The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media,by José van Dijck

Reviewed by: James Carviou, Assistant Professor, Missouri Western State University

As social media has emerged as a major topical area in media and cultural studies, there has been a need for a foundational text discussing the history and political economy of social media. Social media has provided extensive economic success for some innovative creators of these sites as well as groups that found ways to capitalize on them by creating apps, data-mining software, and personalized advertising. Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have virtually transformed interpersonal communication by blurring the lines of social connections and redefining how relationships are publicly constructed within a capitalist structure.

José van Dijck gets at this need by taking us on a journey through the origins of prominent social media sites and exploring their direct connection to individual and collective identification. The book starts by describing the importance of the origin of the social media site and then discusses how those sites have been influenced by users, business, and government. Van Dijck also highlights the complexities, and sometimes dysfunction, regarding the ways these sites maintain themselves.

Sociality is the major connective tissue in this book. Through sociality, van Dijck provides a lens for examining how these sites go beyond the complexities of the programming code into the ways they are directly defined and utilized by the public. These sites are created for a specific purpose, but consumers can give them additional life by defining their meaning beyond the code. Van Dijck also discusses how user input can influence the direct coding of each site by expressing open frustration and satisfaction. She uses the unique relationship that Facebook users have with the company to illustrate where voiced dissatisfaction has played a role in the site’s development.

The third chapter focuses on the rise and stabilization of Facebook as a prominent communication platform. The economic structure of Facebook has drastically evolved while paving the way for mass profitability both internally and externally. This chapter provides important information taken from statements made by Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook’s founder) and others about the nature of the platform throughout its evolution as a public forum including the transformative intentions and decisions surrounding Facebook’s IPO.

The fourth chapter reviews the history of Twitter and makes some predictions about its future. This chapter is beneficial for researchers who study Twitter and could also facilitate classroom discussions about the emergence and maintenance of the social network that has revolutionized the way people interact with media. Van Dijck’s analysis of the ability of Twitter to foster the creation of temporal communities that pop up and then quickly dissipate resonates with the bulk of contemporary scholarship on Twitter that is focused on analyzing communities that emerge surrounding specific hashtags (Bruns & Burgess, 2011).

From Twitter, van Dijck switches gears in chapter five to discussing a less successful social media site: Flickr. Never a leader of the social media pack, Flickr served as more of a blip in the radar compared to other more successful sites. This chapter does lay out an interesting case study for a social network that through various utility challenges ended up not having staying power. In contrast, Facebook’s photo offerings provide solid competition, and YouTube videos are freely streamed throughout the Facebook community as well.

Moving on to YouTube, chapter six focuses on how the site emerged as a prominent source for video publishing and sharing. YouTube is a social network in itself (owned by Google) that also promotes sociality through Facebook and Twitter. YouTube manages not only to attract a large audience to the site but also to facilitate a culture that voluntarily shares YouTube videos across other social media platforms. From a marketing perspective, this model allows for the audience to distribute and promote the content through identified social media sites. Thus, YouTube has become a dominant platform for publishing and sharing videos online.

YouTube may provide a solid platform for video, but that does not mean it should be celebrated uncritically for how the site is utilized by its blend of users and producers. While I would argue that this is an important text in the canon of social media research, there were some gaps in van Dijck’s description. Specifically, there seemed to be a lack of acknowledgment of objectification and how it’s historically situated within the context of social media. Van Dijck recognizes the vast potential of social media to serve as a public space that encourages free expression while identifying the negative aspects that come with this being directly linked to an established economic structure. However, any overview of social media platforms would benefit from greater examination of the complexity of social media sites in fostering and maintaining identity development and sustainability.

As a social media scholar, I was intrigued by van Dijck’s observation of the near impossibility to avoid being represented by a social network. According to van Dijck, professional success in today’s world hinges on a social media presence that provides a stamp of legitimacy. I can think of several examples where colleagues who lacked a social media site were hindered professionally or personally. In any sector of human life, there will always be the abstainers, but even they may be forced to create a social media site merely to stay relevant in many facets of today’s world. Van Dijck describes this as a form of opting out. To opt out as referenced by van Dijck means to completely isolate one’s self from the rest of the communicative world. This kind of isolation poses distinctive risks, especially as the definition of a professional increasingly stresses a concentrated brand that melds one’s professional and personal life.

Pushing in the opposite direction from those who opt out are the masses of individuals who demand opportunities to be more connected. Van Dijck gives credit to the important contributions in the study of connectivity such as the influential work of Jenkins (2006a, 2006b) that helped define how communities formed through and around media. These communities are celebrated for their collective ability to both reward those affiliated and extend the media experience. Social media has provided platforms for connectivity, but van Dijck would likely argue that the infrastructure is much more complicated than the formation of community. Instead, it extends between users, business, and government.

Overall, by mapping the history of social media, van Dijck argues that there is an erosion of public spaces that has led some to see a kind of utopian ideal of the public sphere through social media (Habermas, 1989/2006). Van Dijck notes that social media sites are celebrated as spaces that foster public discourse as she also acknowledges the problematic corporate structures that facilitate those same sites. Van Dijck interrogates the corporate structure of social media and allows the opportunity to see social media platforms more holistically instead of limiting analysis to the face value of these platforms as communication tools for sharing information. She advocates for open dialog and awareness surrounding the role of social media today and amongst future generations.

It is in the combination of historical research and the implications of political economy of social media platform development and evolution that van Dijck’s work makes the biggest contribution to the scholarly literature and makes the best argument for being considered as a foundational text in this particular area.