Understanding Social Media Logic
José van Dijck,Thomas Poell +1 more
TLDR
In this article, the authors examine the intricate dynamic between social media platforms, mass media, users, and social institutions by calling attention to social media logic, the norms, strategies, mechanisms, and economies underpinning its dynamics.Abstract:
Over the past decade, social media platforms have penetrated deeply into the mechanics of everyday life, affecting people's informal interactions, as well as institutional structures and professional routines. Far from being neutral platforms for everyone, social media have changed the conditions and rules of social interaction. In this article, we examine the intricate dynamic between social media platforms, mass media, users, and social institutions by calling attention to social media logic—the norms, strategies, mechanisms, and economies—underpinning its dynamics. This logic will be considered in light of what has been identified as mass media logic, which has helped spread the media's powerful discourse outside its institutional boundaries. Theorizing social media logic, we identify four grounding principles—programmability, popularity, connectivity, and datafication—and argue that these principles become increasingly entangled with mass media logic. The logic of social media, rooted in these grounding principles and strategies, is gradually invading all areas of public life. Besides print news and broadcasting, it also affects law and order, social activism, politics, and so forth. Therefore, its sustaining logic and widespread dissemination deserve to be scrutinized in detail in order to better understand its impact in various domains. Concentrating on the tactics and strategies at work in social media logic, we reassess the constellation of power relationships in which social practices unfold, raising questions such as: How does social media logic modify or enhance existing mass media logic? And how is this new media logic exported beyond the boundaries of (social or mass) media proper? The underlying principles, tactics, and strategies may be relatively simple to identify, but it is much harder to map the complex connections between platforms that distribute this logic: users that employ them, technologies that drive them, economic structures that scaffold them, and institutional bodies that incorporate them.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Datafication, dataism and dataveillance: Big Data between scientific paradigm and ideology
TL;DR: This article deconstructs the ideological grounds of datafication, a ideology rooted in problematic ontological and epistemological claims that shows characteristics of a widespread secular belief in the context of a larger social media logic.
Book ChapterDOI
The Affordances of Social Media Platforms
Taina Bucher,Anne Helmond +1 more
TL;DR: The concept of affordance as a key term for understanding and analysing social media interfaces and the relations between technology and its users is discussed in this paper, where five different ways in which affordance has been conceptualized and subsequently employed to analyse social media in particular.
Journal ArticleDOI
Response to Ellen Mickiewicz's review of When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina
TL;DR: Mickiewicz has done an excellent job of presenting the key elements of our argument and empirical analysis about why the mainstream press proved incapable of independent news framing at critical junctures in the Iraq War.
Journal ArticleDOI
Governance by algorithms: reality construction by algorithmic selection on the Internet
Natascha Just,Michael Latzer +1 more
TL;DR: It is argued that, compared to reality construction by traditional mass media, algorithmic reality construction tends to increase individualization, commercialization, inequalities, and deterritorialization and to decrease transparency, controllability, and predictability.
References
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