A Critical Hypertext Analysis of Social Media

The True Colours of Facebook

Volker Eisenlauer

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441159700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Semántica lingüística

Facebook, in just a few years, has become one of the central tools people use to communicate with each other in everyday life. However, the perceived freedom of action on the site and the actual processes that are permitted in Facebook's set up don't always match up: in this book this gap is examined. This book identifies the interrelations between user text actions and the software environment framing them. It takes a critical perspective on Facebook and develops a model that grants methodological access to complex interlaced practices incorporating media, text and literacies. It shows Facebook users employing idiosyncratic and Facebook-specific literacy practices, and gives weight to the larger hypothesis of the software service as an ideological setting designed to calculate and standardize human behaviour. Specifically, the book examines text action and automation within Facebook to determine how the software service intervenes in the communicative flow between/among profile owners and profile recipients. This is cutting edge work and of huge importance to modern fields of discourse analysis and computer-mediated communication.

1

Social Media and Social Network Sites

Alan Turing and Charles Babbage would not be surprised by the speed of computing or probably even by the microchip. But, they would be surprised that their ‘computing’ machines are the sites for communities that meet and communicate via listservs, MOOs, and MUDs.¹

Denise Murray 2000: 51

In the quotation above, Murray (2000) emphasizes a strong correlation between technological innovations and changes in the social customs and communicative practices surrounding new technologies. More recently, the introduction of Web 2.0 technology has brought forward a range of novel software services (among them Social Network Sites) that interrelate with various social changes. Generating and distributing all kinds of personal data with the help of pre-set templates, Internet users have been transformed into empowered hypertext authors. At the same time, Web 2.0 users increasingly regard the Internet as a social space, where one can meet new people, hang out with friends and pursue all kinds of leisure activities.

In order to approach Social Media from a critical perspective and evaluate its links to social changes and novel semiotic practices, it is necessary to clarify some fundamental concepts and terms. This chapter provides a brief discussion of the main terminology that comes with the enculturation of the Web. Following this, it will address the over-arching issue of the links between technology and culture, before reviewing research on Social Media and Social Network Sites (SNS)² and discussing the structural features and communicative purposes of the SNS Facebook. Finally, this chapter will identify the notion of ‘Facebook’ as a third author and clarify the book’s specific focus that promotes the need to approach Social Media from a critical and hypertextlinguistic perspective.

Web 2.0, Social Media and Personal Publishing

Radio broadcasting would be one of the greatest means for public communication […], if it could not only send but also receive, so that the listener could not just hear but also speak.³

Bert Brecht 1932/1967, rough translation

In his speech about the functions of radio broadcasting, Brecht (1932/1967) envisioned a new bi-directional form of mass media communication, which has come to fruition in the era of Web 2.0 technology. Most notably, in recent Web 2.0 applications, such as Wikipedia, Blogger, YouTube, Myspace or Facebook, ordinary people have become lexicographers, journalists, moviemakers or digital writers. In the early and mid–1990s, the upload and distribution of data on the Internet required, to a large extent, at least a basic knowledge of HyperText Markup Langauge (HTML). Publishing on the Web became, from the end of the 1990s onward, more and more a practice of the masses. Broader Internet connection bandwidths as well as new data-sharing technologies resulted in users perceiving the Internet increasingly as a platform to lodge data (see Ebersbach et al. 2008).⁴ At the same time, the increasing number of non-expert users uploading and dispersing information on the Internet troubled the thitherto dominant position of professional online news sources and databases. From the end of the 1990s onward, Weblogs mushroomed on the Web and introduced fresh voices into the national discourse on various topics, which helped to build communities of interest (Bowman and Willis 2003). Collaboratively written online encyclopaedias (such as Wikipedia) emerged to rival professional online and offline encyclopaedias, while video and photo sharing Websites (such as YouTube or Flickr) prompted the upload and dispersion of more or less personal data. Accounting for the miscellaneous social and technological innovations associated with such genuine interactivity, various expressions emerged in the early years of the new millennium, among them ‘Web 2.0’, ‘Social Media’, and ‘Personal Publishing’. Though these terms open up different perspectives on recent Internet related changes, they are frequently used synonymously in public discourse. In the following section I will discuss the aforementioned terms in order to situate my particular focus within the interweaving of recent communication technologies and the emergence of current online spaces.

Web 2.0

Analogous to common software naming conventions for new and sometimes improved versions, the appellation 2.0 of Web 2.0 emphasizes the next envisioned version of the Web. Unlike the software label, the term Web 2.0 is not limited to a mere technical update of the online medium but also covers its interrelated phenomena on various socio-cultural levels. As a key feature and an indispensable precondition for the emergence of new social spaces, Web 2.0 stands out in its genuine interactivity simply because people can upload as well as download (Fry 2007: online). This simple but profound change in the medial communication process has lead to intense alterations in the textual habits of ordinary web users. Most obviously, in Web 2.0 applications, like Weblogs, WikiWebs or SNS, former hypertext recipients have undergone a transformation to empowered hypertext authors. While humanities still discuss the power shifts inherent to ‘first-generation hypertexts’, where the reader chooses his/her way from node to node, thus becoming ‘co-author’ of the text, (e.g. Bucher 2006, Storrer 2008) the Web 2.0 user has already become author in the primary sense of the word: An estimated 150 million Weblogs in 2012 (see Royal Pingdom 2013) give further evidence for Lanham’s (1993) notion of a vanishing boundary between ‘creator and critic’ (Lanham 1993: 6). Until the end of the 1990s, publishing on the Web was limited to the more tech-savvy users; Web 2.0–triggered online writing caught on with mainstream users. Liberated from tight technical restraints, users could now concentrate on the content of whatever they intend to publish.

However, Web 2.0’s genuine interactivity not only surfaces in the blurring of the traditional roles of author and recipient, but correlates with various other phenomena on technological and/or social levels. As Rollet et al. (2007) emphasize, the collaborative nature and communication methods within Web 2.0 environments result in ‘an ambiguous, even polymorph concept, which is understood in different ways by different people’ (2007: 89). With regard to this, O’Reilly (2006) highlights primarily the economic value brought by technological innovations when defining Web 2.0 as a ‘business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform’ (2006 online). By characterizing Web 2.0 as ‘[…] the philosophy of mutually maximizing collective intelligence […]’, Hoegg et al. (2006: 24) point to social changes on a rather broad level, while studies in information science stress commonly the emergence of a new generation of web-related technologies and standards⁵ (cf. Anderson 2007). Reflecting on the multitude of phenomena covered by the term, Richter and Koch (2007) define Web 2.0 as a combination of new technologies (such as Ajax or RSS), new types of applications (Weblogs, Wikis, Mashups, Social Bookmarking), new social formations (self-representation and collaboration) and new business models (Software as Service, The Long Tail). Emphasizing how the rhetoric surrounding the term Web 2.0 cultivates certain beliefs about media, identity, and technology, Zimmer (2008) opens up a more social perspective on Web 2.0. More specifically, he delineates the ideas and visions ascribed to the term as follows:

[Web 2.0] suggests that everyone can and should use new Internet technologies to organize and share information, to interact within communities, and to express oneself. It promises to empower creativity, to democratize media production, and to celebrate the individual while also relishing the power of collaboration and social networks.

Zimmer 2008: online

At the same time, participation in Web 2.0 environments may lead to a number of more or less unintended consequences – among them the easy access to highly personal data, the dispersion of one’s identity across fragmented online spaces, the threat of online surveillance as well as the possible exploitation of online social spaces by media corporations. In this sense, Postman (1992) emphasized long before the emergence of Web 2.0 that users indulging in media communications are encouraged to ignore the ideas embedded in such technologies. He believes that media technologies are never neutral, but tend to endorse certain ideologies, while blurring others (Zimmer 2005). Turning to Web 2.0 and its mechanisms for transforming former (hyper-)text recipients to empowered authors, it becomes increasingly difficult for users to reflect on the various impacts of the medium on their texts: WikiWebs, just like Weblogs or SNS, are commonly based on pre-given templates, which elicit certain information, while suppressing other more or less relevant information. Likewise, the layout of these texts is, to a high degree, pre-set and users may at most decide among a limited number of default designs. By means of simple mouse clicks, users may perform highly sophisticated actions, such as uploading and publishing texts and other data (as in Weblogs or WikiWebs), generating automatic messages requesting friendship (as in SNS) or purchasing and/or selling items (as on the online auction site eBay). As the examples in Figure 1.1 show, such text actions must not necessarily be performed by ‘real’ users.

The ‘Lazy Bloggers Post Generator’ assists users in maintaining their personal Weblogs by creating posts from pre-given templates; the ‘Facebook Friend Adder’ is a computer program that simulates and/or performs diverse text actions on behalf of an individual member, such as adding friends, sending messages or ‘poking’ other members; the ‘JoyBidder Auto Auction Bidder’ tool supports users purchasing items on the Internet auction site eBay by automatically placing bids in the last seconds of an auction. However, recipients of such automatically generated texts most likely do not suspect a machine is responsible for the Weblog posts, the friendship requests or the auction bids. The propositional content of those automatically generated texts is, to a large extent, generated by a computer program, while its communicative function is intended to be consistent with the user’s (and secondary text producer’s) individual aims. Now it is necessary to take a closer look at the diverse applications that have been developed within the Web 2.0 environment and are often referred to as ‘Social Software’.

Figure 1.1: Lazy Blog Generator, Facebook Friend Adder and JoyBidder eBay Auction Bidder tool

Social Media and Social Software

On the broadest level, the term ‘Social Media’ refers to Web 2.0 applications, such as WikiWebs, Weblogs or SNS, and their various interrelations in the organization of social life. Accordingly, Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) define Social Media as ‘a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content’ (Kaplan and Haenlein 2010: 61). Social Software is often used as a synonym for Social Media. While both terms place emphasis on online tools supporting social interaction among users, the former term highlights the ontological quality of the environment in which the communicative practices are embedded. Throughout this book the terms Social Media and Social Software are used interchangibly.

Holding the medium responsible for changes on a social level, Schmidt (2006) outlines three key functions of Social Software: First, information management facilitating the search (and detection) as well as the administration a...

Table of contents

• List of Abbreviations
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Charts
• Preface
• 1 Social Media and Social Network Sites
• 2 Approaching Social Media Critically
• 3 A Critical Hypertext Analysis of the Software Service Facebook
• 4 Facebook’s Impact on User Text Actions – A Case Study
• 5 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index