Engineering Sociality in a Culture of Connectivity

Chapter One focused on the necessity of a critical history concerning the rise of social media. As José van Dijck (2013) explained, "By exploring technical, social, economic, and cultural perspectives on social media, we can elucidate how recent changes in our global media landscape have profoundly affected—if not driven—our experience of sociality" (p. 5).

Van Dijck stated that the World Wide Web began in 1991 and opened the book with the origin story of information exchange and the monetization of that information. Web 2.0 was created to renegotiate digital space and the information contained within that space, but over time, the public ceded control to corporations that promised transparency and free exchange. Websites like Blogger (1999), Wikipedia (2001), MySpace (2003), Facebook (2004), Flickr (2004), YouTube (2005), and Twitter (2006) offered tremendous insight into the intentions of their creators as opposed to the platforms we currently see. So influential have these sites become that APIs and entire digital ecosystems have been built and depend on them for sustainability.

In an effort to break down the nature of social media into a manageable space to analyze, van Dijck categorized four types of platforms according to their functions:

• Social Network Sites (SNSs): promote interpersonal contact (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Foursquare).
• User-Generated Content (UGC): supports creativity, cultural exchange, content between professionals and amateurs (YouTube, Flickr, MySpace, and Wikipedia).
• Trading and Marketing Sites (TMSs): selling of products (Amazon, eBay, Groupon, and Craigslist).
• Play and Game Sites (PGSs): playing of games via SNSs or UGC (FarmVille, CityVille, The Sims Social, and Angry Birds).

The book primarily focused on SNSs and UGC in an effort to foreground the origins of social media and Web 2.0.

Central to this focus was her examination of companies whose original intentions may have been good, but have clearly strayed. She used Google's "Do no evil" and Facebook's "Making the Web more social" along with its CEO Mark Zuckerberg's declaration for making the web more transparent as examples of an ideal conception for Web 2.0 and online communities. For van Dijck (2013), connectivity through corporations was a resource to be exploited and used for profit as the Internet has become "a marketplace first and a public forum second" (p. 16). While such spaces may have originally been created to promote public discourse and the sharing of content, now there is a monetary value attached to that content and the user.

This chapter introduces a rather singular viewpoint concerning the history and concepts regarding Web 2.0, but it fails to examine the exact nature of user-generated content and the design elements that separate Web 1.0 from Web 2.0—elements that are extremely important for social media users/researchers who also look at how content was shaped by design and not the other way around. A more functional analysis would have provided some insight into the origins of these basic constructs and made a better connection to the platforms discussed later in the book.