The culture of connectivity:A critical history of social media

José Van DIJCK

Samyr PazMestrando em Processos e Manifestações Culturais

Johanna Francisca Theodora Maria "José" van Dijck (15 November 1960, Boxtel) is a new media author and professor of Comparative Media Studies and former dean of the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of recent books such as Mediated Memory in the Digital Age and The Culture of Connectivity.

Since 2010 Van Dijck is member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2015 she was elected by Academy members as the president of the organization and became the first female to hold the position.

In 2016 Dutch magazine Opzij named Van Dijck the most influential Dutch woman of 2016.* Vídeo: Platform Society

“Netizens”Within less than a decade, a new infrastructure for online sociality and creativity has emerged, penetrating every fiber of culture today.

CONNECTEDNESSX

CONNECTIVITY

CONNECTIVITYBy-product of making connections and staying connected online.Quickly evolved into a valuable resource as engineers found ways to code information into algorithms that helped brand a particular form of online sociality and make it profitable in online marketets – serving a global market of social networking and user-generated content.

PLATFORMED SOCIALITYProgrammed with specific objectives. This provides a customized serviceinstead of a utility. It is a commom fallacy, though, to think of platforms as merely facilitating network activities; instead, the construction of platforms and social practicesis mutually constitutive. Sociality and creativity happen while people arebusy living their lives.

CODING HUMAN CONNECTIONSComputers: liberation X opression.World Wide Web: 1991. Infraestructure and counterculture.Web 1.0: turn of the millennium, replaced dot.communism by dot.commercialism.Web 2.0: 2000s – “interactivity” and “participatory”.“Making the Web more social” – Facebook.Sociality coded by technology renders people’s activities formal, manageable, and manipulable, enabling platforms to engineer the sociality in people’s everyday routines.

2006 2010 2016

CODING HUMAN CONNECTIONSConnectivity is a quantifiable value.“Social”, “collaboration” and “friends” > The meaning of these words have increasingly been informed by automated technologies that direct human sociality. Therefore, the term “connective media” would be preferable over “social media”. What is claimed to be “social” is in fact the result of human input shaped by computed output and vice versa.Web more social > making sociality more technical > making online sociality salable.

CONNECTIVITY AS RESOURCEBesides generating content, peer production 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.Commoditizing relationships.Corporations who think of the Internet as a marketplace first and a public forum second.Users > workers and consumers.Transparency > apply to users only.

CONNECTIVE MEDIAThe power of norms, in the area of sociality, is much more influential than the power of law and order.Norms for privacy and accepting monetization.Culture of connectivity > 1. Coding Technologies; 2. Neoliberal economics; 3. Resetting boundaries between private, public and corporate.Ecossystem of connective media > a system that nourishes and, in turn, is nourished by social and cultural norms that simultaneously evolve in our everyday world.

DISASSEMBLING AND REASSEMBLINGDevelopment of technology. Mutual shaping of mycrosystems and ecosystem.Actor-Network Theory: helps disassemble microsystems. (Atores humanos e não-humanos se vinculam em rede e participam mutuamente da agencia. Limites analíticos e metodológicos , além de não levar em conta contextos culturais).Political economy: Manuel Castells – infraestructures contexts in which informational networks could grow into powerful industrial players.

PLATFORMS AS TECHNO-CULTURAL CONSTRUCTSPlatforms are computational and architectural concepts.Political stages and performative infraestructures.Mediator rather than an intermediary: it shapes the performance of social acts instead of merely facilitating them.Providers of software and hardware. Process (meta)data through algorithms and formatted protocols.

PLATFORMS AS SOCIOECONOMIC STRUCTURESOwnership, governance, business models.A company shapes its platform(s) as part of the larger constellation of competing and collaborating platforms.

FACEBOOK AND THE IMPERATIVE OF SHARINGSharing is a ambiguous term: it relates to users distributing personal information to each other, but also implies the spreading of that personal information to third parties.Used in contrast to openness, the word “privacy” conotes opacity, nontransparency, and secrecy.Owners and users have been negotiating the meaning of sharing from the very start.

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DEFAULTPlatform owners have a vested interest in complete openness on the side of users; the more they know about users, the more information they can share with third parties.The more users know about what happens to their personal data, the more inclined they are to rise objections.Users: empower and social capital.Beacon, Like Button, EdgeRank and GraphRank.Underneath this user-centered rationale of connectedness is the owner-centered logic of connectivity.

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DEFAULTResisting or subverting default settings requires both technological ingenuity and persistent motivation. Facebook has every interest in preserving its default settings that make information as open as possible. The fight with defiant users over information control is played out over the tiniest technological detail.

THE DEVIL IS IN THE DEFAULTTimeline – 2011: database structure to a narrative structure. When switching, every piece of data was set by default to “public”.Page Insight Data: enables marketers to acces real-time analytics.

WHAT YOU SHARE IS WHAT YOU GETThe platform has played na importante role in spreading (American) social norms into other national user communities worldwide.By joining the ecossystem’s bandwagon, many platforms attuned their corporate strategies to Facebook’s normative definitions of sharing and openness.

WHAT YOU SHARE IS WHAT YOU GETThe majority of users never bothered to read the terms they have click-to-agree.Putting the onus of user involvement while de-emphasing Facebook’s interest in comercial exploitation, the company’s claim to transparency is conspicuously one-sided.

WHAT YOU SHARE IS WHAT YOU GETPopularity rooted in relative connections between people on the basis of trust is translated into a automated, quatifable commoditie. *Black Mirror S03E01.Facebook’s business model is most certainly contentious balancing act between stimulating user’s activity and exploiting it.

SHARED NORMS IN THE ECOSSYSTEM OF CONNECTIVE MEDIA

What used to be informal social activities in the private sphere – friends hanging out together and exchanging ideas on what they like – have become algorithmically mediated interactions in the corporate sphere.Even if Facebook loses its cool as a platform, its ideology has spread so deeply into the pores of online sociality that its newspeak and mantras will reverberate for a long time.

LOCK IN: THE ALGORITHM BASIS OF SOCIALITYIn barely ten years, algorithms have come to punctuate everyday social acts.Peers pressure has become a hybrid social and technological force; connections between people inform automated connections and vice versa.Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube.Users acceptance and resistance.The current dominance of some platforms in the ecossystem is precarious.Uniform content that has no value in and of itself, but in the connectivity.

FENCE OFF: VERTICAL INTEGRATION AND INTEROPERABILITY

Gradual development of a few major platform chains: Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon.Big players who share some operational principles (popularity and neutrality principles, quick turnover, short-lived trend, etc.), while they differ on some ideological premises (open versus closed).Commercial and nonprofit are on the same space.A few big companies having too much control over people’s private data has become a serious concern.“Free”: “paid for” not in actual money but in user’s attention as well as their profiling and behavioral data.Engineering user’s desires.

OPT OUT? CONNECTIVITY AS IDEOLOGYFor many plugged-in, opting out is not a option: it would mean opting out of sociality altogether, since online activities are completely interwined with off-line social life.“Social” has become an umbrela term that hides more than it reveals, which is why I prefer the term “connective media”.Opting out of connective media is hardly an option. The norm is stronger than the law; if not, it would (not) be too hard for any regime to control its cetizens.We need to teach information literacy enriched with analytical skills and critical judgment.