What is a Critical Introduction to Social Media? Key questions + What is social about social media? ‘+ What does it mean to think critically? + What is Critical Theory and why is it relevant? ‘+ How can we approach Critical Theory? Key concepts Social media Marxist theory Critical theory Critical political economy Overview What is social about social media? What are the implications of social media platforms such as Facebook, Google, YouTube Wikipedia, Twitter, for power, the economy and politics? This book gives a critical introduction to studying social media, It engages the reader with the concepts needed for critically understand ing the world of social media with questions such as: © Chapter 2: What Is social about social media? * Chapter 3: How meaningful Is the notion of participatory culture for think- ing about social media?2 Social Media: A Critical Introduction * Chapter 4: How useful are the concepts of communication power and mass self-communication in the network society for thinking about social media? © Chapter 5: How does the business of social media work? * Chapter 6: What is good and bad about Google, the world’s leading Internet platform and search engine? « Chapter 7: What is the role of privacy and surveillance on Facebook, the world’s most successful social networking site? * Chapter 8: Has Twitter brought about a new form of politics and democracy and a revitalization of the political public sphere? * Chapter 9: What are the potentials of WikiLeaks, the world’s best-known online watchdog, for making power transparent? * Chapter 10; What forms and principles of collaborative knowledge pro- duction are characteristic for Wikipedia, the world’s most widely accessed wiki-based online encyclopaedia? * Chapter 11: How can weachieve social media that serve the purposes of ajust and fair world, in which we control society and communicate in common? This book introduces a theoretical framework for critically understanding social media that is used for discussing social media platforms in the context of specific topics: being social (Chapter 2), participatory culture (Chapter 3), communication and media power (Chapter 4), political economy (Chapter 5), political ethics (Chapter 6), surveillance and privacy (Chapter 7), democ- racy and the public sphere (Chapter 8), power and transparency (Chapter 9), collaborative work (Chapter 10), the commons (Chapter 11). Social Media and the Arab Spring 2011 was a year of protests, revolutions and political change, It was a year where people all over the world tried to make their dreams of a different society reality. Wael Ghonim is the administrator of the Facebook page “We are all Khaled Said”. He says that this page and other social media were crucial for the Egyptian revolutior “| always said that if you want to liberate a society [. . ] if you want to have a free society. [...] This is Revolution 2.0. [...] Everyone is contributing to the content’ Technology analyst Evgeny Morozoy, in contrast to Ghonim, says that social media do not bring about revolutions: the talk of Twitter and Facebook revolutions is “a naive belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication that rests on a stubborn refusal to acknowledge its downside” (Morozov 2010, xiii). Pointing, clicking, uploading, liking and befriending on Facebook would be “slacktivism” - “feel-good online activism that has zero political or social impact. It gives those who participate in ‘slacktivist’ campaigns an illusion of having a meaningful impact on the world without demanding anything more than joining a Facebook group" (Morozov 2009). For Morozov (2013, 127), Ghonim is “a man who lives and breathes Internet- centrism’ - an ideology that reduces societal change to the Internet. 1 http://technoraticom/politics/article/revolution-20-wael-ghonim-thanks-mark, accessed on July 2, 2013.Te Tr Social Media and the Occupy Movement 2011 was also the year in which various Occupy movements emerged in North America, Greece, Spain, the United Kingdom and other countries, One of their pro. test tactics is to build protest camps in public squares that are centres of gravity for discussions, events and protest activities. Being asked about the advantages of Occupy’s use of social media, respondents in the OccupyMedia! Survey? said that they allow them to reach a broad public and to protect themselves from the police (for the detailed results see: Fuchs 2013): * “As much as I wish that occupy would keep away from a media such as Facebook it got the advantage that it can reach out to lots of people that [...] [are] otherwise hard to reach out to” (#20). ‘© “All of these social media [...] Facebook, Twitter etc. helps spread the word but | think the biggest achievement is Livestream: those of us who watch or participate in change can inform other streamers of actions, police or protest moving from one place [.. ] to another. That saved many streamers from getting hurt or less arrests” (#36). ‘At the same time, the respondents identified risks of the use of commercial social media: ‘« “Facebook is generally exploitative, and controls the output of Facebook posts, the frequency they are seen by other people. It’s a disaster and we shouldn't use it at all. But we still do” (#28). “There have been occasions where the police seemed to have knowledge that was only shared ina private group and/or text messages and face-to-face” (#55). “Events for protests that were created on Facebook, but not organized IRL [in real life]. Many ‘participants’ in calls for protests on Facebook, but at least 70% of them [don't] [...] show up at the actual demonstration” (#74). “Twitter has been willing to turn over protestors’ tweets to authorities which is a big concern’ (#84), “Censorship of content by YouTube and email deletions on Gmail” (#103). “Yes, my Twitter account was subpoena’d, for tweeting a hashtag. The supboena was dropped in court” (#238). “Facebook = Tracebook” (#203). . Unpaid Work for the Huffington Post The Huffington Post (HP) is the most popular news blog in the world. Arianna Huffington started it in 2005, It has been based on the contributions of many unpaid voluntary bloggers (Fuchs 2014). In 2011, AOL bought the Huffington Post for 2 The data collection forthe OccupyMetla Survey took place from November 6, 2012 until February 20, 2013.1 conducted the research as an online survey. ts aim was to find out more about how Occupy activists use social media and what opportunities and risks of social media they see. The survey resulted ina dataset with N= 429 respondents.4 ‘Social Media: A Critical Introduction US$315 million and turned it into a profit-oriented business. The writer Jonathan Tasini, who had contributed to the HP, filed a $105-million class action suit against HP, arguing that it unjustly enriched itself from its bloggers’ unpaid contributions when it was turned into a business and acquired by AOL. Tasini stated: “In my view, the Huffington Post's bloggers have essentially been turned into modern-day slaves on Arianna Huffington’s plantation. [...] She wants to pocket the tens of mil- lions of dollars she reaped from the hard work of those bloggers”? What is the role and potential of social media in protests and revolution? Is social media use a form of clicktivism and slacktivism that soothes the con- science of concerned middle-class people who do not want to take risks? Is it a powerful tool of protest? What is the role of commercial interests, the state and politics in social media? Do activists and citizen journalists run the risk of being monitored and surveilled by the police and exploited by social media companies that turn the voluntary work of users into money? And if this is the case, then what are the alternatives? In order to answer such questions, we need to study social media critically. But what is social media? And what is critical thinking? 1.1. What is Social about Social Media? Questions that many people immediately ask when one employs the term “social media” are: What is social about social media? Are not all media social? These questions have to do with another question: What does it mean to be social? Information and Cognition ‘Are human beings always social or only if they interact with others? In sociologi- cal theory, there are different concepts of the social (see Chapter 2). Some say that all media are social because they are part of society and aspects of society are present in the technological artefacts we use. This means that if you sit alone in front of your computer, type a document in your word processor and are not connected to the Internet, your activities are perfectly social: the ideas you think and write up refer to ideas of other people and what is happening in society; the word processor has certain features and functions that were all designed by humans for certain reasons and under specific working conditions. So cognition is a social activity. The computer you use may have been assembled in China and the raw materials out of which its components were made may come from mines in Africa, You cannot see all the labour that goes into the computer, but nonethe- less it is a tool that was created in society by humans who experience certain working conditions. If we employ this broad understanding of sociality, then not just Facebook is social, but also television, the radio, the telegraph, posters, books, wall paintings and all other forms of information. 3 wowsorbescomsts/jffbercovici/2011/04/12/aot-hufpo-suit-seks-105:-this-is-aboutustice/,acessed on July2, 2013,‘What is a Critical Introduction to Social Media? 5 Communication Other people say that not all media are social, but only those that support communi. cation between humans. Communication isa reciprocal process between at leasttwo ‘humans, in which symbols are exchanged and all interaction partners give meaning ‘to these symbols, Computer-mediated communication did not start with Facebook and Twitter: Ray Tomlinson sent the first Internet email from one computer to the other in 1971. If we understand social activity to mean communication or symbolic interaction, then not all media use is social. Based on this understanding, it is not social if you write a document alone, but it is social to send an email or chat with a friend on Facebook. Communication is a basic feature of all societies and all human activity, We cannot live and survive without communication, just like we cannot sur- vive without food and water. Communication takes place routinely in everyday life. Community Some communications that take place repeatedly result in something more than just social relationships - they involve feelings of belonging together or friendship. Communication turns this form of the social into community. A certain share of the communications on Facebook is part of communities of personal friends, political activists, hobby or fan groups. But online communi- ties are not new; they existed already in bulletin board systems such as the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) in the 1980s. Collaboration and Co-operative Work A fourth form of sociality is collaboration or co-operative work. The research area of computer-supported co-operative work (CSCW) was founded in the 1980s and deals with how computers enable human co-operation. Collaborative work, as for example the co-operative editing of articles performed on Wikipedia or the joint writing of a document on Google Docs, is not new in computing, although the popularity of Wikipedia and wiki platforms such as Mediawiki, PBWorks, Wikispaces is a more recent development. CSCW was already the subject of aca- demic discussions in the 1980s when a conference series started with the ACM Conference on CSCW that took place in December 1986 in Austin, Texas. The concept of the wiki is also not new: the first wiki technology (the WikiWikiWeb) was introduced by Ward Cunningham in 1995, Information, Communication, Collaboration and Community are Forms of Sociality but What is Now Social about Facebook? There are different forms of the social, such as information, communication, communities and collaboration, When we talk about “social media’, we have 4 See hnp//openmaphbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/frstemailframehtml and http://openmaphon.com/~tomlinso/ ‘yf oti, accessed on july 2,2013,6 ‘Social Media: A Critical Introduction to be careful to specify which meaning of the term “social” we are employing. Therefore, studying social media is in need of social theory and social philosophy. These tools of thought allow us to come to grips with the basic meaning of terms such as sociality, media, society, power, democracy, participation, culture, labour, communication, information, the public sphere, the private realm, etc. that are often employed when discussing social media, but often poorly understood. All computing systems, and therefore all web applications, as well as all forms of media can be considered as social because they store and transmit human knowledge that originates in social relations in society. They are objec- tifications of society and human social relations. Whenever a human uses a computing system or a medium (also if s/he is alone in a room), s/he cognizes based on objectified knowledge that is the outcome of social relations. But not all computing systems and web applications support direct communication between humans, in which at least two humans mutually exchange symbols that are interpreted as being meaningful. Amazon mainly provides informa- tion about books and other goods one can buy; it is not primarily a tool of communication, but rather a tool of information, whereas Facebook has in- built communication features that are frequently used (mail system, walls for comments, forums, etc.). Social media is a complex term with multi-layered meanings. Facebook con- tains a lot of content (information) and is a tool for communication and for the maintenance creation of communities. It is only to a minor degree a tool for col- laborative work, but involves at least three types of sociality: cognition, com- munication and community. Chapter 2 focuses more in depth on the concept of social media. Understanding social media critically means, among other things, to engage with the different forms of sociality on the Internet in the context of society. If one compares the most frequently accessed websites in 2013 to the ones that were popular in 2000, then one sees that the most accessed sites in 2000 were MSN, Yahoo, Excite, AOL, Microsoft, Daum, eBay and Altavista,’ whereas in 2013 the most accessed websites in the world include Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo!, Baidu, Wikipedia, Windows Live, QQ, Amazon and Twitter, Blogspot, LinkedIn, Wordpress.‘ The difference is that these platforms now include social networking sites (Facebook, LinkedIn), video sharing sites (YouTube), blogs (Blogspot, Wordpress), wikis (Wikipedia) and microblogs (Twitter, Weibo). There are relatively new companies in the Internet business that did not exist in 2000. What makes sites like Facebook distinct is that they are integrated platforms that combine many media and information and communication technologies, such as webpages, webmail, digital image, digital video, discus- sion group, guest book, connection list, or search engine. Many of these tech- nologies are social network tools themselves. Social networking sites, sharing sites for user-generated content, blogs, microblogs and wikis, just like all other 5 According to alexacom, version from August 15, 2000, archived on http://web.archive.org/web/200008150 '52659/, wwwalexaresearch.com/clientdir/ web_reports/top_websites.nonclient.cfm, accessed on July 2, 2013. 6 According to alexa.com, version from February 25, 2013,media, are social in the broad understanding of the term as information. Some of them support communication, some collaborative work, content sharing or community-building. These latter three forms of sociality have, due to the rise of platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Wikipedia or YouTube, become more important on the World Wide Web (WWW). The discussion shows that understanding social media requires asking and engaging with a lot of theoretical questions. This book invites the reader to engage with theory and philosophy for understanding contemporary media, Social theory not only allows us to understand the meaning of concepts, it also allows us to ask important questions about the world and it can be fun to theorize and to discuss theories with others. And the best questions we can ask are critical ones, But what does critical thinking mean? And why does it matter? 1.2. What is Critical Thinking and Why Does it Matter? When discussing the question “What does it mean to be critical?” with academic colleagues, many have the immediate reaction: we are all critical because we ask critical questions and criticize the work of our academic colleagues. Scholars who characterize themselves as critical thinkers or critical theorists often ques- tion these claims. They emphasize the term “critical” and the need for being critical in order to stress that in their view not everyone is critical and that a Jot of thought (academic or not) is uncritical. Their basic argument is that not all questions really matter to the same extent for society and that those whom they call uncritical or administrative researchers often focus on questions and research that is irrelevant, or even harmful, for improving society in such away that all can benefit. They are concerned with questions of power. Power Power is a complex concept, discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, that focuses on communication power. Power has to do with who controls society, who is tak- ing important decisions, who owns basic resources, who is considered as being influential, who has the reputation to influence and change society, who is an opinion maker, or who defines dominant norms, rules and values. The question “Who is in power?" immediately begets the question “And who lacks the capacity to influence and change things?”. Power asymmetries mean that there are groups of people who benefit in society at the expense of others, by using them for their own ends and deriving advantages that do not benefit society as a whole or those who are being used. It makes a difference whether one asks questions about society with a con- cern for power or not. Let’s come back to the topic of social media. One can ask a lot of questions that ignore the topic of power. For example:8 Social Media: A Critical Introduction © Who uses social media? ‘For what purposes are social media used? © Why are they used? + About what do people communicate on social media? © What are the most popular social media? «How can politicians and parties best use social media for obtaining more votes in the next elections? * How can companies use social media for improving their advertisements and public relations so that they make more profits? * How much average profit does one click on a targeted ad that is presented on Facebook or Google bring a company? * How can a company make profit by crowdsourcing work to users and employing free and open source software? Such questions are not uncommon, but rather quite typical. Yet they include two problems. First, many of them ignore the topic of power. They do not ask the questions who benefits and who has disadvantages from the use of social media, the Internet and ICTs (information and communication technologies) and how the benefits of some are based on the disadvantages of others. Second, such ques- tions are based on a particularistic logic: they are concerned with how certain groups, especially companies and politicians, can benefit from social media and ignore the question of how this use benefits or harms others and society at large. So uncritical questions ask, for example, how companies can benefit from social media, but do not discuss the working conditions in these companies - the wealth gap between the well-off, managers and shareholders, on the one hand, and the large number of the unemployed, the homeless and precarious workers on the other hand, and the rising inequality in the world, Let’s go back to the three examples of social media in the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement and the Huffington Post. What does it mean to ask critical questions in the context of these examples? Asking Critical Questions about Social Media and the Arab Spring © Which power structures are underlying contemporary revolutions and protests? * How do they influence the use of social media? * What are the realities, opportunities and risks of social movements’ social media use? * Does the corporate character of platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube negatively impact social movements’ use? * Ifso, how?What is a Critical Introduction to Social Media? 9 How do social movements try to establish and use alternative, non-profit and non-commercial social media? What are the advantages and potentials of such platforms in contrast to for-profit platforms? Which problems and limits do such alternative platforms face in capitalist society, in which the control of resources (money, time, attention, influence, etc.) is asymmetrically distributed? Is there a risk that governments monitor social movements’ social media use and use the obtained data for repressing, torturing or blackmailing activists? Which forms of economic and political censorship of social media are there, how do they work and what needs to be done to fight against them? Asking Critical Questions about Social Media and the Occupy Movement What kind of movement is Occupy and how does it relate to the power structures of contemporary society? What are the realities, opportunities and risks of Occupy’s social media use? Which potentials for creating a public sphere in protests does the use of livestreams and alternative social media have in protests? How do governments try to monitor the social media use of activists and why is this problematic? How can activists best handle the contradiction between increased pub- lic visibility and increased police surveillance that shapes Occupy’s social media use best? What is activists’ perceived role of social media in the Occupy movement? How do they assess the empowering and limiting aspects of social media? Which advantages and disadvantages do Occupy activists see in rela- tion to the movements’ use of commercial digital media and alternative, non-commercial, non-profit digital media? Asking Critical Questions about Unpaid Work for the Huffington Post * What is a commodity and and what is the process by which something is turned into a commodity (=commodification)? * How does commodification work on social media such as the Huffington Post? © What is the role of advertising in these models? What is the role of users’ activities in these models? © Why is commodification in general, and on social media in particular, problematic?10 Social Media: A Critical Introduction What are the negative implications of crowdsourcing and targeted advertising? © What does exploitation of labour mean? «In what way is the labour of users on social media exploited? How can the use of Facebook be exploited labour even though | am not paid for it, I do it in my free time and I find that it is a fun activity that is helpful in my everyday life? How can Facebook use be labour even though itis so different from working ina coal mine and feels more like singing a song with friends at a campfire? Can something be exploitation even though it does not feel like exploita- tion and is fun? Do users actually think about corporate social media use as labour? Do they see any problems? If so, what problems? If not, why not? How do trade unions, data protection agencies, privacy advocates, con- sumer protection groups and social movements react to the existence of this digital labour? Are there any alternatives to commercial social media? What are the opportunities and limitations of alternative social media? The list of questions is exemplary and far from complete. It shows that many critical questions can be asked about social media and need to be asked, Thinking critically about society and the media is concerned with creating structures of society and the media where everyone can benefit. 1.3. What is Critical Theory? Critical theory is a specific form of critical thinking. Why is it relevant for understanding computer technologies? The history of communication and transport technologies is not a progres- sive success story. Although many people today benefit in mutual ways from using books, telephones, trains, cars, television, radio, computers, the Internet, or mobile phones, the history of these technologies is deeply embedded into the his- tory of capitalism, colonialism, warfare, exploitation and inequality. Winseck and Pike (2007) show, with the example of the global expansion of cable and wireless companies (such as, for example, Western Union, Commercial Cable Company, Atlantic Telegraph Company or Marconi) in the years 1860-1930, that there was a distinct connection between communication, globalization and capitalism. Edwin Black (2001) has shown in his book JBM and the Holocaust that by selling punch card systems to the Nazis, International Business Machines (IBM) assisted them in their attempt to extinguish the Jews, ethnic minorities, communists, socialists, gay people, the handicapped and others. The Nazis used these systems for num- bering the victims, storing and processing where they should be brought, what should happen to them, and for organizing their transport to extermination camps