Abstract
The book under review assesses the emerging new culture of socialization and the nature of the impact of social media on society and on relations between people and groups of people. The goals of the publication are twofold. One is to explore the ways in which social media changes human relations in the information age and the information society. Second is to conceptualize the emerging e-culture in general and the e-culture of human communications in particular. In assessing the social impacts of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and new media on developed and increasingly e-connected societies, the author makes a stimulating contribution to the growing body of literature on the trends of the modern world, coming from a substantively different angle in analyzing current trends and evolving changes.
José Van Dijck specializes in comparative media studies and the history of social media with a focus on the world of “social networking and online socialization.” She is a professor of comparative media studies at the University of Amsterdam and a former Dean of Humanities. She has authored several books on culture and media. In this volume, the author attempts to address, among other questions, the ways in which social media impacts the culture of socialization in the contemporary world.
The eight chapters of José Van Dijck’s book search for answers in a series of case studies of high-impact “connectivity platforms” that reassemble “sociality,” a term she widely uses. The starting point and conceptual underpinning of her approach is that “sociality” can be engineered and rebuilt as a new human “ecosystem” based on two phenomena: “techno-cultural constructs” and “socioeconomic structures.” In this context, she analyzes five major components of the emerging “ecosystem of connectivity media” which have made the most significant impact on modern society: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia.
The author argues, for example, that Facebook’s mantra and its “mission is not just a corporate one . . .” Its meteoric rise, size, and domination make Facebook the “first platform to dissect” as it has indeed had enormous impact on socialization and in “articulating norms for online social networking.” In justifying her second and quite controversial choice for analysis, Twitter, the author addresses three essential questions in the context of her research on the changing nature of sociality: What is Twitter [in terms of sociality]? What does Twitter want? and How will Twitter evolve? In the following chapter, the author argues that the impact of Flickr is in building “a social networking site with pictures at its core.” In Flickr’s early concept, “photos were not a by-product of sociality; online picture sharing was the core of a creative and communicative function.” In assessing the rise of YouTube, the researcher argues that it emerged initially as an “alternative at all levels . . . a radical overhaul of the traditional broadcast industry including its business model.” Yet, between 2005 and 2012, YouTube softened into “a complacent rationalized adult entertainment” and concurrently matured by “dragging television production into the ecosystem of connective media,” resulting in a “growing interdependence between television and video-sharing platforms.” In fact, the history of YouTube reflects “how this evolving microsystem” has become “part of a larger ecosystem of connective media, which in turn, arises from the matrix of culture.” In the meantime, Wikipedia, another major player in the world of global social media, emerged as a quite different concept and microcosm of new media’s global ecosystem, which eventually evolved “as a unique peer-produced microsystem” that is “different from commercially run platforms,” becoming a lonely independent non-commercial institution in a world dominated by commercial mechanisms and principles. Wikipedia’s history and evolution reflect that “online sociality mirrors offline sociality—a realm where the boundaries between for-profit, non-profit, and public space are porous, but an implicit hierarchy dominated by market forces eventually defines the conditions for development.”
Van Dijck finalizes her assessment of the impact of new media platforms on the emerging “ecosystem of connective media” by revealing that these platforms have not only enormously eased communication between people, but have also created “the complex tensions that underpin the normalization of connective media in everyday life.” She concludes that all these major super-platforms in the end do not function separately. These ICT platforms intertwine into the lives of ordinary people—and not only social media enthusiasts—as a single cyberspace or cyber-ecosystem and lock those people into the new e-universe. The implication is that all participants of this “connectivity” system have to follow certain norms of the newly created e-culture and, importantly, must stay constantly connected to remain part of the “community” and not drop out of the rapidly evolving and informatively crowded e-society and e-establishment.
The strength of The Culture of Connectivity lies in the author’s ability to take individual case studies of the new ICT platforms and not only analyze their meaning and impact on the individual areas of cyber-activity of netizens, but also conceptualize these assessments toward the next level. She intricately illustrates that these ICT platforms should not be perceived as a simple mosaic of individual software or entertainment that changes some areas of human activities, but as a whole that is radically revolutionizing the entire system of social relations, changing both the society and its culture. Unfortunately, the book has a very short conclusion and the author’s discussions of the changing nature of socialization and its impact on traditions and cultures seem somewhat incomplete. Overall, this is an interesting step toward conceptualizing the changing nature of information flow and social connectivity with well-thought-out arguments built around the most recognized cases of emerging ICT platforms. It represents an attempt to widen the discussion on the implications of these changes for the nature of social relations in the modern culture of information production and consumption.