Social media: A critical introduction

Kapitel 2

The terms ”social media” and ”web 2.0” has been popular to use when talking about certain applications of the world wide web like sites for social networking such as Facebook or Twitter and blogs. The term web 2.0 was established by Tim O´Reilly in 2005. Some of the most characteristic about web 2.0 are ”participation instead och publishing”, ”users as contributors”, ”rich user experience” and ”control of one´s own data” among others. Web 2.0 was born from a crisis of Internet economy in year 2000. The market values were high for many Internet companies and with little profit for them. Many Internet companies was going bankrupt due to the crisis called ”dot.com bubble.” So investors had to be convinced about that a company would come with profit in the future so web 2.0 was seen as something new and promising in this aspect and helped overcome the crisis. The crucial fact about web 2.0 according to Tim O´Reilly that the users is seen as a collctive intelligence and that they togheter create the platforms of the Internet.

Of course there are also some critiques about web 2.0 and the optimism about social media in general. Some of the critique is that:

”Web 2.0 is based on the exploitation of free labour.”

”Blogging is mainly a self-centred, nihilistic, cynical activity.”

”Web 2.0 users are more passive users than active creators.”

The chapter also goes through some definitions of web 2.0 and social media and argue that it is important with social theory in order to understand social media.

Media and social theory is also discussed saying that ”media are not technologies, but techno-social systems.” Human activities help create the knowledge that is produced and consumed with ”the artefacts of the technological level.” The Internet is based on both a technological infrastructure and humans interacting.

The chapter then continues to describing different sociologist wiev on sociality. Émile Durkheims thoguths about the social as social facts who states that a social fact is every way of acting. Applying this wiev on social media brings out that all media and software are social in the way that they are a product of a social process. Max Weber focuses on social action and social relations. Weber meant that if a social relation shall continue their must be a meaningful interaction between humans. Ferdinand Tönnies sees the social as a community built on co-operation in order to understand the social as collaboration. For Karl Marx ”co-operation is the essence of the social.” With help of this statement Marx discusses community and collaborative sides of a society.

Further the chapter explores how the web is social in the aspects of these sociologists statements. Based on this you can see that web 2.0 is ”a computer-based networked system of human communication.”

Isabella Larsson