Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism
Robert W Gehl
Language: English
Pages: 236
ISBN: 1439910359
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Robert Gehl's timely critique, Reverse Engineering Social Media, rigorously analyzes the ideas of social media and software engineers, using these ideas to find contradictions and fissures beneath the surfaces of glossy sites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
Gehl adeptly uses a mix of software studies, science and technology studies, and political economy to reveal the histories and contexts of these social media sites. Looking backward at divisions of labor and the process of user labor, he provides case studies that illustrate how binary "Like" consumer choices hide surveillance systems that rely on users to build content for site owners who make money selling user data, and that promote a culture of anxiety and immediacy over depth.
Reverse Engineering Social Media also presents ways out of this paradox, illustrating how activists, academics, and users change social media for the better by building alternatives to the dominant social media sites.
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Particularities of the machine (the specific configuration of its hardware) to general software that works on that hardware: At a basic level, software prescribes the interacting of a certain part of computer memory, namely the program itself, and another part of memory, called the program data, through explicit instructions carried out by a processor. At a different level, software embodies algorithms that prescribe interactions among subroutines, which are cooperating pieces of programs. At a.
Microsoft’s advertising networks.79 Framing user-led production within a standardized template derived from a seedbed of surveillance standards has been lucrative. Conclusion: The IAB’s Self-Regulation, Its “Cerned” Subject, and Avenues of Resistance Of course, the methodical transformation of the Web from a nonprofit space for academic and intellectual exchange to yet another standardized, template-driven, advertising-centric medium has not gone Standardizing Social Mediaâ•… 109.
Meshnets are ad hoc, self-configuring, self-healing networks of computers using wireless connections. As opposed to the ISP model, where a computer connects to an ISP and then is connected to the broader Internet to upload and download data, each computer in a meshnet relays others’ data as well as uploads and downloads its own. This distributes control over access to the Internet. As Julian Dibbell puts it: If you want a better sense of what that means, consider how things might have happened on.
Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. 86. For analysis of the post hoc production of evidence, see the work of Kelly Gates, particularly her book Our Biometric Future. 87. Gehl, “YouTube as Archive” 88. Available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13993 (accessed January 1, 2010). 89. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms, chap. 2. CHAPTER 3 1. Fixmer and Rabil, “MySpace Sale, Merger or Spinoff Being Weighed by News Corp., Official Says.” 2. Goldman, “MySpace to Cut 30%, or 430 Jobs.” 3.
Benkler, The Wealth of Networks; Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond. For a discussion of “prosumption” from a marketing perspective, see Vollmer, Digital Darwinism. 30. Wells and Chen, “The Dimensions of Commercial Cyberspace.” It is unwise to overstate the “chaos” of the early Web; it was no more “chaotic” than, for example, early radio. The production of the idea of “chaos” in a new medium is Notes to Chapter 4â•…181 often a precursor to intense regulation, both by states and.