have strik
ingly different effects on individual users, particularly users from different
generations. Pete and Sandra showed dissimilar levels of appropriation;
their children’s experience of online sociality, for their part, is also very dif
ferent from their parents’. For Nick and Zara, the use of social media is

ENGINEERING SOCIALITY IN A CULTURE OF CONNECTIVITY [19]

 fully “normalized” in their everyday lives; not having gone through the
early evolutionary stages, they accept these platforms as conditions for
social interaction and are less likely to challenge their underpinnings. Once
new technologies and their use have gained a naturalized presence, it is
much harder to identify underlying principles and thus question their
raison d’être.
Hence, new norms for sociality and values of connectivity are not the
outcome but the very stakes in the battle to conquer the vast new territory
of connective media and cultivate its fertile grounds. Instead of identifying
how Facebook violates privacy laws or how Google’s legal transgressions
correlate with its monetizing schemes, my aim is to trace disputed defini
tions of what counts as private or public, formal or informal, collaborative
or exploitative, mainstream or alternative—arguments that are part of an
ongoing clash between user tactics and platform strategies (van Dijck
2011). The battle described and analyzed has implications for society and
culture at large. Norms are part and parcel of a larger culture that is infused
with historical circumstances and political conditions. Legal scholar Julie
Cohen suggests that culture “is not a fixed collection of texts and practices,
but rather an emergent, historically and materially contingent process
through which understandings of self and society are formed and re
formed.” To underscore the relevance of the ideological forces at work in
this dynamic and the theoretical thrust of its essential openness, she adds:

The process of culture is shaped by the self-interested actions of powerful insti

tutional actors, by the everyday practices of individuals and communities, and
by ways of understanding and describing the world that have complex histories
of their own. The lack of fixity at the core of this conception of culture does not
undermine its explanatory utility; to the contrary, it is the origin of culture’s
power. (Cohen 2012, 17)

The “explanatory utility” of the culture of connectivity is to help us under

stand social media’s historical expansion, the disputes arising in the proc
ess, and the normative changes in which they result, even if the outcome is
transitory.
Several aspects of this culture will be highlighted in this book. First and
foremost, it is a culture inundated by coding technologies whose implica
L tions go well beyond the digital architectures of platforms
themselves.
Sociality is not simply “rendered technological” by moving to an online
space; rather, coded structures are profoundly altering the nature of our
connections, creations, and interactions. Buttons that impose “sharing”
and “following” as social values have effects in cultural practices and legal
:r

[20] The Culture of Connectivity

disputes, far beyond platforms proper. Second, it is a culture where the
‘.1-
organization of social exchange is staked on neoliberal economic princi-
pIes. Connectivity derives from a continuous pressure—both from peers
and from technologies—to expand through competition and gain power
through strategic alliances. Platform tactics such as the popularity princi
ple and ranking mechanisms hardly involve contingent technological struc
tures; instead, they are firmly rooted in an ideology that values hierarchy,
competition, and a winner-takes-all mind-set. And thir4, the culture of
connectivity evolves as part of a longer historical transformation charac
terized by a resetting of boundaries between private, corporate, and public 1
domains. The steady weakening in recent decades of the public sector and
its gradual takeover by corporations forms a necessary backdrop for under
standing the momentum for fast-growing connective media. Historically,
neoliberal clashes with social-democratic ideologies often revolved around
questions of the freedom of individuals and corporations vis-à-vis the
responsibilities of communities and states. Platform owners’ calls for more
transparency and openness, for maximum sharing and frictionless online
traffic, are entrenched in a neoliberal political agenda often advocating a
downsizing of the public sector.
The struggle to define networked sociality and to impute new norms and
meanings to this space began roughly in 2001 and still “lacks fixity,” to
reprise Julie Cohen’s words. For practical reasons, May 2012 serves as the
provisional endpoint of this study. If the aim is to understand how, in the
intervening period, online sociality evolved, it is not enough to study indi
vidual platforms; rather, we need to apprehend how they coevolved in a
larger context of interpenetrating platforms and to dissect the cultural
logic undergirding this process. Therefore, I propose to look at distinct plat
forms as if they were microsystems. All platforms combined constitute what
I call the ecosystem of connective media—a system that nourishes and, in
turn, is nourished by social and cultural norms that simultaneously evolve
in our everyday world. Each microsystem is sensitive to changes in other
parts of the ecosystem: if Facebook changes its interface settings, Google
reacts by tweaking its artillery of platforms; if participation in Wikipedia
should wane, Google’s algorithmic remedies could work wonders. It is
important to map convolutions in this first formative stage of connective
media’s growth because it may teach us about current and future distribu
tion of powers.
Over the past ten years, several (groups of) academics have taken on the
study of singular platforms and reviewed their varied manifestations.
Needless to say, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and others have been the sub
ject of numerous laudatory “inside” stories—mostly attempts to translate
!1 t
1/ 1lV &
ENGINEERING SOCIALITY IN A CULTURE OF CONNECTIVITY [211

‘ft
 a platform’s commercial pcwer to interested users or small businesses, or
to satisfy people’s curiosity about how things work inside “the plex.” 8
Some platforms have received ample academic attention from scholars
analyzing their technological and operational 9 complexities.’ Furthermore,
there have also been a number of general critical studies that examine the
Web’s technological specificities (Galloway 2004) or look at media ecologies
as emergent technical, sociopolitical, or historical systems (Fuller 2005;
Lovink 2012; Gitelman 2008). Last but not least, there are a few excellent
studies mapping the political and economic significance of social media
and focusing on how they leverage power at the levels of grassroots activ
ists, governments, and corporations (Morozov 2011; Castells 2009; Fuchs
2011b). All these studies, as well as a score of others, provide valuable input
for the argument developed in this book.
The particular approach adopted in The Culture of Connectivity is aimed
at providing a critical history of roughly the first decade of connective
media, relating the analyses of five specific platforms to the larger ecosys
tem and the culture in which it evolved. Rather than recounting or dis
counting the success of these platforms, I try to articulate their specificities
as well as their differences by tracking their evolution. Dissecting these
platforms to find the principles of their anatomy, I will be looking for dif
ferences and similarities in the way they function and operate. How did
individual platforms code and brand specific niches of everyday life? What
specific user functions did they develop, and how did users respond to a
platform’s changing technologies? How are the tactics and mechanisms of
individual platforms interrelated? On what ideological or political assump
tions do they operate? What social and cultural norms underpin the eco
system of connective media, how have they changed, and what role did
(and still do) users and owners play in this transformation? Such questions
require not just a comparative analysis of single platforms but also a con
nective approach. Designing such an approach partly forms the challenge
of this study.
The ecosystem of connective media, as it has progressed since the turn
of the millennium, has comprised hundreds of players, engaged millions
of users, and affected both local and global normative and legal schemes.
To this day, the larger technological infrastructure on which social media
platforms are built is still volatile, and few, if any, platforms have yet
attained a stabilized meaning or standardized use in the context of this
unstable ecosystem (Feenberg 2009). I do not pretend in any way to cover
the territory in its entirety, but by tracing the fortunes of five prominent
platforms—Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia—I hope
to offer a systematic framework for understanding their interdependent

[22] The Culture of Connectivity

V V

fV
>V:
 0 The last chapter will particularly address the connections
development.’
between microsystems and ecosystem: how do all platforms interconnect
in an infrastructure that is increasingly compartmentalized? And how do
they live up to promises of making the Web more social and the world
more transparent? As we look into the future, the trend of engineered
platforms permeating our everyday lives will only gain significance with
the dazzling expansion of mobile apps and devices. The ecosystem, too,
adds importance in the wake of technological developments such as “Big
Data” processing. The year 2012 configures a momentary link between
the first decade of maturing platformed sociality and the next decade of
a projected Semantic Web with automated connectivity at its core. ’
2
Notwithstanding the Alvins, this book does not depict the microbehav
iors of users or the quotidian activities of families at one moment in his
tory. It is rather about the ways in which social media have permeated
manifestations of sociality and creativity in the (Western) world over the
past decade. Teenagers and young adults can no longer imagine organizing
their social lives without Facebook at its center; news organizations have
accepted Twitter as one of their principal sources of breaking news; a pop
band that ignores the potency of YouTube’s viral videos might as well
denounce its fan base; Flickr and Facebook have become global distribution
centers of digital snapshots; and few students would still be able to write a
term paper without access to Wikipedia—or Google Scholar or Search, for
that matter. The Culture of Connectivity aims 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 understand
ing of social media’s impact on the everyday lives of families like the Alvins.
When critically examining the history of platforms and the ecosystem
through which they evolve, we need to create a functional anatomical
instrument, a multilayered analytical prism that allows us to see more than
just a technological platform deployed by users and run by owners. Since
there is neither a ready-made analytical model nor a clear-cut theory to
tackle this phenomenon consistently and systematically, the next chapter
sketches the outlines of a multilayered approach to social media.

ENGINEERING SOCIALITY IN A CULTURE OP CONNECTIVITY [23]

:
r
- “,-
 NOTES

CHAPTER 1
1. It is very difficult to find unambiguous facts about overall social media use. The
S
numbers mentioned are cited from the CommScore report 201t Available at
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2011!it_ ‘

4’.
is_a...social_world_top_lQneed-to-knows_about_social_networking. Last
checked May 24, 2012. These numbers serve as a general trend indicator.
2. The verb “twittering” is used in a number of European languages, such as Dutch
and German, whereas the verb ‘tweeting” is preferred in English.
3. Google Search and the company’s specialized services (Maps, Scholar, Earth,
Streetview, etc.) have conquered by far the largest share of the search engine
market (82 percent); Yahoo (6 percent), the Chinese engine Baidu (5 percent),
and Microsoft’s Bing (4 percent) are Google’s main competitors. Source:
Wikipedia overview of search engine markets. Available at http://en.wikipedia.
org!wiki/Search_engines#Market_share. Last checked May 27, 2012. The

I
market for web browsers, intended to access the WWW, is divided much more
equally: in June 2012, Internet Explorer (MS) has 26 percent of the market,
Google Chrome 25 percent, Firefox 22 percent, and Safari 14 percent. Web
directories specialize in linking to websites and categorizing those links; two
examples are Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory Project, in partnership
with AOL search. Available at http://www.dmoz.org/. Last checked May 31,
2012.
4. Search engines and web browsers have arguably become an invisible layer of
applied services, as they are often overlooked in terms of their technological and
ideological steering of users. For instance, Eric Schmidt, one of Google’s
cofounders, in a lecture delivered to a symposium at the Royal Dam Palace in
Amsterdam on May 24, 2012, talked about all Google platforms as “utilities,” a
term he used interchangeably with the Web itself. As I will argue later on
(chapters 6 and 7), search engines and web browsers are central applications on
which many social media platforms depend for their distribution.
5. The term “Web 2.0” was coined in 1999 and made popular by Tim O’Reilly in
2004. The term suggests a technical overhaul or changed specification of the
WWW, but according to Tim Bemers-Lee, there was no such reorientation, as its
founder always intended the Web to become a two-way medium (“the Read!
Write Web”); what gradually changed after 2003 is the way software engineers
and users developed applications for the Web.
—

T 6. See Time magazine, December 16, 2006. Available at http://www.time.com/

time/covers/0,16641,20061225,00.html. Last checked May 27, 2012.
7. See Time magazine, December 27, 2010. Available at http://www.tirne.com/
time/covers/0,16641,20101227,00.html. Last checked May 27, 2012.
8. Mark Zuckerberg has stated Facebook’s mission in numerous interviews, both in
newspapers and on television. See for instance an interview with Zuckerberg and
Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook’s COO) with Charlie Rose on KQED, broadcast Novem
ber 11, 2011. Zuckerberg explained the company as “completely open, transparent;
everyone is connected to each other. You grow more when you’re connected.”
9. Please note the distinction between “engineering sociality” and “social
engineering.” The latter term is rooted in political science, where it refers to
efforts of governments or private groups to massively influence social behaviors
and popular attitudes. The engineering of sociality (my term) refers to social
media platforms trying to exert influence on or directing user behavior.
10. The popularity principle was first established with regard to search engines;
queries tend to reward sources already cited over sources that are less well
connected; this “rich get richer” or “winner takes all” effect—much-cited sources
gain prominence at the expense of less connected sources—is a well-researched
yet disputed phenomenon in search engine research. See also van Dijck (2010).
11. I find the term “connective media” more suitable than the generic label “social
media.” In the remainder of the book, I will still deploy the term “social media”
S to alternate with “connective media.” The term “social media” has become so
ingrained in everyday language that it is hard to avoid.
12. Marc Zuckerberg, in David Kirkpatrick’s book The Facebook Effect (2010: 199), is
quoted as saying: “You have one identity. The days of you having a different
image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are
probably coming to an end pretty quickly. . . Having two identities for yourself
.

is an example of a lack of integrity.”

13. For a detailed analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos transferring the meaning
of nonmarket peer production into for-profit enterprises, see van Dijck and
Nieborg (2009).
14. The top 100 Web 2.0 platforms, ranked on the basis of number of average page
views over the past three months and the number of average visitors, shows only
two Sites that are nonprofit; Wikipedia (no. 6) and Pirate Bay (no. 75). Source:
Alexa Rankings. Available at http://www.alexa.com/topsites/global;0. Last
checked May 27, 2012. For an analysis of profit versus nonprofit web 2.0
platforms, see Fuchs (2009b).
15. Evgeny Morozov sharply attacked Jeff Jarvis’s assumptions on social media
platforms as the saviors of humankind in a review in the New Republic. See
E. Morozov, ‘The Internet Intellectual,” New Republic, October 12, 2011.
Available at http://www.tnr.com. Last checked May 27, 2012.
16. Information experts such as Poritz (2007) are rightly concerned about the
accumulation not only of personal data but also of aggregated information—all
valuable intelligence prone to being manipulated and sold. Jakobsson and
Stiernstedt (2010), more profoundly, are concerned about sociability as such.
17. Hetcher (2004) provides a very thorough and early theoretical work on the
importance of norms in the world of Internet and online sociality. Drawing on
social science as well as moral and political philosophy, Hetcher explores how
norms, understood as patterns of rationally governed behavior maintained in
groups by acts of conformity, fill the gap between the law on the one hand and

[178j NotestoPagesll—19

1.

- . ...
 informal social practices on the other. He applies these insights to tort law and
Internet privacy laws.
18. See, for instance, Levy (2011), Auletta (2009), and Jarvis (2009) on Google;
Comm and Burge (2009) on Twitter; and Jarvis (2011) and Kirkpatrick (2010)
on Facebook.
19. YouTube was the subject of several multidisciplinary efforts (Burgess and Green
2009; Lovink and Niederer 2008), and so was Wikipedia (Lovink and Tkacz
2011). American media theorist Siva Vaidhyanathan (2011) published an
incisive analysis of how Google, by operating a multitude of platforms, has
become a dominant player in the connective media ecosystem.
20. These particular five platforms where selected for various reasons besides the
fact that all are dominant platforms ranked (or previously ranked) in the top
ten. First, two platforms are predominantly SNS (Facebook and Twitter), while
the other three are in essence UGC sites. Second, they do not all represent
successful, triumphant enterprises: Flickr is an example of a struggling, failing
platform (I could have chosen Myspace instead). Third, I wanted to include at
least one platform with a nonprofit ownership structure (Wikipedia) to highlight
its difference from for-profit sites.
21. Futurists and informatiun specialists consider Web 3.0 to be the Semantic Web,
which will involve, among other developments, the rise of statistical, machine-
constructed semantic tags and complex algorithms to enhance the personaliza
tion of information, driven by conversational interfaces. Some also imagine the
simultaneous integrated development of TV-quality open video, 3D simulations, V
and augmented reality, in addition to pervasive broadband, wireless, and U
sensor-directed online activity. See, for instance, Hendler and Berners-Lee
(2010) and Siegel (2009) for Web 3.0 explanations and prophecies.

CHAPTER 2
1. The story of the iPod, iTunes, and the integrated development of software, hard-
ware, content, and the music industry is insightfully described in Waiter Isaacson’s
biography of Steve Jobs (2011), more specifically in chapters 30, 31, and 32.
2. Actor-network theory has drawn criticism particularly in terms of its usefulness
for analyzing digital networks. For one thing, ANT is said to overemphasize the
relation between human and nonhuman forms of agency, while the complexity
of Web 2.0 platforms forces its analysts to move beyond this binary configura
tion (Rossiter and Lovink 2010). Although I agree that there might be too much
weight put on the human versus nonhuman actor in ANT, this criticism ignores
the fact that ANT is explicitly leveled at the fluid relationships between humans,
technologies, and ideas. About the fluidity of the (human/nonhuman) actor,
Latour (1998, n.p.) explains: “There is no model of (human) actor in ANT nor
any basic list of competences that have to be set at the beginning because the
j
human, the self and the social actor of traditional social theory is not on its
agenda. So what is on its agenda? The attribution of human, unhuman, non ,

human, inhuman, characteristics; the distribution of properties among these

entities; the connections established between them; the circulation entailed by
these attributions, distributions and connections; the transformation of those
attributions, distributions and connections, of the many elements that circulates I +

[ski and of the few ways through which they are sent.” It is exactly this notion of
fluidity between various actors that I am looking for when trying to define
connectivity.

NotestoPagesl9—27 [179]

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