Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction PDF

Cibercultura, Internet e Redes Sociais Global DESIGN | IADE 1º ano | 1º semestre Vai mais à frente © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos 2 reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction...

Cibercultura, Internet e Redes Sociais Global DESIGN | IADE 1º ano | 1º semestre Vai mais à frente © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos 2 reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction What are Social Networks? A Chronology © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction SOCIAL MEDIA. A DEFINITION Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of content, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of social media arise due to the variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available, there are some common features: 1- Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications. 2- User-generated content—such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions—is the lifeblood of social media. 3- Users create service-specific profiles for the website or apps that are designed and maintained by the social media organization. 4 - Social media helps the development of online social networks by connecting © Copyright a Todos Universidade Europeia. user's os direitos profile with those of other individuals or groups. reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction The term social in regard to media suggests that platforms are user-centric and enable communal activity. As such, social media can be viewed as online facilitators or enhancers of human networks—webs of individuals who enhance social connectivity. Users usually access social media services through web-based apps on desktops or download services that offer social media functionality to their mobile devices (e.g. smartphones and tablets). As users engage with these electronic services, they create highly interactive platforms in which individuals, communities, and organizations can share, co-create, discuss, participate, and modify user- generated or self-curated content posted online. Since the dramatic expansion of the Internet, digital media can be used to represent or identify a culture. © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction Additionally, social media are used to document memories, learn about and explore things, advertise oneself, and form friendships along with the growth of ideas from the creation of blogs, podcasts, videos, and gaming sites. This changing relationship between humans and technology is the focus of the emerging field of technological studies. Some of the most popular social media websites, with more than 100 million registered users, include Twitter, Facebook (and its associated Messenger), WeChat, ShareChat, Instagram, QZone, Weibo, VK, Tumblr, Baidu Tieba, and LinkedIn. Depending on interpretation, other popular platforms that are sometimes referred to as social media services include YouTube, QQ, Quora, Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, LINE, Snapchat, Pinterest, Viber, Reddit, Discord, TikTok, Microsoft Teams, and more. © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos Wikis are examples of collaborative content creation. reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction Social media outlets differ from traditional media (e.g. print magazines and newspapers, TV, and radio broadcasting) in many ways, including quality, reach, frequency, usability, relevancy, and permanence. Additionally, social media outlets operate in a dialogic transmission system - many sources to many receivers - while traditional media outlets operate under a monologic transmission model - one source to many receivers. For instance, a newspaper is delivered to many subscribers, and a radio station broadcasts the same programs to an entire city. Observers have noted a wide range of positive and negative impacts when it comes to the use of social media. Social media can help to improve an individual's sense of connectedness with real or online communities and can be an effective communication (or marketing) tool for corporations, entrepreneurs, non-profit organizations, advocacy groups, political parties, and governments. Observers have also seen that there has been a rise in social movements using social media as a tool for communicating and organizing in times of political © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos unrest. reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction Definition and features The idea that social media are defined simply by their ability to bring people together has been seen as too broad, as this would suggest that fundamentally different technologies like the telegraph and telephone are also social media. The terminology is unclear, with some early researchers referring to social media as social networks or social networking services in the mid-2000s. A more recent review in the area identified four common features unique to then- current social media services: 1- Web 2.0 Internet-based applications 2- User-generated content 3- User-created self profiles 4- Social networks formed by connections between profiles, such as followers or groups © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction Mobile social media refers to the use of social media on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers. Mobile social media are useful applications of mobile marketing because the creation, exchange, and circulation of user-generated content can assist companies with marketing research, communication, and relationship development. Mobile social media differ from others because they incorporate the current location of the user (location-sensitivity) or the time delay between sending and receiving messages. © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction Mobile social media According to Andreas Kaplan, mobile social media applications can be differentiated among four types: Space-timers (location and time-sensitive): Exchange of messages with relevance mostly for one specific location at one specific point in time (e.g. Facebook Places, WhatsApp, Telegram, Foursquare) Space-locators (only location sensitive): Exchange of messages with relevance for one specific location, which is tagged to a certain place and read later by others (e.g. Yelp, Qype, Tumblr, Fishbrain) Quick-timers (only time sensitive): Transfer of traditional social media mobile apps to increase immediacy (e.g. posting on Twitter or status updates on Facebook) Slow-timers (neither location nor time sensitive): Transfer of traditional social media applications to mobile devices (e.g. watching a YouTube video) © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session # Network Name Number of Users Country of Origin Social networks, a critical introduction (in millions) Most popular social networking 1 Facebook 2,910 United States services: 2 YouTube 2,562 United States According to Statista, it is estimated that, in 2022, there are 3 WhatsApp 2,000 United States around 3.96 billion people who are using social media around the 4 Instagram 1,478 United States globe. This number is up from 3.6 billion in 2020 and is expected to 5 WeChat 1,263 China increase to 4.41 billion in 2025. The following is a list of the most 6 TikTok 1,000 China popular social networking services based on the number of active 7 Facebook Messenger 988 United States users as of January 2022 per Statista. 8 Douyin 600 China © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction Social Media: A Phenomenon to be Analyzed - danah boyd Social media is a phenomenon, not the sum of the term’s parts. (...) As a buzzword, “social media” was far from being precise, but it still set the context and shaped the contours of a phenomenon rooted in the social, technical, and business dynamics of what would become Web 2.0. While the Internet had altered the software development practices and empowered a wide array of people to hack together code, many engineers saw something entirely different with Web 2.0. They saw the opportunity to shed the design, develop, and deploy strategy of earlier engineering efforts and to imagine new ways for front end and back end development to be integrated to enable an entirely new paradigm of interactivity. The development of social media tools brought with it new programming languages, database architectures, and architectural standards, all realized through the widespread and networked nature of the nascent technologies. As these tools evolved, they would become the foundation of another buzzword-laden phenomenon: “big data.” © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction When social network sites emerged, people were given a new structure for connecting to those around them. Through the ubiquitous “friends” lists, users could build social graphs that would allow them to tap into networks of people that they knew, admired, and found interesting. As social network sites evolved and the social graph became the basis for information access, social media emerged as the new paradigm for connecting to information, people, and ideas. Co-constructed by developers and early adopters, social media reflects the values and norms of a narrow section of the network of users who embrace the tools. As social media—and its adjacent technologies—has matured, it has given rise to new business models, technologies, and social critiques. While once viewed as a set of technologies built in resistance to the ugliness of the dot-com era, social media is now intertwined with neoliberal capitalism and data surveillance, prompting both excitement and horror among those watching from afar. © Copyright reservados Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction Over the last decade, social media has gone from being a dream of Silicon Valley technologists to a central part of contemporary digital life around the world. The most famous brands—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on—associated with social media have worked their way into everyday life. While these tools are not the first genre of technology designed to enable social interaction, they have been taken up around the globe at an unprecedented speed, revealing the extraordinary nature of the social media phenomenon. For this reason alone, it is imperative to analyze the phenomenon of social media. © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction Nick Couldry, “Social Media, Human Life” In the era of digital media, a normative turn is under way in communications research which is quite different from the more specialist concern with journalistic ethics, even though that debate too has been ignited by the new practices of surveillance and revelation that digital media make possible. The impetus to such normative reflection is twofold: first, an unprecedented deepening of how media outputs and media-related expectations are embedded in our lives. And, second, the increasing salience of social media platforms in the stimulation of economic demand on which capitalism depends. © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction Nick Couldry, “Social Media, Human Life” The second point is complicated: for it is because of the unprecedented supersaturation of life with media, and the resulting difficulty of generating economic value from the effectiveness of any one targeted message, that pushes value-creators toward generating value through data. That turn to data requires the generation of raw material to be tracked and measured—where else to turn than what we do in everyday life?—and this requires the orientation of our lives toward platforms for interacting online under conditions of continuous automatic monitoring. No one doubts the pleasures and benefits of some aspects of social media—what major innovation in history has had no benefits? The issue is balance, and how we get enough distance from our own embedding in social media to assess that balance. © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction My suggested strategy is to turn our focus away from the brute fact of social media (in all its diversity) toward, more contentiously, the type of “social” now being constructed through social media. What is it for media to be social? What should be the role of media institutions in the construction of the social? Is it merely about providing means for the faster and wider dissemination of whatever we want to send, or can we expect something different from media (the protection of silence, of distance, what Roger Silverstone once called “proper distance”)? What sense can we make of the idea—quite tangible today—that we “ought” to be social online, that we “ought” to keep up with whatever outputs today’s new social media apparatuses generate and require if they (not we) are to be sustained? And how can we make clearer sense of a different possibility: the possibility of being skeptical toward social media, but as skeptics engaged in rigorously researching “social media,” surely one of the most complex and problematic “objects” of our time? © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session World Wide Social networks, Web,aparticipatory critical introduction culture © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction Anastasia Kavada: Social Media as Conversation What I find most exciting about social media is that they have put the emphasis back on conversation. They make us see the media as both texts and contexts, as both the channels of representations and the spaces of interaction. This is what is particularly “social” about social media. Not that they facilitate conversations or that they are spaces of sociality—all media do and are in one way or another—but that they make conversations much more visible and easier to study. It is a refocusing of the lens that I believe is much needed within media and communication research. © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction For so long, this field was dominated by a view of communication as transmission. Carey (1989) notes the predominance of this perception within American culture, suggesting that it is “formed from a metaphor of geography or transportation” (p. 15). Communication is perceived as the beaming “of signals or messages over distance for the purpose of control” (Carey, 1989), and distinctions are made between senders and receivers, producers, and consumers of messages. There is, however, another view of communication that social media seem to be bringing to the fore—the notion of communication as ritual. For Carey (1989), this view is based on the metaphor of “sacred ceremony that draws persons together in fellowship and commonality” (p. 18). The emphasis lies on communication as conversation, a process through which people collectively experience and enact their world (Taylor & Van Every, 2000). This is a view that makes no distinction between producers and consumers © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos but considers everyone as a participant in the occasion. reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction Social media make it impossible for us to disregard how people create and remake the world collaboratively and in interaction. From the early days of social media platforms, when we were still calling them “web 2.0,” the debate focused on their architecture of participation, the ways in which their design shaped interaction and collaboration. Conversations are what social media are designed for and where they draw their power from. Data and metadata on how people converse with each other and interact with the platform lie at the heart of social media business models. Conversations are the main fodder of not only commercial but also state surveillance, with intelligence services engaging in bulk collection of data in the name of security. © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction Focusing on conversation provides us with a more nuanced view of how communication power operates. We usually think of communication power in terms of media effects, of the persuasiveness of messages and media representations, of their biases and prejudices, and of the ways in which these are shaped by political and economic interests. But once our attention turns to conversation, we see other, less overt ways in which power is wielded. This is when the power of the architects of conversations—of the platform designers, moderators, and administrators—becomes evident. It is a power that derives from their ability to shape and enforce the rules of the conversation. It comes not from telling people what to talk about but from regulating who talks about what, when, and where. It is the power of the context provider as opposed to that of the text creator and publisher. © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction Yet, an emphasis on conversation allows us a better understanding not only of power but also of empowerment. It helps us to investigate the ways in which people can enact a better world through communication, how they can prefigure and constitute the society they would like to see. It is communication not only as ritual but also as prefiguration, its purpose is not only to affirm community but also to imagine it, not only to preserve but also to create and innovate. These are the kinds of social media that I would like to see and what I hope they will become. © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos 27 reservados  OBRIGADA! Vai mais à frente © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados.  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Sevenfth Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session Social networks, a critical introduction © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados  Seventh Session World Wide Social networks, Web,aparticipatory critical introduction culture KEY QUESTIONS: x What is social about social media? x What does it mean to think critically? x What is critical theory and why is it relevant? x What is the difference between administrative theory and critical theory? x How can we approach critical theory? x How can we use critical theory for studying digital and social media? © Copyright Universidade Europeia. Todos os direitos reservados