understanding

Understanding Social Media provides a critical and timely conceptual toolbox for
navigating the evolution and practices of social media. Taking an interdisciplinary
and intercultural approach, this book provides a clear and concise explanation of
the key concepts but also goes beyond specific brands, sites and practices to show

social media
readers how to place social media more critically within the changing media and
cultural landscape.

As an aid to understanding, key concepts in each chapter are illustrated by case

studies to give real-world examples of theory in action. Cutting across the many
understanding social media
dimensions of social media, from the political, economic and visual, this book
explores the industries, ideologies and cultural practices that are increasingly sam hinton & larissa hjorth

sam hinton & larissa hjorth

becoming part of global popular culture.

This book is essential reading for students of media studies and cultural studies.

Sam Hinton is a senior lecturer in media and the head of the discipline of Media
Arts and Graphic Design at the University of Canberra.

Larissa Hjorth is an artist, digital ethnographer and Associate Professor in the

Games Programs, School of Media & Communication, RMIT University.
 Understanding Social
Media

00-Hinton and Hjorth_Prelims.indd 1 25/04/2013 4:30:09 PM

 SAGE has been part of the global academic community
since 1965, supporting high quality research and learning
that transforms society and our understanding of individuals,
groups and cultures. SAGE is the independent, innovative,
natural home for authors, editors and societies who share
our commitment and passion for the social sciences.

Find out more at: www.sagepublications.com

00-Hinton and Hjorth_Prelims.indd 2 25/04/2013 4:30:10 PM

 Understanding Social
Media

Sam Hinton and

Larissa Hjorth

00-Hinton and Hjorth_Prelims.indd 3 25/04/2013 4:30:10 PM

 SAGE Publications Ltd © Sam Hinton and Larissa Hjorth, 2013
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 Contents

Acknowledgements vi

1 Introduction to Social Media 1

2 What is Web 2.0? 7

3 Social Network Sites 32

4 Participation and User Created Content 55

5 Art and Cultural Production 77

6 Social Media Games 100

7 Social, Locative and Mobile Media 120

8 Conclusion 136

Glossary 140
References 145
Index 157

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 Acknowledgements

F irstly, the authors would like to thank series editors Jen Webb and
Tony Shirato and Sage’s Mila Steele for their help in developing this
publication.
Secondly, we would like to thank the wonderful community of researchers
who are exploring social media for all your insights, inspiration and thoughtful
provocations. We would also like to acknowledge the support of the University
of Canberra and RMIT University, Melbourne.
Sam would like to thank his family, friends and colleagues in media, arts and
production, who gave him both the time and space to bring this book together,
and to his co-author, Larissa Hjorth, whose energy and intelligence pushed this
book through from draft to conclusion. Sam would like to dedicate this book
to his family: Nicole, Catherine and Sarah – you three continue to humble me.
Larissa would like to thank the Australia Research Council for a discovery
grant (DP0986998) that allowed her the time to conduct empirical research
for this book. She would also like to thank family and friends and dedicates
this book to her son, Jesper, and brother, Greg.

00-Hinton and Hjorth_Prelims.indd 6 25/04/2013 4:30:10 PM

 1 Introduction to social media

I t’s 9 p.m. and in the busy streets of Shanghai, a Chinese teenager takes a
picture via her iPhone and loads it up to her social network site (SNS),
Renren. Meanwhile, a high school boy in Manila logs on to his Facebook
page via his personal PC to say hello to his aunty who has just woken up in
LA. Elsewhere, two university friends in Seoul stay up late to play a social
media game in their local PC bang (PC internet room), while another univer-
sity student in Beijing logs on to FarmVille to play with their parents in a
far away village. In London, two high school students sit together editing
and commenting on their Facebook pictures in a local café. At the same
time, two old friends meet up face-to-face in New York for breakfast,
thanks to Facebook Places.
These fleeting moments of connection take place through flashes of light,
across deep-sea cables and microwave pulses that bounce invisibly between
orbiting satellites. If we could see these connections plotted around the globe,
the world would be illuminated like an exquisite decoration, shimmering
with the mediated social interactions of many of its nearly seven billion
inhabitants. Today, social media in its many forms accounts for a great deal
of this mediated activity. Social media bleeds across platforms (desktop com-
puters, mobile phones, tablets and on modern network-capable televisions),
across social and media contexts, and creates various forms of presence.
As smartphones continue to move into mainstream everyday life in many
urban settings globally, the demographics of social media are also changing.
Once upon a time, SNSs were just for the young (boyd and Ellison 2007), but
today young and old can be seen using SNSs in everyday life.
As SNSs evolve, the term ‘social media’ is also developing to encompass the
growing and often unwieldy sphere of contemporary online media practice.
For Melissa Gregg, social media accompanies a movement towards ‘presence
bleed’, ‘where boundaries between personal and professional identities no
longer apply’ (2011: 2). Underlying this concept is an array of questions about
the changing nature of what is public and what is private, and where work ends
and life begins, as social media infiltrates every facet of everyday life.

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 2  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

For danah boyd, SNSs are a genre of what she calls ‘networked publics’
(2011), that is, public groupings that are structured by the logic and reality
of computer networks. For Mark Andrejevic, the ‘networked sociabilities’ of
SNSs are ordered by a ‘separation of the user from the means of socialising,
thus permitting “storable and sortable” collections of social data’ (Andrejevic
2011: 311). In other words, the social activities of the user can be easily
adapted by social media companies into ‘user profiles’ that are then sold to
advertisers. This phenomenon has led media activist and theorist Geert
Lovink to argue for alternative models of social media beyond the stronghold
of mainstream companies like Facebook and Google (2012).
Understanding Social Media attempts to engage with some of these
complex debates about the definitions of social media. We reflect upon the
differences between SNSs and social media and how the rise in devices
such as smartphones and locative media services such as Facebook Places,
Google Maps, and Foursquare are changing the fabric of social media. We
acknowledge that social media is currently transforming definitions of both
‘social’ and ‘media’.
Social media impacts on the way in which we think, experience and
practise ‘online media’. It is no longer merely a form of teen socialising – it
has become an integral part of everyday life. In turn, this influences how
we reflect and engage with friends, family, colleagues and politics. Social
media further amplifies the changes in the media landscape and as it does,
it provides new avenues for dissemination and engagement. For some crit-
ics, social media is part of the rise of participatory culture which empowers
users (Jenkins 2006) to produce their own content, to become ‘produsers’
(Bruns 2005). For others, social media is part of broader ‘structural
affordances of a capitalist economy’ (Andrejevic 2011: 312) in which users’
free labour is exploited for the benefit of corporations (Kücklich 2005;
Andrejevic 2011; Lovink 2012). For still others, the relationship between
production and consumption has now altered and should not be understood
in the same way that sociologists understood production in an industrial
context (Banks and Humphreys 2008). The widely varying ideas, criticisms
and exhortations about social media reflect the complex social processes
that it engages with.
In order to address these issues, and provide a framework for understanding
the many different concepts and theories that inform the debates surrounding
social media, we deal with four recurrent themes throughout this book. These
themes are: empowerment/control, online/offline, the role of the local/
cultural (especially in non-Anglophonic contexts) and the ‘intimacy turn’.
The first two themes present as dichotomies. However, rather than seeing
them as an ‘either/or’ relationship, we suggest that the reality is somewhere

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 Introduction to social media   3

in the middle, and their apparent oppositions provide us with two ways in
which we can critically examine social media. So, social media is neither
entirely empowering nor entirely controlling. In fact, it is often both.
Likewise, it is important to acknowledge that social media contains offline
modes of engagement: it is never entirely just an online phenomenon. Given
that social intimacy has always been mediated (Hjorth 2005), the online/
offline tension suggests new entanglements for social interaction, notions of
presence and its impact upon public and private spaces. The relationships
that people have online are always shaping, and shaped by, the offline. This
may be as obvious as the recognition that our online friends are frequently
people we know from home or work. Or it may be as subtle as understand-
ing that how we behave online, who we choose to make friends with online,
and how we use our online time are all influenced by the reality of our
offline lives.
The final two themes – non-Anglophonic contexts and the intimacy
turn – respectively focus our attention upon the global and local nature of
social media. In this book, we want to emphasise the truly global nature
of social media by mixing Anglophonic and non-Anglophonic perspectives.
We seek to bring balance and emphasise the socio-cultural nature of social
media in light of the dominance of Anglophonic approaches (Goggin and
McLelland 2009). This not only serves to highlight how different cultural
perspectives change the meaning of certain concepts (like privacy, for example),
but also serves as a foil to help us better understand how our own cultural
practices involve assumptions and tacit knowledge. The local continues to
play a key role in the uneven global evolution of social media across a variety
of platforms, modes of presence, contexts and media.
Even intimacy operates upon micro (individual), meso (social) and macro
(cultural) levels as a glue for social relationships. When we refer to the ‘inti-
macy turn’, we are drawing attention to the way in which the concept of
intimacy can be used to understand some of the erosions between public and
private spaces, and between work and leisure in contemporary societies
(Berlant 1998). To put it another way, social media affords certain kinds of
social performance that involve making intimacy more public. For example,
when a Facebook user takes and uploads self-portraits, they may well only
intend these to be viewed by an audience of close friends even though they
have their privacy settings set to public. However, with Facebook owning the
copyright of the pictures, which are available to be seen by anyone with a
Facebook account, how the pictures would be recontextualised and further
consumed is complex and little understood. Alternatively, a user might
have their personal photo albums set to be viewable only by family and
friends, and so the viewing activity becomes a semi-public performance.

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 4  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

Such constructions of contemporary online identities reminds us of sociologist

Erving Goffman’s work on impression management, especially his use of the
analogy of the theatre stage (with its frontstage and backstage spaces) in The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). With the ‘context collapse’ of
social media (boyd 2011) it is not uncommon to see users having more than
one Twitter and Facebook account for different ‘public’ and ‘private’ con-
texts. Friendship and intimacy can be both amplified and commodified
through social media.
Through these four themes, Understanding Social Media explores the
fabric of social media today. By no means exhaustive, this book seeks to
provide case studies that allow for reflection upon the changing nature of
social media. It is structured into six main chapters, an introductory chapter
and a concluding chapter. Each chapter deals with a different subject and
its relationship with social media, and acts as a vehicle to explore the four
themes that run through the book.
Chapter 2 explores the rise of Web 2.0 as a way of contextualising the
ideological environment in which social media operates. Rather than pre-
senting Web 2.0 as a revolution in the way the web ‘works’, as some have,
we take a more critical stance. We examine the way in which Web 2.0 functions
as an ideology that declares the corporate world’s growing understanding
that the internet is not only mass, but also social, media. We then look at
both the empowering and the controlling elements that go hand in hand
with Web 2.0.
Chapter 3 engages with the undisputed icons of social media, social network
sites or SNSs. Here we contextualise SNSs within a tradition of internet
studies which has been conducting research and enquiry into the nature of
online communities for more than two decades. Without attempting to deny
their novelty, we emphasise that SNSs represent a continuity with earlier ways
of thinking about the social aspects of the internet. In this chapter, we look at
how in the field of internet studies, early notions of the internet as a series of
virtual communities have yielded to more recent ideas of SNS practices and
discourses as involving ‘networked publics’ and ‘intimate publics’. We also
engage with a number of other research approaches to SNSs in order to
define the field.
With a more thorough understanding of SNSs and some of the ways they
have been theorised in place, Chapter 4 returns to the themes of control and
empowerment we introduced in Chapter 2, and applies them to practical
examples of social media in action. In this chapter we look at how internet
participation can yield user created content (UCC) and how it has allowed
the figure of the ‘produser’ (Bruns 2005) to emerge. We describe this as
being a potentially empowering outcome of social media, and examine how

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 Introduction to social media   5

produsage is present in online activism and citizen journalism. We then

consider how the intimate turn has challenged traditional models for
journalism (Goggin 2011) and how participative media is destabilising the
established power structures of governments and what Dan Gillmor refers
to as ‘Big Media’.
Just as participative media is challenging the status quo in politics and
journalism, it is also challenging the established structures in other spheres
of life. In Chapter 5 we examine cultural production and focus on how
social media is precipitating and reflecting changes in the arts as a specific site
of cultural production. We look at how cultural institutions such as galleries
and museums are responding to new challenges by embracing Web 2.0
inspired notions of social media and how this is displacing their traditional
roles as arbiters of taste. We examine how artists are responding to
social media, and how the emergence of art-themed SNSs like deviantArt
are challenging conceptions of art production and consumption as well as
distinctions between the amateur and the professional artist. Finally, we
examine the cultural complication of what Jean Burgess has termed ‘vernacular
creativity’ (2007).
In Chapter 6 we look at games, a realm which has always been associ-
ated with the social. Here we look at how social media and games intersect
in the form of SNS games – games that are played within SNSs and take
advantage of features such as friends’ lists to add a social dimension to
their practice. While social games offer new types of places to play and
socialise, they also involve two forms of labour. First, time spent playing
online games raises money for the SNSs and game companies through
advertising and in-game purchases. Second, since social games are a way to
socialise, playing games is also a way to maintain contacts and thus provide
the means to maintain social capital. In this chapter, we explore the role
that social games play in maintaining inter-generational ties in China as a
case study. Specifically, we examine how social games act as a way for
youth who have moved away from home for work or study to maintain
relationships with their families.
In Chapter 7 we reflect upon the convergence between social, locative and
mobile media, and upon the uneven journey of the mobile phone’s role in
this. In particular we look at how location-based services (LBS), such
as Google Maps and Facebook Places, have converged with mobile and social
media through the smartphone. We look at how mobility has become about
more than the ability to take your social media with you as the popularity of
such devices has grown. Specifically, there are two results: the expansion
of cartographies enabled by LBS devices and mobile apps; and the development
of location-based social apps that blend social relationships with geography.

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 6  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

These changes reflect broader shifts in the relationships between identity,

place and community and raise important issues about privacy, but also
how we narrate and attach meaning to place. This chapter also considers
the changing role camera phones play in our understandings and visu-
alisations of place, especially as they become entangled in locative media
practices.
We end with a brief conclusion that summarises the main themes of the
book. While we have written the chapters in this book to flow from one
chapter to the next, the book can also be read randomly one chapter at
a time. When concepts come up in each chapter that have been covered
elsewhere, we refer the reader back to the relevant chapter. The major themes
we cover in the book – empowerment and control, online and offline, non-
Anglophonic contexts and intimacy – are woven into and across the chapters.
You are encouraged to cherry-pick the pieces in the book that interest you if
that method of reading suits you best.

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 2 What is Web 2.0?

Markets are conversations (Levine et al. 2000)

Focus on the user and all else will follow (Google).

Once the internet changed the world; now the world is changing the internet.
Its mainstreaming is well and truly over, and the forgettable Web 2.0 saga has
run its course. Now that society has overruled their freewheeling ethic, the
notion of the internet as an exceptional, unregulated sphere evaporates. The
moment of decision bears upon us: which side are you on? (Lovink 2012: 1)

As Lovink’s quote above suggests, the internet is coming of age. With more
than a decade of use in many parts of the world, the internet is embedded
in the everyday. But along with its uneven development across the globe
come issues concerning power and locality. There are many internets across
the world, accessed and used in a variety of ways. In this chapter we engage
with one of the major themes that underlie the emergence of social media:
the tension between control and freedom and between exploitation and
empowerment. We look at how business interests have attempted to com-
mercialise the internet and how, over the course of a decade, they have
shifted their strategies in order to align with how people are actually using
the internet. This transition to user-focused business models is represented
in the term ‘Web 2.0’.
To begin this chapter, we indulge in a brief discussion of the web, high-
lighting the key technical features and its relationship with the development
of the internet. When we think of the internet we must acknowledge that it
encompasses multiple definitions and experiences. Rather than ‘one’ internet,
there are multiple, intersecting imaginings and understandings of the
internet that are informed by the user’s background and experiences.
The internet is not a parallel universe (as was suggested by early writings on
cyberspace) but rather has always been a part of everyday life. Today, with
the popularity of ‘always on’ mobile media allowing users to perpetually surf
across social and locative media apps, the internet has become an embedded
part of mundane social life.

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 8  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

For Lovink, the rise of Web 2.0 heralded a new definition of the term
‘social’ that no longer evokes the possibility for democratic empowerment
and change as it did in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. Instead, the
‘social’ has been tamed (2012: 6). As Lovink notes, ‘[p]latforms come and go,
but the trend is clear: the networks without cause are time eaters, and we’re
only being sucked deeper into the social cave without knowing what to look
for’ (2012: 6). Representing internet culture as being ‘caught between self-
referentiality and institutional arrangements’ (2012: 2), Lovink observes that:

It is no longer sufficient to complain about network society’s dysfunctionalities in

terms of usability, access, privacy, or copyright infringements. Instead, we need to
investigate the slippery nexus between the internet’s reinforcement of existing
power structures, and parallel – and increasingly interpenetrating – worlds where
control is diffused. (2012: 2)

In order to understand the current tensions around the relationship between

internet cultures and the social, this chapter investigates the often-confusing
notion of Web 2.0 so that some clarity can be brought into our understanding
of social media. Unpacking social media necessitates us tracing how internet
cultures have shaped, and been shaped by, the social. In this book we try to
expand upon the often Anglophonic or Eurocentric assumptions residing
behind notions of the social, cultural and technological (Goggin and McLelland
2009). We are also trying to avoid repeating the historical narratives that
describe the development of the internet and the web because our goal here
is to provide a broad context. Internet and web history has been done well
elsewhere, and we strongly encourage you to read one of the recommended
texts on internet history if you have not already done so.
Once we establish a shared understanding of the web, we will then go on
to examine how business, through the problematic term ‘Web 2.0’, has
come to understand the internet as a place where people, and organisations,
engage with each other in a ‘conversation’. This realisation, which is a cen-
tral philosophy of Web 2.0, represents an important shift away from mass
media conceptualisations of audiences and a re-imagining of the internet
user. The last part of this chapter examines Web 2.0 and social media more
critically, engaging with the contradictions between freedom, control and
empowerment that, as Wendy Chun (2006) has so eloquently explained,
coexist in the reality of contemporary networked media.

BACKGROUND: WHAT IS THE WEB?

While the internet was developed from the late 1960s, it was not until the
early 1990s that the web evolved into what we understand as the ‘online’

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 What is Web 2.0?   9

today. Prior to the advancement of the web, the internet was made up of a
series of computers, connected to each other through numerous diverse
methods but sharing a common basic data transfer protocol called TCP/IP.
Each of the computers connected to each other via the internet were able
to share data with each other, and as the internet developed, the ability to
locate (or ‘discover’) resources became an increasingly large problem. The
web provided an interface that allowed people to discover and access inter-
net resources quickly and easily.
The TCP/IP protocol describes how data on one computer can be trans-
ferred to another computer across a vast network made up of anything
from physical copper wires to wireless satellite connections. TCP/IP does
not decipher the data, it just deals with lumps of zeros and ones – called
packets – and makes sure each packet is delivered to the correct computer
in the right order without any loss of data. On top of this protocol sit ‘appli-
cation protocols’, which are concerned with making sense of data. Email is
one such application protocol. The email protocols describe how an email
can be turned into small chunks of information, sent over the TCP/IP pro-
tocol to another computer and then reassembled as an email at the other
end. The web constitutes just one of these application protocols – a protocol
called HTTP, or hypertext transfer protocol – but because the web is the
main way in which we interact with the internet on a daily basis, people
often conflate the terms ‘internet’ and ‘web’. In day-to-day circumstances
that is probably fine, but when we think about these things critically it is
important to be precise.
For most people, the primary experience with the internet is through the
web browser – of which there are many different brands such as Firefox,
Internet Explorer, Safari and Google Chrome. While each of these browsers
has slightly different features, they all use the same HTTP application pro-
tocol for sharing information across the internet, and they are all designed
to assemble text, images, video and interactive components together into
one coherent interface. It is this interface – which we call the web page –
that constitutes our experience of the web. Because the browser is so good
at assembling different kinds of media and presenting them in a single uni-
fied interface, the web browser becomes most people’s entire interface with
the internet.
The other important piece of software on the internet that makes the web
possible is the web server. The server is a computer program that is con-
stantly running on a computer that is always connected the internet. The
software waits until someone contacts it, and then responds to this contact
by sending data – mostly text and images, but often also things like video or
perhaps interactive content like games. When you type in a website address

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 10  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

(called a URL or Uniform/Universal Resource Locator) you are typing in the

name of a computer on the internet (called a ‘host’) and also specifying what
resource you want to retrieve from that host. Clicking on a hyperlink does
the same thing – the URL is contained in the hyperlink. The server is a vital
piece of software, and although it can be installed and run on any computer
that is connected to the internet, most organisations purchase dedicated
computers which are optimised to run server software. A busy website may
in fact require several servers to share the load, although through various
techniques these often appear as only one site as far as the person accessing
the website is concerned.
It is essential to understand that communication between a browser and
web server is always two-way – the browser sends information about what
it wants to access, and the server responds with the information, or an
error message if it doesn’t have the requested information. This is different
from a technology like radio or television where the receiver never sends
information, only receives it. This two-way communication is fundamental
to the way the web works, and, as we will see below, this has a number of
important implications for the way that people can, and do, use the web.
In particular, this two-way process means practices such as participation
and collaboration become increasingly possible and relevant to the fabric
of the internet.
We could go into a discussion of the people and events that surrounded
the development of the web in the early 1990s, but there are other references
that do a great job of this (such as Bell and Kennedy’s The Cybercultures
Reader). An important factor here is the idea of hypertext – that is, the
methods of making text interactive – which was invented by Ted Nelson in
1963. By the 1970s and 1980s, hypertext was playing a pivotal role in computer
applications and design of the web.
For Tim Berners-Lee – the inventor of the World Wide Web – hypertext
was crucial in the designing of the web as part of a networked environment.
Berners-Lee’s contribution was to use hypertext to link texts that could
be located on any computer on the internet. This meant that texts could be
connected to other texts, forming a complex series of relationships that
Berners-Lee visualised as a web-like structure, hence the name ‘web’. Not
only did this make accessing resources much easier, it also made discovering
resources much easier. Before long people were setting up web servers that
presented lists of links to other web pages which contained information
they found useful.
The other important thing that the web provided was a single piece of
software for handling different kinds of media. Apart from text and hypertext,

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 What is Web 2.0?   11

the web can also allow computers on the internet to share images, audio,
video and other forms of media. When these are mixed together, the result
is a multimedia interface – a single view that can incorporate elements of
many different media. Almost every web page you access contains a variety
of media elements.
The web quickly became the quintessential ‘killer app’ – a phrase that
denotes a software application that is so successful that it sells the plat-
form that it runs on. Early killer apps sold computer platforms, and the
web, if seen in a similar light, has sold the internet, at least in a meta-
phorical sense. The growth in internet use is closely correlated to the dev­
elopment of the web and, although we should always be careful not to
confuse correlation with causation, it seems quite clear here that the web’s
ability to bring together multiple digital media sources through a single
easy-to-use interface was a significant innovation in the development of
the internet.

COMMERCIALISING THE WEB

In this section we explore the ways in which businesses have tried to com-
mercialise the web, and how an initial understanding of the web as a kind
of television station with many channels has given way to a more nuanced
definition. An important part of this shift has been the realisation that
media was no longer delivered in a sealed package to audiences but that
audiences played a participatory role in its creation (Jenkins 2006). The
commercialisation of the web is marked by this change in attitude, which is
described in business literature as the emergence of Web 2.0. For critics such
as Lovink (2012), this commercialisation not only profits from the labour
and creativity of internet users, but also simplifies the complex history and
definition of the ‘social’ into little more than a prefix for Web 2.0 practice
(i.e. ‘social media’).
We will come back to analyse the term ‘Web 2.0’ a little later in this section.
For now, we use Web 2.0 as a placeholder within a discussion about the com-
mercialisation of the web. Because Web 2.0 is a term that is fundamentally
derived from the logic of capitalism, marketing and commercialisation, it
seems reasonable that we should mobilise it in this critical examination. Thus,
in this section, we will arbitrarily break the discussion of the commercialisation
of the web into two segments, separated by the emergence of the term
Web 2.0. In deference to this term, we will start with the period preceding it,
a time that logically (from a software development perspective, anyhow), is
defined by the term ‘Web 1.0’.

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 12  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

WEB 1.0
Web 1.0 is a phantom term, constructed after the event. People did not speak
of Web 1.0 until after the concept of Web 2.0 had been defined. In this
respect Web 1.0 is an arbitrary historicisation, not much different from the
way historians used to break history into the time before the birth of Jesus
Christ (BC), and after (AD). Just as nobody walked around Europe 2,500
years ago talking about how nice it was to be living in 500BC, nobody talked
about Web 1.0 until the term Web 2.0 emerged. The tag ‘2.0’ evokes the idea
of software versioning and its associated marketing,1 and so suggests that
Web 1.0 was less evolved, less sophisticated and less refined.
In the introduction to this chapter we suggested that the web was a
significant factor in the rapid development of the internet. In a field that
is quite liberally scattered with hyperbole and invective, the one fact that is
probably fair to say is that the growth of the internet has been nothing short
of remarkable. With so many people going online so quickly, it was only a
matter of time before companies started to realise the potential of this
medium. Where there are people, there are markets, and the internet, which
is by design a two-way digital medium, had the potential to offer up some-
thing that mass media broadcast technologies could not: a source of highly
detailed information about audiences.
Inevitably, initial attempts by large companies to control this digital envi-
ronment were based upon their experience with traditional media. Television
used content to aggregate audiences with similar interests: a science-fiction
show attracted a certain demographic, soap operas another, and so on.
Consequently, an apparently reasonable strategy in the online space was to
accumulate attention, in a similar way, and then to sell products and services
to a captive audience. Attracting attention in the online environment proved to
be relatively easy, but turning that attention into money was problematic.
Commercialisation of the web has not been the straightforward process
that many early internet entrepreneurs felt it might be. Roger Clarke (1999)
has suggested that one of the key problems for those looking to make money
from the internet in the early days was a simple unwillingness of internet
users to pay for online services. Straightforward subscription models were
only marginally successful and many initial attempts to set up internet pay
sites were undermined by other sites that gave away information in a rush
to build large user-bases.
Web 1.0 emerged out of a desire to make money from internet users, or to
‘monetise’ them (to use the rather ugly word that is widespread in marketing
and business circles). It also built on pre-internet dreams which involved
computer services of some kind that would be delivered to the home: at this

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 What is Web 2.0?   13

time, the idea of the domestic computer service has been an ongoing theme
in the media, information technology and telecommunications sectors for
almost four decades (Haddon 1999). Attempts by businesses to establish
information networks in people’s homes before the internet emerged as a
viable domestic networking technology – such as Videotex – were largely
unsuccessful and generally very expensive mistakes for the companies that
backed them.
Nevertheless, undeterred by past experience, and spurred on by the phe-
nomenal growth rate of the internet subscription base, entrepreneurs courted
the internet as a commercial domestic network as soon as user numbers began
growing in the mid-1990s. Despite initial enthusiasm, the commercialisation
of internet users (as distinct from commercialisation of internet access, which
was very successful for major ISPs and telecommunications companies)
proved to be highly elusive.
Wired magazine claims that it was the first organisation to launch banner
ads on its website Hotwired in October 1994 (Clarke 1999). Other companies
followed this trend, and there soon began a rapid appearance of advertising
banners on search engines and other websites. This was a substantial
imposition on the slow, low-bandwidth connections of the time. Although
this kind of advertising has since proven one of the more effective ways for
websites to make money, these initial attempts were less than successful.
As Clarke pointed out:

The investments made in electronic marketing proved to be anything but

‘patient money’, however. Little over 12 months after Hotwired’s launch,
another Wired author wrote of ‘The Great Web Wipeout’, with such heralded
new businesses as The Spot, The New York Times site, and Hotwired already
licking their wounds. (Clarke 1999)

This initial failure was blamed on technological and economic factors. The
argument was that the web was simply not (yet) capable of maintaining
internet commerce, the network was not technically sophisticated enough
and slowed things down too much, and as soon as sites and services became
popular they crumpled under the weight of user attention. There was a
certain amount of truth to this, although there was an underlying lack
of interest in actually attempting to understand how people were using
the internet, and how this affected business models that were still treating
internet users like TV audiences.
As an extension of success enjoyed by some of the non-internet online
services that had emerged in the 1980s (Compuserve and AOL, for exam-
ple), some internet entrepreneurs attempted to create internet services that

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 14  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

provided the same kind of isolated walled-off space, but on the internet
rather than on a proprietary online system. Microsoft even attempted to
establish the Microsoft Network (MSN) as its own proprietary network
quite apart from (and perhaps imagined to compete with) the internet. The
idea was to get users to sign up for an online service that integrated directly
into Microsoft’s desktop environment – Microsoft’s plan here was to use
their market dominance in operating systems to establish a new online
service. Generally speaking, such ‘gated’ areas of the internet also failed to
appeal to users, and were not successful in generating revenue. Why volun-
tarily stay behind a walled-off zone that you have to pay subscription fees
to live within when there’s a free garden of earthly delights just a modem’s
dial away?
The failure of MSN was a particularly significant experience for Microsoft
who, until this time, had gone from strength to strength with almost every
new product or idea achieving immense commercial success. Within months
of launching MSN, Microsoft relegated the service to a content-aggregation
node of the internet, making a hasty about-face. A previously unknown soft-
ware company – Netscape – became a multi-million dollar business virtually
overnight by giving its web browser software to users and selling web server
software to companies.2 One of the young engineers who helped establish
the company found himself on the cover of Time magazine, declared one of
a new breed of ‘instantaires’ (Collins, 1996).
While academics had been developing more sophisticated understandings
of internet users through the 1990s – as we will discuss in the next section –
John Hagel’s 1997 Net Gain attempted to explain how online communities
could be considered an important commercial resource. According to Hagel,
the aggregation of internet communities around certain areas of interest
provided an opportunity for so-called ‘info-mediaries’ to deliver audiences
to advertisers and marketers. This concept was engaged with literally by
some businesses, who then constructed web portals – sites that aim to
aggregate users around centralised content – in an attempt to concentrate
user attention.
Because of their importance for internet resource discovery, search engines
formed some of the earliest portals. America Online (AOL), and certain
other companies who provided dial-in access, sought to aggregate users by
channelling them into their sites as the user connected to the internet. But,
aggregation of users was only part of the problem. The more difficult goal
was to make money from those users in some way, either directly (through,
for example, subscription fees) or indirectly (for example, advertising).
Many of these so-called portal sites were to become emblematic of the folly
of initial attempts to commercialise the internet. The problem with portals

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 What is Web 2.0?   15

was a lack of a firm underlying business model stemming from an almost

dogged refusal of marketers to understand that the web was not simply a
push medium – that people were going online and doing things, making
things, and talking to one another. While many sites tried to aggregate users
around expensively produced content, other non-commercial sites like forums
and online games exploded in popularity. Indeed, the influx of new users into
what were once the sanctum of the internet elites was bemoaned by some,
who dubbed the new internet experience ‘the Eternal September’.3
Nonetheless, the potential for users to make money for online busi-
nesses created a gold-rush mentality in the late 1990s. Billions of dollars
were invested in dotcom start-up businesses that claimed to have found a
way to make money online, or which in many cases made no such claims
but were able to boast large numbers of (non-feepaying) users who were
somehow going to turn into cash in some kind of mysterious process of
transmutation. Armed only with rapidly diminishing investor capital, and
devoid of proven business models, these businesses led the charge into
economic oblivion.
Investment in dreams of commercialising the internet saw a rash of public
companies appear on the stock market. The so-called dotcoms were typically
run by young entrepreneurs who had the technical skills to develop internet
sites and the contacts and audacity to acquire the venture capital that would
establish themselves as a viable company. Tales of fabulous overnight wealth
creation abound from the dotcom era. One online grocery retail company
called WebVan, established in 1999, came to be valued at US$1.2 billion
at the height of the market (German n.d.). Others were simply fantasies.
Infospace, for example, debuted on the stock market with a share price of
$20 a share. By early 2000 this had sky-rocketed to over $1,305 a share.
This high valuation was despite a lack of any proven business model, and
perhaps more strangely, upon an almost complete dearth of profits. Time,
it was felt, was all that was needed to prove business models, see profits,
and for dotcoms to take their place as the commercial giants of the new
economy.
However, by 1999 some analysts were warning of an impending dotcom
bust. Over-valued companies with little or no profits were operating on
money from hopeful investors. When the money began to run out, compa-
nies disappeared, leaving large holes in the stock market. When the bust
finally came in early 2000, many dotcoms vanished as fast as they had
appeared. On 10 March 2000, Wall Street suffered the biggest single-day
crash in its history. The crash wiped billions of dollars of value from the stock
market, and the NASDAQ technology stocks index lost 78 per cent of its
value (Alden, 2005).

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 16  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

WEB 2.0

Web 2.0 is not a technology, it is an attitude. (O’Reilly 2005)

‘Web 2.0’ is a weird phrase. It began as the name of a conference, but the people
organising the conference didn’t really know what they meant by it. Mostly
they thought it sounded catchy. However, ‘Web 2.0’ has since taken on a
meaning. There are some interesting new trends on the Web, and it’s the nature
of a phrase like that to adhere to them. (Graham 2006)
Nobody really knows what it means ... If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis,
then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be
all along. (Berners-Lee 2006)

The dotcom bust scared many investors, although a number of companies

came through the bust bloodied, but alive. In the final quarter of 2001,
Amazon.com turned in its first profit in some five years of operation (BBC
Editorial 2002) proving that although many companies had been a bad bet,
others were based on something more than speculative hype. Following the
dotcom crash, numerous other companies, operating on a more cautious
approach to internet commerce, also managed to survive, and some began
to thrive. Perhaps the biggest factor behind the success of post-dotcom com-
panies has been the realisation that online users are not like TV audiences.
This awareness, or at least the way it has been rationalised, can be summed
up by the phrase ‘Web 2.0’.
According to believers in Web 2.0, Web 2.0 doesn’t refer to any changes
in the internet’s architecture. Rather, it refers to the types of software
employed and changes at the level of user practices. While Web 2.0 is often
associated with internet entrepreneur Tim O’Reilly, it has more recently been
recognised that the term was first used by Darcy DiNucci in 1999 to describe
a new type of ‘fragmentation’ that would occur with the rise of mobile web
devices:

The Web has already become an almost iconic cultural reference – ubiquitous
and familiar. We think we know what it is by now. The Web we know now,
which loads into a window on our computer screens in essentially static
screenfuls, is an embryo of the Web as we will know it in not so many years …
The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are now beginning to appear, and we can start
to see just how that embryo might develop … The Web will be understood, not
as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether
through which interactivity happens. It will still appear on your computer
screen, transformed by the video and other dynamic media made possible by
the speedy connection technologies now coming down the pike. It will also
appear, in different guises, on your TV set (interactive content woven seamlessly
into programming and commercials), your car dashboard (maps, yellow pages,

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 What is Web 2.0?   17

and other traveler info), your cell phone (news, stock quotes, flight info), hand-
held game machines (linking players with competitors over the Net), maybe
even your microwave oven (automatically finding cooking times for the latest
products). (DiNucci, 1999)

In DiNucci’s somewhat science fictional future gazing, she is linking Web 2.0
to the rise of ubiquitous computing. The spectres of Mark Weiser’s (1991)
prescient words about the importance of context-awareness and embed-
dedness within the constitution of ubiquitous technologies can be felt in her
vision. Weiser imagined a time in the future where computer technology
would vanish into the background as we moved beyond big, clunky
machines and into a world where ever-present (ubiquitous) but essentially
invisible computers became as commonplace as the written word. In his
vision, Weiser imagined a time when computer technologies were always
available and able to provide extra information about every conceivable
aspect of life – not too far different from the experience afforded by
today’s mobile technologies. DiNucci’s focus is, however, from a designer’s
point of view rather than, as the term later gets recruited, from a business
perspective.

Web 2.0 and business

While personalisation and content creation are fundamental concepts that
have been associated with Web 2.0, the term has also been widely employed
as a model for business in the post-dotcom era. For such figureheads as Tim
O’Reilly, Web 2.0 has provided new ways to conceive of the internet in terms
of economic value (Allen 2009: 17). In this respect, the term Web 2.0 gained
currency through the O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004, wherein
he and John Battelle defined Web 2.0 as a platform in which customers play
an active role in building one’s business. In doing this, they were building
on ideas that had been gaining currency since the dotcom crash. O’Reilly’s
language and position epitomises the shift of focus away from conceiving
the internet as a technological space and, instead, towards it being embed-
ded within the social (and, in O’Reilly’s case, with particular focus upon the
commercial).
In recalling why O’Reilly and his associates used the term Web 2.0, O’Reilly
harkens back to the dotcom crash and notes it as a ‘turning point for the web’
(2005). He and his colleagues felt that the crash had weeded out the bad
business models, and through some kind of Darwinian process the fittest
had survived, and new businesses were starting up. ‘Could it be’, asked
O’Reilly in a 2005 post to his website, ‘that the dotcom collapse marked

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 18  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as
“Web 2.0” might make sense?’
O’Reilly’s concept of Web 2.0 indicates that business in this new internet
age is tightly related to active, engaged internet users noting that ‘(n)etwork
effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0
era’ (O’Reilly 2005; original emphasis). Hints of this shift towards recognising
the importance of internet users – cast as customers – had begun appearing as
early as 1997. As previously mentioned, Hagel’s Net Gain first extolled the
virtues of engaging with users, and was followed in 1999 by a website (later
published as a book in 2000) called The Cluetrain Manifesto, which con-
sists of 95 short essays or ‘theses’ that argue that the real power of the web
is in connecting businesses with their clients. One of the key ideas from this
book is that:

… markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is

natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or
complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It
can’t be faked. (Levine et al. 2000: xi)

Signposting the already emergent movement of user created content (UCC),

the authors essentially argued that such activities could be ‘harnessed’ to create
value for businesses, a point reiterated six years later by O’Reilly. Here we can
begin to see the emergence of a complex relationship between the creative and
communicative practices of internet users and corporations who were interested
in ways of harnessing online activities for profit.

Web 2.0 and creative production

Web 2.0 encapsulates the idea of making it easy for anyone to publish infor-
mation on the internet: this is clearly linked to the new ways Web 2.0 was
to work as a business. This idea encapsulates the transition from Web 1.0,
which was all about reading or watching content, to Web 2.0, which is
much more concerned with providing users with the means for producing
and distributing content.
However, as Tim Berners-Lee’s quote at the beginning of this section aptly
signals, the rhetoric behind the so-called Web 2.0 revolution can be seen
as an extension of the original designer’s intentions. Reflecting this, early
versions of web browsers like Netscape Navigator included web page editors
that allowed people to make web pages, although the processes involved in
getting these online were not for the faint hearted. In a fascinating devolution
of technology, such features were first separated into different versions of the
applications and then discontinued altogether.

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 What is Web 2.0?   19

Under the ‘read’ model of Web 1.0, if you wanted to provide information
online you would need to create your own website. This generally required
a lot of technical knowledge, and may have required you to run your own
web server, which was a fairly daunting technical task. The Web 2.0 model
sees the computer take over the task of managing technical details of for-
matting and presentation, allowing the user to focus on the production of
content. Blogs, for example, provide a way for users to publish informa-
tion online with few more technical skills than are required to use a web
browser and type at a keyboard. Thus, Web 2.0 makes creating content
vastly less complicated, and this, in turn, leads to much more content being
put online as the technical barriers to creation are removed. Once content
could readily be created by just about any user, the technological prerequisites
were met for the emergence of social network sites (SNSs; see Chapter 3
for details).
For Ethan Zuckerman, in his ETech paper entitled the Cute Cat Theory
of Digital Activism, ‘Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share
research papers and Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures
of cute cats’ (2008). While this somewhat facetious comment could be read
in light of the shift towards experiencing and conceptualising the internet
as a social space, it also highlights that, behind the oft-banal activities of
users, new forms of affective sharing and communities are emerging. As
Zuckerman observes, while Web 2.0 ‘was designed for mundane uses, it can
be extremely powerful in the hands of digital activists, especially those in
environments where free speech is limited’ (2008). But for others such as
Lovink, this ‘cute cat’ phenomenon is part of a simplification of the ‘social’
in which all journalism becomes a series of secondary references and divi-
sions (2012: 4).
However, we could say that the personalisation of technology had been
occurring long before Web 2.0, mobile media and the ‘cute cat’ phenomenon.
Indeed, countries such as Japan have excelled globally in their ability to
spearhead the ‘personal technologies’ revolution from the Sony Walkman
onwards. Mizuko Ito (2005), for example, argues that it is the notion of
the ‘personal’ – along with pedestrian and portable – that have characterised
Japanese technologies for decades (Fujimoto 2005; Okada 2005). Part of the
success has been their deployment of high-level customisation, particularly
apparent in what anthropologist Brian McVeigh has called ‘techno-cute’; that
is, the usage of the cute to make ‘warm’ and ‘friendly’ the coldness of new
technologies (2000).
Given that the kinds of behaviours attributed to Web 2.0 seem to have
their roots in older and well-established cultural uses of computer and
media technologies, one could argue that some formulations of Web 2.0

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 20  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

are somewhat hindered in their understanding of the genealogies of ICTs

(information and communication technologies) and especially the internet,
particularly from non-Western or Anglophonic points of view (Goggin
and McLelland 2009). This sentiment is shared by World Wide Web
(WWW) pioneers such as Berners-Lee who define Web 2.0 as little more
than a ‘piece of jargon’ (2006) – and he is far from alone. O’Reilly himself
acknowledges that the practices that he associates with Web 2.0 are not
always novel:

But as with many areas of Web 2.0, where the ‘2.0-ness’ is not something new,
but rather a fuller realization of the true potential of the web platform, this
phrase gives us a key insight into how to design applications and services for
the new platform. (O’Reilly 2005)

For Australian new media theorists Anna Munster and Andrew Murphie
(2009), the confusion around rhetoric to do with Web 2.0, and the type of
attendant agency it affords, is due to the fact that its semantics have been
misunderstood. They argue that O’Reilly got it wrong:

Web 2.0 is not an ‘is’, or not only this. Web 2.0 is also a verb or, as they taught
us in primary school, it’s a doing word. Here’s a list of some Web 2.0 things to
do: apping, blogging, mapping, mashing, geocaching, tagging, searching,
shopping, sharing, socialising and wikkiing. And the list goes on. Yet as the list
goes on it becomes apparent that part of what Web 2.0 does, while doing all
the things on this list and more, is colonise everything in the network. It seems
that there is no part of networked thought, activity or life that is not now
Web 2.0 … Anything can become or be 2.0 as long as it demonstrates or is
affiliated with a certain set of qualities. A list of typical Qualities 2.0 might look
something like this: dynamic, participatory, engaged, interoperable, user-centred,
open, collectively intelligent and so on. Clearly an ‘attitude’ can go a long way.
(Munster and Murphie 2009)

As Munster and Murphie note, ‘2.0’ characteristics include ‘participatory’,

‘dynamic’ and ‘user-centred’ – and while these features are presented as
positives that sell Web 2.0 to users and excite us with enticements of
the possible futures they promise, these features are offered within the frame-
work of marketing and business. This ‘attitude’ points to important questions
about the emerging relationship between users and businesses in the new,
2.0, post-dotcom web. On the one hand, Web 2.0 promises users empower-
ment by supporting a new model of media production (and consumption)
that does away with the domination of production by a few. On the other
hand, it threatens control and colonisation of users’ social lives. In this way,
Web 2.0 is a contradiction: it is simultaneously empowering and exploitative,

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 What is Web 2.0?   21

a platform for both control and freedom. This paradox and contestation is
at the heart of social media, and it is a topic we will further examine in the
second half of this chapter.

USING OR BEING USED?

The danger of participation is that there are hundreds or even thousands of

potentially critical eyes watching every entry. A faulty fact will be challenged,
a lie will be uncovered, plagiarism will be discovered. Cyberspace is a truth
serum. (Rushkoff 1994: 36)
The signs are growing that the once-anarchic, perhaps emancipatory internet is
subject to increasing attempts to privatize, commercialise, control and profit
from the activities of consumers online. (Livingstone 2005: 2–3)

The term ‘user’ has two connotations: controller and controlled. In com-
puter parlance, the user is in charge of the machine. The user is in control
(at least apparently) of the computer’s operation – the computer seemingly
does nothing unless a user clicks a mouse button or presses a key. On the
other hand, within software development circles the user is often derided.
When we think about users in the context of social media, and particu-
larly within the construct of Web 2.0, which one of these categories is
most applicable? Are users the controllers, who are powerful because they
can create the content in stark contrast to the powerless audience of mass
media, or are users the subjects of control, as their personal information
and creative and cultural labour is monitored and commodified by social
media companies?
These questions are phrased here as binary opposites, and as such they
represent ideal positions at the extreme ends of a spectrum of different
possibilities. Certainly, social media can be seen as empowering or it can
be seen as a set of tools for commercialising the social, affective and crea-
tive efforts of the user. The ambient intimacy of everyday SNS practices
(the way the SNS can sit idle in the background while the user works on
something else, or the way that Twitter is always at hand on the mobile
device but not always actively engaged with) makes it hard to pin down
how much work the user is doing and how this translates to value for
the social media company. Work by Banks and Humphreys (2008) in the
area of game players, along with Bruns’ model of the ‘produser’ (see
Chapter 3 for detailed discussion), have attempted to provide more useful
models for conceptualising the often tacit labour that accompanies con-
temporary media practice today.

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 22  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media as empowering

It is tempting to look at social media as a democratic revolution in the
media, and indeed it has been trumpeted as such in some of the earliest
writings about the internet (Lovink 2012). At the heart of these arguments
is the idea that the internet bypasses old structures of control and power –
instead of a few powerful people controlling what the majority see and hear,
the majority can now produce (and reproduce) media. This decentralisation
of the production of media content also decentralises media control, which
poses vast challenges for media companies that established their media
empires based upon a monopoly over distribution. This, in turn, leads some
observers to see the internet as an inherently democratising or emancipatory
medium because of the way it seems to empower individuals and undermine
old monopolies and systems of power.
This narrative of empowerment has a long history that pre-dates the
popular internet and has its roots in the techno-utopianism of counter-culture
movements of the 1960s and with libertarian ideals that are fundamentally
intertwined with the political landscape of the US. Metaphors that engaged
concepts such as the ‘virtual frontier’ invoked notions of new, open spaces
that were free of the controls of an old order, a kind of ‘Wild West’ with-
out the dust and guns. Given that the early development of the internet was
driven largely by the US, it is hardly surprising that these ideals should
hail from the cultural and political traditions of that nation. In this particular
Anglophonic evolution, issues such as race and gender performativity have
become key battlegrounds (Nakamura 2002). As Lisa Nakamura has so
eloquently discussed, often locations such as Tokyo have become a ‘default’
setting for Western imaginations of the future and technology.
A number of influential commentators managed to capture people’s
imaginations with romantic concepts that meshed US libertarianism with
1960s alternative culture and the emergence of new technologies. John
Perry Barlow, for example, presented a firmly libertarian view of the inter-
net in his A Cyberspace Independence Declaration (1996), as did Douglas
Rushkoff in Cyberia (1994). These influential works cast the internet as
something that was above and beyond the reach of industrial govern-
ments, which John Perry Barlow described as ‘weary giants of flesh and
steel’ (1996).
Adding to these romantic concepts of the internet as being beyond the
reach of old power structures (understood by Barlow in true US-libertarian
style primarily as governments) were claims that the technology itself
was inherently democratising. It became a known ‘fact’ that the internet was
developed to withstand nuclear attack (Chun 2006: 65), and this robustness

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 What is Web 2.0?   23

in the face of the greatest threat known to humankind helped to elevate the
internet – often referred to as cyberspace – to the sublime. This immunity to
nuclear war extended beyond physical attacks and into the political realm.
The internet, according to John Gilmore ‘treats censorship as damage, and
routes around it’ (Elmer-Dewitt 1993). In this light, the internet could not be
stopped, let alone tamed.
In the decade following these initial works, a great deal changed on the
internet. As described above, the demographic profile of internet users
changed as more and more people came online, and businesses started
colonising the internet. The dotcom crash was for some a kind of proof
that the internet was resistant to control. The emergence of Web 2.0 and the
near simultaneous emergence of mobile internet has again raised questions
about the ability of the internet to bypass conventional control and bring about
social change. Some of these themes, like citizen journalism and online activism,
are addressed in more detail in Chapter 3. Others are less visible, and are
represented in a variety of ways, but all focus on the ways that social
media empower the individual.
Certainly, it is difficult to ignore the way that social media has greatly
expanded the networked individual’s access to information. For the lucky
ones, answers to many questions are only a Google search away (though
veracity may be a little further afield). SNSs, as we will discuss in Chapter 4,
provide them with access to a wider social network, allowing them to find
employment or maintain social relationships that once would have died
owing to distance. Networked individuals have access to a large repository of
media almost at whim (YouTube, for example), and can make creative works
that can be enjoyed by thousands or millions of people where once they might
have been consigned to the back of a cupboard, to be discovered by relatives
sometime after they had died.
On a larger scale, social media has been implicated in regime change and
is playing an increasingly important role in the political: from unofficial
uprisings like the Arab Spring to political campaigns. With the uprising of
the Arab Spring in the Middle East, we have seen ways in which social and
mobile media can be used to help mobilise new forms of politics while at
the same time amplifying paradoxes around media effects and affects. For
example, the control/freedom paradox of the online addressed by Chun (2006)
can be seen in the recent ‘liberation technology’ (Diamond and Plattner 2012)
rhetoric of the Arab Spring in which media can both be a site for emancipa-
tion (in the case of Egypt and Tunisia) and a reinforcing authoritarian state
(Iran). Governments in some countries are becoming interested in social
media as a way to engage more directly with citizens, and citizens are using

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 24  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

social media to draw attention to local issues (Shirky 2009). We give this aspect
of user participation more treatment in Chapter 4.

Social media as control

A medium that allows users to create things and develop a voice which also
eludes regulation by authorities can lead to significant positive (perhaps even
emancipatory) impacts in many areas of society, from the economy to politics
(see Chapter 4 for a detailed discussion of the changing nature of citizen
journalism through vehicles such as Twitter). On the face of it, social media
gives a great deal more control back to the majority of people. Yet there are
also arguments to the contrary: while social media undermines many existing
media models, it also establishes new ones.
As James Beniger showed in the 1980s, computers and communications
technologies were developed primarily to increase centralised management
and control of industrial processes, not to diminish them. It is probably a little
rash to simply dismiss this argument as irrelevant to the internet, although
in the face of so many internet-led changes that seem to be undermining
industrial economic structures (the music industry springs to mind), it is
tempting to ignore arguments to the contrary.
Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, control has been an ongoing
concern. As production sped up and more goods were produced and moved
faster and in greater variety to diverse markets, increasingly sophisticated
information systems were required to maintain control. Seen in this light,
the evolution of digital computers is a response to the need for increased
control in industrialised countries (Beniger 1986). Although Beniger was
writing well before the rise of the internet – let alone social media – it is
possible to extrapolate and see the rise of social media as part of the refine-
ment in control that Beniger identified. While in some respects social media
is democratising, empowering and emancipatory, it also makes us all more
dependent upon the digital. Consider how ‘lost’ a typical teenager is without
a mobile phone or access to SNSs like Facebook. For many young people
today, even the idea of being without their phone or social media for a day
causes great distress. This dependency makes us all more subject to the con-
trol mechanisms of the information society; to be counted, sorted and organ-
ised into groups that can be matched with products and processed as fast as
materials and services can be produced and distributed.
For Andrejevic, networked social interaction moderated by SNSs, for
example, are structured around a ‘storable and sortable’ separation between
users and the means of socialising. In other words, in order to participate in an
SNS, a person must create an account, and in so doing they are immediately

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 What is Web 2.0?   25

creating online information about themselves. Because the information is

digital, it can be processed and compared, allowing the owners of the SNS to
create ‘collections of data’ that can then be repurposed by companies and
marketing campaigns (Andrejevic 2011: 88). Following on from the work of
Terranova on today’s ‘social factories’, Andrejevic argues that commercial
interests are ‘colonising’ narratives of personal self-presentation and sociality.
Sonia Livingstone would appear to concur. She writes:

[W]e must instead ask questions about how, and with what consequences, it has
come about that all social situations (whether at home or work, in public or
in private, at school or out shopping) are now, simultaneously, mediated spaces,
thereby constituting their participants inevitably as both family, workers, public
or communities and as audiences, consumers or users? (2005: 25–6)

Cast in this light, social media can be seen as a step in increasing the control
afforded by the information technologies. This point becomes clearer if we
compare social media with television, and consider how much more useful
consumer information can be gathered relatively easily. While television
provided an important means for product makers to connect with audience
through advertising, television also suffered from a number of shortcom-
ings. Under a broadcast model, for example, nobody can tell what television
station is being watched at any one time. Broadcast companies pay top
dollar to media ratings companies like ACNielsen who go to extraordinary
lengths to determine ratings for television programmes. Broadcasters simply
don’t know who is watching their channels without polling the audience.
Unless somebody is watching you from across the street, you can be com-
pletely certain that when you are watching a broadcast TV programme, you
are the only person who knows you’re watching it.
On the internet, however, every time you sit down at your computer and
access a website, your activity is instantly recorded by multiple sources – if
not your ISP, then at the very least, the website that is receiving your request,
and generally by a much more complex array of monitoring systems that help
website owners and search companies develop a profile of each individual’s
online habits. No matter how little information you provide to sites and ser-
vices (and many people provide quite a lot), the mere fact you are connected
to the internet immediately compromises your privacy. People who wish to
maintain their privacy online must go to significant lengths to do so, and
require a level of technical proficiency that eludes most internet users. When
seen in this light, the internet seems to be as much an advance in control as
an empowerment of the user.
The fact that everything is logged and available for analysis opens up a new
and valuable source of information for companies – very precise information

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 26  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

about the browsing habits of internet users, which in turn allows for a
much, much greater targeting of advertising and the prospect of direct sales
to the consumer, or simply the sale of collected information about users to
other parties. Instead of undermining central authority and power, this
seems to be doing the opposite. The processes of control are now beginning
to move further into our private lives, and users and their cultural and
interpersonal activities are being monitored, regulated and managed like
never before.
In Wendy Chun’s (2006) excellent book on the internet, the dichotomy of
control and freedom are presented as a paradox. Chun argues that the
meaning of freedom has gradually been shifted to incorporate control as an
implicit precondition. In other words, if you want freedom, then you have
to submit to control. This apparent contradiction makes a strange kind of
sense in a post-9/11 world where phantom terrorists lurk in every airport
terminal. According to this logic, there can be no greater threat to individual
freedom than death, and the only thing standing between us and death at
the hands of a terrorist is often control applied through surveillance – full-body
scanners, constant monitoring through security cameras, the tightly regimented
processing of people.
Conversely, our sense of freedom is realised through a sense of control
because the more control one has, the argument goes, the more freedom
you have to do what you want. Here we return to the earlier point men-
tioned near the beginning of this section about users, and the ambiguity
of the term. The user is understood as a powerful individual, and this
notion is reinforced in information technology and the internet all the time.
Microsoft’s slogan ‘Where do you want to go today?’ embraces the notion
of the all-powerful user who is in absolute control of his or her destiny
within the online environment.
As Chun points out, this draws upon earlier conceptions of cyberspace
as being a place beyond space (as we noted above), and also draws upon
popular representations of cyberspace from fiction which preceded and
accompanied the development of the internet. From William Gibson’s
cyberpunk novels and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash to a raft of themati-
cally similar books and films, images of cyberspace have been constructed
as a place where the individual is in control. From the utopian holodeck of
Star Trek: The Next Generation to the dystopian virtual reality that fea-
tured as a central plot device in the Wachowski Brothers’ Matrix, virtual
online cyberspaces have been represented as a place where the user exerts
control over his or her destiny by knowing or learning how to control their
online environment.

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 What is Web 2.0?   27

SNSs, as one example of Web 2.0 applications, also place the user at
the centre of their own universe, a platform on which to stand to engage
with and control their online space. As discussed above, underlying this
so-called user-centred media is the fact that the data is then mined and sold
to advertisers (Vaidhyanathan 2011; Lovink 2012; boyd and Crawford
2012). Consider that Facebook has some 800 million subscribers at the
time of writing, and yet each and every one of these subscribers (users) has
a network of friends in which they are the central nodes that organises
everything else. The user can switch off unwanted contacts, send messages
out to hundreds (or millions, just as easily), all the while developing the
illusion of freedom through control. This isn’t just any space that the user
is (apparently) controlling, it is not even cyberspace; it is their own ‘personal’
space. YouTube places you at the centre of the universe, and MySpace,
as this SNS so helpfully points out, creates an online space that is sup-
posedly mine.
However, as Chun argues, it is in the interests of the companies behind
these services to foster and develop the illusion of control. Providing users
with a certain kind of control (the ability to create profiles and interact
with others and produce cultural objects), all mediated within the company’s
platform, actually establishes broader economic and political controls
over the whole system. We have used the term ‘platform’ here a couple
of times to draw attention to another way of thinking about Web 2.0.
Tarleton Gillespie notes that a platform has a number of definitions in
English language, which together suggest ‘a progressive and egalitarian
arrangement, lifting up those who stand upon it’ (Gillespie 2010: 350).
When applied to Web 2.0 applications such as YouTube, Facebook or
Twitter, the term suggests that the role of the company is impartial – they
are just there to provide a platform that users can stand on and be treated
as equals.
The principles of the platform are enshrined in Facebook’s 10 principles
that, at the time of writing, contain the word ‘free’ or ‘freedom’ no less than
14 times (http://www.facebook.com/principles.php). Facebook’s role as an
open, free conduit for users to become empowered through their networked
agency is also reinforced through its mission statement, which reads in part:
‘to give people the power to share and make the world more open and con-
nected’ (www.facebook.com/facebook). Supposedly, Facebook is simply the
catalyst that makes these things possible. It is a wonder, then, that Facebook
should have been at the forefront of debates about privacy and intellectual
property. Given that many of its changes have given few rights to their users, and
in many cases have appeared to be self-serving rather than user-empowering;

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 28  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

arguments that social media are purely about putting the user in control
need to be taken with more than just a grain of salt.
While the platform metaphor seems to support the empowerment of the
user, it also plays another role, echoing Chun’s paradoxical alignment of
freedom and control. As we discussed above, Web 2.0 companies – those
that emerged after the dotcom bust, or which rode it out – are companies that
recognise the importance of and value of a user’s online practices, and use
those practices to enhance their businesses. This works for users, because it
means there are many services available that are cheap or free. Writing a blog,
putting videos online, developing software, creating or participating in online
communities – all these activities are free, given away by companies whose
actual motivations are less clear. What does an SNS like YouTube, Facebook
or a search engine company like Google get in return for their apparently
altruistic motives? The answer, of course, is control.
Google is a prime example of a company that has embraced (or helped
define) the Web 2.0 platform mantra. As a search engine company, Google’s
most prominent service is its almost universally known search page – a web
page that’s incredibly simple given the behemoth that lies behind it. Every
day Google’s computers index content on the internet, creating a massive
searchable database of most of the pages on the web. This vast database is
then provided to us via the Google homepage, or directly within our browser
software, and provides us with virtually instant access to many topics, and
with a little effort, many more beyond. Yet for all this, Google does not
charge its users a cent. The service is free.
Google’s revenue stream is drawn primarily from its advertising busi-
ness. When you type in a search term like ‘price of tulips’, Google’s
AdWords advertising engine will attempt to connect your search term
with terms that advertisers have purchased. If a match is found, you will
not only get your search results but also a list of results directing you to
advertisers – in this case, mainly florists. Google is at pains to keep this
part of their business separate from the search business. They don’t try to
integrate the advertisements into the actual search results, and they do not
allow anyone to pay money to have their sites appear at the top of search
results. Google’s search algorithms – the methods they use to locate and
present relevant information – are sacrosanct. The reason for this is quite
simple: if the search engine becomes less effective, users will start using
other engines, and that will cost Google market share. So, while Google’s
Adwords advertisements are presented in strategic places on search results
pages, Google uses various techniques to visually separate them from the
list of unpaid search results.

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 What is Web 2.0?   29

The main point here is that Google’s business model is ostensibly about
users. Google’s ‘about’ page says that the number one thing they know to
be true is ‘focus on the user and all else will follow’ (www.google.com/intl/
en/about/). However, as Siva Vaidhyanathan notes in The Googlization of
Everything, ‘we are not Google’s customers: we are its product’ (2011: 3).
Here Vaidhyanathan echoes Chun’s position – that the publicly touted
importance of Google as a platform for the user lies within a more funda-
mental Web 2.0 business model where users are actually the source of
value, not the information on the web that Google indexes. When we
search on Google, Google builds profiles that match search terms with
sites visited. Websites install Google Analytics, which allows them
to quickly and easily see who is visiting their pages, but also allows
Google to see where people are going. This is generally aggregated – Google
doesn’t care so much where you went today, but does care where ‘you all’
went today.
More than that, companies like Google are engaging in a process that
might be seen as horizontal integration. In traditional hierarchical mar-
kets (lemonade manufacturers, say), horizontal integration is where one
company buys out its competitors and by so doing is able to corner the
market for lemonade. Google’s purchases of YouTube and its integration
of other services like Gmail into one happy family doesn’t immediately
appear to be horizontal integration because all the companies it is buying
are all doing different things: YouTube serves video, Gmail is an online
email application, Google is a search engine and Google+ is a social net-
work tool. If, however, we accept Vaidhyanathan’s argument, that users
are Google’s product, then critically, the same could be said for the sites.
YouTube is a platform creating users, as is Gmail, as is Google+. Therefore,
Google’s purchase of YouTube allowed them to horizontally integrate,
dominating not the streaming video market but the user-as-commodity
market.

CONCLUSION
Web 2.0 is a notion that encapsulates a lot more than the idea that users are
important, or that markets are conversations. It is a philosophy of doing
business in the online environment and it is a response to the challenges of
control in a networked society where many of the structures established by
industrial societies are not always as effective. According to this philosophy,
Web 2.0 is the more advanced, updated, better version of Web 1.0. What’s
updated and improved here is not the technical architecture of the web

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 30  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

itself, but the way that business has come to think about the web, and most
importantly, the ability of business to exert control in an environment
which had previously been seemingly resistant to it.
The changes said to be part of Web 2.0 are sold to users as desirable
primarily because they apparently increase users’ control over their
environments: freedom through control. The changes improve the
agency of the networked individual, and through doing this apparently
give us all more freedom. However, while Web 2.0 can be regarded as
internet companies embracing the user and giving them more control
over what they can do online, it can also be regarded as a way for the
same companies to gain more control over their operating environ-
ments by building better knowledge of their users. The real revolution
encompassed by Web 2.0 is a revolution in thinking, where internet
companies have finally come up with a way of understanding the inter-
net and working out effective methods for using it as a technology of
control in the networked society.
Here we should go back to one of the points we made earlier. The tensions
between control and freedom should not be treated as absolute positions,
where you take a side and fight it out to the end. Instead, these represent
extreme ends of a spectrum in which complex interactions play out.
Sometimes social media is empowering, and may work very effectively to
increase a user’s agency and ability to control and interact with their envi-
ronment. Other times social media can be controlling, providing significant
financial benefits to the social media company but little or no compensation
to the user for their time and energy. Most often social media is both controlling
and empowering at the same time, in an uneasy relationship where a certain
amount of exploitation is negotiated as the price for a certain amount of
empowerment. In the following chapters we will explore some of these
themes further.

NOTES
1 The use of a number like 1.0 is something adopted from computer programming
practice. When a computer program was finished, it was given a version
number – version 1.0 for the first final, complete version of the software. As
the software was further developed other versions would be given a num-
ber like 1.1 or 1.2 to indicate that they represented minor developments. When
the software underwent a major overhaul, it might be given a whole new version
number to indicate the significance of the update – version 1.5 might be upgraded
to version 2.0, for example. During the 1980s, this quickly became part of
the marketing strategy for software, with companies offering up new versions

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 What is Web 2.0?   31

of software regularly, exhorting their users to continue buying new software so

they could take advantage of the latest features.
2 Although it’s worth noting that Netscape itself ended up losing market share to
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and eventually folded, only to be reborn as project
Phoenix, which due to trademark issues ended up being renamed Firefox.
3 The Eternal September – the rapid growth of internet users mirrored experiences
on forums each year when new people started at college in the northern hemi-
sphere. The influx of new users created problems within the social fabric of online
forums and each year took weeks in which the relatively small number of ‘newbies’
were initiated into the correct modes of behaviour. Massive influxes of new
internet users, particularly from AOL, overwhelmed these social systems, leading
to the Eternal September.

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 3 Social network sites

What makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to
meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible
their social networks. (boyd and Ellison 2007)
[S]ocial networking sites don’t publicise community, they privatise it. (Andrejevic
2011: 97)

Social media is increasingly infiltrating everyday media practices. As we

witness the rise of smartphones that allow users to move ambiently between
social media like Facebook and Twitter at all times of the day, how we
define social network sites (SNSs) is changing. As a series of cultural practices
and artefacts that are both commercial and cultural, SNSs are becoming an
integral part of identity, social and political management. But does this
pervasiveness of SNS result in a flattening in definitions of the ‘social’ as
some critics might suggest (Lovink 2012)? What does the ubiquitous nature
of social media, especially as it becomes incorporated with mobile and
locative media, say about contemporary media practice? Are SNSs transform-
ing notions of publicness, privacy and intimacy (boyd 2011)? Or are the
changes more dynamic and complex than previously theorised? Can alter-
native social media practices be formed in the face of monopolies such as
Facebook (Lovink 2012)?
SNSs are at the interface between people and social media. These sites
represent some of the most well-known and most highly valued brands (in
market, if not social terms) on the internet today. For many the ‘internet’ is
synonymous with SNSs. Names such as Facebook, Qzone, Twitter, Habbo,
Renren and Badoo boast millions of online users who use these services to
build connections with other people, to stay in touch, to find support and
answers to questions, to reinforce common ideas and values, to share news
and other information, and to be entertained. These sites have become exem-
plars of the Web 2.0 ethos and the shift in focus from users as audiences
to users as networked publics that we identified in Chapter 2. In many ways

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 Social network sites   33

SNSs represent the intersection of networked publics and business interests,

although, as we will see below, this is by no means a perfect fit.
In this chapter we want to develop an understanding of SNSs that goes
beyond the popular and stereotyped notions of SNSs as being an Anglophonic
domain populated by under-25s engaging in banal conversations about
what they got up to on the weekend. Instead, we present SNSs as a global
phenomenon that is engaging people from broad demographics in a variety
of ways. Most importantly, we are interested in the ways that SNSs provide
places for the construction and maintenance of relationships between people.
Building on the themes we established in Chapter 2, and will expand upon
in Chapter 4 (Web 2.0, networked publics, produsage and playbour), we
look at how SNSs are deeply embedded within offline contexts, and support
many kinds of activities which have very real social, economic, political and
cultural consequences.
In the first part of this chapter we explore research that reveals the com-
plexity that lies behind SNSs. Then we examine how SNSs have developed
in non-Anglophonic contexts, and explore some of the ways that these
contexts challenge Anglocentric understandings of social networks. In this
section we consider how different groups that cut across demographic, cul-
tural and social boundaries are using social networks, casting doubt over
the persistent stereotypes and memes about online relations that still get
presented in many forums, especially the mainstream media.
The final part of this chapter will review some of the ways that SNSs
are being researched, to provide a broad overview of the main themes and
topics in what is becoming a very closely studied phenomenon. We will
end the chapter with a summary of the key points we have covered. But
before we begin with the deeper analysis, let us begin with a working defini-
tion of SNSs.

DEFINING SOCIAL NETWORK SITES

There are dozens if not hundreds of sites that meet the functional definition
of an SNS (which is, at its most fundamental level, a site that allows users to
create some kind of online presence and articulate that with others). SNSs
come in a range of shapes and sizes, from the behemoth that is Facebook,
which at the time of writing claims it has over 800 million subscribers, to the
small and niche-like WriteAPrisoner.com, a US-based SNS that allows pen-
pal-like communications with the outside world, with the goal of easing
prisoner’s transition from jail back into the community.

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 34  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

In attempting to define social network sites, it is useful to note boyd and

Ellison’s (2007) comment that the terms ‘network’ and ‘networking’ are
often used interchangeably in critical literature. boyd and Ellison prefer the
use of the term ‘network’ because, for them, networking implies the initiation
of relationships by strangers. Consider, for example, a business networking
event, where the point of the event is for people who have certain interests
to meet other people who also share those interests. Here the emphasis is on
the construction of new relationships. SNSs, while supporting this kind of
relationship construction, are more frequently used by people to maintain
existing relationships, and so boyd and Ellison elect to use the term ‘social
network site’ to emphasise their role in maintenance of relationships that in
many cases exist in offline as well as online contexts. We will return to this
point later in the chapter.
At the core of social network sites is the construction of social networks
that are enabled and enhanced by the internet. To date, boyd and Ellison’s
definition of SNS has been the most accurate. SNS are:

web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-

public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with
whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections
and those made by others within the system. (boyd and Ellison 2007)

Most social network sites share a number of common features such as

profiles, lists of connections, comments and private messaging. Profiles are
how users identify themselves to the social media site, and usually contain
a range of information about the user, including a name (and sometimes a
screen name), email address (which is often kept hidden), birth date and
other biographical information. Many sites also encourage users to upload
a photo for use in their profiles. This information helps to build social
networks and allows for site features like annual birthday reminders but
also has clear implications for users’ privacy. Some sites make their users’
profiles publicly available, while others keep profiles hidden, only reveal-
ing them to other users of the SNS based on their relationship with the
profile’s owner.
A list of connections or relationships with other users of the SNS –
sometimes called ‘friends’, although as boyd and Ellison point out, people
in these lists may not actually be considered friends by the user – allows
individuals to assert relationships with other individuals on the network.
How these links are created depends on the site. For some SNSs, like Twitter,
connections can be made unilaterally by one party, and a distinction is
made between those people a user has linked to, and people who have linked

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 Social network sites   35

to the user. In Twitter these incoming/outgoing links are distinguished by

the terms ‘followers’ and ‘following’. Other SNSs, such as LinkedIn, require the
link to be agreed to by both parties. Most SNSs also have ways of enabling
users to link with contacts who are not signed up to the service, usually by
dispatching an email to the other party which contains instructions on how
to sign up for the SNS so they can accept the connection. This is one mecha-
nism through which SNS can increase their subscriber base.
Comments, status updates and private messages allow communication
between people on the network. The communication may be used like instant
messaging (real-time conversations), may be a question inviting a response
(‘Does anyone know what’s going on with the traffic this morning?’) or
may simply be a statement (‘Just had lunch, tuna is great!’) that is not intended
to provoke a response but serves to keep an individual’s social network
alive by reminding others in the network that the individual is still there
(Crawford 2010).
There are many dozens of SNSs, with some based around a theme, while
others have no theme at all, other than offering a way for people to make
connections. For example, LinkedIn is themed around people’s working and
business relationships, and Flixster is for developing social networks based
around films. On the other hand, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ have no
central organising theme (although Facebook did start as a site for US col-
lege students). Some sites aim to cater for specific social groups (BlackPlanet
for African-American users; OUTeverywhere for lesbian/gay/bisexual/trans-
sexual users, for example), although many do not. Even amongst sites that
do not target any particular group some level of social differentiation does
seem to have occurred. For example, in the US at least, LinkedIn has an
older demographic than MySpace (Hampton et al. 2011), and Orkut is
popular in Brazil and India (even though the service is based in the US). As
we will discuss below, this connection of SNSs with national identity incor-
porates public displays of intimacy that help to establish and reinforce
connections in an online environment, reflecting underlying influences in the
way people use social networks that are not immediately visible.

COMMUNITIES AND NETWORKS

Despite social media being a relatively recent phenomenon, research into
people using network technologies to communicate with others pre-dates
the development of social media by decades. From the 1980s, pioneers like
Barry Wellman were already engaging with questions about the nature
of sociality within what was generally referred to as ‘computer-mediated

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communication’. This included internet-based networks, but also bulletin

board systems and networked work places. While one theme in this early
work suggested that online interaction was a poor substitute for face-to-face
communication (often based on workplace-based studies), others recognised
that some people were using the networks for more social activities.
This section provides an overview of the discipline of internet studies,
which looks at the subject of what people do online, what kinds of structures
are re-mediated and what kind of structures are new. We will look at the
‘ethnographic turn’ that has become increasingly apparent in internet studies
since the late 1990s and how debate has emerged in this discipline around the
question of whether online interactions are best described as communities or
networks.

Virtual communities
Back in 1993, Howard Rheingold popularised the idea of virtual communities
in his book by the same name (and subtitled, importantly, ‘Homesteading
on the Electronic Frontier’). Rheingold’s book examined his experiences
with an early online community called the WELL, a pre-internet community
based around Northern Californian new age ideologies. The WELL – an
acronym for Whole Earth Lectronic Link – was a computer bulletin
board maintained by a group of alternative lifestyle users who also pro-
duced the Whole Earth Catalog. Stewart Brand, editor of the catalogue
and founder of the WELL, coined the aphorism ‘information wants to be
free’ (Clarke 2000).
Rheingold’s work popularised the notion of online communities, and fed
into emerging media interest in the fledgling internet. On one side of what
Wellman and Gulia (1999) have described as a Manichaean and unschol-
arly debate were those who derided the idea of online communities as mere
escapism, and yet further evidence of the decay of society and social relations.
Here, the image that was constructed was of a socially awkward computer
nerd, sitting in his basement engaged in a fantasy world that further
removed him from reality and social connections. Castells points out that
these negative images of online communication fed into existing pessimistic
narratives about the loss of community in the modern suburb or megacity
(2001: 125).
Others, like Rheingold, saw potential in these online environments to
create new kinds of communities that could reinvigorate public discussion
and debate. Instead of seeing these networks as socially isolating, many
argued that the internet created a new space for social interaction and
democratic participation, establishing some of the basis for claims about the

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 Social network sites   37

internet as an empowering medium, as discussed in Chapter 2. For others

still, this online or virtual construction of social spaces was reminiscent of
what Ray Oldenburg (1989) had described as ‘great good places’ or ‘third
places’. Such places exist outside the home and work, and are places where
conversation is the main activity, positions are levelled (for example, the boss/
worker relationship is left at the door when entering the third place) and the
mood is generally playful. Most importantly, they are places that are readily
accessible to everyone. A number of scholars (Kendall 2002; Soukup 2006)
have argued that online spaces meet Oldenburg’s criteria for third places, and
it is a theme we will return to in Chapter 6 when considering the social envi-
ronments constructed by social media games.
Some, like Sherry Turkle (1984, 1995), also argued that these spaces
opened up opportunities for experimentation with new forms of identity,
and pointed to the ways that online communication had the potential to
free the individual from his or her body, allowing them to play in the realm
of their imagination. This, in turn, allowed the playful exploration of con-
cepts like gender. The online environment appeared to be a space which acted
like a playground for identity, although some of the best work in this area still
acknowledged the importance of offline factors (Turkle 1995; Baym 1998).
However, in Turkle’s later work, Alone Together, she did an about-face in
terms of her celebration of the online.
These studies were conducted in the early days of the internet and often
referred to people’s own journeys through online communication environ-
ments. However, as larger numbers of people started joining the internet and
commercialisation and dotcom excitement began to kick in, the character of
these early environments began to change.

Networked communities
As the number of people using the internet began to burgeon in the
mid-1990s, internet researchers had more opportunity to study online com-
munities. Researchers began to discuss and emphasise the continuity of
offline relationships and behaviours of users over discontinuity, amplifying
the importance of social context. While a great deal of research has been
done into online communities over the years, it is difficult to ignore the
contribution of certain key scholars. Wellman conducted some of the first
studies into the ways people used information technologies, and was one
of the first people to argue for the importance of offline factors in online
communication.
In one study Wellman, along with his colleagues, studied the ways that
computer scientists working in universities used computer networks as part

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of both their work and social interaction. One of the key findings was that
people communicated more depending on how strong their offline ties were.
People who were already friends, or who had developed relationships with
each other through work, communicated with each other more often on
these networks (Haythornthwaite and Wellman 1998). The findings of this
and other studies led Wellman to argue for more robust models of under-
standing online communities where offline factors were recognised as having
an important role in online communication. Wellman and Haythornthwaite
brought these perspectives together with other research in their edited col-
lection The Internet in Everyday Life (2002).
The recognition that online experiences were grounded in real-world
settings led to what could be termed an ‘ethnographic shift’ in internet studies.
A good example of the ethnographic shift in internet studies is reflected in
Daniel Miller and Don Slater’s (2001) study, which looked at the use of the
internet by Trinidadians. Their focus went beyond the online behaviours of
Trinidadians to engage with the way in which internet use is contextualised
with other (offline) cultural activities. Rather than attempting to generalise
their study to describe all internet behaviour, Miller and Slater concerned
themselves only with explaining the specific instance of internet use that their
study focused on.
Unlike earlier studies of online communities, which typically started
by constructing the online environment as a novel communicative space,
Miller and Slater saw geographical place and the offline social world of
their users as an extremely important consideration in their attempts to
understand Trinidadian use of the internet. They describe their approach
as ‘one that sees it [the internet] embedded in a specific place, which it also
transforms’ (Miller and Slater 2001: 21). In this way, the internet shapes,
and is shaped by, the cultural context in which it is performed. Miller and
Slater found that being Trinidadian was an important factor in how and
why people in Trinidad went online. Furthermore, they discovered in some
cases that the online environment provided a space where people could be
Trinidadian.
A key facet of these new internet community studies was the recognition
that the internet is not one monolithic or homogeneous communication
technology. Instead, the internet is presented as an unbounded object, which
escapes a single all-encompassing definition. Unlike a mass media subject
such as television, the internet is not understood as representing a totality.
From this perspective, the internet is defined by an ongoing process of
meaning making, a process through which the internet is socially constructed
through its use. Moreover, in this understanding there is not one definition
of the internet but many, depending on the context of the people who use

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the internet and the context of that use. Miller and Slater, for example,
argued that the internet must be ‘disaggregated’, emphasising that it is
important:

not to look at a monolithic medium called ‘the Internet’, but rather at a range
of practices, software and hardware technologies, modes of representation and
interaction that may or may not be interrelated by participants, machines or
programs (indeed they may not all take place at a computer). (Miller and Slater
2001: 14)

Miller and Slater describe the internet as both a ‘symbolic totality’ (as
people do refer to an entity called ‘the internet’) as well as a ‘practical
multiplicity’ – because one individual’s definition of the internet might be
radically different to another’s (2001: 16). Christine Hine, another leading
researcher who uses an ethnographic approach to the study of internet com-
munities, reinforces this by pointing out that while common parlance might
invoke the phrase ‘the internet’ as a single technological object, the actual
meaning of ‘internet’ can be quite different depending on who is speaking
and who is being spoken to. For example, she refers to the variety of different
attitudes and ideas about the internet reflected by the students in her under-
graduate classes (Hine 1998: 30).
Following her own interests in studying the internet from an ethnographic
perspective, Hine has argued that the internet can be treated as both culture
and a cultural artefact (1998). She points out that the notion of ‘the internet’
has meaning attached to it through a process of social negotiation. For
example, the parents of grown children may have internet access, but not
know what to do with it. However, when one of their children moves inter-
state or overseas, email may become an important method for maintaining
contact. And when a baby is born in a family, a family member sets up a
website with digital photographs of the new baby, and so the internet
acquires meaning again, this time as represented through the web.
Manuel Castells picks up this theme and connects it back to his well-known
overarching metaphor of the networked society. Castells points out that in
studies such as Wellman’s early work, and the Pew Internet and American Life
Project, internet use is revealed as instrumental to the activities of everyday life.
Earlier characterisations of ‘virtual communities’, then, needed to be reconsid-
ered to de-emphasise the virtual and emphasise the connectedness of activities
both online and offline.
Both Wellman and Castells argue that while the family still forms the
basis for many of the strongest social ties in people’s lives, other strong ties
are formed through activities like work or play, and these ties may not neces-
sarily be based on geographic proximity. We may work with people who live

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hours away from us in the modern city, but we develop ties with them based
on shared knowledge and experience, and the internet allows us to maintain
these relationships over distance. These relationships take on the character
of networks in that each of us is connected to others by ties that, if mapped
out, would resemble a map of a computer or telephone network.
This does not mean that these ties between people are always strong, but
as Castells points out, just because a tie is weak does not mean that it is
not important. People coming together in an online forum to discuss a
topic of shared interest may come to know one another through their
posts, but never meeting in real life or knowing the real person means these
are weak ties. However, dismissing these ‘weak ties’ as unimportant is
clearly a mistake, as Clay Shirky demonstrates in telling the story of a lost
Motorola Razr phone (2008). In this example of the power of social net-
works, Shirky relates the story of how a lost phone that had been taken by
a passerby was recovered through the activities of an online community.
The links between the protagonist in this story and the community could
be characterised as weak – he didn’t know any of the people who helped
him recover the phone – but the weakness of the relationships did not
make the relationships ineffectual.
Wellman has pointed out that in many modern societies, a phenomenon
he calls ‘networked individualism’ has arisen; that is, individuals build net-
works to solve problems, make decisions or get support. The internet has
vastly extended these networks so that they are no longer constrained by
space. This change moves people away from traditional geographically
bounded social groups – neighbourhoods, for example – and towards
‘sparsely-knit and loosely-bounded networks’ (Wellman 2003). For Castells,
networked individualism is part of the networked society, rather than the
internet per se, but can be supported and augmented by the internet to pro-
duce ‘new patterns of sociability based on individualism’ (Castells 2001: 130).
To illustrate this, ask yourself a question: if you are thinking of buying
something – let’s say a new car – do you first get advice from a neighbour
or someone you work with, or do you Google it? If the answer is the latter,
then you’re engaging in networked individualism.

Networked publics
With the rise of the SNS, questions about the nature of online community
have again become a topic of interest. danah boyd has reworked the idea of
networked communities within the SNS to describe networked ‘publics’ as
an extension (but not necessarily an alternative) to the word ‘communities’.
When we speak of ‘the public’, we are in fact talking about a collection of

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 Social network sites   41

publics. A public, on the other hand is a bounded collective of individuals

who have come together under a common set of principles, affinities or
beliefs that bind and define the public – ‘a relation among strangers’ (Warner
2002). The public forms a single new entity that can be a social actor. There
is also the assumption that these publics are open and designed for participa-
tion by everyone; they are not ‘privates’, although, because they are bounded,
they necessarily have implicit rules which define what is considered part of
that public, and what is not.
According to boyd, networked publics are:

publics that are restructured by networked technologies. As such, they are

simultaneously (1) the space constructed through networked technologies and
(2) the imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people,
technology, and practice. (2011: 39)

There are two fundamental components outlined here that are worth reiterating:
networked publics are both spaces and groups of people who are connected
through practice and technology. They are ‘simultaneously a space and a
collection of people’ (boyd 2011: 41). Importantly, boyd argues that these
publics are not just networked because they are linked together by the tech-
nology, but they are transformed and restructured by networked media.
SNSs are examples of online technologies that support the production and
reproduction of networked publics. As boyd notes, there are three key
dynamics in SNSs: invisible audiences, collapsed contexts, and the blurring
of public and private (2011: 49). In examining the transformation of publics,
she observes that ‘the affordances of networked publics rework publics more
generally and the dynamics that emerge leak from being factors in specific
settings to being core to everyday realities’ (p. 53). In the pervasiveness of
networked publics, boyd perceives erosions of physical barriers while, at the
same time, ‘many people feel unmotivated to interact with distant strangers’
(p. 53). In sum, in networked publics, ‘attention becomes a commodity’ (p. 53).
While the notion of networked publics has considerable overlap with
Castells’ concepts of a networked community, networked publics differs
primarily in its use of the idea of ‘publics’ rather than ‘communities’ as the
organising metaphor for conceptualising online users. This is a useful alter-
native, because it allows us to drop the cultural associations caused by that
term, a problem that Castells himself is keen to avoid (2001: 127).

NETWORKS OR COMMUNITIES?
There is still healthy debate in the scholarly discourse about the nature of
the social structures that are enabled by network technologies. While Castells

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and others have moved away from the idea of online communities, and
embraced the network metaphor, others argue for the value of understand-
ing networked sociability as a kind of community.
The term ‘community’ is complicated and contested. There are a variety
of definitions that make it difficult to use without also accepting the intel-
lectual baggage that comes with them. This is why some, like Castells,
prefer to avoid the term altogether. Others have persevered, with interest-
ing results. Celia Pearce has attempted to sidestep some of the baggage by
drawing on German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies’ definition of commu-
nity (Gemeinschaft) as ‘an association of individuals with a collective will
that is enacted through individual effort’ (2009: 5). Pearce notes that ‘a
community of practice is defined as a group of individuals who engage in
a process of collective learning and maintain a common identity defined by
a shared domain of interest or activity’ (2009: 5). One of the key factors
in making and maintaining a community is social capital. The concept of
social capital requires a few paragraphs to explain, but it is important so
it’s worth a minor detour.
The term ‘social capital’ is used by Pierre Bourdieu (1984 [1979]) in his
widely read work Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.
Bourdieu was interested in taste and how taste becomes naturalised in
people. In other words, Bourdieu wanted to know what societal mechanisms
led to a person from one kind of background enjoying caviar and opera,
while someone else likes fried chips and hard rock music. These tastes are
naturalised so that people don’t even know why they like them, or how they
came to like them – it just seems ‘natural’ for them to feel such responses.
For Bourdieu, capital was a form of ‘knowledge’ that helped produce and
naturalise taste.
To explore this, Bourdieu interviewed 1,200 French people from varying
class backgrounds about their tastes in art, music and popular culture. As a
result of this research, Bourdieu deployed his concept of capital to discuss
what he saw as three significant kinds of capital that influenced people’s
taste: cultural (informed by education and upbringing), social (community
and networks), and economic. These factors, along with the individual’s own
‘habitus’ (the regulatory patterns of everyday life and everyday practices),
were the contributing factors in determining one’s identification with a par-
ticular lifestyle niche.
Bourdieu’s concept of ‘social capital’ took on new significance when it
was reworked by James Coleman (1988) to infer a more ego-centred con-
cept. Social capital was then redefined by Robert Putnam as part of his
savage exposé on the declining role of community and social welfare in the
US in Bowling Alone (2000). Here Putnam characterised social capital as

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societal-orientated activity based upon notions of trust and reciprocity.

Social capital, therefore, can be seen as an integral component in the sustain-
ability of online communities. Reflecting upon the literature about social
capital from Pierre Bourdieu onwards, Ellison et al. note that an SNS such
as Facebook:

facilitates specific types of connections between people that can generate social
capital … SNSs are continuously reshaping our social networks and the
communication practices we use to maintain them, and thus constitute a
vibrant, important, and challenging context for studying communication
practices and their social capital outcomes. (2011: 141)

In his reworking of the concept of SNS as community, Parks argues that

Rheingold’s depiction of the virtual community may find a new home in
SNSs (Parks 2011). Reviewing various definitions of community, he deter-
mined that there are five characteristics that constitute a virtual community.
Each of these characteristics are difficult to measure, so Parks derived three
affordances that would indicate activities that were conditions for commu-
nity: membership, personal expression and connection. Parks argued that if
an SNS demonstrates all three affordances, then it can be said to be support-
ing a virtual community. Using MySpace as a case study, Parks examined
how often people logged in, how often they updated their profiles and how
many friends they were connected to.
Parks’ results were surprising. Instead of finding that communities thrived
in MySpace, he found that many people (as many as 40 per cent) had so few
online friends and logged in so infrequently that it was questionable
whether they could even be considered ongoing subscribers to the service,
let alone members of any virtual community. Other studies tend to confirm
Parks’ observations in other social media, although there is also the pos-
sibility that the way people use MySpace may differ from the way they use
other SNSs like Facebook (Hampton et al. 2011). Only 15 to 25 per cent
of surveyed members met Parks’ basic requirements for constructing online
communities.
Parks also noted, however, that for people with large numbers of friends
on MySpace, a high percentage of those friends lived within a relatively small
geographical distance from the user. In other words, the online social net-
works were being used by these people to maintain or supplement existing
offline connections. He also suggested that users who find their that friends
are already online might be more likely to stay online themselves, and to
build communities. The key point here is that these online communities are
tightly tied to local relationships, and that offline and online communities
are tightly linked – much more so than we might imagine. The Pew Research

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Center’s Internet & American Life SNS survey conducted in 2010 supports
this claim. In this study (which was conducted by phone) it was reported that
89 per cent of North American users’ Facebook friends are people they have
met more than once in person, and a high percentage of the total number of
friends on Facebook are people who are known to the user through school/
university, work, family or volunteer groups (Hampton et al. 2011).
This data suggests that SNS relationships are geographically and socially
oriented towards the local. Significantly, these findings suggest an important
point: it’s not just the size of the network that matters, but the quality of the
connections. More intimate connections seem to be more valuable and
more common for SNS users than large numbers of less intimate connections.
This weakens the importance of network effects and increases the relative
importance of intimacy, suggesting that rather than being characterised as
networked publics, SNS-constructed publics might alternatively be defined
as ‘intimate publics’.

Intimate publics
The idea behind intimate publics is that as social and mobile media become
more pervasive, different modes of using these media mean that increasingly
publics are defined by the strength of their relationships, rather than the total
number of network connections. The term ‘intimacy’ when used here not
only refers to the common-usage kinds of intimacies that exist between lov-
ers, family members or close friends (though these can and do play a role),
but also to intimacies that can exist at a social or cultural level. As Michael
Herzfeld observes, cultural intimacy describes the ‘social poetics’ of the
nation-state; it is ‘the recognition of those aspects of a cultural identity that
are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless
provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality’ (1997: 3). To put
it a different way, intimacy can be something that exists between strangers
because of the common bond they can share by virtue of them belonging to
the same cultural group, whether that be a town, city, nation or some other
sociological or political grouping. An example might be a small country town
where everyone who grew up there knows that the town has a reputation for
having the worst weather in the nation (or the most boring night-life, or the
most superstitious people in the province and so on). This shared knowledge,
even if it is potentially embarrassing, also acts as a kind of social bond – a
‘cultural intimacy’.
An example of when cultural intimacies come into play would be when
two people from similar cultural backgrounds but who are otherwise stran-
gers accidentally meet on a train in an unfamiliar country, and find that they

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immediately have a connection. The way that SNSs have been developed or
simply picked up by different nations and cultures across the world is
also a tangible example of this kind of cultural intimacy. China’s QQ is not
just any SNS; it is the Chinese SNS, and to use QQ is to participate in a
community that shares a set of cultural intimacies. Facebook has become
popular in Korea, but it does not speak to and of Korea in the way Cyworld
minihompy does (Hjorth 2007). One of the first SNSs, Friendster, began in
the US but soon became widely adopted in the Philippines. Many Brazilians
use Google’s original SNS, Orkut. The list of SNSs which have become
associated with particular nationalities goes on. In these examples it can
be argued that a sense of community emerges through the performance of
personal intimacies and the aggregation and identification of public socio-
cultural intimacies.
At a more interpersonal level, SNS can be regarded as a technological tool
that mediates interpersonal intimacies. Esther Milne (2004) has suggested
that new media, such as SNSs, function socially as tools to mediate intimacy,
and should be historically contextualised with other technologies that have
filled this role. Far from being a new phenomenon, others have argued that
intimacy has always been mediated (Hjorth 2005), with examples of other
technological intimacy mediators including texting on mobile phones, the
telegraph (see, for example, Standage 1998), and written correspondence.
When seen in this light, the only thing that has changed with the arrival of
SNSs is that people have appropriated computer networks as yet another
technology that mediates intimacy.
Intimacy in SNSs is also represented by how people manage their online
details. All SNSs have a concept of a profile, or something similar, which
reveals something about the user. This profile, as we mentioned above, may
include images and other information, and can often be made public or
private through the software, with these two categories defined fairly rigidly:
sharing with everybody (public) or sharing with friends (private). Google+
introduced the idea of ‘circles’ that allow people to place friends into differ-
ent and potentially overlapping user-defined categories like ‘work mates’ or
‘school friends’. The amount of information about oneself that is revealed
through the profile is part of the performance of intimacy online.
For boyd (2011), US youth have responded to the growth in networked
media by creating networked publics that engage in various forms of semi-
public and semi-private modalities. Choosing what to share and who to
share it with allows people to control the privacy or publicness of their
information that goes beyond the relatively clumsy tools provided by social
networks. Instead, people use new kinds of strategies to control their infor-
mation, carefully assessing the social value of revealing information against

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the potential costs (boyd and Marwick 2011). Privacy, in other words, is
not simply an on/off switch or a setting that is chosen and then ignored.
Rather, the boundaries between public and private are something that
people are constantly revising as a perpetual work in progress (Hjorth and
Arnold 2013). Rather than viewing all SNSs as ‘networked publics’, as
boyd does for the context of the West, we could characterise SNSs instead
as ‘intimate publics’ that are played out, and through, social media prac-
tices. Some of these practices are expanded and examined in a Korean
context in Chapter 7.

TRENDS IN SNS STUDY

The different perspectives presented above demonstrate that SNS are highly
complex phenomena, and virtually demand the social scholar’s attention.
Reflecting this, the study of SNSs has become prominent within internet
studies and related disciplines. One glance at the programme of key annual
conferences such as AoIR (Association of Internet Researchers) shows the
various methods and approaches in the multitude of papers addressing SNSs.
This is hardly surprising as SNSs are highly visible internet phenomena, not
only because they are so widely used, but also because they provide a poten-
tial wealth of information for researchers about how people interact.
Through the popularity of Web 2.0, the riches that have become associated
with social media entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and the correspond-
ing media coverage SNSs have become the ‘new new thing’ (Lewis 2000).
Much of the research into SNSs until recently has been preoccupied with
the uses of SNSs by young people in Western contexts (Goggin and McLelland
2009). However, to think of SNSs as a Western Anglophonic phenomenon
would be a mistake, as SNSs are fast becoming a global phenomenon and
are no less emergent in developing countries (boyd and Ellison 2007).
Surveys of SNS users continually put a lie to the idea that SNSs are the
domain of the young. While younger users are often more active on social
networks, they are not the dominant age group. For example, the average
Facebook user was 38 in 2010 and the average age is increasing every year
(Hampton et al. 2011). As the demographic continues to widen, SNSs are
also becoming increasingly important sites for emerging forms of familial
interaction, socialising, relationship management and identity construction
(Bennett 2008; Bennett et al. 2009; Ito et al. 2008; Rheingold 2008; Hjorth
and Arnold 2012; Madianou and Miller 2012).
Methodological approaches to the study of social networks also vary.
Following on from the virtual ethnographic research traditions we mentioned

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above (Hine 1998; Miller and Slater 2001), some researchers of SNSs have
used qualitative approaches (boyd 2004, 2009, 2011; Miller 2011) to focus
upon more detailed, local and personalised understandings of the intimate
and social dimensions of SNS use. Other approaches are broader, analysing
and criticising social media, or particular aspects of it (Shirky 2008). Studies
around SNSs as part of broader forms of twenty-first century media literacy
(Ito et al. 2008) have also begun to emerge.
SNSs are also implicated in other areas of research, like journalism, poli-
tics and law. As we will see in Chapter 4, social media are enabling changes
in the way people engage with politics via citizen journalism and online
activism, and SNSs are often the sites and technologies that support these
activities. The discussion is thus rapidly moving beyond Western and teen
contexts and expanding to engage with broader social issues that include
censorship, privacy and copyright. This means that study into SNSs is highly
multi-disciplinary, and thus methodologies and motives for research are
highly varied. In the remainder of this chapter we are going to paint an
impression with broad brush-strokes of some of the major areas of current
research that engages with SNSs. As we will see, SNS studies are maturing
and multiplying, reflecting the way that SNSs are occupying an increasingly
important role both within and across societies.

Non-Anglocentric studies
Initial research into SNSs focused upon contexts familiar with the researcher’s
own cultural context. Given the nature of English as the lingua franca in
‘global’ studies, many studies into SNSs came from Anglophonic researchers
(Goggin and McLelland 2009). Later, non-Anglophonic models began to
grow, relating the cross-cultural and global nature of SNSs (Yang et al. 2003;
Goggin and McLelland 2009).
This shift is important when we consider that many of the locations
for hardware and software manufacturing have been situated in non-
Anglophonic contexts. The Asia-Pacific region, which encompasses locations
such as India and China, is one such non-Anglophonic context that is home
to some of the oldest SNSs such as Cyworld (Hjorth and Kim 2005). Many
nations within the Asia-Pacific also have longer histories with mobile and
locative technologies (see Chapter 7) and demonstrate examples of new social
uses of the technologies in areas such as gaming, location-aware social media
and social networks (Hjorth and Chan 2009). This makes the region difficult
for researchers to ignore.
Studies of social media use in the Asia-Pacific region, for example, have
found that for youth, SNSs are not only a fundamental part of everyday life

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 48  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

and the exercise of their social capital (see below), but also a space that
helps to maintain intergenerational ties when geographic distance might be
involved – a point we will illustrate more clearly through a case study of
social media games in Chapter 6.
As studies in the US have found, in many countries in the Asia-Pacific it
is no longer just ‘youth’ that are using SNSs, as adult-to-adult and inter-
generational forms of dialogue and digital literacy expand with increased net
accessibility. Moreover, the demographics are shifting too, as internet access
becomes a tool not just for the rich or middle classes, but as an integral
part of a new mobile working class (Qiu 2008). Interestingly, in China it
is working-class use of the internet that is growing exponentially, mainly
through mobile media (CNNIC 2009). This gives us insight into the ways that
some of the largest societies on Earth are developing and integrating new
media into this development.
Cross-cultural approaches to the study of SNSs also provide us with
insights into the differences and similarities between new media practices in
different cultures. By moving the cultural frame to another context, we often
find we learn a lot about the way that social media works in our own culture,
as behaviours which are rendered invisible through familiarity become visible
in unfamiliar cultural contexts.

SNSs and political action

In Chapter 4 we will look at the participative qualities of social media, and
the way that political engagement can emerge from activities like citizen
journalism and online activism. We will also suggest that mobile technology
is playing an increasingly important role in the way that groups of people
can organise, as outlined by Howard Rheingold’s concept of ‘smart mobs’
(2002). The possibilities of using SNSs and social media for political action
has been further promoted by events, such as the Arab Spring uprisings of
2011, which helped to establish the idea that social media was no longer
only about social networks for maintaining interpersonal relationships.
Social media was presented here as a powerful communication technology
that changed the nature of how information gets disseminated through new
affective channels that have the potential to motivate and mobilise people in
ways that media has never before – as we will see with the Kony 2012 cam-
paign example in Chapter 4.
While we need to be cautious about claims that any new technology is very
different or revolutionary, in this case this technology is a particularly useful
tool for organising and communicating. This is partially because there is
a greater degree of affective personalisation involved with social media.

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 Social network sites   49

In other words, if you receive a pamphlet about a protest from a stranger in

the street it is a different experience to receiving the same information from
a friend on Facebook. In the latter example, there’s already a connection
between you and the friend, so the message has more significance and it is
likely to affect you on a different level. Messages can also take on unique
forms not just in terms of media format (text, image, video) but also discus-
sion and active engagement through messaging, online petitions and so on
(Bennett 2008; Bennett et al. 2009; Ito et al. 2008; Rheingold 2008). Social
mobile media also provide new spaces for networked, effective civic responses
and affective interpersonal responses (Hjorth and Arnold 2012).

Privacy
One of the more significant and complex concerns associated with social
network sites is the issue of privacy and, not surprisingly, this is a burgeon-
ing area in the field of SNS research. This issue has received a great deal
of attention not just in popular media, but in critical literature as well.
Privacy is a highly popular topic precisely because it is so complex, and
because it provides a handhold for anchoring fears and anxieties about a
new technology.
Most new technologies are met with an initial social response that contains
elements of fear, paranoia and anxiety (Kember 1998). The media frequently
plays into these fears, often emphasising them out of proportion by focusing
on the exceptional and presenting it as the norm. SNSs are no exception to
this, and have been implicated as the culprits in a range of modern anxieties
from playground bullying to terrorism. The media is happy to offer a range
of anecdotes to support these fears (Marwick 2008).
For SNSs, concerns about privacy are tantamount. Parents worry that
their children are able to publish too much about themselves, attracting
unwanted attention, damaging their reputations or breaking laws that they
may not even realise they are breaking. For their part, teenagers often resent
their parents’ interest in their online activities, and see parental attempts at
monitoring their online behaviour as an invasion of their privacy (boyd and
Marwick 2011).
Some studies have examined the uses of SNSs and their built-in privacy
systems and have concluded that many users of SNSs – especially younger
users – do not take advantage of the privacy features (Gross and Acquisti
2005). Others suggest that to understand young people’s attitudes to pri-
vacy in the online environment requires a more thorough understanding of
online practices. boyd and Hargittai (2010), for example, show that teens
in their studies are very aware of the privacy implications of their online

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 50  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

activities and are very selective about what they share and who they share
it with.
Much of the work on privacy concerns the relationship between individu-
als and how people negotiate, public and private, between themselves and
other users of the SNS. However, another dimension of privacy that has been
less explored concerns the relationship between users and the SNS itself. The
issues associated with this go back to fundamental questions about user and
used, and control, that we examined in Chapter 2.

Analysing social data

As we saw in Chapter 2, SNSs collect and generate data about their users
and about how users connect with each other. Although much of the
data that SNSs collect remains private, some of that data is public, especially
those things that the users themselves want to share. An example is posts on
Twitter, which provide information such as time and date sent, sometimes
a geographic location for the originating post, the user name of the person
who created the post and so on. The richness of Twitter posts also comes
from the use of hashtags, which allow people to track issues rather than
individuals.
Many SNSs now provide application programmable interfaces (APIs) that
allow various applications, including custom-built applications, to access
the data generated by the SNS. This can provide researchers with a wealth
of information about the use of the SNS, but can also provide enticing
glimpses into the social machinery. Research using this data has resulted
in a wide range of different applications. For example, Bamman et al.
(2012) have used statistical analysis techniques on data from Twitter and
Sina Weibo (a Chinese SNS, similar to Twitter) and Chinese instant mes-
saging services to gain an understanding of levels and application of cen-
sorship in mainland China. From their analysis they claimed to be able to
identify terms that were censored and even to show how censorship varied
by province.
Data visualisation techniques are increasingly being used to provide visual
representations of the data, too. In this work, large amounts of data collected
from an SNS is used to draw images, charts and graphs which reflect some
aspect of the SNS. For example, Facebook intern Paul Butler (2010) used
data on the location and frequency of Facebook posts, resulting in a map
that lights up the world based on Facebook use. Large chunks of Africa,
China and Russia are rendered dark, providing a startling visual mapping of
population density, global wealth and aggressive censorship.

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 Social network sites   51

In a similar vein, Jer Thorp, a Canadian artist and educator, developed Just
Landed In ..., a visualisation of the location of Twitter posts that contain the
phrase ‘just landed in’. In this visualisation, lines appear superimposed across
the globe, representing people’s travel and providing a visual representation
of human movement through space and time and their connections with
social media (Thorp 2009).
Others are using social media sources and applying sophisticated infor-
mation processing techniques to explore the relationships and uses of SNSs
as a way of providing quantitative data that supports (or refutes) qualitative
research. Thelwall has conducted a number of such analyses of SNSs. In one
such study, Thelwall (2008) collected a random selection of around 20,000
profiles from MySpace users and analysed the information provided in
these profiles to develop a statistical overview of data such as age, religion,
frequency of access and so on. Thelwall found that users were younger than
previously reported (the median age was 21), and that the median number
of friends was 27. He also saw that there were groupings of this data; there
were a lot of people who only had 1 friend, a group who had 2–9 friends,
another that had 10–90 and a third group who had more than 90. The authors
noted that this was consistent with qualitative research that suggested that
people who use MySpace categorise friends into close friends, acquaintances
and strangers. Given that the median was 27 friends, the data suggested that
for MySpace users, most friends were acquaintances rather than close friends.
The suggestion here is that people made friends online, rather than using
the SNS as a way to maintain offline relationships. This is at odds with
some research, although it may also reflect the kinds of users that were
using MySpace.
Others still are using social media data to gain insights into how people
respond to events. For one example, Bruns et al. (2012) analysed social
media postings in the aftermath of the 2011 floods in Brisbane, Australia.
They followed the changing social media etiquette and the response by the
Queensland police to the disaster through large-scale data collection of
Twitter hashtags, and then created visualisations of the patterns of media
use and themes around this event. For another example, in Hjorth and
Kim’s (2011) case study of the role of social and mobile media in the crisis
of Japan’s earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster
(known as 3/11), they found that many victims of these events relied on older
media and communication methods. This seemed to be because the partici­
patory nature of social media made understanding the event more confusing
than when it was encountered through ‘packaged’ media like television. One
respondent noted that prior to 3/11 he had viewed Twitter as ‘conversational’,

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 52  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

but during and after the crisis his opinion changed dramatically; he felt
bombarded by conflicting social media threads which then made him
redefine the discourse surrounding Twitter as more like a ‘conference’
than a ‘conversation’.
If we are to understand the impact of social media in times of crisis or
political upheaval we need to move our analysis from an effect-orientated
focus to affect-orientated one. We need more hybrid studies that combine
the micro and macro analysis, using such methods as Ken Anderson’s
‘ethno-mining’ in which ethnographic processes are used to analyse data-
mining (Anderson et al. 2009). Data-mining and visualisations may paint
pictures of media phenomenon during these times, but as anyone who has
lost an intimate will attest, they are abstract in the reality of grief’s texture.
Instead, there needs to be more ethnographies of media affect and mobile
intimacy to understand the micro, meso and macro levels of intimate publics
in times of trauma.
There is certainly a proliferation of data in current society, leading some
to call this moment the ‘era of Big Data’. However, as boyd and Crawford
note, ‘Big Data’ is ‘in many ways, a poor term’ (2012: 663). They argue
that:

like other socio-technical phenomena, Big Data triggers both utopian and
dystopian rhetoric. On one hand, Big Data is seen as a powerful tool to address
various societal ills, offering the potential of new insights into areas as diverse
as cancer research, terrorism, and climate change. On the other, Big Data is
seen as a troubling manifestation of Big Brother, enabling invasions of privacy,
decreased civil freedoms, and increased state and corporate control. As with all
socio-technical phenomena, the currents of hope and fear often obscure the
more nuanced and subtle shifts that are under way. (2012: 663–4)

Representations of Big Data are compelling, illustrating Matt Jones’ point

that data is seductive material (2009). Data holds the promise of containing
answers to questions you haven’t even asked yet, so long as you have the
tools to collect, sort and analyse the dataset. But this can be a compelling
illusion, as there are limits to what the data alone can tell us, especially when
it comes to the analysis of social data. Sentiment analysis, for example, is a
technique where the computer attempts to determine the affective meaning
pieces of text. This is done through statistical analysis of words and word
proximity. So, a piece of text like ‘I’m having the worst day of my life’ could
be analysed and determined to be a negative sentiment. However, the com-
puter cannot read context. When one person claims that a particular person
is ‘sick’, for example, it has different meanings that depend on the person
being referred to and the person doing the referring. Kamvar and Harris’s

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 Social network sites   53

We Feel Fine (2009), which builds up an interactive mapping on sentiment

in blog posts, is probably still the most engaging use of sentiment analysis
even though their purpose is more artistic than analytical. As Anderson et al.
(2009) note, data mining by itself provides little insight beyond abstract
pattern recognition. Forwarding their hybrid model of ‘ethno-mining’,
Anderson et al. argue that the socio-cultural depth provided by ethnography
needs to be brought to data mining in order to render these abstractions into
dynamic reflections of lives and subjectivities.
The use of data analysis techniques as a research tool raises a number of
issues. boyd and Crawford (2011, 2012) point to a number of them, including
issues with the ethics of using public data that was never intended to be used
in this fashion, the methodological reliability and limits to the approaches used
(sentiment analysis is an obvious problem here) and the potential of uneven
and inequitable access to data sources. As boyd and Crawford observe, the ‘Big
Data’ move should be understood as part of the computational turn (Burk-
holder 1992) that, in turn, creates new digital divides. This is an emerging and
valuable area of research in social media that would benefit from a more rigor-
ous examination of its techniques.

CONCLUSION
In many ways, SNSs are the definitive social media technology. They are the
interface through which people engage with social media, and increasingly
they are the way that people engage with the internet. SNSs are shining
examples of the Web 2.0 ethos we discussed in Chapter 2 – they are user-
oriented, providing a space for people to make things, share things, communi-
cate and connect with each other, allowing for a wide range of empowering
practices from activism to creative production. However, we must not forget
that they are also commercial ventures, and as such can and do commercial-
ise users by collecting and using their data and details. SNSs are free, in that
we do not pay subscription fees to access them, but companies like Facebook
have multi-billion dollar valuations. The question we must ask here is, why?
If we are not paying in cash then are we paying in some other way, and are
we getting value?
In the first part of this chapter we have looked at the evolution of the inter-
net as a medium for sociality. From virtual communities we have explored
networks, networked publics and intimacy as structural features of the sociality
afforded by SNSs. Questions persist about whether SNSs and online inter­
actions are better understood as a network or a community. We suggest that
SNSs exhibit properties of both.

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 54  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

SNSs are also both global and local. From Manchester to Manila, and from
Seoul to Sydney, people are using SNSs for similar reasons, and in this way
they are a powerful symbol of the way that communication technologies
really are spanning the globe, crossing cultures and encouraging research that
appreciates the diversity this represents. Yet SNSs are also intensely local,
emphasising rather than erasing geographical proximity. SNSs may span the
globe, but the relationships we maintain through them are generally those
that we also maintain through face-to-face contact.
There is, of course, a faddish element to SNSs, and it is likely that today’s
darlings of the digerati will be tomorrow’s old news, but it would be a mis-
take to dismiss SNSs as nothing more than a fashion, as they reflect social
practice as much as they create it. SNSs have not become popular because
they create social networks, but because they provide a space for social
networks to exist. These social networks, as we have seen throughout this
chapter, and indeed in other chapters, exist in both online and offline worlds.
They provide spaces for online relations, but also structure our offline
relationships.

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 4 Participation and user created
content

I f there is one word that summarises the particular quality of social media,
it would be ‘participation’. Unlike the mass media before it, social media is
fundamentally a participative medium. Our online experience increasingly
involves methods of actively providing information about what we are doing,
or what we think of something. This might be as simple as a Facebook ‘like’
button, or as involved as maintaining a blog. Participation can take various
forms of agency from user generated content (UGC), in which users forward
content made by others, to user created content (UCC), in which the content
is made by the user. Every time we participate we partake in various forms of
labour sharing – from creative and social to emotional and affective labour.
In each cultural context, what it means to participate takes on different
dimensions. For example, in China where the internet is highly regulated by
the government, participation can often take the form of what in the West
might be called ‘lurking’. After all, imagine if the 457 million internet users
(CIW 2012) all spoke online at once. If everyone were talking, who would be
listening? Indeed, listening as a form of participation has only recently gained
attention in critical work concerning social media (Crawford 2009).
The emergence of social media and its emphasis on participative modes
of use has many significant implications for the study of media and society
more broadly. In each location, the implications of ‘click-activism’ are play-
ing out with different results (Nugroho and Syarief 2012). For example, we
can see changes in the fabric of activism in the emergence of social uprisings
like the Occupy Wall Street movement, or the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011
(Diamond and Plattner 2012). New dimensions are added to crisis manage-
ment and response as seen during the New Zealand earthquake of 2011
(Bruns et al. 2012) and the events of Japan’s 3/11 tsunami (Hjorth and Kim
2011). Perhaps most significantly for journalists, social media is throwing
up challenges to the privileged position of journalists and the news media
as the sole arbiters of reportage. As participative forms of media like blogs
and SNSs become more mainstream, we are seeing the rise of the citizen
journalist – a phenomenon that is challenging conventions around press

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 56  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

media and journalism in general (Meikle and Redden 2010). It is important

not to grant social media too much agency when examining its role in
political events: social media didn’t cause these events, but it did change the
context for distribution and participation. In short, we are witnessing a shift
in the affect, rather than effect, and this has effects on other spheres of
society such as political agency and online activism.
The impact of the participative features of social media has been studied by
a number of scholars from a number of different perspectives. Bruns et al.
(2012) found that the use of social media, Facebook and Twitter played an
important role in crisis communication at the height of the 2011 South-East
Queensland floods crisis. In their report they focused upon the role of Twitter
‘in disseminating and sharing crisis information and updates from state and
local authorities as well as everyday citizens’ (Bruns et al. 2012: 7). In his
discussion of the political capacities of political fans and Twitter faking, Jason
Wilson argues that such mobile and social media ‘are interwoven with emerg-
ing, fan-like forms of engagement with mediatised politics’ (2011: 1). In what
he calls ‘post-broadcast democracies’, activities such as Twitter ‘faking’ show
‘playful, performative and mobile dimensions, which challenge scholars to
rethink theories of play, performance, fandom and political engagement’
(Wilson 2011: 1). Hjorth and Kim’s analysis of social media for crisis manage-
ment in the wake of Japan’s 3/11 asks whether we can think about a social
and mobile media ‘affect’ in the ways in which it frames people’s responses. They
argue that ‘while social media provide new channels for affective cultures
in the form of mobile intimacy, they also extend on earlier media practices
and rituals such as the postcard’ (Hjorth and Kim 2011: 1).
Central to these discussions about the politics of social and mobile media
is a rethinking of the relationship between participation, agency and media.
In this light, it is important to recognise that media ‘participation’ is a cul-
turally specific notion. Let us return to the opening example of China.
While ‘lurking’ in an Anglophonic context evokes images of users being
passive (Crawford 2009), in China such an activity is seen as an important
part of media participation (Goggin and Hjorth 2009). As social and mobile
media evolve unevenly across the globe, we see the ways in which that
media reflects local cultural, social and economic nuances. By engaging with
a culturally divergent understanding of participation that complicates the
binary between empowerment and exploitation, we reflect upon the evolu-
tion of ‘participatory media’ (Jenkins 2006) and how this has shaped, and
been shaped by, social media (Bennett 2008; Rheingold 2008). In order to
explore what participation means, and how it has been theorised and
represented in the social media literature, we will investigate a few broad
areas of academic study.

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 Participation and user created content   57

First, we will expand upon one of the threads explored in Chapter 2 and
engage more deeply with how academic scholars have conceptualised the
idea of audiences/users as producers. We also deploy Bruns’ term ‘produser’,
which we think is a very helpful term for describing the kinds of productive
behaviours to be addressed in this chapter. After we have defined what we
mean by produser, we will tackle another slightly more straightforward and
related theme: user created content (UCC). We will define what we mean by
these terms, contextualise them within the literature and then go on to look
at some of the implications of produsage and UCC.
Once we have defined the ideas of users as co-producers and of UCC, we
will move on to look at how these concepts play out in more generalised
and grounded practice. First, we will consider crowd sourcing as one way
that combined user production can be utilised to great effect in an online
environment filled with literally millions of users. We will then examine the
phenomenon of citizen journalism, before going on to examine online activism,
both quite practical examples of the kinds of behaviours that participatory
media enable. We will limit our discussion of journalism in light of the
book’s focus upon social media. Entire books have been written about citizen
journalism (Gillmor 2006; Meikle and Redden 2010) and online activism
(Zuckerman 2008; Pickerill 2010; Lovink 2012), and where relevant, we
encourage you to refer to these works if you want to develop a more thor-
ough understanding of the phenomena.

USERS AS PRODUCERS – ‘PRODUSERS’

As we saw in Chapter 2, the premise of Web 2.0 and the associated shift in
audiences has become a kind of reaction to the growing understanding that
in networked communication environments the audience are no longer
simply consumers of media: they have become participants. Just what partici-
pation means in the context of online media is very fuzzy indeed. In general
terms, we can say that internet-based media is participative because it is
two-way. This phenomenon has led some people to describe certain kinds of
uses of the internet as participative or participatory media (Rheingold 2008).
One aspect of participation is public response. Commenting on a news story
in an online newspaper is a kind of participation, although it is a kind of
participation that rehearses earlier types of media such as radio talkback
and letters to the editor of a newspaper. This kind of participation is some-
thing that has been written about widely, especially in social media and Web-
2.0-branded marketing texts. The common exhortation you will see repeated
by marketers is that the web is a conversation, a rhetoric that has become a
contemporary business mantra.

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 58  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

A much more provocative idea, however, is the idea of the audience as

media producer. This takes the idea of participation to another level. Instead
of simply responding to content that has been created by an organisation,
here the user becomes the source of the original material. Bloggers become
journalists, fans become the authors of extensions to books and films
(Jenkins 1992, 2006). Your kid becomes a star on YouTube because millions
of people think he was funny after he had visited the dentist and was still
zonked out on anaesthetic.1 If you have ever watched a funny video on
YouTube or been sent an email containing a funny picture, then the chances
are very high that the material was produced by another user – a person a
bit like you who was armed with nothing more than their laptop or desktop
computer, some technical skill and a clever idea. This kind of participation,
which is made possible by internet media (and exploited by social media),
tells us that the internet user is perhaps not best characterised as a member
of an audience, with its associated implications of passivity. This kind of
user – the person who makes videos, songs, sounds, images and writings
and shares them online – is something more active, something that looks
more like a producer.
In terms of scholarly approaches to the idea of user production of media,
there have been a number of papers and books written by some well-
respected and influential academics. One of the first to stake a claim in this
territory was Henry Jenkins, whose earlier work closely explored fan com-
munities in which he persuasively argued that fans were producers (1992).
As a cultural theorist, Jenkins comes from a tradition of cultural media
research that is interested in how audiences use and make meaning from the
media. Stuart Hall’s seminal work Encoding and Decoding in the Television
Discourse (1973) argued that television audiences are not passive but active
consumers of the media. They are active in that they construct their own
meanings from media ‘texts’ that may not be entirely in line with the
intended meaning of the producers.
Jenkins’ early work in this area, which pre-dates the development of the
internet as a mainstream medium, looked at fan cultures. He was particu-
larly interested in the way that fans of TV series like Star Trek, for example,
did not simply watch the show, but actively engaged with it through a series
of highly visible creative practices which include everything from making
outfits and role-playing characters at conventions to extending plots and
the storyworld of the show by writing fictional narratives of their own. The
film Trekkies (directed by Roger Nygard, 1997), in which Star Trek fans are
divided into two types – Trekkies and Trekkers – is a good example of dif-
ferent levels of ‘fandom’ participation. Trekkers might be fans in that they
watch the show and buy some merchandise, while Trekkies actively render

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 Participation and user created content   59

their lives into characters and storyworlds of Star Trek. In other words,
Trekkers might visit Star Trek whereas Trekkies completely inhabit the
world of Star Trek. Thus, engagement with the TV series was much more
than passive watching; it was highly creative and active with audiences
participating in the making of meanings and interpretations. Indeed, it
was in these fan communities – both those of gamers (we will come back
to this in Chapter 5) and fans of popular culture – that the first kinds of
production emerged, well before anyone coined the term ‘Web 2.0’, and well
before the first social media sites appeared. In reflecting on these observa-
tions, Jenkins describes something he called a ‘participatory culture’, which
he defines as:

a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement,
strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations, and some type of
informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed
along to novices. A participatory culture is also one in which members believe their
contributions matter, and feel some degree of social connection with one another
(at the least they care what other people think about what they have created).
(2006: 3)

While Jenkins was concerned with the way that audiences produced, others
pointed to the emergence of a new class of worker – the professional ama-
teur, or ‘pro-am’ – whose production did not fit into ideas of either amateur
production or professional production, but occupied a territory somewhere
between (Leadbeater et al. 2004). The professional amateur was someone
who worked at their interest like a professional, spending as many hours on
their endeavour as they might in their day job, treating it like it was a task
that earned money, and yet was not a professional since they were not part
of a professional community and did not get paid for their work.
Other scholars looked more intently at the way in which users who pro-
duced undertook their work. Australian academic Bruns has engaged with
the idea of the user who produces through his book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second
Life and Beyond (2008), in which he describes the term ‘produser’ as a
conflation of the words producer and user. This coining of a new phrase is
not just about coming up with a word to mark academic territory; it is also
about developing a word that is simply lacking in the English language to
describe something that has become so ubiquitous that it is simpler to use a
new word than to continue using a phrase.
Other terms have also been coined, but as yet none have stuck. The idea
and practices are quite new, and it will be some time before the phrases are
resolved. Perhaps in the future we may simply return to a term like ‘user’,
and simply incorporate the understanding that users are also producers into

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 60  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

this term. In any event, the term ‘produser’ is useful in the context of this
discussion, and you will find that throughout this book we use Bruns’ term
when we are referring to users who produce.

USER CREATED CONTENT (UCC)

There is a wealth of information online, and a great deal of it is produced
by users working in their own free time. Creating content not only involves
creativity but also time, emotion and various forms of capital (social, cultural
and sometimes economic). With the availability of high-quality cameras
connected to smartphones, the ways in which we can record, experience,
visualise and memorialise events is changing (Ito and Okabe 2005, 2006;
Hjorth 2007; Mørk Petersen 2008). Many social media sites including
YouTube, Flickr and Facebook, to name only a few, exist only because of
the content created by their users (Burgess 2007; Mørk Petersen 2008).
These sites – more services or ‘platforms’ than places that actually produce
content – make money by selling attention, and that attention is gained
through users’ creative and social labour. An active part of the media dis-
courses involve forwarding content to other users – often generically called
‘user generated content’ (UGC).
Not all of this information is produced directly with the implicit intention
of making something for someone else to enjoy. Recorded conversations
between users is one example. A vast majority of conversations may be of
absolutely no interest to other people. Many of these micronarrative gestures
seek to reinforce existing relationships and social capital (Ellison et al. 2011).
A conversation on Facebook between two friends about what they did on
the weekend plays an important role in building and maintaining offline
relationships in the online space, but is unlikely to have a great deal of
value to others outside this relationship. But this does not mean that all online
conversations have little value. For example, a conversation between a few
people about their cats’ health problems that leads to a resolution might
have a great deal of interest for other cat owners who find themselves in the
unhappy position of having a sick feline friend. Other information that comes
under the overall heading of UGC includes information that users supply
about themselves on personal profiles, such as birthdate, gender, physical
location and so on. This information may be even less interesting to the aver-
age user, but as we discussed in Chapter 3, it is of great value to the SNS that
collects it for data-mining.
While all of this material is clearly created by users, and it can become
content that is useful to other people, there is a difference between user profile

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data and a carefully crafted blog post that is uploaded to the internet for the
express purpose of being read by other users, or a short film that may rep-
resent many hours of production work that is then uploaded to YouTube. In
this book we draw a distinction between content that has been created pur-
posefully by a user expressly for exhibition to others, and content that is
generated by users as a result of using social media. We use the term ‘UCC’
to more precisely refer to the kinds of content produced intentionally by
users, usually for the purpose of consumption by other users.
There have been a number of criticisms of UCC, some of which we
explore in more detail in other chapters (see Chapter 5, for example). One
of these criticisms is that (often) amateur UCC is displacing established
forms of content creation where the content creator is a professional who
has significant training and experience in their field. This is a pronounced
criticism in some fields, such as journalism and the arts, as we will see below.
In seeking to move the discussion of user creativity beyond the professional/
amateur dichotomy, Jean Burgess (2007) has used the term ‘vernacular
creativity’ to identify UCC as something that is characterised by the vernacular
and everyday. She points out that while creativity is often seen as the exclu-
sive domain of trained elites like artists or design professionals, creativity has
always been an activity that everybody engages in, even if in the past it was
not always visible.
Scrapbooking, writing of short stories, and family histories, home crafts
and decoration are all examples of vernacular creativity that are no less
creative just because they are not produced by professionals or widely acces-
sible in the public domain. For Burgess these activities are about cultural
citizenship, a concept that expands and redefines classical notions of citizen-
ship that are based on participation in political activity. Here, the production
of creative works acts as a way of asserting and defining one’s citizenship,
which is ‘practised as much through everyday life, leisure, critical consump-
tion and popular entertainment as it is through debate and engagement with
capital “P” politics’ (Burgess et al. 2006: 1). We will return to some of these
issues around UCC in Chapter 5 when we come to look at art and cultural
production in the age of social media.

CROWD SOURCING, SMART MOBS, WIKIPEDIA

A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know
it. (Men in Black, dir. Sonnenfeld 1997)
[U]nder the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are
often smarter than the smartest people in them. (Surowiecki 2004: xiii)

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While some of the material about user participation explores cases where
individual produsers can participate in activities that were once beyond them,
others focus on the action of groups of users working together to produce
materials or solve problems. James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds (2004)
explored the idea that large groups of people can often solve problems that
individuals within the crowd cannot. Tim O’Reilly picked up this idea and
worked it into his formulation of Web 2.0 (2005).
Extrapolating from this idea, Amazon launched their Mechanical Turk ser-
vice in 2005, which allowed people to either pay a fee to have some problem
worked on by a group, or on the flip-side, to be paid a small fee for participation in
helping to solve a larger problem. Other online services provide facilities that
allow users to associate tags (single words or short phrases) with content,
thus allowing large numbers of people to build up keyword indexes based on
human-entered information.
The National Library of Australia has also utilised crowd sourcing to
help fix text from scanned newspapers for their online Trove service. Trove
is a digital repository of Australian media, including print, images and
audio. Part of their archive consists of newspapers dating back to 1803,
resulting in millions of pages of newsprint available online. These pages
were passed through an optical character recognition (OCR) process that
automatically turned the printed text into electronic text, which allows the
text to be indexed and searched. This is clearly a very valuable resource for
historians. However, OCR is not perfect and newsprint – especially material
that is smudged or damaged – does not always scan correctly. To fix this a
person needs to read the original text, compare it to the OCR text and make
any corrections manually. For a collection the size of Trove, this is an
intimidating amount of work.
In order to tackle the sheer size of this task, the National Library of
Australia developed an interface that allowed anyone on the internet to
register and edit the text themselves. This has proved a very successful way
of using crowd-sourcing techniques to help produce a publicly accessible,
searchable archive. The success can be measured in part by metrics. An early
version of the service was released in July 2008 and as of February 2009,
2.2 million lines and 104,000 articles had been corrected by internet users
(Holley 2009). While this is only a small percentage of the total 3.5 million
articles in Trove (which is planned to increase to 40 million), the strong
engagement of the community so rapidly suggests that there is a great deal
of value in crowd-sourced applications, especially when people perceive
they are helping the community. As one person noted about her motivation
for fixing material on Trove:

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‘I enjoy the correction – it’s a great way to learn more about past history and
things of interest whilst doing a “service to the community” by correcting text
for the benefit of others’ but also, her motivation for continuing to change
pages was driven by ‘the knowledge that you are doing something that will
benefit future people that wish to access articles on their family history’.
(Holley 2009: 17)

This gives us a small insight into the kinds of motivations that drive user
participation. If Mechanical Turk and the Trove experience demonstrate the
power of crowds, then Wikipedia provides a compelling case for the power
of utilising millions of online users to create an online knowledge repository.
Wikipedia is a portmanteau of two words – ‘wiki’ and ‘encyclopaedia’. The
word ‘wiki’ was developed from a Hawaiian word that means ‘quick’. In
practical terms, a wiki is a web-based system, developed by Ward Cunningham
in 1994, that allows people to write and edit a shared document, which can
be quickly linked to other documents. This allows a group of people to
collaborate on the production of documents that contain a hierarchical and
inter-linked arrangement of content. A perfect use for this kind of service is
the production of documents that consist of small chunks of self-contained
information that have relationships with other chunks of information – a user
manual for a piece of software, a technical manual for a mechanical device,
or an encyclopaedia.
Realising this potential, the founders of Wikipedia sought to create the
world’s largest repository of knowledge on just about any topic imagi-
nable. To facilitate this, they created a wiki that they then opened to
everyone to contribute to. Wikipedia has quickly become the world’s largest
source of knowledge on a variety of topics, from the history of the
Roman Empire to biographies of actors who starred in obscure cult TV
shows. Anyone can create pages in Wikipedia, and anyone can also edit or
amend information on Wikipedia – allowing not only for the creation of
a wide variety of information, but also for an iterative process of correc-
tion and amendment, towards the goal that over time the quality of the
entire source will improve.
Some of the major issues with crowd-sourcing come from a failure to rec-
ognise its limitations. The main limitation is the inherent fallibility of crowds
and the disproportionate ability of a committed individual or small group to
bias results. As soon as the Mechanical Turk services started, for example,
people quickly found ways to maximise the amount they could earn by pro-
viding random results or by automating their input. This means that certain
kinds of activities that might utilise the service are open to abuse. Wikipedia,
while offering far more information than traditional encyclopaedias, cannot

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assert the same level of quality that an encyclopaedia with a tightly controlled
editorial process can. While the crowd will tend to correct errors and omis-
sions, individuals and groups who have strong views will attempt to sway
articles to reflect their points of view, which has led to some significant
disagreements over certain contentious subjects.

CITIZEN JOURNALISM
Citizen journalism is fundamentally about the collision between traditional
news reporting and participative media. In the online environment, users can
take an active role in the production of content, and when this extends to
reporting on events, it constitutes citizen journalism (although as we will see
this definition makes the issue seem more clear-cut than it is). Citizen journalism
has appeared at the intersection between the challenges faced by traditional
news reporting in the internet age, the emergence of social media and the
growing ubiquity of devices like mobile phones that can capture images and
video. For some like Gerard Goggin, the rise of mobile media such as the
camera phone, along with personal but broadcast media like Twitter, has
made messages, contexts and content more intimate (2011). As part of a
broader movement of intimacy into the public realm (Berlant 1998), the
role of mobile media – as one of the most personal and intimate devices
(Fortunati 2002) – has had an impact upon journalism. With ‘amateur’
images taken by the mobile phone having more of a raw and unpolished feel,
the texture of visuality in journalism has changed. It is not uncommon for a
journalist to evoke that amateur feel to give the news a more intimate and
trustworthy affect. The use of camera phones to shift notions of intimacy
and place is discussed further in Chapter 7.
In the contemporary media landscape, one of the areas that has come
under the most pressure is news reporting, and in particular, newspapers.
Newspapers, which have long been supported by advertising revenue,
have steadily lost this revenue to the internet as advertisers follow user
attention online. Compounding this, many online news sources offer con-
tent for free and directly compete with traditional newspapers for their
readers. This loss in revenue for newspapers results in increased pressure
for newspapers and related news organisations to find cheaper ways to
produce and present the news. Social media offers an interesting alter-
native for the collection of news stories, allowing news organisations to
crowd-source content which not only gives them access to content that
would not have been possible to get in years past but also to get it for very
little money.

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So what is citizen journalism?

While the internet has allowed users to write and contribute from its earliest
days, it is only since the emergence of social media that the tools for doing
this became mainstream. The chief technology associated with citizen journal-
ism has been blogs, which made the publication of material on the internet
accessible to people who did not possess the knowledge and skills required
to set up and maintain a web server, or organise their own hosting (both of
which require a fairly high level of technical knowledge).
Another key feature in the emergence of citizen journalism is the growing
ubiquity of mobile media devices – primarily mobile phones – that allow
users to take photos and videos, and which are always with millions of peo-
ple all the time. This means that when an event occurs where there are people
to see it, there is frequently also footage, courtesy of someone’s ever-handy
mobile phone. Following the London bombings in 2005, for example, the
BBC received hundreds of videos and thousands of images from the public
(Stuart 2007). Furthermore, with the growing uptake of internet-enabled
smartphones, content can be both captured and shared within minutes of an
event occurring. When linked to social networks like Twitter or Facebook, news
can break very quickly and reach an audience much faster than traditional
media – especially print media – can respond to. These same features of mobile
and social media also have significant implications for online activism, which
we will deal with in the following section.
Citizen journalism takes a number of forms, and there is some debate
about what does and what does not constitute citizen journalism. There
has also been significant criticism of the term, as we will see. Fundamental to
all expressions of citizen journalism is the idea that the person doing the
reporting is independent and does not work for a media organisation. This
leaves a broad range of practices and forums that can be considered citizen
journalism. At one end of the spectrum are user comments or feedback on
news articles, which allow user participation but maintain the production of
news stories within a more traditional editorial setting. These are borderline
cases of citizen journalism, as the news organisation maintains tight editorial
control over the published story and in many cases also exercises control
over the comments posted about the story.
Some sites, like Slashdot and Kuro5hin, for example, feature news stories
submitted by users of the site, and encourage commentary on the stories to
the point where it is the feedback of the readers (some of which are highly
knowledgeable about the topic material) that becomes the most important
feature of the sites. Here, the stories act as catalysts for discussion, and a
participative moderation system allows readers to rate comments, ideally

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promoting the more insightful or interesting comments above the banal or

poorly thought-out.
There are other sites that are built on a participatory model, where the
news reported is sourced almost entirely from users. In Australia, The Con-
versation is a news site that provides an editorial framework for the pub-
lication of stories written by Australian academics. In Korea, OhmyNews
has provided a forum since 1999 for anyone to publish news stories under
the slogan ‘every citizen is a reporter’. Dozens of similar sites exist in coun-
tries across the world.
In Australia and the UK, government-supported national broadcasters (the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC)) support sites that draw from the community, and are
actively engaged in exploring the possibilities of citizen journalism. ABC’s
The Drum, for example, is an opinion site that merges commentary from
journalists and politicians with submissions from the public. Stories posted to
The Drum go through an editorial process, and are presented on the site for
public viewing.
At the other end of the spectrum are the blogs or websites that report on
news where an individual or small group post messages to report on events.
Some of the best-known examples of citizen journalism fall into this category.
Salam Abdulmunem (better known by his alias Salam Pax), a blogger based
in Iraq, became a well-known figure during the Second Gulf War as he
reported on the progress of the war as a local Iraqi from his home in
Baghdad. Following the terrorist attacks on the US of September 11, 2001,
Glenn Reynolds’ blog Instapundit.com attracted a large following, pushing
Reynolds into fame as another blogger who had the impact and audience
normally enjoyed only by professional journalists.
Live tweeting has also become a significant phenomenon in recent years.
Here people who are present at a newsworthy event – be it a press conference
or perhaps a disaster – use instant messaging tools like Twitter to replay short
updates, possibly inflected with personal observations or commentary. This
can be very powerful as a form of news as it operates in real time, allowing
thousands or millions of people to follow an event as it unfolds, rather than
waiting for a regular news briefing or the morning paper. With intimate
devices like mobile phones functioning to collect and disseminate events
almost immediately, the aforementioned intimate turn in journalism has
seen an aestheticisation of this effect for more audience affect. This intimacy
makes the content and context of mobile media appear more trustworthy
and everyday, although of course this may not be the case as the identity and
motivations of the reporter are opaque. This immediacy also has other draw-
backs, as we will see below.

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There is an overlap between traditional journalism and citizen journal-

ism, with many trained journalists working for news organisations main-
taining blogs and other forms of social media to provide a channel for news,
inflected with the individual journalists’ own perspectives on the issues at
hand. Many, like Dan Gillmor, see citizen journalism as being a positive
development overall. Gillmor, a journalist with more than 25 years’ experi-
ence, is highly critical of the rise of what he calls ‘Big Media’ and the negative
effects this has had upon journalism. His 2006 book We the Media is
probably the best-known text on the topic of citizen journalism. For Gillmor,
Big Media are large companies that treat the news as a commodity, where
costs of making news are pushed down while profits are maximised, a
strategy which Gillmor (amongst others) argues is rarely aligned with good
journalism.
In this environment, citizen journalism offers an alternative to mainstream
media, filling what Gillmor sees as a middle ground that has been opened as
Big Media has shifted its focus to ‘light’ news which focuses on celebrity gos-
sip and violence (2006: 5). In Australia, for example, the news media is highly
concentrated into two companies: Rupert Murdoch’s News Limited and John
Fairfax Holdings Ltd. In the 2007 Australian federal elections, citizen journalists
emerged as an alternative to the mainstream media, and actively criticised the
reportage of the Big Media organisations through their blogs. The Australian –
the only national daily newspaper in Australia that felt threatened enough
by this criticism to come out with an article attacking citizen journalists –
described them as ‘sheltered academics and failed journalists who would not
get a job on a real newspaper’ (cited in Bruns et al. 2008).
Gillmor sees the evolution of citizen journalism as paralleling a trajectory
of increasing user participation in the production of content. He sees this as
an evolutionary process ‘from journalism as lecture to journalism as a con-
versation or seminar [which] will force the various communities of interest to
adapt’ (Gillmor 2006: xxiv). This characterisation of online behaviour as a
conversation is a recurring theme in much of the non-academic literature,
as we noted in the beginning of this chapter.

Criticisms of citizen journalism

While proponents point to some significant potential for citizen journalism,
there are also many criticisms that point to problems and limitations inherent
in the form. One criticism, which is often levelled by professional journalists,
is that citizen journalists lack the training and rigour of professional journal-
ists. Critics argue that citizen journalists consequently don’t have the skills to
get stories that trained journalists are able to break, because trained journalists

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have better access to people and have honed their skills in interviewing and
research. In effect, this argues that there is more to journalism than having a
publication platform, and that participative media, in providing people with a
platform, is not enough to make them journalists. This argument does not
necessarily dismiss the value of citizen journalists, but emphasises the need for
professionally trained journalists even in an era of participative media.
Another serious criticism of citizen journalism is that it lacks the trans-
parency of traditional news media. Citizen journalists do not need to follow
professional codes of conduct. Furthermore, while a professional journalist
is kept in check by editorial processes, citizen journalists are free to write
whatever they want. Any political affiliations or bias on the part of the
citizen journalist is therefore harder to determine, bringing the impartiality
and accuracy of their work into question, and placing more responsibility
on the reader to determine the quality of the source. Trust becomes a major
issue that was in the past mitigated to some degree by the reputation of the
news source.
Citizen journalists are also far more vulnerable than journalists working
for news organisations because they lack the protection that is often extended
to them as employees. Some of the best journalism provokes strong responses
from people and opens journalists to legal (and sometimes physical) retal-
iation. Journalists working for news companies enjoy a certain amount of
protection, especially legal protection against civil litigation (for example,
being sued for libel). Because citizen journalists are working for themselves
they have no overarching protection, which in some circumstances seri-
ously compromises their ability to report on provocative issues. As Dan
Gillmor asks:

Who would have exposed the Watergate crimes in the absence of powerful
publishers, especially the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham, who had the
financial and moral fortitude to stand up to Richard Nixon and his henchmen?
(Gillmor 2006: xxvii)

The speed with which social media allows news to be distributed also raises
issues. Traditionally, the professional journalist’s job was not simply to relay
pieces of information to their readers, but to sort rumour from fact, to ana-
lyse and synthesise a story from multiple, often-contradictory sources. With
instant messaging services like Twitter, news can be disseminated so rapidly
that it bypasses normal editorial control, potentially leading to incorrect and
misleading reports being released which are then left to readers to analyse
and evaluate. The short 140 characters or less format of Twitter in many
ways remediates its technological predecessor, SMS (short messaging system).
Twitter thus borrows the etiquette of SMS as both compressed and seemingly

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fleeting. While the information arrives faster, the quality of that information
may be lower and less considered. Increasingly stories are noted as either
Twitterable or not.
Some have also pointed out that the same factors that allow citizen journal-
ism to challenge Big Media and established power structures can be utilised
by these same groups to move Big Media into the internet age. Politicians,
celebrities and large organisations are using blogs and social media in the
same way as citizen journalists, presenting their own perspectives and views
with the same level of apparent openness as any other citizen journalist.
While this may not be a problem in and of itself, it undermines the conten-
tion that digital media is fundamentally empowering – it can also be used to
reinforce, strengthen and deepen existing power structures.
As social media becomes more pervasive, it is also influencing the way
we think about citizen journalism. Following their citizen journalism pro-
ject based around the 2007 Australian election, Bruns et al. noted that
there is a role for sites that facilitate ‘communities of news and content
makers’, which suggests a new form of journalism that they tentatively
refer to as ‘journalism as social networking’ (2009: 205). For them, this
construction helps get around the unfruitful professional-versus-amateur
issue that lies at the heart of much criticism of citizen journalism. They argue
that an emergent ‘networked journalism’ would incorporate both trained jour-
nalists and citizen journalists, enjoying the strengths of both forms of news
gathering and reportage.

ONLINE ACTIVISM

Cyberspace has become a global electronic agora where the diversity of human
disaffection explodes in a cacophony of accents. (Castells 2001: 138)

Citizen journalism is one specific form of produsage that is enabled by par-

ticipative media, most notably in this case, blogs. Online activism is related
in that it also enables various participative media, and allows produsers to
express opinions and ideas in the online environment. Online activism goes
beyond commentary – it allows groups of people to organise around a
political issue.

What is online activism?

Online (or internet) activism is a burgeoning area, and has seen the publica-
tion of numerous books and articles on the subject. This presents a problem
for researchers who are new to the area because it is hard to determine what

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the key texts are. As Garrett (2006) points out, the literature also comes
at the same issue from different perspectives and fields, further complicating
study. Our goal in this section is not to try to cover the entire gamut of
online activism, because to do so would take us well away from social
media and into other subjects that are only tangentially related. However,
in order to examine the importance of participation, it would be remiss of
us to ignore the importance of online activism and particularly its intersec-
tion with social media. By way of contextualising this section, let us briefly
outline some of the fundamental points about online activism before
going on to examine some examples and how social media has influenced
online debates.
One of the earliest and best-known groups to use the internet for social
activism was the Zapatistas, a revolutionary movement based in the
Chiapas state of Mexico. In late 1993 the Zapatistas occupied a number
of towns in southern Mexico, and gained attention in the West for their use of
the internet as a means to communicate with the rest of the world. Although,
as Turner (2005) points out, the Zapatistas come from an impoverished area
of Mexico, they relied upon non-governmental organisations to place their
hand-written materials onto the internet. In particular, they were supported
by the San Francisco Institute of Global Communication, who Castells
describes as ‘an NGO of socially responsible “techies’’ ’ (2001: 138). They
helped establish an internet network in Mexico called La Neta, which in
turn supported the Zapatistas as well as a number of other activist groups
in Mexico.
While the reality of how the Zapatistas got their messages online may
dispel romantic images of revolutionaries writing emails from satellite-linked
laptops in remote caves or jungle hideouts, it emphasises the growing impact
of the internet for activists – even sometimes those working outside wired
environments – to increase awareness about their cause. For Cleaver, the
Zapatistas’ approach to activism, including their use of the internet, ‘has
inspired and stimulated a wide variety of grassroots political efforts in many
other countries’, a phenomenon which Cleaver refers to as the ‘Zapatista
effect’ (Cleaver 1998). As the quote at the beginning of this section suggests,
Castells sees the internet as becoming a place where social disaffection is
engaged on a global scale.

Online activism and a democratising internet

The study of online activism returns us to one of the fundamental claims
about the internet: that it is inherently democratising. Some early writers
claimed that the internet was democratic by its very design because, as John

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Gilmore is famously quoted in a Time International article from 1993, the

internet ‘interprets censorship as damage and routes around it’ (Elmer-Dewitt
1993). This suggests that the internet’s physical architecture constitutes a kind
of agora in which all ideas can be freely presented, and all people are free to
engage with them. The idea of the agora is borrowed from the agora of ancient
Greece. Agora were marketplaces where communities would come together
to trade in goods and produce, but also to engage in politics and matters of
public life. In the late 1960s the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas devel-
oped the concept of the public sphere, an agora-like conceptual space that
he saw as an engine of social change that had been eroded by the emer-
gence of mass media (Habermas 1989). Habermas’s book was published in
German in 1969 but was not translated into English until 1989, at which
time it was well placed to provide a theoretical foundation to discussions of
the internet and its potential relationship with democracy (Dahlgren 2001).
Both Habermas’s ideas of public sphere and the concept of the agora as a
marketplace of ideas have figured prominently in debates about the role of
the internet as a democratising social force.
The emergence of social media has only served to accentuate debate
around the role of the internet in democratic processes and activism. As
participative media has made it increasingly easy for people to create and
share media, social media provides services that allow people to come together
and organise around issues. With the growing ubiquity of internet-enabled
mobile phones, these features of online activism can more readily be trans-
lated into offline contexts.
‘Smart mobs’ provide one example of the interface between social media
and offline organisation (Rheingold 2002). The term ‘smart mob’ describes a
large group of people who use mobile technologies as a way of connecting
with each other, thus allowing the group to act with a kind of collective intel-
ligence. Smart mobs can be organised online and can allow activists to organ-
ise protests with many people at short notice. One example often used to
illustrate smart mobs is the way that mobile text messaging was used to
organise protests in the Philippines against then President Joseph Estrada.
Estrada was impeached in 2000 following allegations of corruption, and his
trial was covered widely in the mass media. At one point the judges in the trial
elected not to admit a critical piece of evidence. Outraged people took to the
streets using their mobiles and text messaging to organise protests (in the
Philippines, mobile call costs are high, while mobile texting is cheap and thus
has a high level of use). Soon afterwards Estrada lost the support of the military
and was ousted in a coup, replacing Estrada with the then vice-president
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. These smart-mob protests, organised by text mes-
saging, were credited with playing a significant role in the ousting of Estrada.

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Examples of the use of the internet and social media in particular to

organise social protests are increasingly easy to find. Social media has been
implicated as playing a role in the so-called Arab Spring uprisings in the
Middle East during 2011, and have played a prominent role in the Occupy
movements in the US and other Western nations. The Arab Spring is a phrase
that refers to the widespread social and political unrest that spread across
the Middle East from December 2010. During this period anti-government
and pro-democracy protesters ousted leaders in Yemen, Tunisia, Libya and
Egypt, and significant protests erupted in numerous other countries in the
region. It was widely reported that social media played a significant role in
helping protesters to organise and share information in states where other
forms of media are strictly regulated. Howard et al. (2011) analysed millions
of social media posts from the period leading up to and throughout the Arab
Spring in order to determine what, if any, effect social media had. They
argued that social media played a key role in the Arab Spring uprisings, noting
that tools like Twitter and Facebook were used by well-educated urban youth,
many of them female, to pressure governments. They saw spikes in conversa-
tions that they described as ‘revolutionary’ just prior to major events, and
suggest that social media helped to spread political dissent beyond the bor-
ders of countries.
Although social media is implicated in all of these movements, one of the
persistent questions is exactly what role it plays. It seems unlikely that these
technologies are the main cause or catalyst for social activism. As Anderson
points out, countries like Egypt and Libya have a long history of social activism
and protest that predates modern communication technologies (Anderson
2011). Another way of asking this question is whether online environments are
purely instrumental, or whether they actually change the dynamics of activism,
including the players, their goals and their methods (Castells 2001: 137). In
many ways, online environments both are instrumental in, and change (or
are indicative of change), the nature of activism. In the Arab Spring example,
it seems likely that while social media played a role, it was an instrumental
one, appropriated by a movement because of its utility, and abandoned
when its utility was limited.
In other cases, as Castells argues, political movements are shaped by the
structure of modern information societies; and the internet, as the emblematic
expression of communication media in the information society, becomes an
important organising site. Castells draws parallels between the labour
movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and modern
social movements. Where the labour movement extended from the factories
and used pubs as rallying points, modern movements extend from the network
and use the internet as their medium (Castells 2001: 139). For Castells, the

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 Participation and user created content   73

social movements of the network society have certain common features.

He points to anti-globalisation movements that are not highly structured
organisations like the trade unions before them, and are in fact a conglom-
erate of various different groups with local and culturally inflected concerns
that, through the internet, can coordinate their efforts. These movements
are global, although they draw strength through local mobilisation.
The Occupy Wall Street movement is an example of a protest movement
that extends from the network. Beginning in September 2011, this move-
ment was designed to highlight the growing inequality in Western societies,
emphasised by the global financial crisis and the protection that was
extended to banks and financial institutions (whose questionable business
decisions and loose ethics were heavily implicated in the crisis) by govern-
ments while individuals and families lost their homes and livelihood. Even
before the first protests began, this movement was deeply linked to the inter-
net, with a domain name for the protests registered in June of that year.
A Facebook page appeared only days later. Like the Arab Spring protests,
the Occupy movement used social media to organise people and provide a
virtual rallying point for activists. For the Occupy movement, social media
provides a site for a variety of very different and disconnected protest groups
to come together and protest for a common cause.
It seems, then, that some movements, like the Arab Spring uprisings, might
be said to be heavily based in local issues that are less about the new net-
worked society and more about ongoing struggles expressed through different,
multiple public channels. In these cases, social media appears as an instrumental
tool, an implement that can be wielded by activists to enhance their activities.
Other movements, like the anti-globalisation movement, arise from the net-
worked society, and are shaped by the structure of the society, responding to
its challenges and tensions. In this second case, the internet and social media
suit the forms, methods and goals of the kinds of activism typical of anti-
globalisation protests.

Problems with online activism

By way of another example, and in order to segue into some of the prob-
lems with social media-based activism, we now turn to an example that is
intensely connected to social media, Kony 2012. In March 2012, as we were
preparing this book, an activist group called Invisible Children Incorporated
put a video on YouTube titled Kony 2012. The video, which was 24 minutes
in length, featured a simple message that was reinforced by highly emotive
content. The message was ‘make Joseph Kony famous’. Joseph Kony is the
leader of a paramilitary group called the LRA, which operated in Uganda and

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 74  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

then moved into the surrounding countries. In 2005, Kony was indicted by the
International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. The idea
behind the video was to bring popular attention to Kony’s crimes and to
drum up popular support for continued US military support of the Ugandan
government’s attempts to capture Kony.
The video was immediately shared by millions of people via Facebook and
Twitter, and the YouTube video achieved over 40 million hits within the first
few days of its launch, with the number continuing to climb past 84 million.
Critical responses to the video followed, with a number of journalists, aca-
demics, Ugandans and organisations criticising the way the video simplified
a complex problem, and, many claimed, contained misleading facts. The film
was seen by some as a kind of neo-colonialism that depicted Ugandans as
powerless, while others questioned the financial transparency of the Invisible
Children organisation. These criticisms prompted Invisible Children Inc. to
publish a response to the critiques.2
Questions about the finances and backing of online activists, as raised
in the criticisms of Kony 2012, suggest more fundamental issues with the
transparency of online activist organisations. As we identified earlier, social
media allows campaigns to be organised very quickly, and the combination
of affective social networks and well-designed rich media (for example,
video materials) can evoke action (even if it is in the form of making a finan-
cial donation to a cause) before people have had time to properly assess
the cause. This was the case with Kony 2012, and will no doubt be the
case for similar causes into the future. This is not to say that such causes
are not worthy of support, but merely to point to some of the problems that
stem from slick marketing-inspired campaigns that encourage action without
thought.
The Kony 2012 video is a powerful demonstration of how effective social
media can be for groups with the right skills and knowledge to get a message
out to millions of people very quickly and raise the profile of a cause. However,
the immediate controversy around the video and its use of social media raise
some very salient questions about the role of social media in social activ-
ism. In particular, it raises serious questions about the value of social media
in creating a new kind of activism in which participants feel good because
they have taken a stance, but in fact may have done very little, and may
actually do harm. The problems facing central Africa are significant, and
cannot easily be reduced to a 24-minute YouTube video, or a trite one-line
campaign message. Support for the video is not the same thing as support for
a movement.
This kind of activism has pejoratively been described as ‘slacktivism’ to
denote activism that is lazy, half-hearted and generally ‘slack’. Others point

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to the emergence of online activist groups who use social media and online
marketing techniques as a way of engaging social media users with political
movements. The word ‘clicktivism’ has been coined to describe ‘the pollu-
tion of activism with the logic of consumerism’ (www.clicktivism.org).
Critics argue that this undermines traditional modes of activism and consti-
tutes a threat to movements that require more substantial engagement from
activists.
In Australia, for example, GetUp was established as an online site that bills
itself as ‘[a]n independent movement to build a progressive Australia and
bring participation back into our democracy’ (www.getup.org.au). The site
allows people to vote for causes that GetUp will back if they achieve sufficient
popularity. Thus, ‘ordinary Australians’ can feel they are engaging politically
and making a difference by signing up to digital petitions or voting for causes
that matter to them. Whether this constitutes true activism or not is open to
debate, but it does suggest the evolution of new avenues for political activism
with unusual topologies (Flew and Wilson 2010).

CONCLUSION
In this chapter we have looked at participation as a central concept that
underlies social media. The internet has always been a two-way medium
that supports the production of digital content by anyone with internet
access. However, social media has enabled and encouraged participation by
making the production, distribution and storage of content less challenging
and, in many cases, all but free. Emergent from this phenomenon is the
user who produces – the phenomenon that Bruns (2005, 2008) has help-
fully described as the ‘produser’. However, it is important to ask how much
‘produsing’ is repurposed for profit by the companies such as Google and
Facebook, and at what point does this repurposing become problematic,
especially when weighed against the potential value of the material being
produced?
The examples of produsage illustrated in this chapter – crowd sourcing,
Wikipedia, citizen journalism and online activism – demonstrate some of
the ways that produsage is impacting on how we engage not only with the
internet but also with society itself. This provides yet another context
for both of our central themes. Participation reinforces the importance
of offline realities in online behaviour. Far from developing new forms of
expression that are disconnected from the real world, people’s online produc-
tive behaviour is strongly anchored in real-world concerns. For Salam Pax,
blogging from inside Iraq during the Gulf War, participative media allowed
his very local and contextualised perspective to transcend the informational

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controls of both the Hussein regime and the mainstream Western media
to provide readers from around the world with a strong and personal
connection to something very real that had ramifications well beyond the
digital world.
While produsage – particularly in forms such as online activism and citizen
journalism – appears to be a very empowering use of social media, there are
always issues around exploitation, as we saw in Chapter 3. We must be careful
to bring a critical eye to any claims of revolutionary change. Although citizen
journalism promises empowerment through a more open press that avoids
the bottlenecks and gatekeeping of Big Media, it also raises issues about trans-
parency, trust and quality. Online activism provides exciting opportunities
for democratic participation and change even in places where political dissent
is treated harshly, but it also opens up potentials for the abuse of good intentions.
The participative dimensions of social media are subject to local conditions,
highlighting that what constitutes ‘participation’ is defined by the forces of the
local environment.

NOTES
1 David after the Dentist became a hit on the internet when it was posted in 2009.
See www.youtube.com/watch?v=txqiwrbYGrs.
2 www.invisiblechildren.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/critiques.html.

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 5 Art and cultural production

A s we saw in the previous chapter, social media has opened up new

avenues for participation in many areas of social life, and is having
an immediate and visible impact in fields like journalism and social activism.
In this chapter we want to look at the ways that these same changes, both
represented and exacerbated by social media and the concomitant rise of user
created content (UCC), are effecting and affecting the production of other
cultural products. In this chapter we will be focusing on the way that social
media is both challenging the arts while, at the same time, providing artists
with new avenues for artistic expression. Although much has been written
about the adaptation and remediation of other media like television and film
via online media, the role of art and social media has been relatively over-
looked (Perkel 2012).
This chapter explores two major trajectories. First, we look at the
ways that cultural institutions like museums and galleries are responding
to the challenges of evidence-based policy and social media by embracing
the concepts of Web 2.0 in order to engage with their visitors. We briefly
outline some of the main points about internet art and its status in the art
establishment prior to social media. This is important because it demon-
strates how the arts have responded to the development of the internet, and
sets the scene for the rise of social media. Second, we look at how the tra-
ditional domination of culture by these institutions is being eroded as new
and old forms of creativity are being revealed by social media, and we
consider the impact of social media on cultural institutions – which we
define here as museums and galleries. After looking at how these traditional
arbiters of culture have responded to social media, we look at how artists are
responding to social media. Here we identify that the tensions felt by cultural
institutions are also being engaged with by artists in a variety of ways.
Finally, we will examine the rise of art websites, with a particular focus on
deviantART (as an example of an art-based SNS) and its role as an alterna-
tive to traditional cultural institutions as arbiters of culture. Following on from
this discussion, we will finish the chapter by engaging with Burgess’s notion

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 78  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

of vernacular creativity (2007) and the rise in importance of everyday situ-

ated creativity, not just in art, but in social relations more broadly.

CULTURAL PRODUCTION
To begin, it is important to be clear about what we mean by the term ‘cultural
production’. The term ‘culture’ is highly loaded in academic literature and
has been studied to a great degree from many different perspectives. Rather
than trying to present a single unified definition of culture here, we will take
a particular perspective on culture that we draw from the academic traditions
of critical theory and cultural studies. These traditions are particularly
relevant for an engagement with cultural production concerning the media
(and here we include the internet) because the media has often been a focus
of their study.
Critical theory is a branch of sociology that is associated with the Frankfurt
School, a group of leftist scholars who worked in Germany prior to the Second
World War. These scholars, writing in the 1920s and 1930s, included people
like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, although
the tradition extends past the War and into the 1960s to include others like
Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas. These scholars wrote on a number
of issues, but their most well-known works concern the relationship between
culture and capitalist society. Writing from the 1930s, before television and
during the heyday of radio and the early days of commercial cinema, the
Frankfurt School scholars were witnessing a great deal of social upheaval
in Germany as Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party began making their move into
power. The importance of radio and its use by the Nazi party for propaganda
was significant at this time. As Jews and intellectuals, many of the Frankfurt
School scholars fled Nazi Germany and moved to the US where they contin-
ued their writings.
Much could (and has) been written about the Frankfurt School, but for
our purposes here, we want to focus on one of the most famous essays that
came out of the Frankfurt School, titled ‘The Culture Industry’, written by
Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno in 1944. In this essay, Adorno and
Horkheimer described the culture industries as being akin to heavy, factory-
based industry. Commercial radio, newspapers and cinema were factories
that produced culture for the purposes of manipulation of the masses in the
pursuit of consumerism and/or fascism. They distinguished between high
culture (like fine art, for example), which they felt encouraged thinking and
critical engagement, and low culture, which they saw as base-level enter-
tainment pumped out by the culture industries. This low culture was easy
for people to access and enjoy, but also acted as a kind of tranquiliser that

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provided people with distraction and built demand for goods that they didn’t
really need.
This notion of the media as all-powerful cultural industries remained
prominent until the late 1970s. As discussed in Chapter 4, Hall’s seminal
Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973), in which he
argued that the meaning in a media text (a TV show or a film, for example)
is not necessarily fixed but is open to active interpretation by the viewer,
started a radical rethinking of this model. Hall’s restructuring of dynamics
between the reader/audience and text can also been seen earlier in the highly
influential work of Roland Barthes, particularly in his concept of the ‘death
of the author’ (1966 [1977]) in which he pronounced the ‘birth of the reader’
as an active participant in the process of making meaning. The encoding/
decoding nexus opened a new chapter on the study of the culture industries,
because although the culture industries could produce culture with an inten-
tion, the reader/viewer/listener was free to interpret that content as they
wished. Later cultural theorists developed a circular model – such as the
circuit of culture (Du Gay et al. 1997) – where the culture industries were
themselves subject to the meanings constructed by audiences. In other words,
through things like TV ratings and audience analysis, the culture industries
modified their production of culture to better suit their target markets. This
general approach to studying cultural production (one in which the audience
plays a crucial role in the construction of meaning) has become known as
‘cultural studies’, and now includes a range of different ideas and theories,
and forms an important scholarly basis for many internet studies.
From this perspective, cultural production is about the way that culture is
produced and reproduced within modern societies. Culture here can be in
the form of media texts (television programmes, podcasts, websites, films) or
cultural objects (iPods, mobile phones and so on). Horkheimer and Adorno
saw cultural production as a mass industry, with factories producing easy-
to-swallow culture to be consumed by the masses in order to keep them
controlled (and consuming). For Hall and cultural studies, the focus has
shifted from production to consumption as the point at which meaning is
made. With this shift in focus also comes a shift in the focus of study: from
the political economy of large organisations and how they make cultural
products, to the uses of cultural products and how people construct meaning
in everyday life.
With the rise of the internet and especially more recently with the rise of
Web 2.0 and participative media, cultural-studies scholars have found
themselves in familiar territory. As discussed in Chapter 4, people are now
producing and distributing of their own original media texts that are in turn
being consumed by other people. The dominance of centralised production

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 80  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

is apparently being eroded by new kinds of decentralised production, and

this raises all kinds of questions about the emerging role of social media in
modern societies.
Chapter 4 examined some of the ramifications of this in the realm of
journalism and political activism, but how does it translate to the realm of
cultural production? What impacts does UCC have upon the individuals
and organisations that have traditionally been the arbiters of culture?
What new possibilities does it open for these individuals and organisa-
tions? There are many different ways to examine these questions, because
there are many different ways that culture is produced in the emerging
social media landscape. We could look, for example, at the ways in which
independent film is changing in the face of cheaper production technolo-
gies and internet video-sharing sites like YouTube or Vimeo. We could
examine the impact that social media and distribution portals like the
iPhone’s app store has on the way that software (until recently rather
neglected as cultural objects) is produced.
Rather than engaging with a grab-bag of different examples of cultural
production, in the following sections we are going to examine cultural pro-
duction from the perspective of the arts. The arts are interesting to us here
because they have traditionally been the site for the production of culture
and the identification of what is considered culturally significant and what
is not. Public institutions such as museums and galleries have long been the
arbiters of taste, defining what is and what is not culturally significant, and
now these institutions are having to respond to a more interactive public and
be more demonstrably accountable to them, thanks in part to social media.
As social media provides new ways for artists to connect with people and
to sell their work (we will consider deviantART below), the role of private
galleries in the art market is also being challenged. Art historian Julian
Stallabrass notes that social media poses a serious challenge to the authority
of arts institutions. He writes, ‘[t]o the extent that online art is associated with
the culture of Web 2.0 and the “wealth of networks”, it appears not merely
dissociated from the mainstream market for contemporary art but dangerous
to it’ (Stallabrass 2010: 7).
In the post-dotcom world, and with the rise of social media, we are seeing
an expansion in the variety of cultural production, and at the same time we
are seeing a diminution in the traditional roles of institutions (whether they are
giant media companies or public institutions) in dictating what are and are not
considered valuable cultural materials. In the following sections we will examine
the impact of social media on art and cultural production at different levels.
We begin by looking at how cultural institutions have responded to social
media and what is perceived as a focus on the interactive audience.

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CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Both museums and galleries are committed to the mystification of the objects
that they display, holding to the fiction of a distinct realm of high art that
stands above the bureaucratised world of work and the complementary vulgar
blandishments of mass culture. (Stallabrass 2010: 7)

The term ‘cultural institution’ has been used to describe a wide range of
organisations that produce or are involved in the production of culture
under a broad definition that includes the cultural industries (such as radio,
television and film), schools and education. Here, though, we are mainly
concerned with public institutions that have traditionally been the arbiters
of culture – museums, galleries and libraries. When we use the term ‘cultural
institution’ in this chapter, we are referring to these organisations. Keep in
mind, however, that many of the points we make about museum, galleries
and libraries also apply to other cultural industries.
Cultural institutions, whether they be galleries, museums or libraries,
have traditionally mediated the relationship between the art/artefact and
the public. Whether public or commercial, the role of the gallery is to act
as a filter, choosing a subset of works and presenting them to the visitor/
viewer/reader. The idea of selection is vitally important here – what gets
selected (and what gets excluded) by an institution makes explicit claims
about the cultural values of the institution, which in turn reflects and poten-
tially reinforces or constructs the culture of a society. Traditionally, art and
culture that is selected and included in this way can be referred to as ‘high
culture’, whereas cultural productions that are common, everyday or folk
art are considered ‘low culture’.
Art institutions have played a key role in normalising tastes and aesthet-
ics associated with ‘art’. Even when the content of art brings traditionally
non-art content or values into the gallery (like avant-garde movements such
as ‘relational aesthetics’), ultimately the role of these spaces in orchestrating
taste cultures only seems to be reinforced. Relational aesthetics is defined
by the French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud as ‘a set of artistic practices
which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole
of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and
private space’ (Bourriaud 2002: 113). Artists who engage in this kind of art
practice will stage an event in which the experience of the event is the art-
work, rather than objects hanging in a gallery. The point is to displace the
gallery and even the artist from the art. An example is Rirkrit Tiravanija’s
untitled show in 1992 where he invited people into a gallery and cooked
them Thai food. The art here was the environment and experience of that
environment created by the food, the people and the cooking: the art is the

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experience that emerges from relationships between the real-world experi-

ences of eating, talking and anything else that goes on in that place at that
time. The problem with relational aesthetics in practice is that the events
in many cases simply reinforce the role of the artist (making them into
mini-celebrities hosting the event) and bring attention and fame to the gal-
lery hosting the event. Art institutions, therefore, continue to maintain a
strong role in defining art even in the face of a movement that attempts to
undermine that.
Bourdieu, whose work we discussed in Chapter 3 in relation to social
capital, was one of the key sociologists to explore the construction and
naturalisation of taste through various forms of culture – from art to films
to television (1984 [1979]). Rather than focus upon class, Bourdieu’s
analysis of ‘taste’ provided a productive vehicle for understanding the then
contemporary formations of aesthetics. In his analysis of 1,200 French
people in the 1970s, Bourdieu defined three key types of knowledge he
called ‘capital’: social, economic and cultural. While social capital was
defined by who you know rather than what you know (that is, social
connections), cultural capital was defined by education, background and
some of the more tacit aspects of lifestyle. Institutions like museums and
galleries play a role in establishing and defining cultural capital. However,
with the rise of Web 2.0, questions about the role of museums as arbiters
of taste have begun to arise as they become but one of many contexts for art
production and consumption. In particular, we must ask just how much
Web 2.0 ideologies, which emphasise the importance of fostering collaboration
and sharing, reinforce or subvert traditional notions of authorship, taste and
creativity.

THE CHANGING ROLE OF CULTURAL

INSTITUTIONS
As Huhtamo (2002) observes, many twentieth-century avant-garde (‘advance
guard’) movements such as futurism and Dadaism challenged the role of art
galleries and exhibitions as arbiters for definitions of art. For example, father
of the ready-made, Marcel Duchamp, was a keen provocateur. Through
using a commercially made, banal and everyday object as his art, Duchamp
challenged the limits of debates around art’s content and craftsmanship. By
taking, for example, a urinal, and rotating it 90 degrees, signing it (with a
pseudonym) and placing it in a gallery, Duchamp challenged the limits of
art and, especially, the role of the gate-keepers of the art world. Duchamp’s
play with the relationship between context and content, which would haunt

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much of twentieth-century art (especially minimalism), moved art from

the world of safe craftsmanship, value judgements and aesthetics into the
messy world of concepts. Duchamp’s challenges around context and content,
while still very much present in questions about the limits of contemporary
art, become even more amplified in an age of social media.
The changes that started to take place in galleries and museums in the
early twentieth century were also about shifting the role of the viewer – a
phenomenon which still continues today. For example, in relational aes-
thetics we described above, the viewer becomes an active participant in the
making of the experience and meanings. Unquestionably informing the
ground-breaking work of Roland Barthes in ‘The death of the author’
(1966 [1977]), in which he argues that the role of readers to interpret
makes them as active in the meanings as the author, many early twentieth-
century avant-garde movements – especially conceptualism – sought to con-
struct the viewer as an active maker of both meaning and, in some cases, the
actual artwork. These debates about agency and participation resonate with
the texture of Web 2.0 as supporting collaboration, participation and UCC.
Given this, could we not view UCC as this century’s ready-made?
The role of the museum or gallery has been inverted, and context has
increasingly been eradicated from museum and gallery spaces so that people
are free to engage with the artworks without cultural interference from things
like the classical architectural features that dominated Victorian galleries.
As Huhtamo remarks, ‘instead of a passive spectator in front of static exhibits,
the visitor is meant to turn into an active participant’ (2002: 6). For David
Fleming, Director of National Museums Liverpool, the main thing that char-
acterises change in the twenty-first-century museum is their relationship with
what he calls their ‘audience’:

essentially there is little that is totally new in museums activity beyond a

massive change in our attitude towards audiences, which might best be
described as one of total inclusion, that is of all the public, not just a narrow
sector. (Fleming 2005: 6)

Now the ‘active participant’ that Huhtamo referred to is being recast as the
‘interactive participant’ as various factors come to push for a change in the
way that cultural institutions engage with the public. Chief among these con-
cerns is the ongoing democratisation of cultural institutions that, as we have
described, has been an ongoing concern throughout the twentieth century. The
second is that since the 1980s, as governments started placing more faith in
market forces, cultural institutions have been required to justify their funding
by showing how effectively and efficiently they are engaging with the public.

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Cultural institutions in the age of social media

In this climate, the rise of social media affords new ways for public arts
institutions to engage with their visitors (and quantify this engagement).
Arts institutions such as museums and public galleries have embraced social
media, seeing it as a way to reach out to the community and involve them
in order to both improve access and improve understanding. This represents
a shift towards a user-focused conceptualisation of public arts institutions that
can be compared to the kind of shift that O’Reilly characterises as occurring
in the internet’s move from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 (2005).
It is perhaps not surprising that the Web 2.0 mantra has been picked up
with alacrity by arts institutions, with terms like ‘Museums 2.0’ (Simon 2012)
and ‘Art 2.0’ (Broun 2007) being used as direct invocations of O’Reilly’s
formulation. Here public arts institutions are turning to the logic of Web 2.0
and applying that to their relationship with visitors both online and in the
physical museums. Elizabeth Broun, director of the Smithsonian American Art
Museum, sees the development of the online aspect of public art institutions
as an imperative:

There is really no way any longer for public museums and libraries to separate
their bricks and mortar business from their virtual business. They have to
integrate with each other, and it is no longer optional to do these things. It is
now required. (Broun 2007)

This is a telling statement. It both represents the reality of modern arts

institutions in the US, the UK and Australia as business-like institutions,
as well as emphasising the perceived importance of online media in supporting
the interactive visitor. For Broun, the ‘virtual’ museum is not just a valuable
concept, it is required. For public arts institutions the integration of online
and offline aspects has resulted in numerous different approaches, from the
development of virtual museums and galleries, which makes collections
available for online viewing from the comfort of one’s home, to the use of
the social media techniques, such as folksonomy (a portmanteau of ‘folk’
and ‘taxonomy’, meaning a classification system generated by the general
public), in order to engage people with collections.
An example of a virtual gallery is Art Project, a collaboration between a
number of galleries and Google. The project uses Google’s Streetview tech-
nology to take users on an unguided tour through the art galleries that
participate in the project. High-resolution images of individual paintings can
be clicked on, zoomed in and then accessed to obtain more detailed informa-
tion about the artwork. Users can then use their Google account to create an
‘artwork collection’ which can be shared using Google’s SNS Google+, so

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neatly integrating the online experience into the social network. This is not
just about making the gallery available online; it is also about utilising
social media in order to encourage people to engage with the galleries.
Despite their technological ‘wow’ factor, the value of the virtual gallery
is debatable. While they provide access to the images of the gallery, they
do not necessarily engage the viewer in the same way as a physical space.
For Australian artist Anastasia Klose, the physicality of the gallery space is
important:

YouTube, MySpace and the Internet in general is no substitute for a gallery. But
it can offer a good resource for people wanting to research an artist … The
gallery space is transformative, powerful and singular. Being able to physically
experience an artwork (video or otherwise), i.e. ‘see it’ in all its non-compressed
glory, is paramount. Seeing documentation, or video excerpts online, is no
substitute. (Klose, 2011)

Virtual galleries are, however, only one of the ways through which museums
are utilising social media. Many museums and galleries are using social
media in order to encourage a kind of crowd-sourced grass-roots curatorial
role for users. Here, the idea of curators as experts who can put together a
single unified exhibition of (say) sixteenth-century tapestry is replaced with
a model where the general public are encouraged to build their own path-
ways through a collection. The role of the curator does not disappear, but
does change. In the examples of virtual galleries above, social media plays an
important role.
Many museums are now making their collection databases available
online for public access, and in many cases are providing interactive ways
for people to engage with the collections through the web. The use of folk-
sonomies is one example of how exposing databases on the web allows
people to become more involved with public art institutions – in this case,
encouraging people to become curators. Folksonomies, as the name sug-
gests, are crowd-sourced taxonomies, essentially asking large numbers of
people to associate keywords or ‘tags’ with objects. Over time, and with
enough people tagging objects, new ways of presenting and organising
objects within a collection can be determined through a crowd-sourced
index. This allows people to ‘assert their own connections and associations
between objects in ways that reflect personal perspectives and interests’
(Trant 2006: 85).
The Commons on Flickr, for example, is a collection of images uploaded
by different museums and galleries from around the world. Users can
browse the image collections, which, by virtue of being in the Flickr SNS,
can be tagged and marked, shared by users and even accessed through the

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Flickr API, allowing people to create software applications that incorporate

images from the Commons. Numerous software applications have been
developed to take advantage of the Commons materials, allowing the photos
to be sorted and presented to viewers in a range of ways. The Flickr Com-
mons Explorer, for example, is a software application that lets users
explore Commons collections. The software can be downloaded from the
internet, and when run it loads up images from the various collections,
presenting an interface to the viewer that lets them browse and isolate images
by keywords in their titles. This software provides an example of how museums
are harnessing social media techniques to increase participation with their
collections (Hinton and Whitelaw 2010).
Cultural institutions are turning to social media in a response to economic
pressures and the changing demands of the audience. Instead of using experts
to select the works that are considered important or noteworthy, expertise is
increasingly being used to help visitors navigate the collections and develop
their own exhibitions and pathways through the material. This is displacing
the primacy of cultural institutions as the absolute arbiters of culture, or at
least is changing their role so that there is a more dynamic understanding of
culture emerging.

ART AND SOCIAL MEDIA

If cultural institutions have embraced social media, then the response to social
media from professional artists and the arts community at large has been
mixed. While some artists have been reluctant to engage with social media,
either through Luddism or genuine resistance, others have been quick to
embrace what they see as a way to get their work out to larger audiences.
Some have gone so far as to claim that social media is the new gallery, arguing
that artists should use social media as a platform to market and sell their
work. At the same time, new artists are emerging through online art com-
munities such as deviantART, which provides a way for emerging and non-
traditional artists to gain attention and potentially financial benefit from their
work outside of the traditional structures of the art world.

Artists and social media

One of the ways that artists have responded to social media is to make art
from social media itself. Artists use social media in different ways: having
their work influenced by input from social media like Twitter; producing
visual works based on social networks and online interactions; and perform-
ing within social media as a platform for delivering art and reflecting on the
medium in which it is delivered.

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Figure 5.1 Anastasia Klose, My boyfriend dumped me on Facebook (2007),

C-type photograph

Figure 5.2 Anastasia Klose, Facebook ruined my life (2007), C-type

photograph

Man Bartlett is a New-York-based artist who used Twitter in a number of

performance pieces. The works involve Bartlett occupying a space and sending
messages to Twitter. In his first project, Bartlett spent 24 hours in Union

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 88  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

Square Best Buy (a convenience store) where he didn’t buy anything. His
tweets told people what he was doing, thinking and looking at, and for the
24 hours he remained engaged in thoughts about buying. While Bartlett has
attracted a great deal of attention for his use of social media in his perfor-
mance pieces, his work raises questions about the nature of internet art in
the age of social media. For example, how important is interaction with the
audience to the performance, and if it is important, then what is the role of
the artist, and to what extent does the work become a collaboration with
Bartlett as just one of the participants?
An Xiao (2010) is a social media artist who engaged with some of these
questions in a round-table she convened with some other social media artists
in 2009. One of the questions she asked them was, What is social media art?
As a result of the discussion, she defined social media art as consisting of four
‘rules of thumb’. She says that, first, social media art is art where the web
plays a key role in the expression of the art; it is not enough for the work to
be marketed on the web, nor that it is sourced from the web. Second, the art
must involve the audience somehow because social media is a social medium.
Third, she says that the work must be accessible to an audience outside the
art world, but must still be conceptually rich. Fourth, social media art is about
intent – the artist must be able to articulate a reason or purpose of the art-
work that then permits it to be examined and validated by others.
What’s interesting in Xiao’s conceptualisation of social media art is that
a clear notion of a divide between the artist and the audience must exist,
suggesting tensions between the privileged position of the artist as a specialist,
and the untrained. However, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 4, the rise in UCC
practices is having profound effects on traditional modes of knowledge
and cultural production and is blurring the lines between the producer and
consumer. The question is whether artists can maintain their privileged
position, and if not, what does this mean for the symbiosis of art, culture
and technology?
As the internet continues to become more mainstream, the concept of
‘internet art’ as a separate art form may well decline. From some perspec-
tives the Candy Factory (Styled as *CANDY FACTORY PROJECTS), a
Japanese group consisting of collaborations with artists from elsewhere,
encapsulates the spirit of this by deploying collaboration and the visual
economy of repetition often associated with the visuality of the internet.
Much like their frequent collaborative partners Young-Hae Chang Heavy
Industries, whose visual aesthetics seem to be a reminder of early web ani-
mated graphics, the Candy Factory deploys an aesthetic and ideological
position that is a cornerstone of Web 2.0. For the Candy Factory’s Takuji

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 Art and cultural production   89

Kogo, the web-inspired aesthetics of the work bleed into the gallery space,
and the relationship between online art and offline art is blurred:

More recently I often present images as looped and mirrored or still images
animated through close-ups and pan shots. I see them as looped video sculptures
that function both for the exhibition space and online. I have also been
engaged in several collaborative projects working with different subject matter
and material using the same techniques. I’ve been trying to utilize *CANDY
FACTORY PROJECTS as a sort of software which can be used as a platform
of diverse collaborations. (Kogo, 2011)

The Candy Factory both mirrors the composition of new media as well as
adapting it back into the traditional context of art, the gallery. Kogo’s use of
the Candy Factory Project as a platform for collaboration echoes the way
that SNSs are utilised as a platform for sociality, as discussed in Chapter 3. This
adaptation of their work into traditional forms and offline spaces empha-
sises that the Candy Factory artists do not see themselves as internet artists,
but as artists who use the internet. For Kogo, the importance of the internet
needs to be understood in relation to offline considerations:

Since diverse collaborations online are related to the planning of offline

activities like the direction of Kitakyushu Biennial (which was organised by
Candy Factory), neither is especially more important than the other. However,
the web is free by definition from geographical constraints and I can anticipate
an audience that has a wider spectrum of interests in genres other than only art.
(Kogo, 2011)

The internet here is seen mainly as a way to engage with audiences over a
wider geographical area. This is not to diminish the extra affordances that
the internet presents to artists as the various contexts, content and genres
afforded by this medium provide not only bigger audiences but also feed-
back into the collaborative nature of *CANDY FACTORY’S PROJECTS.
The value of using the internet for art, however, is not seen by Kogo as
remarkable or extraordinary. Indeed, Candy Factory artists feel uncomfort-
able with titles such as ‘internet artists’, preferring instead to see themselves
as just ‘artists’. Their use of internet themes and aesthetics reminds us that
creativity and new media are both frequently borrowed from older modes
of visuality as they simultaneously expand into new ones.
Beijing-based artist Cao Fei is another internet artist whose concerns and
intentions are firmly anchored in the offline, but who uses the internet as a
medium for engagement, performance and display. Cao Fei’s art is embedded
within the political reality of modern China and the Chinese government’s

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complex and deeply conflicted relationship with the internet. China’s govern-
ment recognises the internet as being important for national development,
but also as presenting a threat to the tight centralised control over the media
and communications that they currently exercise. Thus the internet is not
banned in China, although it is highly regulated. This tension has led to the
implementation of the so-called Great Firewall of China, a technical and
human system designed to block and censor the parts of the internet that
are seen by the government as destabilising. For example, in 2009, with the
twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the subse-
quent ethnic riots taking place in China, ‘Western’ media such as Facebook
and Twitter were banned. Alternative social media services – carefully
sanitised versions of SNSs like Facebook (Renren) and YouTube (Douban) –
have been created, supported and controlled by the government. In this
environment, the use of social media tools by artists is often blocked or
hampered.
It is into this internet context that Cao Fei’s work is presented. For her,
the internet is another space for popular cultures in which local and global
images and ideologies are up for reappropriation. Cao Fei’s practice draws
upon the various popular cultural references (hip hop, karaoke, cosplaying
and so on) from Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong and Hollywood. However, her
perspective is informed by the way in which technologies and the internet have
functioned in China as it shifted from communism to capitalism. Indeed,
the visual culture of the internet in China is one informed by the particular
politics of the local and governmental. She says:

China’s Great Fire Wall, or ‘Great Firewall’, for Internet information control is
escalating. It is due to China’s specific national conditions. What we can get is
all ‘restricted’, limited, and incomplete. As Chinese, we are forced to accept the
reality. Fortunately, we can use Second Life … Currently, the Internet provides
a new public space for exchanging our feelings. The Internet plays a good role
in venting and consoling. Increasingly people hope this personal, intimate space
can permeate the public life. The problem in the current Internet age is, it is a
society under siege and every separated individual needs sympathy in a broader
level. (Cao Fei 2011)

While Cao Fei’s media practice would be perhaps less politically remarkable
in other countries, within the Chinese technoscape her work takes on a
much more politically charged element, something that is highlighted by her
Second Life work, RMB City. Second Life is an online virtual world that is
loosely based on the imaginings of science fiction writers such as William
Gibson and Neal Stephenson and their respective concepts of cyberspace and
the metaverse. Within Second Life, people, represented by a 3-D avatar, can

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 Art and cultural production   91

walk around an online space populated by other people, buying, selling,

building and creating. While once the darling of artists and the media, many
are beginning to view Second Life with suspicion as it became little more than
a corporate playground. However, within the technoscape of China, working
in Second Life provides a space that is not (yet) under the same governmental
controls as other internet media, as Cao Fei explains:

Unfortunately, all the popular international social networking sites, like

Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, MySpace and Twitter, are currently prohibited in
China. I have accounts for all the above social networking sites, but I can’t use
them now. They seem to be restricted areas which are abandoned and can’t
been seen. They are close to me but not available. Now I continue to run my
own blog and the RMB City project in Second Life … The network is a very
attractive popular platform. As an RMB City cultural art project based on the
internet community, Second Life 3-D, it is a work not only for browsing or
surfing in the internet but also for operation. It will encourage and invite people
to participate – raising questions and assumptions in its systematic construction.
It presents an ideal that the future will be more open. (Cao Fei 2011)

Within RMB City, Cao Fei takes on the form of her avatar, China Tracy,
who presents us with a pastiche of contemporary Chinese popular cul-
ture. In the virtual space of Second Life, RMB City presents as a playful and
performative world where Pandas mix with MTV references in a space that
mingles the popular with Cao Fei’s own offline life and history. Cao Fei notes

Figure 5.3 Cao Fei/China Tracy, RMB City: A Second Life City Planning (2009)

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 92  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

that as an artist, the internet intensifies and complicates the artist’s relation-
ship with his or her audience:

The power for connection is not only infinite and creative, but also subversive
and destructive. I think that is a paradox. When finishing an artistic creation,
the artist wishes it to be independent and subjective. At the same time, they also
hope to receive public attention and response. The Internet as a medium
provides a good model for interaction. But it depends on how the artist
understands and handles its so-called ‘open borders’. (Cao Fei 2011)

For Cao Fei, there is the dissolution of the barrier between visual art and
new media practice, so that using new media and making art become similar
things. Her position de-privileges the artist, or makes artists of us all:

The world is multiplying and becoming cheaper to access. It is impossible for one
culture to dominate another anymore. This is an information age. During this
period, art can be communicated, copied and connected immediately. So it is
more important that art can maintain its openness and sharing. I have uploaded
a lot of video on to YouTube while many artists still only agree to put their works
in the gallery or keep their works in limited access and not easily reproduced.
RMB is in Flickr. You can find a lot of people to do some recording and sharing.
I think these are the aesthetic characteristics of this era: ‘Communication, sharing,
created by a lot of people.’ (Cao Fei 2011)

deviantART
In a great deal of the discussion within the arts community, art and artists are
seen as a privileged elite, who produce art which is consumed by people – an
audience – in much the same way that mass media produce content for
audiences. As we have seen, for some artists (particularly those engaging
with social media and the internet) the notion of the audience is becoming
unclear as the boundaries between practice and art blur. However, in the
mainstream art world, the clear division between artist and audience remains.
The US National Endowment for the Arts report’s title Audience 2.0 sets the
tone. This report tells us how people – ‘the audience’ – use the internet to
participate in the arts. Participation here is generally not conceived as active
construction of art works. Art is created by artists and presented to audiences
in venues like galleries and theatres (National Endowment for the Arts 2010).
Participation in this context implies watching or listening, but rarely active
creation.
Yet as we have seen, social media is raising questions about the role and
nature of the professional artist as a privileged source of culturally significant
creative production. One of the consequences of the shifts in media paradigms

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from twentieth-century ‘packaged’ media to twenty-first-century ‘conver­

sational’ media (Jenkins 2006) is that notions of authorship, creativity and
collaboration have become part of everyday culture, rather than remaining
in the hands of the elite. The art world is not immune to these transforma-
tions. We are now seeing the emergence of a range of creative activities that
are produced by people who often do not see themselves as artists.
There are a number of websites that provide forums for painters, photog-
raphers, musicians and other artists to present their work. deviantART is an
SNS platform that is themed around art. The word ‘deviantART’ refers to an
idea that the site’s artistic content is not officially sanctioned art, but instead
deviates from the mainstream. The site’s main purpose is summarised on its
‘About’ page:

As a community destination, deviantART is a platform that allows emerging

and established artists to exhibit, promote, and share their works within a peer
community dedicated to the arts. The site’s vibrant social network environment
receives over 100,000 daily uploads of original art works ranging from tradi-
tional media, such as painting and sculpture, to digital art, pixel art, films and
anime. (http://about.deviantART.com, original emphasis)

The site has 20 million registered members (called ‘deviants’), some of

whom sell their works online or who have established themselves in the
commercial or art world as artists. The vast majority, though, are people
who do not draw an income from their work and have no standing within
the arts community. These others, the vast majority of those on the site, are
home hobbyists, students and fan artists. The site provides a number of
typical SNS features: each user maintains a profile, has a journal that they
can use to post short messages, and supports a friends’ list. The site also
allows members to ‘watch’ other members, which provides a method for
users to follow other users whose work they like. This is a similar concept
to followers in Twitter and differs from friends in that a friend relationship
is two-way and must be acknowledged by both parties.
The heart of the site, however, revolves around the idea of uploaded
artworks – ‘deviations’ – which were initially images, but have evolved to
encompass video as well. At the time of writing, the site claimed to have
197 million pieces of uploaded artworks. Individual users upload art to
their sites where it is hosted and made publicly available for other users
and non-users to see. Each artwork uploaded to the site can be com-
mented on by others, allowing for community discussion to evolve around
the topic of the artworks. The comments often consist of constructive
criticism as more experienced users provide tips and advice to less experi-
enced users.

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Almila Akdag Salah (2010) compares deviantART to the Salon des Refusés,
the gallery established by Napoleon III in 1863 for art works that were
refused by French Academy Salons. For Salah, deviantART provides a tan-
gible site that engages with some of the key questions in art today: the
identity of the artist, the role of institutions and the status of collaborative
art. The identity of the artist refers to how an artist is defined within the art
community, both in terms of the kind of artist they are and in terms of their
status as an artist. Salah identifies the ‘identity politics’ movement in the
1980s art world in which any difference (such as, gender and race) resulted
in artists being labelled and pigeon-holed as ‘minority’ artists. This labelling
profited some artists, but for many it operated as a handicap and limited
readings of their work. Thus, an artist who is defined as an Australian Abo-
riginal artist is expected to produce works of art that are consistent with
their aboriginality. This ‘exoticisation’ led to debates around the changing
relationship between art and anthropology (Marcus and Myers 1995)
whereby art critic Hal Foster (1996) proposed the artist as ‘ethnographer’. In
the online environment of deviantART, artists define themselves through a
peer community, and so are freed somewhat from this form of discrimina-
tion and vertical labelling through curators and art buyers.
The second point that Salah makes about identity is perhaps more funda-
mental in the context of this chapter. She notes that identity also applies to
the identity of the artist as an artist. This argument goes to a more funda-
mental question about what it is that defines an artist and the separation
between artist and non-artist, a direct representation of the amateur/profes-
sional division that troubles other professions like journalists, as we saw in
Chapter 4.
In an SNS such as deviantART, it becomes possible to develop quantitative
measures of the relative popularity of individual users by tracking the number
of people visiting their pages, making comments on their works and watching
them. deviantART also regularly highlights the work of individual members
of the community through the ‘daily deviation’, where anyone in the deviantART
community can nominate a work to be featured. The daily deviations are then
selected by deviantART and ‘official’ volunteers to create presentations for
the homepage. These processes provide a way for artists to have their work
recognised, and be promoted by the community.
Traditionally, artists produce works that gain attention through exhibitions
or the forwarding by arbiters of taste like curators, gallery owners or art
buyers. Exhibition curators are responsible for selecting the works that are
to be presented at exhibitions, and thus act as the arbiters of what is and
is not considered art, or at least what is considered high culture, worthy of
display at a gallery or in an exhibition, and what is considered low culture.

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Online art sites like deviantART provide new ways for artists and amateur
artists to present their work and have it judged by other users, rather than by
the arts establishment alone. Furthermore, as Salah (2010) points out, if we
judge museums and galleries in terms of visitor numbers to their websites,
we find that deviantART has a much more significant web presence than
some of the leading cultural institutions, including the Museum of Modern
Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre and the Tate.
What is striking about this function of deviantART is that in providing a
platform for artists to gain recognition, it is providing a role that is very
similar to that traditionally provided by galleries. The major difference here
is that all works are potentially visible, and the selection of works that are
presented is a function of community selection, rather than selection by an
expert such as an exhibition curator. SNSs like deviantART therefore raise
questions not only about the status of the artist, but also about the institu-
tions that make choices about what is and is not considered art.
Dan Perkel argues in his dissertation ‘Making art, creating infrastructure:
deviantART and the production of the web’ (2012) that Web 2.0 isn’t creat-
ing new forms of art or artistic practices, but rather the fabric of the web is
a ‘multi-faceted form of infrastructure’ that forces old tensions in art to col-
lide with Web 2.0 ideals. This then, in turn, produces new tensions. Reflect-
ing upon the changing nature of IP and art theft, Perkel considers ‘two common-
place notions: (1) that a new generation of Internet savvy creators are upend-
ing old ideals about art as property and (2) that the Internet is a medium for
sharing rather than control’ (2012). This leads Perkel to conclude that as well
as creating new tensions between sharing and theft, there is a new balance
between sharing and control. Far from disrupting ‘[r]omantic conceptions of
art and creativity’, Perkel argues that the web uneasily accommodates these
multiple and often conflicting ideologies (2012: 1).

VERNACULAR CREATIVITY
If amateur art questions the boundaries of art, then vernacular creativity
stretches them even further. As we have seen, websites like deviantART sup-
port communities of people who create and share creative works. Outside of
arts-focused SNSs like deviantART is a world of ordinary, everyday creative
production. This everyday creativity includes a range of creative activities
that are rarely commercialised and which are very unlikely ever to appear in
museums. It includes things such as travel photographs, family photographs,
photo album arrangement, needle stitch, quilting and so on – all often prac-
tical or instrumental pursuits, but also undeniably creative.

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Jean Burgess (2007) has called this kind of creativity ‘vernacular creativity’,
drawing upon the word ‘vernacular’, which implies language that is ordi-
nary and everyday. This kind of creativity clearly predates modern tech-
nologies by hundreds if not thousands of years, but the rise of social media
means that these forms of everyday, ordinary creativity can be circulated
and shared. Furthermore, the growing ubiquity of devices like mobile cam-
eras and the creative potential of modern computers for video and digital
art have meant that there has been an explosion in the production of ver-
nacular works.
A good example of this kind of everyday vernacular creativity is the pho-
tographic vernacular, which refers to images of the everyday and banal that
started to appear, as photography became more accessible to a mass market.
Photography moved out of the realm of the professional and into the ama-
teur and domestic. This was brought about by the development of Eastman’s
Kodak camera. As Burgess discusses, the Kodak camera made photography
an everyday activity by making it available to everybody. Vernacular photog-
raphy emerged as people began to take images in the course of everyday life,
capturing glimpses into the personal and private. Travel and holiday photos,
family photos and a miscellaneous array of images of people, animals, archi-
tecture and anything else that took a person’s fancy soon began to become
commonplace.
If the Kodak camera made photography an everyday activity, then
the digital camera has democratised the technology, and the advent of the
internet and photo-sharing websites such as Flickr has pushed this even
further. The emergence of the digital camera, especially with its ubiquitous
appearance on mobile phones, suggests a democratisation of media. Those
who previously couldn’t afford cameras or film processing costs suddenly
have access to cheap and convenient alternatives, which has opened up
the world of photography to people who would formerly have not had the
time, technical knowledge and/or money. For example, in Seoul, the ready
availability of digital cameras has seen some women develop a love of
photography that has sometimes ultimately led to them wanting to become
professional photographers (Lee 2005). We discuss some of the key emer­
ging visualities around camera-phone images in social and locative media
spaces in Chapter 7.
However, for Burgess, the term ‘vernacular creativity’ embraces two
important concepts: the everyday or ordinary, but also a concept of situated
creativity, because vernacular also implies locality and context dependence.
Burgess cites Batchen (2001), who describes a range of ways in which people
used photographic prints: arrangement in photo albums, as grids hung on
the wall with an implied narrative, using photographs in ornaments, and

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using photos or parts of photos in scrapbooking. Thus, when a photo-

graphic print is placed into an album, it is done so in relation to other
objects and the structure and affordances of the book form itself. To take a
photograph out of an album, to find it isolated from its original context,
changes its meaning.
Although vernacular creativity operates outside the purview of art, it
should not be seen as ‘other’ to art. Burgess argues that rather than moving
away from art practices and mass culture, vernacular creativity often engages
with it, reproducing, mimicking and borrowing techniques. This means that
at the boundary there is often no clear distinction between vernacular
creativity and art: ‘the boundaries between vernacular creativity and art or
commercial mass media are, in practice, consistently permeable and transitory’
(Burgess 2007: 35).
However, while the vernacular may not be the opposite of art, it is tra-
ditionally placed outside the sphere of art. With the exception of recent
moves to embrace social histories, galleries and museums have traditionally
ignored the vernacular altogether. Stallabrass points out that unless a vernacu-
lar object is extremely old, it is not acknowledged by art history, galleries or
museums:

Whole categories of visual cultural production never gain art-historical

attention – amateur photography is an example, along with a large swathe of
online practices, including the vast majority of the photographs uploaded to
Flickr. (2010: 5).

Ignoring everyday creative practices belies their importance. The kinds of

questions that are being raised are those we have been engaging with
throughout this chapter: what is the nature of the division between the ama-
teur and the professional, and who is the arbiter of what should and should
not be considered art?
Context has important ramifications in online and digital media, too. Ito
and Daisuke Okabe (2005) made this point clearly in examining the three
Ss – sharing, storing and saving – of camera-phone usage. Taken out of con-
text, the vernacular photograph from the mobile phone may seem banal,
even narcissistic, depending on the content. However, in the social context
for which they were developed these photos take on other meanings, just
as if they had been arranged in a photo album. This contextualised sharing
of images is not just about creative practice, but also a part of broader media
literacy and etiquette (Koskela 2004). Within SNSs like Flickr (Mørk
Petersen 2008) or deviantART, the social matrix established by the SNS and
the people using it provide context. Comments, friend lists, watchers, favour-
ites and a range of other site-specific tools all work together to contextualise

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the image and give it specific local meanings within a community. This dynamic
environment in which strangers and intimates are sharing images and com-
ments (both aesthetic and technical) suggest that new visualities are
ordered by a ‘situated creativity’ (Burgess 2008) and also new geosocial
cartographies (Hjorth and Gu 2012).
As camera phones become more commonplace with the explosion of
smartphones – along with new contexts for image distribution like micro-
blogging and location-based services (LBSs) – we are witnessing emergent
types of visuality. In particular, through LBSs such as Facebook Places, we see
ways in which users create new contexts for the overlay between place, ambient
images and geographic locations. While, globally, camera-phone genres like
self-portraiture have blossomed, we are also witnessing the flourishing of
vernacular visualities that reflect a localised notion of place-, social- and
identity-making practices (Lee, D-H 2009; Hjorth and Gu 2012). We dis-
cuss this in greater detail in Chapter 7.

CONCLUSION
This chapter has looked at the impact of social media on art as a way of
examining the broader questions about the emerging relationships between
social media and cultural production. As we saw at the beginning of the
chapter, cultural production has come to be understood as something that
involves the consumer as well as the producer. Social media invites new
modes of cultural production where the user pays an even more active role
by actually producing cultural objects rather than just interpreting them.
The result of this is not only that more people can now produce and dissemi-
nate culture, but also that institutions and individuals who have traditionally
been a part of this production process are having to adapt to these new
modes of production.
This can be seen in the way that cultural institutions – galleries and
museums – have begun to focus more heavily on their audiences. While there
are other factors in play that are only tangentially related to the evolution of
the internet, social networks have nonetheless provided a way for museums
and galleries to engage with audiences. Consequently, we are now seeing
people being included in cultural processes that were once solely the domain
of curators and other experts.
For artists, the response to social media has been more mixed. Some artists,
like Man Bartlett, have engaged with social media, working it into their artistic
practice. However, as artists engage with social media and the internet, they
also raise questions about the nature of the artist and his or her relationship

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 Art and cultural production   99

with their audience. Other artists and art collectives, such as the Candy Factory,
prefer not to see themselves as social media or internet artists at all, but are
instead artists who use the internet. For other artists still, such as Cao Fei,
social media and the internet open up spaces for critical analysis that engages
with audiences and again complicates the role of the artist and his or her
audience.
The complexities that these artists are grappling with belie the still-
dominant concept of the artist as a member of a privileged elite. However,
as we saw in the example of deviantART, art and cultural production is not
the domain only of those with the ‘right’ background, but increasingly it is
becoming the domain of people who produce creative works but whose
work would rarely be considered by the art establishment. Instead, sites like
Flickr and deviantART are providing alternative forums for the presentation
and critical assessment of creative works and promoting works based on
community consensus.
This trend is exacerbated by the increasingly important and visible role of
everyday creativity in which vernacular forms of cultural production, such as
mobile-phone imaging, have become part of the structure of social networks.
While not new, vernacular creativity is revealed within social media as playing
an important role in mediating social relationships. It does this through con-
textually nuanced performances that often engage with and adopt the codes
and themes of both popular media and art.
In the final analysis, it seems clear that the shifts we have identified in other
chapters, from mass audience to individual user, and from customisation
to personalisation, are also being felt in the sphere of cultural production.
These changes promise to have significant implications not just for how
we conceptualise and understand art, but also for a whole range of creative
practices and their role in society more generally.

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 6 Social media games

S ocial media games are games that are played within social network sites
(SNSs). These games, with names like Happy Farm and Mafia Wars, are
a familiar and integral part of using SNSs for many people. They are both a
source of entertainment and a way to maintain relationships with friends
and family. Thus, for people who study social media, social media games
become an important part of the overall experience of social media, and
demand attention. For games-studies scholars, the emergence of social media
games (which are generally termed ‘casual games’ within the industry) is also
significant. Social media games are being played by people with different
motivations and different demographics than those who play games on consoles
or those who play conventional computer games, and they are presenting a
new economics of game production, which has seen new players enter the
market. For some, like Juul (2009), the emergence of social media games
constitutes a ‘gamification’ of culture, a casual revolution.
In this chapter, we are going to examine the emergence of social media
games from both a social media and a game-studies perspective. In the first
part of this chapter we look at the idea that games are social, which is at
odds with the popular image of computer games in Western culture. Follow-
ing this we consider social media games more specifically, paying particular
attention to their role within social networking sites and identifying some of
the unique features of these games and the associated implications for
gaming and social media more broadly. As part of this analysis we look at the
way in which social media games provide socially valuable spaces, but also
acknowledge that these spaces are not provided for purely altruistic reasons;
behind the games are SNS and games companies that rely on social gaming
as an important source of revenue. The final part of this chapter presents a
case study that brings the conceptual ideas we have discussed in the chapter
together. The case study focuses on the uses of social media games in China
and the way that the games are mediating relationships between generations
as young people are increasingly moving away from their home and families
for study and work.

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FROM GAMES TO CASUAL GAMES

In the past, computer games have stereotypically been portrayed by the
media in Western cultures as solitary activities for children who are socially
inept and/or physically moribund. However, the growth of the computer
game industry in recent years has made these ideas about games difficult
to maintain. Furthermore, with the rise of so-called ‘casual’ games, more
and more people are playing a wider variety of games, often in new and
unconventional ways. In this section we will look at the evidence that
games are not only social, but can also play a broader role in our social
interactions generally. We begin by examining the social nature of games
before looking at the rise of casual games as specific examples of the
changing nature of the games industry. This will provide us with the back-
ground for the second section that will look more specifically at social
media games.

Games and the Social

Despite having received a reputation as a solitary and socially isolating
pursuit, games have in fact long been associated with conviviality (Salen
and Zimmerman 2003). For evidence of this, one only needs to think of
games that require two or more players (think of chess, backgammon,
bridge, poker, mahjong, Monopoly, Twister) to notice that games that are
played solo (solitaire, patience) are the exception rather than the rule. While
many computer games are designed for a single-player experience, even
here there is a great deal of social activity that extends from the game but
may not be immediately apparent (online discussion forums, for example),
to say nothing of the many, many games which are played as multiplayer
games in an online environment (Taylor 2006).
Recent interest in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), fuelled by
the success of games like Activision/Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, is just the latest
engagement between academic scholars, games and sociality (Corneliussen and
Rettberg 2008; Nardi 2010). Some of the earliest research into online communi-
ties focused on text-based multi-user games called multi-user dungeons/domains
(MUDs). Numerous scholars such as TL Taylor used these early multiplayer
gaming environments as exemplars of online sociality. For example, Curtis
(1996) examined the scope for social interaction afforded by the online environ-
ment while Reid (1995) argued that MUDs produced communities and forms
of rich online sociality.
More recently, Steinkuehler and Williams (2006) have argued that MMOGs
provide a rewarding and engaging online social environment. The authors
conducted two extensive studies into MMOGs (Lineage and Asheron’s Call)

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 102  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

in which they interviewed participants and played the games, taking notes
and recording the way that other players were engaging with the game.
In one of the studies, the researchers found a sample of 750 people who did
not play the game Asheron’s Call; they gave copies of the game to one half
of the group, and used the other group as a control. Using these method-
ologies, the researchers were able to gain some insights into the way that
people socialised on MMOGs and on the differences between playing and
not playing. The results of the two studies were convergent (they came to
the same conclusions), both agreeing that MMOGs represented a sig-
nificant social environment. For Steinkuehler and Williams, people’s use
of MMOGs had a social dimension that fits within Oldenburg’s concept
of a ‘third place’ (the social space beyond work and home, discussed fur-
ther in Chapter 2). The studies provide further tangible evidence of the
social nature of games.
Beyond the games themselves, gaming has been a source of sociality as
players build forums to discuss games and develop user created content that
ranges from fan fiction to game ‘mods’ that see players become creators and
actively hack games in order to customise them. Far from being an isolating
or solitary experience, game-playing is often a highly social experience, espe-
cially when games move into online multiplayer environments. If games can
be social, then it might also be fair to say that games are frequently found
alongside social activities, and in this respect SNSs are certainly no excep-
tion. SNS-based games are extremely popular, as we will see below, and have
played an important role in building the subscription bases of social media
as players seek friends to play with.
Yet games have often been disconnected from other forms of analysis
because they are frequently conceptualised, especially in Western culture, as
something that exists outside of everyday life, in a kind of sealed-off space
of their own. This idea of games as being separated from other social activi-
ties reflects early debates about cyberspace as a place that is different from
the offline (we touched on some of these arguments back in Chapter 2).
However, as the internet grew, it became apparent that the exceptionalism
that dominated early writings about the internet hid the fact that the same
inequalities that existed offline were duplicated online (Nakamura 2002).
And, as we saw in Chapter 3, there is also strong evidence to suggest that
offline relationships have a very important bearing on online relationships
amongst users of SNSs.
In the literature on games, the idea that games are separate to other
parts of life was explored as far back as 1938 by Johann Huizinga, who
examined games in his book Homo Ludens (1938 [1970]). Huizinga was
fascinated by play and wanted to understand its function in culture. One of

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the concepts described by Huizinga in his book was the idea of the ‘magic
circle’, a concept that was picked up and popularised by Katie Salen and
Eric Zimmerman in their 2003 book Rules of Play. For Huizinga, Salen
and Zimmerman, the magic circle acted as a site for play that was separate and
removed from the real world. Inside the magic circle was the game world which
was associated with play rather than reality. Thus inside the game world you
are completely free to play, to try things out and to fail without fear of there
being any real-world repercussions. There is no sense that the barrier
between the game world and the real world is at all permeable.
Thomas Malaby offers a useful counter position in which he critiques
what he sees as the exceptionalism in much game and play scholarship that
continues to separate play from everyday activity (2007). One of the critical
points that Malaby makes here is the idea that play can be usefully thought
of as a mode of experiencing reality, rather than a separate activity that has
no bearing on the real world. For Malaby, games are a set of processes that
are linked to experience; many non-game activities have playful elements,
just as many games have strong relationships with the real world. Using
examples of both digital and non-digital games, Malaby provides empirical
evidence to show that play is not always separate, safe or necessarily pleas-
urable, and that these notions of play are culturally nuanced and socially
constructed. He also suggests that the division of work and play into sepa-
rate spheres of experience may be a cultural artefact, rather than a universal
distinction. Here Malaby points to work by scholars like Sherry Ortner,
who defines the distinction between work and play/leisure as a ‘modernist
affectation’ that results from the nineteenth-century construction of the idea
of work (Malaby 2007: 8).
Astute readers will already have noted the parallels between the idea of
the magic circle and early constructions of cyberspace in internet theory.
Both have been seen as separate places that are disconnected from the real
world. Yet, just as internet theorists have come to see the importance
of the offline in the online, so too game theorists have begun to question
this rigid separation of games and other aspects of social life. These insights
into the position of games with respect to the other human activities become
more important as we consider social media games which, like SNSs, are
sites for social activities and where online and playful activities intersect
with the social. As we will see below, social media games play an important
role in SNSs, helping to recruit new users, and also providing a way for
SNS users to maintain and develop contacts with their friend networks.
Before delving into social games, however, we need to contextualise the
development of social media games within the broader phenomenon of
casual games.

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Casual games
Casual games, as the name suggests, are games that can be enjoyably played
without the high level of attention that is associated with non-casual games.
These are games that do not require the same investment of time, and so
appeal to a broader market than traditional console or PC-based games. The
games are typically said to be easy to learn (but perhaps difficult to master).
However, as Juul (2009) points out, these stereotypical definitions of casual
games often do not withstand close scrutiny.
Many social media games fall into the general category of casual games
by virtue of their design and their mode of play. While many social media
games are casual games, it is not true to say that all casual games are
social media games (many casual games are designed to be played on
smartphones or other mobile devices, and often have little if any integration
with social networks). However, to understand the role and importance of
social media games, it is useful to understand them in the broader context
of casual games.
As noted above, possibly the most distinctive feature of casual games is
their light-attention mode of engagement, or their ‘interruptibility’ as Juul
terms it (2009). Where traditional computer games encourage players to set
aside hours for dedicated play, and reward players accordingly, casual games
allow players to engage with the games for minutes at a time, dipping in and
out of the game as time and interest permit. This different mode of engage-
ment has a number of significant implications for game producers. First,
casual games appeal to a broader range of people who do not have the time
or inclination to play games that require them to put aside hours of dedi-
cated playing time. Second, this low-attention mode of play means that casual
games are well suited to environments in which the user is likely to be engaged
in more than one task. For example, casual games are well suited to mobile
devices, where players can play the games during brief periods of leisure
throughout the day: during lunch breaks, waiting in a queue, or even while they
are working, switching between work tasks and social media as time permits.
For some, social media games allow people to be present in two social places
at once, ushering in forms of ‘presence bleed’ (Gregg 2011) whereby boundaries
between work and leisure blur.
Casual games also provide different incentives for play. As Hou (2011)
points out, games designed for dedicated play focus on mastery of difficult
tasks, demand full attention, and punish players for failure. For example,
MMOGs have traditionally been the preoccupation of ‘hardcore’ gamers,
demanding full attention and the investment of many hours of continuous
gameplay. In MMOGs like World of Warcraft, failure at tasks is often treated

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 Social media games   105

harshly (with the death of a character and a penalty extracted in loss of

accrued experience), and players who do not spend hours obtaining the cor-
rect in-game equipment find they cannot participate in activities with other
more committed players.
By contrast, casual games present players with easier challenges and reward
players for succeeding, sometimes excessively. This different dynamic makes
casual games easier for a more casual gamer to engage with, and makes them
less likely to leave the game out of frustration. This view of casual games as
being gentler with the player is not universal, however. While Juul accepts that
rewards are handed out frequently in casual games (a feature Juul refers to
as ‘juiciness’), he also argues that casual games do punish users for failure,
but that ‘you rarely fail due to a single mistake but rather an accumulation
of mistakes’ (Juul 2009: 42). This maintains a pressure on the player to suc-
ceed, but reduces the penalty for failure. For example, in FarmVille (one of
the biggest social media games) crops can wither and die, and weeds will
come to take over a farm if the player leaves it too long, but no matter how
bad it gets, it is always recoverable. The key point here is that casual games
are more forgiving than traditional games.
For the games industry, casual games have opened up a new and lucrative
market that includes new, vastly increased numbers of players and a more
diverse demographic. Demographic groups that have traditionally been
difficult for the games industry to reach (people over the age of 40, and
women, for example) are engaging with casual games. Many casual games
seem to cross cultural boundaries, with leading games enjoying huge levels
of popularity in many countries. Even MMOGs have now become casual-
ised (Juul 2009) and part of the daily diet of many millions of SNS users.
For many players, the importance of these casual social games sometimes
eclipses the SNS itself. This new market for games has seen a number of
formerly small game development companies like Rovio (Angry Birds),
Zynga (FarmVille) and PopCap Games (Bejeweled) grow into multi-million-
dollar companies by focusing their development efforts on casual games.
Recognising the emergence of this market, larger game companies like
Electronic Arts are now making games for the casual market and are also
reaping the rewards.
Why have casual games emerged now, and what is driving their uptake?
From a technical vantage point, the capability for mobile phones and
web browsers to support casual games has been available for many years.
Casual games have come of age now not so much because the technologies
are available, but because there are now platforms that support the distribu-
tion of these games. To put it another way, although the technology to make

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 106  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

casual games has been around for more than ten years, there was no consist-
ent way for game developers to get their games to large groups of users and
to receive suitable financial compensation in order to make casual game
development an ongoing reality. Furthermore, the wide variety of different
mobile technologies, each with their own nuances and technical limitations,
meant that game development for the mobile market was extremely labour
intensive.
For casual games on mobile devices, the important market development
has been the emergence of smartphones, which are unified by their operating
systems and associated app stores (the big names at the time of writing are
Apple iOS, Google Android, RIM BlackBerry and Microsoft Windows
Mobile). These operating systems, along with their online stores, provide a
means for game developers to produce a game for a single platform (rather
than a hundred different phones) and, significantly, to distribute the game
within a system that allows them to profit from each game sold. For many
game developers (especially smaller companies), the royalties that can be
garnered from selling a game through an app store are significantly higher
than would normally flow back to them if the game were published in a
traditional retail outlet.
Web-based casual games have also come of age as the platforms to support
them have developed. Again, the technical capacity for web browsers to sup-
port games has been around for a long time. A key technology is a software
application from Adobe Inc. called Flash. Flash is a tool that allows the
production of interactive content that can be delivered via a web page,
and for many years Flash provided the only consistent way to develop and
distribute web-based games. Many games have been developed, and advertising
supported web gaming sites like Newgrounds, FlashPortal and Kongregate
encourage Flash game developers to upload their games to the sites. These
Flash games are often supported by advertising, which is facilitated by
the sites (with game makers getting a royalty based on how popular their
games are), or on in-game advertising, which also sees royalties flow to games
based upon a variety of metrics.

Social media games

If the enabling development for mobile casual games was the smartphone and
the associated app stores, then the equivalent for web-based casual game
developers has been the SNS. It is here, at the intersection between casual
games and social media, that we see the emergence of the social media game.
SNSs like Facebook and MySpace provide a platform for game developers
that offers added benefits for the developer, in much the same way that app

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stores and operating systems offer benefits for mobile game developers. By
developing a casual game for Facebook, for example, a developer can gain
access to the user’s friends’ lists and add a social dimension to the game. This
allows successful game developers to access many more people than if their
game was placed on a standard Flash game site, thus increasing the total
number of players, which in turn translates to a more profitable game. To
illustrate the relationship between SNSs and game developers, we will examine
the relationship between two of the largest – Facebook and Zynga.
There has been a lot of interest in social media games, driven partly by the
popularity of SNSs, but also because the success of some social media games
has demonstrated that these games can be just as profitable (and in some
cases, more so) than console or PC-based games. The two factors that feed
into this are the lower cost of developing a social media game, and the poten-
tially broader audience of users that the game will attract. One of the major
game production companies, Electronic Arts, acknowledged this when they
purchased the UK-based social game development company Playfish for
US$300 million in 2009 (Playfish 2009).
SNS-based games can collect revenue from advertising, from in-game
purchases or from promotional marketing (Shin and Shin 2011: 854).
In-game purchases are small payments made by players as they play a
game to enhance their utility within that game. For example, a player who
is playing Happy Farm can use real money to purchase virtual goods, such
as seeds for the farm or decorations. To a non-player, the idea of spending
money on virtual goods may seem ridiculous, but this kind of purchasing
represents an important source of revenue for companies like Zynga, who
have said that they derive 90 per cent of their revenue through in-game
purchases of virtual goods. To illustrate the kind of money involved here,
consider that in July 2012 Zynga reported that they had 306 million players
per month and revenue from these users of US$332.5 million, of which
US$291.5 million (close to 90 per cent) came from online games, the remain-
ing amount coming from advertising. So, game and in-game purchases
make up the bulk of Zynga’s income, and although Zynga also sells games
directly on mobile platforms, revenue from Facebook games continues to
make up the lion’s share of Zynga’s profits (Zynga 2012).
While the SNS provides a valuable platform for social media games,
it would be a mistake to think that the relationship between SNSs and social
media games is one-way. Symbiosis would be a more accurate characteris­
ation of the relationship between SNSs and SNS-based games. There are a
number of reasons for this. SNS games are a method of recruiting new users
to the SNS. Many games reward players with game bonuses, in-game gifts
and/or currency for recruiting friends. For the committed player, the incentive

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 108  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

to get all their friends and acquaintances involved in the game is significant.
Once a player has exhausted their online friends, there is an incentive to get
even more people involved by encouraging friends and family to join the
SNS. Beyond the recruitment of new users, and perhaps more significantly
for established SNSs with already large user bases, games also provide a
revenue stream.
The importance of the game revenue stream is highlighted by the symbiotic
relationship that has developed between Zynga and Facebook. Zynga, as
mentioned above, is one of the most successful SNS game developers. In
2011 when Facebook made its initial public offering (meaning it would list
on the stock market so people could buy shares in it), it revealed that Zynga
accounted for 12 per cent of Facebook’s revenue (Geron 2012). Zynga and
Facebook had entered into a five-year partnership in 2010 in which Facebook
guaranteed Zynga a steady increase in the number of users, and Zynga guaran-
teed Facebook that it would make its web games exclusively for Facebook.
Another indication of the importance of games (and Facebook apps gen-
erally) for Facebook can be seen in the deployment of Facebook Credits.
Facebook Credits is a system designed to allow Facebook users to pay for
content within Facebook. The idea is that you use a payment system, like a
credit card or PayPal, to buy Facebook credits. Then, if you’re playing a
game like FarmVille, instead of paying for in-game purchases with your
credit card, you use some of your Facebook credits. This system has one
major advantage for Facebook: it allows Facebook to take a cut of all in-game
purchases. The amount that Facebook takes is 30 per cent, so if someone buys
a virtual chicken coop for US$3.00, the game-maker gets US$2.10 and
Facebook gets 90 cents. Multiply this by every transaction on Facebook
and it can add up to a lot of money. Even if Facebook decides to phase this
system out, it will probably continue some kind of ‘pay by Facebook’ scheme,
where users can opt to make online payments with a Facebook account
rather than a credit card.
While the examples we have presented here have focused on Facebook
and Zynga, they are provided here only as examples to illustrate the kind
of business that is going on behind the scenes of social media games. In the
future perhaps neither of these companies will exist, having ridden a wave
of investor enthusiasm that ended up being little more than another dot-
com-style bubble. They might both exist in a different form; the future is a
dangerous thing to predict. The key point to take from this is that the strategies
that underlie Facebook and Zynga’s approach to the online environment are
representative of the business of social media games. From the above, it is fair
to say that to Facebook and Zynga, the value of social media games is that
they provide another way for SNSs to commodify users’ sociality. As discussed

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 Social media games   109

in Chapter 3, SNSs are businesses, and thus need to make money. They do
this by deriving profit from their users, primarily though analysis of user’s
submitted data, and selling highly targeted consumers to advertisers. Here,
SNS games provide a kind of platform-within-a-platform for deriving profit
from the sociality of online games.
To this point, we have focused on the economic aspects of social media
games. This is important because it outlines the environment in which social
media games exist. Understanding the economics of social media games gives
us important insights into how the games are designed. For example, once we
know that the major source of revenue for Zynga is the purchase of virtual
goods, it becomes clear that the economic imperative for the designers of the
game is to make virtual goods a central design feature of the game.

PLAYERS AND SOCIAL MEDIA GAMES

While understanding the economics of the social media game is an important
part of understanding the games themselves, it is only part of the picture
because it tells us what game designers are trying to achieve with social
media games, which is not necessarily what is actually happening online.
To get closer to completing the picture of social media games, we also need to
examine how and why people actually use social media games, and what
they get out of them.
Given the revenue that successful social media games have made, it is
perhaps not surprising that there are numerous studies that attempt to define
what makes a social media game successful in order to come up with a for-
mula, or at least a series of guidelines, for social media game developers. Shin
and Shin (2011), for example, suggest from their preliminary research that
people are more likely to play a social media game if they perceive it as playful.
This might seem obvious at first glance, but motivations for playing games can
be quite varied. Other studies have suggested that players are motivated to play
games for reasons such as the thrill of competition and the satisfaction that
can be gained from beating the game. In their study, Shin and Shin are suggest-
ing that the capacity for playful behaviour within the game (that is, a game
that allows players to interact beyond a set narrative of the game) is more
important in SNS-based games than in other online games.
The importance of playfulness in social media games is also echoed by
Kirman (2010), who emphasises the importance of what he calls ‘gaps’ in
game design. These are the places in which there is space for the players to
deviate from the game’s overall design. These gaps allow players to experiment
playfully with the game and to come up with new and unintended (from the
designer’s perspective) ways of playing games. This can range from players

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of a game like FarmVille creating designs and illustrations by planting their

crops in strategic positions (something that the game supports, but was not
designed to do), to players subverting the intended success or winning con-
ditions of the game. Kirman cautions against social media game designers
becoming too formulaic, suggesting instead that leaving gaps in the design
of the games is a desirable thing that can have positive, if unpredictable,
side effects. In essence, the more latitude the players have to experiment
within the game, the more playful the game and the more potential it has
to become successful.
Studies that have looked at the demographic profile of social media gamers
have tended to suggest that when compared to players of conventional games
on consoles and PCs, social media gamers are generally older, more likely to
be female and do not necessarily identify themselves as ‘gamers’ (ISG 2010).
We do need to approach these claims with some caution, as much of the
research has been conducted by the industry, who have long desired to see
games elevated into a more mainstream pastime. The study methodology is
a little opaque (it is not clear how the sample was selected), and the study
does not actually define what they counted as a social game. However, the
notion that casual games appeal to a broader section of the community than
so-called ‘hardcore’ games seems a reasonable assumption that is supported
by the research, and if we are to take the statistics at face value we might
also wonder if the motivations that people have for playing these games have
also changed.
An important source of the research into social interaction in online games
has come from research into MMOGs. These games boast large user populations
who are often deeply engaged in social activities within the game environment.
For example, Yee conducted a study of 30,000 players across a number of
MMOGs and found that primary motivating factors for people to play
MMOGs were social interaction and achievement, noting that ‘MMORPGs
[massively multiplayer online role-playing game] attract a diverse demographic
who are drawn to the environment to socialise and interact with other users’
(2006: 320). Williams et al. (2006) conducted a study that looked closely
at social structures called ‘guilds’ in the World of Warcraft MMOG and
found that for many players the MMOG was a space that acted to support
existing online relationships. In other words, people who knew each other
socially offline would use MMOGs as a convenient place to socialise online.
These findings are similar to studies of users of SNSs that we discussed in
Chapter 3, who also seem to socialise primarily with people they know in an
offline context.
Yet while the research into MMOGs gives us some insights into the ways
that people use games as social environments, the research into MMOGs

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does not necessarily always translate to social media games. MMOGs such
as Everquest and World of Warcraft are games that are hardly casual. In
fact, these games are often associated with time-consuming attention-
demanding play that rewards players for time investment and, in the case
of World of Warcraft at least, virtually requires that players form groups
at higher levels to continue playing the game and progressing. Casual
games, by comparison, do not demand the same kind of time investment,
and so it seems reasonable to hypothesise that a different level of engage-
ment would yield different kinds of social interaction. It is also possible that
games that are designed to operate within an SNS provide different environ-
ments which may influence the way people socialise within them.
One approach that begins to develop insights into these questions
compares games that are designed to work within an SNS with stand-
alone games to determine what (if any) effect social networking has upon the
structure of games. Kirman et al. (2009) conducted one such study and
have suggested that one of the reasons for the popularity and rapid growth of
SNS games when compared to stand-alone games is because of the intimate
nature of the game request. For a stand-alone game to pick up new players,
it needs to recommend itself either through advertising or word of mouth.
For social games on SNSs, the word-of-mouth method becomes very power-
ful not only because it is easy, but also because the recommendation to
play the game inevitably comes from someone in your social network. In
other words, if a good friend invites you to play a game with them you are
more likely to say yes.
Other studies have analysed the social networks constructed by social
media games, or have asked questions of the players directly. In her study of
social media games, Hou (2011) found that players do not seem to be motivated
by challenge and competition to the same degree that players of conventional
games are, but instead play social media games for relaxation and diversion.
This, she suggested, reflects the casual nature of social media games. Specifi-
cally, they do not require extreme expenditure of time or attention and do not
punish failure. Importantly, however, Hou also found that the social dimen-
sion of social media games was important for players. According to Hou,
‘respondents played social games more frequently, spent more time on the
game, and got more engaged in game activities for the purpose of social inter-
action’ (Hou 2011). Hou’s research suggested that social interaction was the
most significant reason for playing social media games. This is somewhat at
odds with the ISG (2010) report mentioned above which found that only
around 25 per cent of their respondents identified social interaction as the
major reason for playing social media games. Respondents to that study
nominated relaxation and enjoyment as their primary motivation.

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It is not clear why there is a disparity between the ISG study and Hou’s,
but the methods used for analysis, including the way in which the respond-
ents were selected, may play a role. One of the key issues here is that there
is a tendency in some research to generalise the player population. Players
are not one homogeneous group, but are diverse, and different people play
different games in different ways. Not all players of social media games
approach them with the same casual attitude, and some social media games
promote different kinds of game play than others. Some players do invest
serious amounts of time and resources in social media games, and could be
termed ‘hardcore’ players, even though they play casual games. Referring
again to the ISG (2010) report, 12 per cent of US and UK social media game
players play their games for more than ten hours a week, and 9 per cent play
social media games for more than three hours at a sitting. It is reasonable to
hypothesise that the experience and motivations of social media games for
these hardcore players is somewhat different to the average player who,
according to the ISG report, plays social media games for one to five hours
a week. The more hardcore players can also have a stronger influence on the
game than more casual players. That is, a small number of players can be
responsible for a very large proportion of interactions within a game (Kirman
et al. 2009). These players, while in a minority, may be responsible for a dis-
proportionate amount of apparent social activity within the game.
If we consider that different players may play social media games differ-
ently, then it is just as important to consider how different kinds of social
media games can affect player sociality. Rossi (2009) suggests that social
media games can be grouped into two broad categories based upon how the
user’s friend network is utilised by the game’s design. The first type is ‘skill/
knowledge’ games, which essentially challenge the player to accomplish a
given task or answer a question. In these games, SNS friends are fellow
competitors, to be played against and/or ranked against in a score table. The
second kind of social media game identified by Rossi are managerial or, as
Rossi terms them, ‘truly social’ games, in which the object of the game is not
to win so much as to build and develop a virtual space populated with virtual
goods. This would include games such as Happy Farm, FarmVille and Pet
Society. In these games, the goal is to maintain and perhaps develop your
virtual space through regular maintenance.
These different kinds of game would tend to suggest different modes of
play and different ways to involve friends. The skill/knowledge games require
more attention over shorter periods of time (depending on the game). Friends
in these games are competitors, and are more likely to be drawn from a closer
group of people you know, people with whom you have strong ties in a social
network. Truly social games are played over long periods, often having no

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defined end-point or winning strategy, and require the user to dip in for
relatively short periods to perform basic maintenance tasks. Friends in these
games take on a new dimension as the game rewards players with virtual
goods for recruiting new players and sharing or helping out other players.
In these games, friends become game resources where the more friends you
have connected with, the more agency you have in-game. Even with such
broad categories of social media games, and rough/confusing delineations
of users into ‘casual’ and ‘hardcore’, it becomes clear that there is no one
way to play social media games, and that the levels and kinds of social
interaction are going to vary from user to user and game to game.
It is perhaps not surprising that some have argued that social media games
may not be as social as they may seem. While a game like Happy Farm
appears ostensibly to be a hot-bed of social activity as users increase the size
of their social networks, more often than not this behaviour is purely
instrumental. As Shin and Shin put it, ‘[i]n social games friends are not
really friends, they are mere resources’ (2011: 853). In other words, the
game rewards players for inviting new players, and so players comply, but
this does not necessarily lead to those players going on to be sociable in that
environment. For Rossi (2009) this then leads to the idea that there can be
at least two kinds of friends in an SNS gamer’s network: real friends (that
is, people who they socialise with), and instrumental friends (who are on the
user’s friend list within the SNS, but who might otherwise have only a very
weak relationship with that user).
This raises an important point about sociality within the social media
game. The game can act as a kind of catalyst for other social behaviours, and
may spawn further kinds of sociality and creative production from players.
Rao (2008) has previously argued that social games are inherently social,
and may constitute a third place for sociality (in much the same way that
Steinkuehler and Williams argued that MMOGs construct a third place).
For Rao, social media games can foster relationships by providing a forum
for socialisation that is separated from the mainstream way that this is
performed in an SNS. An example might be a mother and daughter who play
an online game together regularly. The game provides a scene for online socia-
bility that probably would not have existed in the user’s conventional SNS
activities, which is reserved for other kinds of (non-family) contact.
The remainder of this chapter is dedicated to a case study that examines
some ways that social media games are played in China. In this case study
Happy Farm (an adaptation of FarmVille) features prominently, although
other games are also mentioned. Many of the themes discussed above are
played out in the case study, demonstrating that social media games do play
an important and sometimes surprising role in online social interaction.

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In particular, the case study provides qualitative insights into how social
media games are being used socially to bridge social gaps that have opened
up in a country that is experiencing rapid development and social change.
This serves two purposes. First, it highlights how some of the conceptual
ideas about social media games work in practice; and second, it demonstrates
that social media games are not just Anglophonic phenomena, and are not
just used by the young.

HOME AND AWAY: A CASE STUDY

OF SOCIAL GAMES IN CHINA

Cultures … [do] not hold still for their portraits. (Clifford and Marcus
1986: 10)

The rise of social games such as Happy Farm, played through SNSs such as
Renren and Kaixin, have seen millions of people young and old participating
in their communities of practice. According to iResearch, a consulting group
specialising in internet research, around 50 per cent of the 26 million daily
users of one of the main SNSs, renren.com, play online games (Cheng 2010).
These games generate around half of the website’s annual income. Whilst the
number of traditional network games (like MMOGs) has remained relatively
constant at 50 million, SNS users have burgeoned from nothing to tens of
millions in a few years (Cheng 2010). This phenomenon, whilst highly social,
also demonstrates changing attitudes to both the online world and gaming.
The success of Happy Farm in China may have something to do with the
context of Chinese society more generally (Hjorth and Arnold 2012). China
is going through a process of rapid development and industrialisation and is
transitioning from a communist to a capitalist economy. The communist
underpinnings of Chinese society are still very much a part of the educational
system, and all educated Chinese children graduate from school with a firm
understanding of Marxist and Maoist philosophy. Happy Farm allows people
to play with the basic economic model of capitalism, replete with the morally
questionable practices of theft to increase one’s personal wealth. In addition
to this socio-economic backdrop, rapidly increasing real-estate prices in
major population centres like Shanghai and Beijing means that for many, the
thought of owning one’s own home is an elusive dream. Against this back-
drop Happy Farm is a nostalgic fantasy that rewards hard work (represented
in the game by hours online) with a successful farm.
Happy Farm is in many ways the epitome of the casual social game, and
the central game mechanic is a simplified model of capitalism. The object of
the game is to start with a very basic farm with few resources and to develop

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the farm over time by acquiring, raising and selling produce for a profit. One
of the key – albeit subversive – factors of this game is to steal other people’s
produce when they are offline. While this is a slightly damning condem­
nation of the morals (or lack thereof) of capitalism, it serves an important
function for the game in keeping players engaged.
Many Happy Farm players keep the game open on their desktop whilst
doing other activities (such as work) to avoid being robbed. Some have
been known to set their alarms for late in the night so they can go online
when everyone is asleep in order to steal. Interaction with friends is built
into the mechanics of the game through a number of features. Players can
gain experience points by helping their friends develop their farms, and are
rewarded with in-game gifts (that help players improve their farms) for
encouraging their friends to play the game. Hou (2011), although acknowl-
edging the limitations of her study and warning against generalising her
results, found that the elements of social interaction in Happy Farm
encouraged people to play the games more frequently for longer and with
higher levels of engagement.
While the casual game connotes a less attention-intensive mode of game-
play, it would be wrong to think that this translates to less engagement.
Unlike their ‘hardcore’ predecessors, SNS games are much more casual in
their demands for engagement. However, behind this casualness is a play
architecture that is often just as time-consuming – but just in the form of
distracted micro-engagement. Users often have the game open on their desk-
top behind other screens like word documents, email, instant messaging
and so on whilst their virtual plants mature and grow. Leave the vegetables
too long and they will wither and rot, and weeds will grow, so the pace of the
game is slower and requires less intense attention than hardcore games, but
it still requires attention.
Interestingly, the demographic of players migrating to these games don’t
consist of the obvious demographic of the young student. Instead, it seems
that the fastest growing demographic is parents and even grandparents. They
are often being taught how to use the internet by their children, who are living
away from home for study or work. This cross-generational new media literacy
emerging in China’s increasingly mobile population (that is, migrating to cities
like Shanghai for work or study) sees social media such as QQ (the largest
and longest-running SNS in China) and online games as helping to alleviate
the negative effects of cross-generational class mobility by maintaining kinship
relations.
In China, the generation of children born in the post-1980s period are
called the ba ling hou (literally, the ‘after 1980s’: ba ling is 1980 and hou is
after). The term has been used in a similar way and with similar connotations

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 116  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

to the use of the Anglophonic term ‘generation Y’. Children from the ba
ling hou generation grew up in a rapidly modernising, post-cultural revolu-
tion, one-child family China. As a result, these children are characterised
as spoiled and self-centred but also technologically adept and more open-
minded than older generations. Reflecting the rapid urbanisation of China,
many people from this generation move to find work or take up study in
urban centres, so it’s not unusual to find ba ling hou living away from their
familial support structures. Like all generational generalisations, of course,
the idea of the ba ling hou is more an embodiment of social anxieties and
hopes about the present and the future than it is an accurate description of
real people, so we can see that the characterisation of the ba ling hou repre-
sents a generation at the forefront of significant social and economic change
in China.
Interviews with young adult users of Chinese social games provides us
with some valuable and surprising insights into the ways that the issues sur-
rounding the uses of social games and inter-generational politics are being
played out in China. In a study conducted by Hjorth and Arnold (2012),
they saw that it was a desire to maintain inter-generational connection as
students left home for work or study that encouraged communication via
social media and especially social media games.
Maintaining these relationships requires work that, for a time-poor student,
was sometimes regarded as laborious. For example, one female respondent
aged 25 played online games such as mahjong (an online version of the
traditional Chinese board game) because her mother liked to play them
with her. She said, ‘The more I play, the happier my mother is. I like to make
her happy.’ Another female respondent aged 20 complained that she believed
her father to be addicted to playing games. She said, ‘He has so much time
on his hands, he just wastes it on gaming. Our generation don’t have time.’
This is an interesting role reversal in the stereotypes associated with age and
media practice. Rather than children being accused of wasting their time
with new media, instead parents are often called out for excessive online
media use.
Another female respondent (aged 19) said her parents were still learning
to play games and use social media like QQ. Her parents were retired and
they now had time for the student to teach them new media skills. This
education was not always a great success:

They have a lot of time to stay at home, so they will play the computer games
and want to surf online. But my father and mother are not good at it yet, so
I continue to teach them and with the help of QQ, I can contact them more
often. For example, when I come back home, I find that my father’s mobile
phone has something wrong – it always happens and he can’t receive my short

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message. I said he’s a little old for it. He has played games in QQ and also,
Happy Farm. He liked stealing vegetables. But my uncle is more of a social
media user. Several years ago, we taught him how to use the internet – how to
connect and talk with others by QQ or something like that. And now he uses
it all the time. He even makes friends with strangers. And so, every time I come
back to my home and we can talk a lot about QQ and games. I don’t know if
the technology is a very good thing for him. I don’t know, because I think
maybe he has spent a lot of time on this new technology, maybe too much.
Personally, I have no doubt he has a very, very young heart from his technology
use. And I think he is enjoying his life very much. (Hjorth and Arnold 2012)

This respondent invested time and energy in getting her family online and
bringing them up to a level where she could include them in the social
activities, like playing Happy Farm. While her parents seemed to be slow in
the uptake of the technology, her uncle took to it with alacrity, which the
respondent found a little surprising. Like the previous respondent who dis-
approved of the amount of time her father spent online, this respondent
disapproved of her uncle’s use and noted with great surprise how willing
her uncle seemed to play with strangers online. She viewed her uncle’s atti-
tude as demonstrative of a type of youth or youthful attitude, or what could
be dubbed a type of ‘kidults’ (adults adopting kid-type attitudes to lifestyle
objects like new media). Here we see that knowledge of new media is
equated with a type of youthfulness, but not knowing the often-tacit limits
of media practice seemed to be the faux pas for older users (according to ba
ling hou respondents).
Another respondent, this time a 23-year-old female, also indicated that
there was effort required to maintain these social connections, effort that was
sometimes more than she was willing to expend. This respondent liked play-
ing a variety of games that reflected two worlds – the casual and the hardcore.
She liked both casual games like Happy Farm and hardcore games like World
of Warcraft. However, she found that she has too many friends on her SNS,
Renren, which means that once she starts playing one game she gets caught
up and finds it hard to leave and get work done. So now she mainly plays the
online game on the local university server. As she notes:

I liked playing Happy Farm very much. I think the plants I planted are very
beautiful and I like to keep my farm looking neat. I also like visiting other
people’s farms and stealing some plants and flowers from friends. Often I’m
playing in the same [physical] space as my friends. It adds to the enjoyment of
the game … I think it is very good for socialising, but then I became too busy
and it was hard for me to stop playing when friends were logging on. I now use
a local game developed at Fudan University. It is good because I just play that
one with my friends and roommates at the university. We play when we have
all finished or need a break studying. (Hjorth and Arnold 2012)

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 118  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

For her, playing online social games is a social activity, and one that’s sometimes
carried out with her friends in the same physical space. But the intensity of
this activity became too much, and began impinging upon other aspects
of her life, so she moved her activities into another space where she has less
social connections to maintain. For this respondent, the labour associated
with maintaining too many connections was too great to justify continuing
to play the game.
For the ba ling hou, social games are not only about play, they are also
about the work of maintaining relationships. This is a full-time intimate
labour that requires effort for the user to maintain. Like playbour (forms
of labour carried out in and around computer games), and the work that
modders (those who modify games’ software) do, this labour is essential to
the economics of social games and social network sites. As Kücklich’s
(2005) example of the modder illustrates, the modder has to call upon their
various forms of labour (social, creative, affective, emotional) that reflect
their community and the associated modes of knowledge. This process is an
integral part of the gaming communities – a labour of love that is supported
and then turned into profit by the industry (Andrejevic 2011). Media such
as SNSs and social games can be seen to operate to exploit a type of full-time
intimacy in which work and life boundaries continue to blur (Wacjman
et al. 2009).
In this case study we have seen how SNS games amplify the local. Through
the case study of Chinese social media games we see the growing tensions
around forms of socio-economic mobility for the ba ling hou as they try to
be both at home and away; a process in which intimacies are negotiated
across private and public, work and life spheres. The constant contact
afforded by social and mobile media means that users can be operating across
various forms of co-presence. In SNS games like Happy Farm, we see new
forms of cross-generational media practices that are indicative, and sympto-
matic, of China’s transformations.

CONCLUSION
Games are social activities, and it is no accident that some of the earliest as
a well as some of the most current forms of online sociality take place within
the framework of games. While there is a tendency to regard games as some-
thing that is separate to real life, games must, as Malaby (2007) points out,
be understood as a mode of experiencing reality, one that is no less valid than
other modes. So, when we come to look at social media, it is hard to ignore
the great degree to which games have found their niche. As we have seen,

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 Social media games   119

social games – as games that are played within the constructs of SNSs –
have attracted great numbers of players, brought new subscribers to SNS
sites and have opened up both gaming and social media to demographics
that were not otherwise engaged with them.
Social games are social because of the fundamental role that social
engagement plays in them. All social games, in some way or another, utilise
people’s friends, or the potential for people to make new connections in the
online environment. This makes these games more enjoyable, and provides
playful ways for people to socialise in online environments. Playing social
games requires players to engage with the game in different ways that are
often more socially oriented, and thus embedded in offline contexts. This,
in turn, has given birth to new forms of player practices. These games are
no longer about hardcore, subcultural practice, but are casual, in that they
require less intensive attention than hardcore games – they are interruptible
(Juul 2009) – and have various mechanics that make them appeal to broader
audiences.
This is not to say that all social media games are the same, or that all
players interact with these games in the same way. While some users play
social media games competitively with their friends, others tend virtual
gardens for hours a week, this time accumulated from many small moments
snatched throughout the day. Some only play games with friends, and others
play games with family as a way to maintain contact. Still others collect SNS
friends (who may not be actual friends, but friends only as defined by the SNS)
as resources that give them greater utility within their virtual space. The uses
of social media games are almost as varied as the people who use them, but as
we saw in the case study, there are familiar motivations even across language
and cultural boundaries. Social media games are playing a central role in
the ways that people socialise within SNSs.

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 7 Social, locative and mobile
media

While Hyunjin waited for Soohyun in a café in Shinchon, South Korea, she
toyed with her iPhone. Having downloaded some of the numerous photo apps,
she began to experiment. Finally she was happy with the Hipstamatic lens that
made her coffee look like it was out of some old analogue photo shoot. She then
quickly uploaded it, along with the caption ‘Waiting’, to a few social media sites
with location-based services (LBSs) like Facebook Places and Cyworld mini-
hompy. While the relevance of the caption might be lost on many of her friends,
for Soohyun it served as a reminder that she was keeping her friend waiting as
she dashed from the train station. Another friend of Hyunjin, Joon, was in the
area when she saw her friend’s photo message and her location via her phone.
She quickly made a detour to the café and sneaked up behind Hyunjin. Both
girls laughed and shared a coffee while Soohyun raced to get to the café in busy
peak hour traffic.

Toshi had never understood why people used the LBS game Foursquare until
after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster of March 2011 in Tohoku
(called ‘3/11’). During 3/11 he tried in vain to make contact with his parents,
finally making contact hours later and after much distress. Access to social
network sites like Mixi was difficult with mobile phone (keitai) networks jam-
ming. Moreover, with loss of electricity, Toshi found himself in an unfamiliar
situation – no working keitai. So when some sort of normality was established
after 3/11, Toshi began to constantly use Foursquare not to play the game but
as a way to give his friends and family a way to always know where he was.

Over in Shanghai, a mother, Jia, misses her daughter, Yuewen, who has just
moved away for university work placement. Thoughtfully, before she left,
Yuewen installed the most up-to-date software on her mum’s pirated smart-
phone (shanzhai). As instructed by her mum, Yuewen installed all the most
popular games, especially social media games like the farm simulation Happy
Farm, for even though the game had its heyday in 2009 it is still played by mil-
lions today. So Jia logs onto China’s version of Facebook, Renren, and signs
onto Happy Farm. She sees Yuewen is not online and so not protecting her
crops. So Jia uses the most popular instant messaging (IM) service, QQ, to send
a message to Yuewen to see if she has time for a quick play in Happy Farm. For
Yuewen, typical of China’s Generation Y (ba ling hou), LBS mobile games like
Jiepang, along with microblog Weibo, are her favourite media. However, when
she reads her mum’s message, she quickly signs into Happy Farm to reconnect
and catch up on gossip with her mum.

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Grandmother Amy had never been a technology kind of person. She grew up in
an age when technology was a male domain. On the other hand, her husband
was a passionate adopter of new technologies and always had the newest Apple
Mac item on hand. But one day, Amy’s husband brought home an iPad with
some of her favourite books uploaded. The next minute, Amy was hooked.
Before long she had numerous games and social media apps downloaded,
thanks to her enthusiastic grandchildren. Before long, Amy, like so many grand-
parents in Melbourne, had joined Facebook. And with that membership, her
relationship with her grandchildren took on new forms of intimacy. While Amy
was a little unsure about the ways in which her grandchildren seemed to impul-
sively upload pictures and make comments, she enjoyed seeing this other side
to them and their friends – their ‘mobile publics’ if you will.

As a mother of two adult children, Penelope had begun to reacquaint herself

with new media. The first thing she did was buy an iPhone. After a decade of
using one of the first generation ‘classic’ Nokias, which was only capable of
SMS and voice calls, Penelope’s world quickly expanded. Having never used
Facebook prior to the iPhone purchase, Penelope was quick to adopt new social
and even locative media practices. She loved catching up with old friends over-
seas that she hadn’t seen for decades. It created a new world of possibilities and
conversations. But her children weren’t so keen. Once upon time, Facebook was
their social media world. Now, people over 55 are the fastest growing users of
Facebook in Australia (SEO Sydney Blog 2009), and parents and grandparents
seemed to be dominating the space. So Penelope’s children and their friends,
like many others, responded to their parent’s online presence by changing their
privacy settings and defining their online boundaries.

These examples are but a few of the millions of intimate vignettes that describe
the ways in which mobile social media is being deployed. Across numerous
technical platforms, personal and cultural contexts, and through a wide vari-
ety of social media, people young and old are using social, locative and mobile
media to rehearse earlier forms of ritual and, at the same time, create new
forms of intimacy and different contexts for the expression of intimacy. While
locations like Seoul and Tokyo have long been centres of innovation in the
invention and popularisation of mobile media, the relationship between per-
sonal, social, locative and mobile media is quotidian and, for the most part,
tacit in its familiarity. In other locations like Australia or the US, convergence
in the form of smartphones is nascent. Mobile social media is a global phe-
nomenon, but also local at every point (Hjorth and Arnold 2013).
Having explored the convergence of social network sites and games in
the last chapter, this chapter looks at the way in which mobile media has
increasingly become the key portal for social and locative media as smart-
phones increasingly, and unevenly, are adopted around the world. Devices
such as the iPhone have become synonymous with this media evolution.
Through this growth, we have witnessed a shift from the device being analysed
as communication medium to being understood as a networked media tool

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in which social media, games and various forms of everyday creativity can
be found (Hjorth et al. 2012). In the short few decades in which mobile
phones have been readily available, this technology has changed from being
a mere extension of the landline to being a sophisticated and convergent
online mobile media portal (Goggin and Hjorth 2009). For many, mobile
media is the key device and context for online and social media, with loca-
tions like Japan having more than a decade of mainstream mobile internet.
In China, three-quarters of its 485 million online users (318 million) access
the internet via mobile media (CNNIC 2011). In locations like Singapore
and Melbourne (Australia), the rapid adoption of smartphones has seen a
rise in cross-generational social media usage – much to the disgust of some
younger users who fear their parents won’t understand much of the tacit
etiquette.
Over the few decades of mobile phone use, the analysis of mobile com-
munication has rapidly expanded to encompass many disciplinary and inter-
disciplinary approaches such as sociology, anthropology, internet studies,
games studies and new media studies. While not everyone has a computer,
the ubiquity of mobile phones in places like China and India have provided
many with access to a version of the online. But while mobile media is a
global phenomenon, it is also reflective of the local at every level. The growth
in mobile media has served to amplify the various complex dimensions of
locality, rather than eroding the importance of place. This interdisciplinary
context has afforded the study of mobile communication a rich history of
mixed methods and conceptual paradigms. But it also means that studying
mobile communication has become the battleground for some of the various
disciplines’ boundaries.
All over the globe, location-based services such as the global positioning
system (GPS), geotagging and Google Maps have become a pervasive part of
everyday life through platforms and devices such as smartphones, Android
devices, tablets and portable gaming devices. Moving beyond printed maps,
mobile digital devices now frame and mediate our ability to traverse, expe-
rience, share and conceptualise place. This shift appears to have a range of
consequences for our relationships to place, intimacy, privacy, time and pres-
ence. Locative media shapes, and is shaped by, a variety of factors such as
culture, age and temporal differences.
In this chapter we reflect upon the journey of the mobile phone as it has
unevenly developed into social, locative and mobile media. In particular we
look at the development of LBSs, often integrated with social media, that
have converged with mobile technologies in the smartphone. Acknowledging
the increasing use of these converged devices, we look at how mobility has
become about more than the ability to take your social media with you.

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 Social, locative and mobile media   123

Specifically, there are two results of media mobility: the expansion of car-
tographies enabled by LBS devices and mobile apps, and the development
of location-based social apps that blend social relationships with geography.
These changes reflect broader shifts in the relationships between identity,
place and community and raise important issues about privacy, but also how
we narrate and attach meaning to place. In the next section we reflect upon
the nature of the convergence of mobile, social and locative media. This is then
followed by a discussion of the changing role that camera phones play in
our understandings and visualisations of place, especially as they become
entangled in locative media practices.

MOBILE, SOCIAL AND LOCATIVE

Over a short few decades, the mobile phone has expanded from being little
more than an extension of the landline into this century’s version of the Swiss
Army knife (Boyd, J. 2005). In order to encompass this transition from a mere
communication tool to a multimedia device, the rubric of ‘mobile media’ has
been deployed (Goggin and Hjorth 2009). Currently the hottest must-have
consumer device is the smartphone, a general term used to describe mobile
devices that can access the internet and support a range of applications (apps)
that can be downloaded and installed by the device’s user. Smartphones also
boast a range of ways of sensing their environment, from GPS to digital
compasses and tilt-sensitive accelerometers. Smartphones have brought a
new dimension to social media as their ‘always on’ internet connectivity,
combined with their support for a wide range of applications, means that
people can now engage with social media anywhere, anytime.
The ‘always on’ nature of mobile media is amplified in the case of smart-
phones. These devices can be viewed as a kind of identity caravan, in that
they mobilise, tether and contain the user’s inner world and their sense of
home (Hjorth 2012). Smartphones work as both a portal for new media and
as a remediation of older media practices, such as television via YouTube.
The concept of remediation was first used by Bolter and Grusin (1999) to
describe the dynamic and interdependent relationship between new and old
technologies. Far from old media being superseded by new technologies, a
cyclic relationship ensues. An example can be found in analogue and digital
photography whereby rather than the digital erasing the importance of the
analogue, much of the digital is in fact haunted by the analogue. Digital
software programs such as Final Cut and Photoshop reference the analogue
in the ways in which their editing techniques are named and structured.
Camera-phone apps such as Hipstamatic increasingly deploy the analogue
look for a retro aesthetic. Mobile media is a great example of remediated

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media; it houses many media and apps that are a hybrid of new and old media.
Along with housing remediation, mobile media also operates as a vehicle for
‘presence bleed’ – a term Gregg uses to describe the bleeding of one’s personal
presence across platforms, contexts and media (2011). We have previously
examined this term in Chapter 6 as a part of our discussion of the ‘always
on’ nature of social media and casual games.
Along with the changes in the technology have come changes in the profile
of the people who use the technology. Associations of the mobile phone with
ostentatious wealth that accompanied the first generation of mobile phones
in the Anglophonic world are now almost completely forgotten as cheap
phones are plentiful and coverage is wide, even on a global scale. While
for many of the world’s poor countries, mobile phones are 2G (second gen-
eration, that is, non-internet), according to the International Telecom-
munication Union (ITU) (ITU 2011), this is rapidly changing as markets for
pirated smartphones have seen phenomenal growth. Some statistics suggest
that as of March 2012 China’s mobile phone subscriptions topped 1 billion
(CNNIC 2012).
The increasing use of mobile technologies worldwide is also seeing the
growth in the use of mobile internet, which is enabled in part through
the increased accessibility of smartphones. With prices being driven down
by demand and competition in some of the most populous countries in the
world, smartphones are becoming increasingly accessible even in develop-
ing countries. Cheap smartphones and shanzhai (imitations of brand-name
phones like Apple’s iPhone) are now readily available, and prices keep falling
as companies develop low-cost phones for the burgeoning markets of China
and India.
Until recently in many countries – especially the Anglophonic world –
the evolution of the mobile phone has appeared in the form of a transition
from a mobile communication technology to a mobile multimedia technol-
ogy. But, as social media becomes mobile, it is also beginning to converge
with other technologies, such as LBSs, that continue to redefine the uses of
the mobile device. LBSs utilise various features in smartphones (including
GPS, and various methods of triangulating position based on proximity
to cell-phone towers and wireless networks) in order to determine the
location of the user in geographic space. LBSs in current smartphones allow
the phone to determine its position to an accuracy of within 100 metres,
usually much less.
Although LBSs have been available in mobile devices since the early
1990s, it is only fairly recently that LBSs have become a feature of smartphones,
and so have started to become available to people who would not otherwise
have gone out to purchase a separate device such as a GPS unit. While

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locative media, like the Internet, has its history in the military, GPS was
quickly adapted for commercial use. However, locative-based mobile games
were developed from an experimental and creative context (de Souza e Silva
and Hjorth 2009) that has later taken the form of commercial games such as
Foursquare.
The transition of LBSs can be thought of in terms of generations. The first
generation of LBSs were available through custom devices which provided
a single-use device, often seen in countries such as the US and Australia only
in higher-end motor vehicles. The use of first-generation LBSs saw some
innovative experiments with play, but was constrained largely to experi-
mental uses by early adopters. Second-generation LBSs have emerged as
GPS and GPS-like services that are embedded in consumer devices as just
one of many features on those devices. With the more general accessibility
of LBSs, the experimental uses of the technology have been commodified
and are moving beyond gaming and into other applications. The most
immediate impact of these second-generation LBSs for users of smartphones
is through services like Google Maps, where an interactive map can pinpoint
a user’s location and calculate the fastest route to almost any destination.
Although the navigational capabilities this affords are important, the feature
only represents a fraction of the implications of LBSs, particularly when
they converge with networked media. It should also be noted that while this
convergence of mobile, locative and social media is quite new in some coun-
tries (particularly in the Anglophonic world), in other countries, like Japan,
the mobile phone (keitai) has been associated with social and locative media
for over a decade (Hjorth 2003; Ito 2005). Now, with the increasingly wide-
spread use of smartphones and the convergence of mobile, social and locative
technologies in these devices, the implications of convergence are being seen
in many places.
For obvious reasons, place has always played an important role in mobile
media (Ito 2002; Hjorth 2005), but the ramifications of these changes go
beyond the immediate promise of being able to access the internet and
social media anywhere, anytime, or of mapping one’s position in the world
(as useful as that may be). Mobile media highlights the various, often-tacit
notions of place as something that is lived and imagined, psychological and
geographic (Hjorth 2012). As mobile media converges with social and loca-
tive technologies, new forms and practices are emerging that are especially
focused on developing social connections. These technologies can be seen as
increasingly overlaying space with digital information in order to create new
places that are mediated in part by the technology itself. These new places are
not entirely online, since they are fundamentally rooted in geographic space,
but neither are they entirely offline – they sit somewhere in between.

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These ‘hybrid’ spaces, as Adriana de Souza e Silva calls them, create

social situations in which borders between remote and contiguous contexts
no longer can be clearly defined (Gordon and de Souza e Silva 2011: 86).
Instead of us understanding our world in terms like online and offline or
virtual and physical, we are increasingly engaging with a reality in which
the physical and virtual are merged to some degree. These spaces are not
just mediated in this way, but can also become localised; that is, a hybrid
reality places us and our social connections at the centre of not just our
social world (as we discussed in Chapter 3), but also at the centre of our
understanding of the hybrid physical world. Buildings, parks, pubs and
churches become enhanced with meanings that are associated with them
by us and our friends.
As these hybrid realities emerge, new cartographies also emerge. Here we
use the term ‘cartography’ to refer to the practice of making maps, though
not necessarily visual ones. Maps function as representations of the world,
allowing us to navigate to what we are looking for by helping us to orientate
ourselves in our environment. They are abstractions of the real world, as they
only show the things that the map-maker feels are important. Nautical maps
indicate water depths, while land maps indicate the location and size of roads.
Maps link space with place, where place is the concept of a space that has
meaning ascribed to it. As noted earlier, although place has always mattered
to mobile media, this is magnified in the case of locative media. Later in this
chapter, we will reflect upon how locative media and camera-phone practices
are shaping, and being shaped by, our conceptions of place and locality. But
first, let us try to untangle one of the most shifting notions being redefined
by social, locative and mobile media: place.

RETHINKING PLACE:
IMAGES OF GEOSOCIAL MAPS
The contestation of the term ‘place’ is further magnified through mobile media.
Increasingly, urban spaces are being mediated by technologies. Mobile media
not only mediates intimate relations; it also mediate how we experience
and think about spaces and places. Place is not only a space with geographic
contours, it is a space that operates across many levels: imagined and lived,
social and physical. While nineteenth-century narrations of the urban were
symbolised by the visual wanderer of the flâneur, the twenty-first-century
wanderer of the informational city has been rendered into what Robert Luke
calls the ‘phoneur’ (2006). The flâneur was both a voyeur and part of the urban
spectacle of the growing bourgeoisie: the phoneur sees the city transformed

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 Social, locative and mobile media   127

into an informational circuit in which the person is just a mere node with
little agency.
The impact of networked and locational media on place cannot be under-
estimated (Farman 2011). Digital, mobile maps change how we navigate
and conceptualise place. Consider how the act of looking up a journey
via printed paper road maps is a distinctively different experience and
conceptualisation of space when compared to the automated and digitally
co-present experience of LBSs. LBS games like Foursquare and Jiepang high-
light how place cannot be mapped just as a geographic or physical location,
but also reflects cultural, emotional and psychological dimensions.
Through the convergence of social, locative and mobile media we are seeing
the contested notion of place becoming even more complicated. Michel de
Certeau famously defined place as a ‘“proper” and distinct location’, whereas
‘space is a practised place’ (1984: 117). This is a little confusing, because it is
counter to the common-sensical way in which most people use these two
words, in which space is merely a geographical location and place is a space
invested with emotional meaning. In this chapter we, like many other cultural
critics, will use the terms ‘space’ and ‘place’ in their colloquial sense. For exam-
ple, Tim Cresswell defines place as ‘a meaningful site that combines location,
locale, and sense of place’ (2009: 1), and Doreen Massey sees places as entangle-
ments and combinations of the ‘stories-so-far’ (2005: 130).
While maps give us one sense of space, they are incomplete in conveying the
complex and often competing cartographies of place. As Massey notes:

One way of seeing ‘places’ is as on the surface of maps … But to escape from
an imagination of space as surface is to abandon also that view of place. If
space is rather a simultaneity of stories-so-far, then places are collections of
those stories, articulations within the wider power-geometries of space. Their
character will be a product of these intersections within that wider setting, and
of what is made of them … And, too, of the non-meetings-up, the disconnections
and the relations not established, the exclusions. All this contributes to the
specificity of place. (2005: 130)

In Wilken and Goggin’s timely Mobile Technology and Place (2012), the
various authors reflect upon the conceptual currents and controversies facing
notions of place in the face of increasingly ubiquitous mobile and location-
aware devices. With the ‘spatial turn’ in media studies (Falkheimer and Jansson
2006), entanglements between space, mobility and sociality have, for good
reason, been further complicated. For Wilken and Goggin:

place is considered fundamental to the construction of our life histories and

what it means to be human, while mobiles now form an intrinsic part of the

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daily lives and habits of billions of people worldwide – and for the manifold
ways that they mutually inform and shape each other. Place is a notion that is
of enduring relevance – one worth mobilising – if we are to comprehend fully
how we think about and experience who we are, where we are, and the ways
we interact and relate with one another. In other words, place is considered a
vital notion in that it represents a ‘weaving together’ of social and human-
environment interaction in ways that situate place as central to how embodied,
technologically mediated mobile social practice is understood. (2012: 18)

Locative social media such as Foursquare, SeeOn (Korea) and Jiepang

(China) are fusing social media and LBSs through the mobile device, and
often LBSs are being merged with other mobile device features – most notably
camera phones. This media practice adds a great deal of complexity to the
cartographies that are being constructed and shared by users. Personalised
social maps are being overlaid on the geography, with personal recommen-
dations about places to eat, or to stay away from, and even the location of
friends mapped out through the mobile device, creating new ways in which
place and co-presence is visualised, shared and memorialised (Hjorth et al.
2012). Ingrid Richardson (2011) argues that, through LBSs, mobile devices
are realigning our experience of ‘being online’ by allowing us to recon-
ceptualise earlier ideas which cast online and offline as binary opposites.
This, in turn, opens up complex and dynamic ways of thinking about – and
being – present.
In LBSs we see an overlaying of place with the social and personal whereby
the electronic is superimposed onto the geographic in new ways. In particular,
by sharing an image and comment about a place through LBSs, users can cre-
ate different ways to experience and record journeys and, in turn, impact upon
how place is memorialised. Although the area of locative media has attracted
much critical and rigorous attention of late as a convergence between urban,
gaming and mobile media studies (Gordon and de Souza e Silva 2011; de
Souza e Silva and Frith 2012; Farman 2011), there are some gaps. Specifi-
cally, there is a need for case studies over temporal, cultural and generational
contexts if we are to fully understand the impact of LBSs on relationships
to people, place and privacy.
There are some key theorists who have really helped to forge this second
generation of locative media studies as it moves increasingly into the main-
stream through devices like smartphones. For de Souza e Silva and Daniel
Sutko, net locality can be understood as the process whereby location-
aware technologies create a perpetual, evolving dynamic between informa-
tion as place and place as information (2009). While urban spaces have
always been mediated by technologies, according to Gordon and de Souza
e Silva net localities ‘produce unique types of networked interactions and,

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 Social, locative and mobile media   129

by extension, new contexts for social cohesion’ and so ‘co-presence is not

mutually opposed to networked interaction – and as emerging practices of
technology develop, drawing the line in the sand becomes increasingly dif-
ficult’ (2011: 91).
Through mobile media, the relationship between being online and being
offline has shifted, creating new types of engagement and co-presence. Lines
that mark out and differentiate the online and the offline, virtual and actual,
here and there, are shifting and fading as these zones overlap, entangle and
bleed into one another. It is in this context that Richardson and Wilken call
for a post-phenomenological reading of body–technology relations in
order to understand three key mobile media modalities: located presence,
co-presence and telepresence (2012: 185). As both a disciplinary field and
a movement in philosophy, phenomenology studies the structures of expe-
rience and consciousness from a first-person view. Key phenomenologists
include Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and
Jean-Paul Sartre. Don Ihde has been categorised as a post-phenomenologist
with his adapted version of phenomenology that encompassed the changes
brought by technologies. For Richardson and Wilken, ‘mobile media use
occurs across a spectrum of “placing” and “presencing’’ ’ (2012: 185). They
continue:

Mobile devices clearly antagonize any notion of a disembodied telepresence

that is seemingly endemic to digital screen media, as we are frequently
on-the-move, on-the-street and purposefully situated in local spaces and places
when engaged in mobile phone use and mobile gameplay. (Richardson and
Wilken 2012: 184)

These authors argue that the ‘meshing of located place and networked space’
creates crucial questions, especially around whether mobile media ‘collapse
the space-place distinction, or enable “space” and “place” to be simultaneously
present’ (2012: 185). They argue that mobile media devices create a different
dynamic around perpetually interrupted and distracted body–screen–place
relations (2012: 194) in which ‘placing’ and ‘presencing’ are entangled.
Building on Gordon and de Souza e Silva, Richardson and Wilken argue
that mobile media practices involve a series of overlapping ‘presences’
(telepresence, co-presence, located presence and net-local presences) in every-
day spaces (2012: 195).
These ‘presences’ and their intimate, social and networked affects construct
a rich fabric of emotional, social, technological, electronic and geographic
overlays that inform, and are formed by, existing social and cultural prac-
tices. To understand the implications of these presences on notions of place
and intimacy, locative media needs to be studied as part of everyday social

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and mobile media practices. Case studies of educational, creative and experi-
mental projects by researchers such as Gordon, de Souza e Silva and Christian
Licoppe (2004; Licoppe and Inada 2006) are useful, but are limited because
they are not studies of locative media in the context of the everyday. In par-
ticular, what has been missing from the conversation has been the role of
camera phones in the use and adaptation of locative media in everyday contexts.
As this chapter’s opening vignettes described, with locative media there is more
impetus for users to take and share camera-phone images as a place-making
exercise that interweaves the social with the geographic. In the next section
we consider the changing role of the camera phone as part of locative, social
and mobile media networks.

THE PLACE OF IMAGES: LOCATIVE, SOCIAL

MEDIA CAMERA-PHONE PRACTICES
While camera-phone genres such as self-portraiture have blossomed on a
global scale, vernacular visualities that reflect a localised notion of place,
sociality and identity-making practices (Hjorth 2007; Lee 2009) are also
flourishing. Smartphone apps like Hipstamatic and Instagram have made
taking and sharing photographs easier and more interesting. With LBSs like
Facebook Places, Foursquare and Jiepang, we see a further overlaying of place
with the social and personal, whereby the electronic is superimposed onto the
geographic in new ways. Specifically, by sharing an image and comment about a
place through LBSs, users can create different ways to experience and record
journeys and, in turn, create an impact upon how place is recorded, experi-
enced and thus remembered. This is especially the case with the overlaying of
ambient images within moving narratives of place as afforded by LBSs. An
example might be someone uploading a geotagged camera-phone image onto
Facebook Places whereby the information of place is recorded and shared in a
variety of ways. This practice, in turn, impacts upon their experience of place
as something that is mediated through networked media. While place and
intimacy have always been mediated by language, memories and gestures, it
is the way in which they are being mediated that is transforming how we
think about and practice place.
The rapid uptake of smartphones has enabled new forms of distribution
and has provided an overabundance of apps, filters and lenses to help users
create ‘unique’ and artistic camera-phone images. Although the iPhone has
been quick to capitalise on this phenomenon through applications such
as Hipstamatic, other operating systems like Android have also had their
share of this expanding market. So too social media such as microblogs and

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 Social, locative and mobile media   131

LBSs have acknowledged the growing power of camera-phone photogra-

phy, not only by affording easy uploading and sharing of the vernacular
(Burgess 2008), but also by providing filters and lenses in order to further
enhance the ‘professional’ and ‘artistic’ dimensions of the photographic
experience (Mørk Petersen 2008). Consider, for example, how social media
applications for smartphones no longer ask you to go through multiple
steps to attach images to a post. Formerly, if you wanted to post an image,
you’d take the image using the phone’s camera application, which would
store the image in the camera’s library, which you would then access by
attaching the image to a post. Sometimes you would even need to upload
the image to an online image repository so it could be linked to the SNS.
Now, many social media apps provide a photo button integrated into the app
that allows you to take a picture and post it immediately, and social media
companies provide their own image-hosting servers that operate almost invis-
ibly to the user.

CAMERA PHONE IMAGES:

NETWORKED VERSUS EMPLACED
When visuality becomes part of a networked culture, its meanings, contexts
and content change. Camera phones, as an extension of the networked
nature of mobile media, are clearly defined by this dynamic. Although initial
studies into camera-phone visuality discussed it as part of networked
media (Ito and Okabe 2005; Rubinstein and Sluis 2008; Villi 2013), this sec-
ond generation of visuality – one that is characterised by locative media – is
about new types of place-making exercises. These exercises are emotional
and electronic, geographic and social – highlighting the complexity of ever-
evolving notions of place. In each location, camera-phone images are overlaid
onto specific places in a way that reflects existing social and cultural intimate
relations as well as being demonstrative of new types of what Pink calls
‘emplaced’ visuality, in which locative media emplace images within the
entanglement of movement (2011).
First-generation ‘networked’ visuality, when combined with LBSs in the
obvious case of the smartphone, becomes ‘emplaced’ visuality – that is, a
visuality mapped by a moving, geospatial sociality (Pink 2011). Incorporat-
ing movement in the theorisation of visuality is important given the ways
in which camera-phone practices give way to an accelerated taking, editing
and sharing of a ‘moment’ that is then contextualised through its place in
the moving geographic and social maps of LBSs and social media. Whereas
first-generation camera-phone sharing was defined by the network (Ito and

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Okabe 2006; Burgess 2007; Villi 2013), the second-generation, characterised

by LBSs like geotagging, becomes focused upon emplacement through
movement (Pink 2011). In other words, LBS camera-phone culture is about
reinforcing the process of the node rather than the product of the net-
work. Images increasingly become about creating a sense of movement
through an ambience of place. These images are ‘multisensorial’ (Pink
2009) in that they evoke more than the visual; they overlay information
(such as location) with emotion.
For Pink (2011), the combination of locative media with the photographic
image requires a new paradigm that engages with the multisensoriality of
images. It might at first seem odd to talk about images as being multisensorial,
because surely images are visual, and so draw upon only one sense: vision.
Pink draws on Tim Ingold’s (2008) critique of the anthropology of the senses
and of network theory as well in Doing Sensory Ethnography (Pink 2009),
and argues that by exploring the visual in terms of multisensoriality one can
re-prioritise the importance of movement and place.
For Pink, locative media provides new ways in which to frame images
with the ‘continuities of everyday movement, perceiving and meaning mak-
ing’ (2011: 4). By contrasting ‘photographs as mapped points in a network’
with ‘photographs being outcomes of and inspirations within continuous
lines that interweave their way through an environment – that is, in move-
ment and as part of a configuration of place’ (2011: 4–5), Pink argues that
we must start to conceive of images as produced and consumed in move-
ment. Here, we can think about how images are being transformed in the
light of various turns: emotional, mobility and sensory. Indeed, of all the
areas to be impacted and affected, camera phones – especially with their
haptic (touch) screen interface and engagement, along with their locative
media possibilities – can be seen as indicative of Pink’s (2011) call for a
multisensorial conceptualisation of images. As Pink notes, the particular way
in which text, image and GPS are overlaid create a multisensorial depiction
of a locality.
This shift can be viewed as the movement from a camera-phone visuality
that is networked to camera-phone images which are ‘emplaced’ (Pink 2011).
An image that is socially networked, tagged and GPS located is ‘emplaced’ in
a number of ways. First, it is emplaced as one of many images captured by a
particular member of our intimate or social public and is contextualised by
our relation to that person. Second, the co-presence of many images arranged
by time or place on the one site places each image in the context of others to
constitute a narrative, and thus another context. Third, the GPS coordinates
place the image in geographic space and invite the viewer to recall the place

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 Social, locative and mobile media   133

in question as well as view the image captured in the place in question, thus
overlaying another context. Finally, the social distribution of the images cre-
ates a social public for those images, thus overlaying another context, and the
image tags entered by the public overlay yet another context.

Devices and images

For Chesher (2012), the rise of smartphones like the Samsung Galaxy and the
iPhone – with their attendant software applications like Instagram, Google
Goggles and Hipstamatic – have created new ways in which to think about
camera-phone practices and their engagement with both image and informa-
tion. For Chesher, the iPhone universe of reference disrupts the genealogy of
mass amateur photography. Chesher argues that up until camera phones, the
Kodak moment dominated. This was then replaced by the Nokia moment,
and then further colonised by the iPhone through the plethora of camera-
phone apps available. Applications like Instagram which allow users to take,
edit and share photos partake in what could be called a second generation of
camera-phone and photo-sharing social media. With sites that allow the
display of ‘vernacular creativity’ (Burgess 2008), Flickr being the precursor,
Instagram heralds a new generation of visuality in which the cult of the ama-
teur is further commercialised. Launched in October 2010, Instagram quickly
grew to boasting over 150 million uploaded images. The virtual and viral
nature of Instagram was illustrated by a graphic design firm in Italy who
recently built a physical digital camera prototype that looks like the Instagram
icon, called the Socialmatic. With these new applications, often working in
collaboration with social and locative media, camera-phone images have
been given new contexts.
For Daniel Palmer (2012), iPhone photography is distinctive in three
ways. First, it creates an experience between touch and the image in what
Palmer calls an ‘embodied visual intimacy’ (2012: 88). While ‘touch has long
been an important, but neglected, dimension in the history of photography …
the iPhone, held in the palm of the hand, reintroduces a visual intimacy to
screen culture that is missing from the larger monitor screen’ (2012: 88).
Second, the proliferation of photo apps for the iPhone has meant that there are
countless ways for taking, editing and sharing photos. No longer do camera-
phone images have to look like the poorer cousin to the professional
camera. Third, and most important to our discussion here, is the role of
GPS capability with the iPhone automatically ‘tagging photographs with
their location, allowing images to be browsed and arranged geographi-
cally’ (2012: 88).

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 134  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

As Palmer identifies, the placing of photos through tagging creates a differ-

ent way of archiving and contextualising the image. With the growth in LBSs
like Foursquare, Jiepang (China) and flags (South Korea) that allow users
to ‘check in’ and upload pictures, networked visuality and the attendant
empowerment/control binary is further complicated. For some, LBSs provide
new forms of übersurveillance (Michael and Michael 2010) and stalking
techniques (Gazzard 2011). For others, they highlight how the local continues
to play a pivotal role in informing notions like privacy and sociality. LBSs
allow already ‘friendly’ surveillance, such as that present in parent/child rela-
tionships, to flourish in new ways. In these new geospatial visualities, the
motivations and types of genres are changing to reflect the ways in which
locative media impact upon how localities are shared and experienced. Local-
ity, gender and generation are all informing these visualities. In particular, the
pivotal role camera phones have played in women’s and girl’s cultures cannot
be ignored (Lee 2005; Hjorth 2007).

CONCLUSION
We began this chapter with an overview of the development of mobile
technology, noting the development of LBSs and their integration into
mobile media. An important point we made was that smartphones are emerg-
ing as converged technologies that bring together other technologies like
wireless internet, LBSs, camera phones and so on. Mobile devices do not
just extend the number of places that you can use social media; they bring
social media to those places and, through the LBS, contribute to the con-
struction of new cartographies of space. In other words, they provide us
with new ways of mapping meaning to space and creating new places.
The growth of locative media is having significant impact upon cul-
tural practice, place-making and relationships in ways that are shifting,
ongoing and emergent (Cincotta et al. 2011; Farman 2011; Gordon and
de Souza e Silva 2011; de Souza e Silva and Frith 2012). This phenom­
enon has both positive and negative impacts upon localised notions of
privacy and surveillance across both micro and macro, and individual and
collective, levels (Michael and Michael 2010; Gazzard 2011). While much
analysis has been conducted into experimental forms of locative media/
art (de Souza e Silva and Sutko 2009; de Souza e Silva and Hjorth 2009),
the increased ubiquity of locative media through devices such as the smart-
phone will undoubtedly transform the way in which place and mobility
are articulated.

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 Social, locative and mobile media   135

Although second-generation LBS games like Foursquare and Jiepang are

in their infancy, they represent an area of growing diversity and complexity
within mobile media and communication. In particular, LBSs are changing
how we visualise intimate cartographies through shifting camera-phone
practices. Whereas first-generation camera-phone practices noted gendered
differences (Lee 2005; Hjorth 2007), through LBSs, these gendered differ-
ences in visualities take on new dimensions – particularly in terms of
potential ‘stalker’ elements (Gazzard 2011; Cincotta et al. 2011). The
mainstreaming of LBSs through smartphones is demonstrating the diverse
ways in which privacy is understood across cultural, social, temporal and
generational contexts. Future studies in locative media will need to reflect
upon these issues.

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 8 Conclusion

A ttempting to understand social media is a daunting task because the

questions and problems that social media provoke are a reflection on
some of the most fundamental questions we are grappling with in contempo-
rary societies. As a vehicle for popular culture, social media is a dynamic and
ever-evolving creature in which use-by dates perpetually loom in the face of
the new, novelty practice. Consider Microsoft’s Hotmail. Once the key email
site, its use now evokes embarrassment and shame with comments like
‘You’re not still using Hotmail?’ To use an old social network site (SNS)
like MySpace evokes a reference to the user being not just old-fashioned
but also obsolete. What technologies we use reflect our taste-cultures. They
reflect localities as competing technological, socio-cultural, economic and
linguistic spaces. Thus to understand social media, it is not enough to simply
log in to Facebook and start participating; we have to look more deeply at the
economic, political and social dimensions of the changes that seem to be asso-
ciated with social media.
With any technology, especially one that seems to be so ubiquitous, it
is tempting to fall into a technologically deterministic mindset. In other
words, it is easy to see social media as a technology that is changing society.
However, the relationship between technology and society is always complex,
and social media is particularly so because it crosses through some of the
most fundamental parts of our societies. Technology use is about cultural
practice and, in this way, social media operates as a barometer of the politics
of everyday life.
Rather than seeing social media as a radical technology that is changing
society, in this book we have looked at social media from a number of different
angles to examine the ways that social media is both changing society as well
as responding to and reflecting changes in the society. This is a dialectic – a
backwards-and-forwards discussion for the purposes of investigation – that
ultimately determines what social media is and what it is becoming.
As we saw in Chapter 2, one of the fundamental issues is the tension
between the empowerment offered by social media and the control and

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 Conclusion  137

commercialisation that is seemingly interconnected. This tension is played

out on numerous levels, and throughout the book we have returned to
issues of empowerment and control as a recurring theme. In Chapter 3, for
example, we looked at how the tensions between empowerment and control
played out in SNSs. SNSs are empowering because they provide a platform
that people can use to connect with each other, with numerous significant
results. We looked at some of these results in Chapter 4 where we examined
the practical implications of produsage as social media empowers users
by making it possible for everyone to be both consumer and producer. The
implications of this for journalism and social activism are only beginning to
be felt. We saw similar questions raised in art practice and creative institu-
tions in Chapter 5.
Our goal here has been to avoid reducing the empowerment/control
dynamic to a binary. Polar opposites are useful for establishing the boundaries
of a discussion, but in reality, nothing is ever entirely empowering, nor is
it entirely controlling. A more productive discussion emerges when we under-
stand that empowerment and control are tendencies in social media that raise
questions which deserve careful consideration and exploration.
Another theme that can be represented as a binary is the relationship
between offline and online modes of presence and co-presence. Here, we
can go back to the early internet-studies literature and see the way that
scholarship shifted from utopian or dystopian claims about ‘cyberspace’ to
incorporate a more balanced understanding that articulates online experi-
ence with offline experience. When we come to examine the way people
actually use social media, we find that studies and theorists again and again
emphasise the importance of the offline in the online. In Chapter 7, for example,
we looked at how locative media is converging with social and mobile
media in ways that are shaping how we experience and conceptualise place.
We also reflected upon the role camera phones play through geotagging and
how this sharing of co-present visual ambience creates new ways for thinking
about place and intimacy.
We have tried to maintain a global, or at least non-Anglophonic, perspec-
tive throughout the book. To understand social media increasingly implies
understanding a technology that moves beyond the borders of the nation-
state as it connects people across geographical boundaries, and in so doing
structures our societies so that they resemble networks. As we saw in
Chapter 3, networks have become an influential metaphor for understanding
social structures in modern post-industrial societies. This can be a little con-
fusing at first, because contemporary societies are networked in at least two ways:
technologically and socially. Technologically, we are all aware that computers,
coupled with electronic networks (most importantly, the internet) are a defining

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 138  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

feature of modern societies, just as the steam engine and the factory were the
defining features of industrial societies. However, when theorists like Manuel
Castells (1996) declare that we live in a networked society, there is another
subtle element being introduced. Here Castells is using the idea of the
networked society as a metaphor for how the structures in society are being
organised in a way that is similar to a computer network. For others, the
analogy of the network seems to neglect the importance of the journey and
movement within these spaces as part of broader entanglements of place
(Pink 2011).
In Chapter 3 we examined some of the practical applications of this. Barry
Wellman’s notion of the networked individual represents a person who is
able to control their social environment better because of their networked
connections. People like boyd (2008, 2011) have argued that such net-
worked-media forms as the SNS provide a place in which people can
come together to form networked publics – publics that are mediated by the
technology. To summarise boyd’s argument as presented in Chapter 3, this
mediation of the network plays an important role in defining what is different
about these ‘networked’ publics. Networks extend the reach of publics
geographically and temporally; for example, think of a special-interest
internet forum. Members are from all over the world and while some might
constantly monitor the forums, many log in just once a week. As boyd
observes, ‘as social networking sites and other genres of social media
become increasingly widespread, the distinctions between networked pub-
lics and publics will become increasingly blurry’ (2011: 55). In these
dynamics, which some define as an intimate turn, the boundaries between
social media and everyday life further erode.
While the networked qualities of networked publics are important, there
is some evidence to suggest that something else is going on. As we saw in
Chapter 3, studies in the US have found that people’s online social networks
often consisted of people who they knew well and who lived within a rela-
tively small distance. Then, in Chapter 6, we looked at the way youth in
China were using SNS games to stay in touch with their family as they moved
away from home for work or study.
This brings us to a third central theme of the book: intimacy. Through
their work looking at the uses of mobile and social technologies in the Asia-
Pacific region, Hjorth and Arnold (2013) conclude that intimacy plays a very
important role in social networking. They suggest the notion of ‘intimate
publics’ to emphasise the role that intimacy plays in the construction of
online publics. They are not arguing that networks do not also structure
publics, but that intimacy is a primary structural factor. Intimacy here is
not only romantic or familial intimacy, but also includes other kinds of

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 Conclusion  139

intimacy, like the connection that two people have by virtue of the fact they
went to the same school or come from the same country. As we have noted
previously, as intimacy becomes increasingly public (Berlant 1998), we see
various forms of ‘presence bleed’ (Gregg 2011) across publics, networks,
SNSs, platforms and media. So too, the ways in which cultures are imagined
and experienced rely on particular forms of cultural intimacies.
This movement of intimacy into the context of the social returns us to
questions about empowerment and control. Instead, we can reframe the
empowerment/control dialectic in terms of a shift in social dynamics in
which displays of intimacy begin to play an increasingly important role in
the way we socialise and interact with the media. For example, even jour-
nalism has been affected by the intimacy turn through utilising an intimate
mode of address online. As Goggin has pointed out, much of Twitter’s eti-
quette borrows from more intimate media like SMSs (Goggin 2011). This
movement of intimacy into the public is not simply a phenomenon of social
media, it is a social phenomenon that is shaping, and being shaped by, con-
temporary media.
In the final analysis, then, we would like to think that Understanding Social
Media is not about understanding the specific technologies and politics that
are only associated with this month’s stock market favourites. Far more
importantly, Understanding Social Media is about comprehending the way in
which this new medium is both affecting and reflecting social developments
more broadly, and as a result of understanding social media, we will come
to develop a better understanding of the world in which we live.

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 Glossary

API (application program[mable] interface) – a set of software tools that

can be used by a computer programmer to access a complex web service or
hardware component.

App – an application that is accessed by users over a network, or which

is downloaded to a mobile device. The term is becoming complicated as
the mobile ‘app store’ method of application delivery is extended to the
desktop.

Big Data – the proliferation of data in current society.

Big Media – large companies that treat the news as a commodity, where
costs of making news are pushed down while profits are maximised; this is
rarely aligned with good journalism.

Casual games – social media games that allow players to engage with the
games for minutes at a time, as opposed to the more demanding MMOGs.

Citizen journalists – amateurs offering an alternative to the mainstream

media, operating mainly through their own blogs.

Clicktivism – the pollution of activism with the logic of consumerism.

Computational turn – a term that points to the way that computer technology
appears to be changing processes and structures of existing organisations.
For example, the computational turn in journalism relates to the way that
news research and publication has been altered by the emergence of the
networked computer and the internet.

Folksonomy – a portmanteau of ‘folk’ and ‘taxonomy’, meaning a classifi-

cation system generated by the general public.

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 Glossary  141

Gamification – making something more game-like by introducing game

development principles into its design. An example might be educational
software that aims to engage students by presenting educational material in
the form of a game.

Geotagging – using an LBS (see below) to associate geographic location

with some other kinds of data such as a photograph or text message.

GPS (global positioning system) – technologies that calculate the position of

a ground-based device through satellite communication. Modern GPSs pro-
vide accuracy to within about 3 to 15 metres and are becoming a regular
component in modern smartphones.

HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) – the technical term given to the

method for transferring web pages across the internet. Other internet services
(like email) use different protocols.

ICT (information and communication technology) – a catch-all term that

covers computer and network technology. The more pervasive ICT becomes,
the less useful this term becomes.

IM (instant messaging) – a computer-based chat system that allows one or

more people to ‘talk’ by typing words into the system. When the typed text
is sent, the person or people connected to the chat session will see the other
person’s words instantly. This is similar to email in that it is text-based, but
its speed allows for more rapid conversations to take place.

Intimacy – in common usage, this refers to very close relationships between

people, typically lovers or family members. However, intimacies also exist
when referring to social relations at larger scales. For example, there are
intimacies between people who belong to the same country or culture (a
large- or macro-scale social group).

ISP (internet service provider) – a company that provides a person or organ-

isation with internet access, almost always in return for a fee.

Killer app – a software application that is so successful that it sells the plat-
form that it runs on.

LBS (location based service) – a collection of technologies that allow a

device to map its position. GPS is one LBS technology, but there are others,

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 142  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

such as digital compasses, those that calculate a position by triangulating

the signal strengths of known wireless internet or mobile signal towers,
and those that use accelerometers in order to determine the orientation of
a device with respect to the ground. Many LBSs use a combination of these
technologies.

Local, the – a term that describes things that are close to an individual, not
just physically (the local shops) but also culturally and socially (close friends,
for example, may not be physically close).

Macro – cultural level.

Media – any technology that stands in between and facilitates communication

between two or more people.

Meso – social level.

Micro – individual level.

MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) – games that uses computer

network technology (typically the internet) to allow many players to
occupy a virtual game space at the same time such that they can interact
with each other.

Mobile publics – associations between people (publics) that are made possible
owing to or through the use of mobile technologies.

MSN (the Microsoft Network) – an early attempt by the software company

Microsoft to create a proprietary internet-like online service.

MUDs (multi-user dungeons/domains) – like MMOGs (see above), but

were text-based and descriptive instead of graphical.

Networked publics – public groupings that are structured by the logic and
reality of computer networks.

OCR (optical character recognition) – a method for translating an image of

printed text into letters and numbers that can be edited and searched on a
computer.

Online activism – the use of internet or mobile (online) technologies to

enhance, support and/or promote social activism around a topic or event.

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 Glossary  143

Platform – a service or software application that supports other software or

activities. For example, an SNS like Facebook is both a platform for social
interaction and a platform for software apps such as Facebook games.

Produser – a user who produces (rather than just consuming) internet con-
tent. The term emphasises the highly interactive nature of much social
media use, wherein the user often contributes their own creative products
to websites. Produsage includes activities such as uploading videos and
photos to web services like Flickr and building and maintaining blogs.

Remediation – a term used by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin (1999)
to describe the way that new media tends to call upon the conventions of
earlier forms of media. So, for example, photography remediates perspec-
tive painting, and YouTube remediates television.

Sentiment analysis – a technique whereby the computer attempts to deter-

mine the affective meaning of pieces of text.

Slacktivism – activism that is lazy, half-hearted and generally ‘slack’.

Smart mobs – a large group of people who use mobile technologies as a way
of connecting with each other, thus allowing the group to act with a kind
of collective intelligence.

SMS (short messaging system) – the technical term for mobile phone
texting; that is, sending short text messages from one mobile phone handset
to another.

SNS (social network site) – websites that support or extend social networks.
According to danah boyd, the basic requirements of an SNS are: 1) the
ability to create a profile; 2) a ‘friends’ list or similar; 3) exploration of friends
lists and perhaps others in the system (boyd and Ellison 2007). Typically,
most online relationships are with people who are already part of the user’s
offline social network.

Social capital – once defined by Pierre Bourdieu (1984 [1979]) as social

‘knowledge’, the term has taken on a variety of definitions to reflect changing
social relationships/connections and the fabric of community.

Social, the – a general term used to describe the social world that constantly
surrounds us and in which we live. The term reminds us that although we

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 144  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

live in a physical world of things, we also live in a social world, which has
a very large influence on how we act and behave.

TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) – the technical

method that is used by computers to share information across the internet.

Ubiquitous computing – the idea that a computer can be accessed any-

where, anytime. The term has gained currency as computer technologies
have become smaller and cheaper to the point where many people now
carry around networked computers in their pockets in the form of a mobile
telephone. Ubiquitous computing can also refer to the use of computers in
objects like appliances and buildings.

UCC (user created content) – content that is created by non-professional

people who would otherwise be considered consumers. Amateur photos,
fan fiction and homemade video are all examples of user created content.
In this book we prefer to use the term ‘UCC’ when we are specifically refer-
ring to works intentionally created by users.

UGC (user generated content) – this is similar to UCC but covers a broader
range of user-produced material. In this book we define UGC as material
that is produced as a by-product of another activity, possibly without any
knowledge or intent on the part of the creator. An example of UGC could
be forum posts, in which the content of the website is text created by users,
and read by other users.

URL (uniform/universal resource locator) – this is a string of letters that

describes where something is on the internet. A web site location, written
like http://www.mysite.com is an example of a URL.

Vernacular creativity – this term was suggested by Jean Burgess (2007) in

order to describe everyday creativity. This kind of creativity is distinguished
from professional or artistic creativity because it is practised in non-work
contexts and is designed for local consumption. For example, arranging and
decorating a photo album is an act of vernacular creativity because it is in
no way commercial, and the intended audience is local – friends and family.
Vernacular creativity often has very situated meanings; in other words, the
significance and meaning of pictures in the photo album can best be appre-
ciated by close friends or family who share memories or knowledge of the
people and places in the photos.

Web portals – sites that aim to aggregate users around centralised content.

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 Index

active participant 83 camera phones 64, 97–8, 130–1, 137

Adorno, Theodore 78 see also smartphones
advertising 107 Candy Factory 88–9
aesthetics 81 cartography 5, 126
affective personalisation 48 Castells, Manuel 39, 40, 72
agora 71 casual games 100, 101, 104–6, 140
altruism 28 censorship 50, 71
Anderson, Ken 52, 72 China
Andrejevic, Mark 2, 24 internet art 89–92
Angry Birds 105 locative social media 128, 134
anti-globalisation movements 73 lurking 55, 56
APIs see application programmable mobile media 122
interfaces QQ 45
app 140 smartphones 124
application programmable interfaces (APIs) social games 5, 114–18
50, 140 Chun, Wendy 8, 26, 27
application protocols 9 citizen journalism 5, 55, 64–9, 75, 140
Arab Spring 23, 72 Clarke, Roger 12, 13
art institutions 81–3 click-activism 55
Art Project 84 clicktivism 75, 140
artists 86–92 co-presence 129, 137
Asheron’s Call 102 Coleman, James 42
attention 41 collaboration 93
audience 83, 92 collapsed contexts 41
Australia 75, 122 collection databases 85
authorship 93 commercialisation 11–21
avant-garde 82 The Commons 85–6
avatar 91 communication 35–6
community 42
ba ling hou 115–18 computational turn 53, 140
Barlow, John Perry 22 computer-mediated communication 35–6
Barthes, Roland 79, 83 content 12
Battelle, John 17 context 3, 52, 97
Beniger, James 24 context collapse 4
Berners-Lee, Tim 10, 20 control 2, 24–9, 137, 139
Big Data 52, 140 The Conversation 66
Big Media 67, 140 conversations 57, 60
blogs 19, 53, 66 conviviality 101
Bourdieu, Pierre 42, 82 copyright 3
Bourriaud, Nicolas 81 creative production 18–21
boyd, danah 2, 40, 52, 53 creativity 93
Burgess, Jean 5, 61, 78, 96 Cresswell, Tim 127

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crisis management 55, 56 Foursquare 120, 125, 128

critical theory 78 fragmentation 16
cross-cultural approaches 48 Frankfurt School 78
crowd sourcing 62–3, 75 freedom 26
cultural institutions 77, 81, 84–6 friends 34
cultural intimacy 44 Friendster 45
cultural production 5, 78–80
cultural studies 79 gamers 59, 110
culture 39, 78 games 5, 100–19
gamification 100 gamification 141
participatory 2, 59 gaps 109
Cunningham, Ward 63 generation Y 116
cute cats 19 geosocial cartography 98
cyberspace 23, 102, 137 geotagging 122, 132, 137, 141
Cyworld 45, 47 GetUp 75
Gillespie, Tartleton 27
data analysis techniques 53 Gillmor, Dan 5, 67, 68
data-mining 52 Gilmore, John 23, 71
data visualisation techniques 50 global positioning system (GPS) 122, 141
democratisation 22, 70–1 Goffman, Erving 4
demographics 48, 105, 110 Goggin, Gerard 64
dependency 24 Google 23, 28
deviantART 77, 80, 86, 92–5 Google+ 45
deviations 93 Google Maps 5, 122, 125
digital cameras 96 GPS see global positioning system
DiNucci, Darcy 16–17 Great Firewall of China 90
dotcoms 15 Gregg, Melissa 1
The Drum 66 guilds 110
Duchamp, Marcel 82–3
dynamics 79 Hagel, John 14, 18
Happy Farm 107, 113, 114–18
Electronic Arts 105, 107 hardcore players 104, 112
email 9 Herzfeld, Michael 44
emplacement 132 high culture 78
empowerment 2, 22, 137, 139 Hine, Christine 39
engagement 3, 104, 129 Hipstamatic 123, 130
ethnographic shift 38 horizontal integration 29
ethno-mining 53 Horkheimer, Max 78
etiquette 51 host 10
evidence-based policy 77 Hotmail 136
exceptionalism 102, 103 HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) 9, 141
exhibition curators 94 Huizinga, Johann 102
exoticisation 94 hybrid spaces 126
hyperlink 10
Facebook 3, 5, 27, 45, 60, 98, 108, 130 hypertext 9, 10, 141
Facebook Credits 108
Facebook Places 5, 98, 130 ICT (information and communication
fan communities 58 technology) 141
Farmville 1, 105, 110 identity 1, 94–5
flâneur 126 identity politics 94
Flash 106 IM (instant messaging) 141
Flickr 85, 96, 133 impression management 4
folksonomy 85, 140 in-game purchases 107

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 Index  159

information and communication technology Massey, Doreen 127

(ICT) 141 massively multiplayer online games
Ingold, Tim 132 (MMOGs) 101, 104, 110, 142
Instagram 130, 133 meaning 79
instant messaging (IM) 141 Mechanical Turk 62
interactive participant 83 media 2, 22, 142
internet 8–11 effects/affects 23
internet activism see online activism participatory 56
internet art 77, 88 media literacy 115
internet service provider (ISP) 13, 141 media mobility see mobile media
interruptibility 104 meso 3, 142
intimacy 2, 3, 45, 66, 138, 141 micro 3, 142
intimacy turn 2 microblogs 130
intimate publics 4, 44–6, 138 Microsoft Network (MSN) 14, 142
invisible audiences 41 Miller, Daniel 38
iPhones 121, 133 Milne, Esther 45
ISP (internet service provider) 13, 141 minority artists 94
Ito, Mizuko 19 MMOGs see massively multiplayer online
games
Japan 88–9, 125 mobile media 16, 64, 120–35
Jenkins, Harry 58–9 mobile publics 142
Jiepang 128 modder 118
Jones, Matt 52 motivations 109
juiciness 105 MSN (Microsoft Network) 14, 142
MUDs see multi-user dungeons/domains
kidults 117 multi-media interface 11
killer app 11, 141 multisensorial images 132
Klose, Anastasia 85, 87 multi-user dungeons/domains (MUDs) 101,
Kodak camera 96, 133 142
Kony 2012 73–4 Munster, Anna 20
Kuro5hin 65 Murphie, Andrew 20
MySpace 43, 136
LBS see located-based services
legal protection 68 Nakamura, Lisa 22
liberation technology 23 neo-colonialism 74
LinkedIn 35 Netscape 14, 18
live tweeting 66 networked communities 37–40
the local 2, 142 networked individualism 40, 138
located-based services (LBS) 98, 120, 128, networked media 131
141–2 networked publics 2, 4, 40–1, 138, 142
camera phones 130–1 networked sociabilities 2
generations 124–5 networked visuality 131
mobility 5 networking 34
located presence 129 newspapers 64
locative media 132, 134–5 non-Anglocentric 3, 47–8
Lovink, Geert 2, 7, 8, 11
low culture 78, 94 Occupy Wall Street movement 73
Luke, Robert 126 OCR see optical character recognition
lurking 55, 56 Oldenburg, Ray 37
online activism 5, 56, 69–75, 142
macro 3, 142 online communities 36
magic circle 103 online information 25
Malaby, Thomas 103 online media 2

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 160  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA

online news sources 64 Salah, Almila Akdag 94

online/offline 2, 3, 102, 129, 137 Salen, Katie 103
online relationships 102 search engines 14
online stores 106 Second Life 90–2
operating systems 106 self-portraiture 3, 130
optical character recognition (OCR) 62, sentiment analysis 52, 143
142 sharing 97
O’Reilly, Tim 16, 17–18, 20, 62 short messaging system (SMS) 68, 143
Orkut 45 situated creativity 96
Ortner, Sherry 103 skill/knowledge games 112
slacktivism 74–5, 143
participation 55, 62, 75, 77, 92 Slashdot 65
participative media 5 Slater, Don 38
participatory culture 2, 59 smart mobs 48, 71, 143
participatory media 56 smartphones 65, 106, 121, 123, 133–4
PayPal 108 SMS see short messaging system
Pearce, Celia 42 SNS see social network site
peer community 94 the social 143–4
Perkel, Dan 95 social activism 72
personal technology 19 social capital 42, 60, 82, 143
phoneur 126 social data 50–3
photography 96 social interaction 110–11
place 126–7 social media games 5, 106–14
placing 129 social negotiation 39
platform 27, 60, 143 social network site (SNS) 1, 4, 19,
play 102–3 32–54, 143
playbour 118 community 43–4
Playfish 107 control 27
playfulness 109 intimacy 45
political action 48–9, 56, 72 networked publics 41
practical multiplicity 39 political action 48–9
presence 137 privacy 49–50
presence bleed 1, 104, 124, 139 see also social media games
presencing 129 social protests 72
privacy 25, 49–50 sociality 102, 113
produsers 2, 57–60, 75–6, 143 South Korea 66, 128, 134
professional amateur 59 de Souza e Silva, Adriana 126, 128
profile 45 Stallabrass, Julian 80, 97
promotional marketing 107 Star Trek 58–9
public 41 Surowiecki, James 62
public offering 108 Sutko, Daniel 128
public response 57 symbolic totality 39
public sphere 71
Putnam, Robert 42 tags 62, 85, 134
taste 82
QQ 45 taste-cultures 136
TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/
regime change 23 internet protocol) 9
relational aesthetics 81–2 teenagers 49
relationships 3 telepresence 129
remediation 123, 143 text messaging 71
revenue stream 28 third place 102
Rheingold, Howard 36, 48 Thorp, Jer 51

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 Index  161

touch 133 virtual communities 36–7, 43

transmission control protocol/internet virtual gallery 84–5
protocol (TCP/IP) 9 virtual reality 26
Trove 62
truly social games 112 Web 1.0 12–15
Turkle, Sherry 37 Web 2.0 4, 7–30
Twitter 21, 50, 56, 68, 88, 139 web browsers 9, 18
Twitter faking 56 web pages 9
web portals 14, 144
ubiquitous computing 144 web server 9
UCC see user created content Weiser, Mark 17
UGC see user generated content Wellman, Barry 35, 37, 40
URL (Uniform/Universal Resource Locator) Wikipedia 63, 75
10, 144 Wired magazine 13
user created content (UCC) 4, 18, 55, 57, work/play distinction 103
60–1, 77, 144 World of Warcraft 101, 104, 111
user generated content (UGC) 55, 60, 144
users 21, 59 YouTube 23, 58

Vaidhyanathan, Siva 29 Zapatistas 70

vernacular creativity 5, 61, 95–8, Zimmerman, Eric 103
133, 144 Zuckerman, Ethan 19
vernacular photography 96 Zynga 107–8

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