There are currently 2.6 billion users of online social networks, up from 0.9 billion in 2010, and set to grow to 3 billion by 2020, which will represent a trebling of the number of users over this current decade (1); and the fact that it is mainly younger users who are embracing these technologies suggests that new social media (NSM) platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and the many and varied Google applications are set to become ever more tightly woven into the social fabric of our day to day lives.
‘Moral panics’ aside, there is an overwhelming tendency (evidenced primarily in their widespread adoption) to think of social media in overwhelmingly positive terms, with proponents focusing on the potential for NSM platforms to encourage innovation, co-creation, decentralization, community engagement, and of course a medium through which users can explore and express their identities, and people obviously spend a lot of time creating and reflecting on the content they ‘put out’ on social media; and on the reactions (through likes etc.) they get from others in relation to that content.
HOWEVER, for the most part, social media reflexivity is, not particularly ‘deep’: that is we may spend a lot of time reflecting on the content we put out, and modifying that content (and our own self-concepts) on the basis of the feedback we receive from others, but we don’t generally spend that much time reflecting on the ‘structural’ features of the various social media platforms themselves, on how these platforms are embedded into power relations in wider society, or on how these platforms are transforming the way we think about the nature of the ‘self’ and ‘others’ at a deeper, philosophical level.
Critical social theorists argue that if we ‘drill down’ into the ‘deeper structures’ which lie behind social media platforms and take an in-depth look at how people are incentivised to act through social media, then we find that rather than opening up opportunities for all, these platforms in fact reinforce existing unequal power relations, and rather than encouraging community engagement and co-creation, people are incentisivesed to act as selfish individuals.
HOWEVER, these trends are both just tendencies towards rather than determining factors, and so it’s my hope that by highlighting such tendencies, people will be more able to resist them and use social media in positive ways, which is perfectly possible!
Web 2.0. And the positive spin around New Social Media
The origins of social media are fundamentally tied up with the term/ concept of ‘web 2.0’, a term which was popularized by Tim O’Reilly in 2005 (2005) , who identified the following main characteristics of web 2.0:
To provide a more formal definition (O’Reilly 2005):
Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remizing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an ‘architecture of participation’... to deliver rich user experiences’.
Christian Fuchs (2017) notes that these industry derived definitions of Web 2.0, focus purely on the positive sides of social media, and that we should be very skeptical of such conceptualizations, not least because of the historical context in which web 2.0. and social media evolved...
Social Media emerged out of the crisis of capitalism….
Allen (2012) and Sholz (2008) argue that new social media are only ‘new’ at the level of usage (in that platforms such as Facebook have become more popular since the mid 2000s), however, at the level of underlying power relations in terms of capital flows, nothing has changed….. new social media are based on the same systems of the extraction of surplus value and capital accumulation.
Fuchs (2017) suggests that we need to understand new social media in specific historical context: they were born out of a ‘crisis of capitalism’: namely the bursting of the dot com bubble at the turn of the millennium, and he sees them as primarily a means of overcoming this crisis and establishing new spheres and models of capital accumulation for the corporate internet economy.
Fuchs argues that all of the ‘buzz’ about democratisation and co-creation surrounding New Social Media was really just a smokescreen, whereas in reality, such talk was really about attracting new investors and new economic models following the dot com bust.
Seven reasons to be skeptical about social media optimism
Nearly 20 years on from the origins of NSM, there is plenty of evidence suggesting that we need to be critical about its Utopian potentials. Below I summarize seven different threads of critique, each of which I will explore in much more depth in future posts.
ONE: Most forms of New Social Media are based on the exploitation of free digital labour:
Effectively prosumers produce content for free, creating a sort of ‘digital commons’ - the owners of the platforms then use those commons to sell advertising space/ time, thus extracting surplus value from the prosumers. It is true that some people (e.g. Zoella) do very nicely out of their blogs and vlogs, but this only happens through a process of ‘corporate imperialism’: such people have to ‘tow the line of the Corporations controlling the platforms, they cannot be too ‘critical’.
TWO: Precariousness of Income
Lovink (2008) sees internet users as a ‘creative precarious underclass’, always dependent on the platforms they establish themselves on, but having no real power to control the underlying workings of these platforms.
The case of YouTube recently demonetizing every account with fewer than 1000 subscribers is a case in point: a move which effectively took away the second incomes of thousands of YouTube users; and I am personally painfully aware of how precarious my own advertising income is from WordPress, as I outlined in this recent post.
THREE: Self-ish promotion
New Social Media encourage the ‘branding of the self’ and the application of advertising and marketing to the self, and the infiltration of these logics into relationships and social interaction such that they encourage competitive individualism - ‘self-promotion, branding and one’s own individual status’ come first and social relations with others second. (See especially Marwick 2013 on this point).
FOUR: The quantification of self-esteem
Related to (but IMO different to the above point) - one’s status on these platforms becomes quantified and individualised - NSM encourage one to seek one’s self-worth in terms of the number of likes or followers one has rather than the quality of interaction with people (or anything one might co-produce with other people).
FIVE: Busy lives…
Participation in social media platforms is generally based on an ideology of activity and creativity… in order to be successful on such platforms, you need to be constantly creating new content. There is little time for ‘calm and collected’.
SIX: Engineered, instrumental sociality
New Social Media often encourage a simplistic notion of participation that is quite shallow, not very committed and often apolitical. Rushkoff (2010) suggests that we might be ‘optimising humans for machinery, because the social is optimal… we have stopped thinking of the social as a problem, and now have an amoral attitude towards it where we see considering the social as an option.
SEVEN: New forms of social inequality
(Van Dijk 2013) argues that NSM engineer social connections such that they automate the social, thus making ‘sociality technical’.... Thus those with the technical expertise gain greater control to shape society than those without. New forms of inequality arise as a result.
Final Thoughts
NB - None of the authors cited above are suggesting that social media are deterministic: they do not simply ‘cause’ individuals to be selfish and apolitical (for example), rather they encourage us to act in the above seven ways. It is perfectly possible for individuals to resist acting in a self-obsessed manner and to genuinely use social media for good, or to resist using it altogether, of course!
Sources:
Fuchs, Christian (2017) Social media: A critical introduction. London: Sage.
Lovink, Geer (2008) Zero comments: Blogging and critical internet culture. New York: Routledge.
Marwick, Alice (2013) Status Update: Celebrity, publicity and branding in the social media age. New York: Yale University Press.
Rushkoff, Douglas (2010) Programme or be programmed: Ten commands for a digital age. New York: OR Books.
Image Source (1) - Statistica - Number of worldwide network users from 2010 to 2021