SUMMARY J. VAN DIJCK, THE CULTURE
OF CONNECTIVITY. A CRITICAL
HISTORY OF SOCIAL MEDIA (OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS 2013)
2017 – 2018, Semester I
BACHELOR YEAR III
Lisa Jurrjens
,Summary Van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity (2013)
Contents
Chapter 1 Engineering Sociality in a Culture of Connectivity..................................................................3
Introduction........................................................................................................................................3
From Networked Communication to Platformed Sociality..................................................................3
Making the Web Social: Coding Human Connections.........................................................................4
Making Sociality Salable: Connectivity as Resource............................................................................4
The Ecosystem of Connective Media in a Culture of Connectivity.......................................................5
Chapter 2 Disassembling Platforms, Reassembling Sociality..................................................................7
Introduction........................................................................................................................................7
Combining Two Approaches...............................................................................................................7
Platforms as Techno-cultural Constructs.............................................................................................8
Platforms as Socioeconomic Structures..............................................................................................9
Connecting Platforms, Reassembling Sociality..................................................................................10
Chapter 3 Facebook and the Imperative of Sharing..............................................................................11
Introduction......................................................................................................................................11
Coding Facebook: The Devil Is in the Default....................................................................................11
Branding Facebook: What You Share Is What You Get......................................................................12
Shared Norms in the Ecosystem of Connective Media......................................................................13
Chapter 4 Twitter and the Paradox of Following and Trending.............................................................15
Introduction......................................................................................................................................15
Asking the Existential Question: What Is Twitter?.............................................................................15
Asking the Strategic Question: What Does Twitter Want?................................................................17
Asking the Ecological Question: How Will Twitter Evolve?................................................................18
Chapter 5 Flickr between Communities and Commerce.......................................................................19
Introduction......................................................................................................................................19
Flickr between Connectedness and Connectivity...............................................................................19
Flickr between Commons and Commerce.........................................................................................20
Flickr between Participatory and Connective Culture........................................................................21
Chapter 6 YouTube: The Intimate Connection between Television and Video Sharing.........................22
Introduction......................................................................................................................................22
Out of the Box: Video Sharing Challenges Television.........................................................................22
Boxed In: Channelling Television into the Connective Flow...............................................................23
YouTube as the Gateway to Connective Culture................................................................................25
Chapter 7 Wikipedia and the Neutrality Principle................................................................................26
Introduction......................................................................................................................................26
Lisa Jurrjens 1
,Summary Van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity (2013)
The Techno-cultural Construction of Consensus................................................................................26
A Consensual Apparatus between Democracy and Bureaucracy......................................................27
A Nonmarket Space in the Ecosystem?.............................................................................................29
Chapter 8 The Ecosystem of Connective Media: Lock In, Fence Off, Opt Out?.....................................30
Introduction......................................................................................................................................30
Lock In: The Algorithmic Basis of Sociality........................................................................................30
Fence Off: Vertical Integration and Interoperability..........................................................................31
Opt Out? Connectivity as Ideology....................................................................................................32
Lisa Jurrjens 2
,Summary Van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity (2013)
Chapter 1 Engineering Sociality in a Culture of Connectivity
Introduction
Social media, roughly defined as “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the
ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and
exchange of user-generated content”, form a new online layer through which people organize
their lives. Originally, the need for connectedness is what drove many to these sites.
With the rapid growth of social media platforms companies often appeared less
interested in communities of users than in their data. Connectivity quickly evolved into a
valuable resource. As a result of the interconnection of platforms, a new infrastructure
emerged: an ecosystem of connective media with a few large and many small players.
From Networked Communication to Platformed Sociality
The invention of the World Wide Web in 1991 formed the basis of a new type of networked
communication. 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, online services shifted from offering channels for
networked communication to becoming interactive.
Users moved more of their everyday activities to online environments; these activities
were not simply channelled by platforms, but programmed with a specific objective. This
move shifted the emphasis from providing a utility to providing a customized service.
Many of the habits that have recently become permeated by social media platforms
used to be informal and ephemeral manifestations of social life, such as talking to friends,
exchanging gossip and showing holiday pictures. A major change is that through social media,
these casual speech acts have turned into formalized inscriptions, which take on a different
value. Social media platforms have unquestionably altered the nature of private and public
communication.
The pinnacle of a company’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. Few platforms have
reached this stage; at this point in time, “skyping” and “tweeting” perhaps comes closest.
It makes analytical sense to distinguish various types of social media. A major type
involves what is called “social network sites” (SNSs). These sites primarily promote
interpersonal contact, whether between individuals or groups; they forge personal,
professional, or geographical connections and encourage weak ties. Examples are Facebook,
Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Foursquare. A second category concerns sites for “user-
generated content” (UGC): they support creativity, foreground cultural activity, and promote
the exchange of amateur or professional content. Well-known UGC sites are YouTube, Flickr,
Myspace, GarageBand, and Wikipedia. On top of these, we can add the category of trading
and marketing sites (TMSs): these sites principally aim at exchanging products or selling
them. Amazon, eBay, Groupon, and Craigslist come to mind as noteworthy examples. Another
distinctive category consists of play and game sites (PGS), a flourishing genre with popular
games such as FarmVille, CityVille, The Sims Social, Word Feud, and Angry Birds.
Lisa Jurrjens 3
,Summary Van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity (2013)
Making the Web Social: Coding Human Connections
When new interactive platforms entered the scene, such as Blogger, Wikipedia, Facebook, and
YouTube, they promised to make culture more “participatory”, “user centred,” and
“collaborative.”
The very word “social” associated with media implies that platforms are user centred
and that they facilitate communal activities, just as the term “participatory” emphasizes
human collaboration. Individuals’ ideas, values and tastes are contagious and spread through
human networks, but these networks also affect what individuals do and think. Social media
are inevitably automated systems that engineer and manipulate connections. The meaning of
“social” hence seems to encompass both (human) connectedness and (automated)
connectivity.
Companies tend to stress the first meaning (human connectedness) and minimize the
second meaning (automated connectivity). Sociality coded by technology renders people’s
activities formal, manageable, and manipulable, enabling platforms to engineer the sociality
in people’s everyday routines. 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 Facebook
actively steers and curates connections.
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.
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.” The choice for
a “like” button betrays an ideological predilection: it favours 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.
The meanings of words such as “social,” “collaboration,” and “friends” have
increasingly been informed by automated technologies that direct human sociality. Therefore,
the term “connective media” would be preferable over “social media.”
Making Sociality Salable: Connectivity as Resource
Between 2000 and 2005, 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, where individuals could pursue their communicative and creative
needs and could regulate their own social traffic.
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
Lisa Jurrjens 4
, Summary Van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity (2013)
peer-production” soon dwindled. The development of business models, balancing user
participation against for-profit strategies, posed a real challenge to the digital media industry.
Commoditizing relationships – turning connectedness into connectivity by means of
coding technologies – is what corporate platforms discovered as the golden egg their geese
produced. Besides generating content, peer production yields a valuable by-product that users
often do not internationally deliver: behavioural and profiling data. Under the guise of
connectedness, they produce a precious resource: connectivity.
Not surprisingly, the rapid rise of social media has also triggered a standoff between
social media adepts and staunch critics. On the one hand, we find early enthusiasts who
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.
On the other end of the spectrum, we find two types of detractors. Political economists
assailed the incorporation of social media, labelling them as failed experiments in democratic
participation or dismissing them as dependent on a naïve belief in the possibility of
developing a new or alternative public sphere alongside the existing public, private, and
corporate spheres. Other critics of platforms object to users’ being doubly exploited, both as
workers – deliverers of data – and as consumers forced to buy back their own processed data
by relinquishing privacy.
Obviously, social media services can be both intensely empowering and disturbingly
exploitative; sociality is enjoyed and exercised through precisely the commercial platforms
that also exploit online social activities for monetary gains.
The Ecosystem of Connective Media in a Culture of Connectivity
In less than a decade, the norms for online sociality have dramatically changed, and they are
still in flux. Patterns of behaviour that traditionally existed in offline (physical) sociality are
increasingly mixed with social and sociotechnical norms created in an online environment.
Changes were implemented gradually, and while users got habituated to new features, the
norms for privacy and accepting monetization were stretched accordingly.
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 changing levels of acceptance. In addition, norms are
diffuse, as they have strikingly different effects on individual users, particularly users from
different generations.
Norms are part and parcel of a larger culture that is infused with historical
circumstances and political conditions.
The culture of connectivity is a culture inundated by coding technologies whose
implications go well beyond the digital architectures of platforms themselves. Buttons that
impose “sharing” and “following” as social values have effects in cultural practices and legal
disputes, far beyond platforms proper. Second, it is a culture where the organization of social
exchange is staked on neoliberal economic principles. Connectivity derives from a continuous
pressure to expand through competition and gain power through strategic alliances. And third,
the culture of connectivity evolves as part of a longer historical transformation characterized
by a resetting of boundaries between private, corporate, and public domains. Platform owners’
Lisa Jurrjens 5
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