Abstract
We teach children to share their toys. We share meals with friends and family. And with the rise of social media, we can now share every facet of our lives—from political manifestos to cat videos—through the World Wide Web. Social media is inherently built on sharing. Although it is only one word in the title of his book, sharing is the crux of University of Westminster Professor Graham Meikle’s Social Media: Communication, Sharing and Visibility. “To share” is how we communicate through social media. “To share” via social media complicates the relationship between privacy and visibility online. And “to share” means that social media redefines what is mass communication.
Sharing can have multiple meanings: to impart information, to maintain relationships, to present a version of oneself, to support someone or something, to commune with others. But sharing is also a business model for Web 2.0: to share is to sell, to commodify. Thus, for better or for worse, all of these definitions of sharing consolidate on social media. Perhaps Meikle’s most valuable contribution in this book is his critical analysis of what it means to share in the sharing industry. Using Facebook as his focal point, he demonstrates how social media platforms are instances of symbolic power relations. How people adopt and adapt to social media is largely dependent on how these sharing platforms communicate use(s) to their publics. Through the linguistic use of words like “share,” “connect,” “like,” and “express,” platforms like Facebook push users to continue to reveal more and more content, in turn giving these companies more data points to sell to advertisers.
Furthermore, because these social media platforms become ubiquitous in use (e.g., one out of every five people on Earth has an active Facebook account), people feel compelled to utilize these platforms to “keep up,” so to speak. But this can be problematic, both in terms of who has access to social media to take part in these broad conversations, and in the power dynamic each social media outlet holds. As Meikle explains,
The capacity to communicate to various kinds of public is now much more widely distributed. But its distribution is uneven and unequal. Large media organizations with the resources on the scale of a Facebook are able to exercise disproportionate resources of symbolic power.
In addition to his discussion of the tensions surrounding the commodification and power dynamics of sharing, another strength in Meikle’s book is his explanation of the sharing and citizen journalism relationship. Citizen journalism complicates the traditional mass communication model. No longer is public communication done for publics. Instead, public communication can now be done by publics, and this shift is largely due to the rise of Web 2.0 and social media. As Meikle claims, “The news . . . is now something users can do as well as watch, listen to or read.” Citizen journalism gives Average Joe the opportunity to play a role in setting the news agenda and crafting the story, as well as increasing the timeliness and immediacy of news coverage. However, this new-found participation and speed can come at a cost. Using the case of Reddit during the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, Meikle shows how information accuracy can be sacrificed for information immediacy. On the subreddit findbostonbombers, users shared in the collaborative process of making sense of the event. Through this collaboration, Reddit users misidentified several individuals as the bombers, thus producing both slanderous and upsetting content to the misidentified individuals and to the falsely accused individuals’ social circles. Meikle argues for an ethics of visibility to help prevent this type of defamation. He claims that our responsibility as social media users is to take “conscious account of the ways in which we make others visible” when we Snapchat, retweet, tag, like, screengrab, or share, and to more carefully reflect on “who and what is valid for exposure.” This argument brings Meikle’s dialectics of sharing full circle, as he claims that for users to unite in an ethic of visibility can counter the sharing industry’s push for users to be even more visible and to disclose more information for these platforms’ own exploitation and profitability.
As an author of three other media books, an editor of two mass communication publications, and a longtime media professor, Dr. Graham Meikle certainly has the authority to speak on the topic of social media, and his expertise and vast knowledge base are apparent on each page of the book. It is difficult to critique such a thorough piece; however, a few notable areas could be strengthened in this book. First, the final chapter of Social Media seems to stray from the rest of the book. I appreciate his call for social media literacy, but this idea could have been better woven into the conversation of sharing dialectics and ethics that the rest of his book lays out so cleanly. Second, this book needs a stronger discussion on how mobility and smartphones have affected social media. Meikle touches on this topic in Chapter 1, but mobile communication and technology play an important role in chapters where they were not mentioned, such as the citizen journalism chapter. In all, Meikle’s book is informative and engaging. Although primarily targeted to academics, this book has implications for scholars and practitioners alike.