Engineering Sociality in a Culture of Connectivity

2. Summary 1.1
• Need for “connectedness” initially
drove users to media sites
• This “connectivity” made it possible
to make profitable online markets
Passages/Quotes/Vocab 1.1
• “Social Media, roughly defined 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’”(p. 4)
• “By exploring technical, social,
economic, and cultural perspectives
on social media, we can elucidate
how recent changes in our global
media landscape have profoundly
affected–if not driven–our
experience of sociality” (p. 5)
Web 2.0 definition: “the second stage of
development of the World Wide Web,
characterized especially by the change
from static web pages to dynamic or
user-generated content and the growth
of social media” -Google

3. Summary 1.2
• After invention of World Wide Web
in 1991, came interactive, two-way
vehicles were soon invented for
network sociality shortly after 2000
• Everything that used to be intimate
and only shared with specific
people (i.e. baby pictures) are now
public
• Types of Social Media
• Social network sites: promote
interpersonal contact
• User-generated content:
support creativity; promote
exchange of amateur or
professional content
• Trading and marketing sites:
exchanging or selling products
• Play and game sites
Passages/Quotes/Vocab 1.2
• “As a medium coevolves with its
quotidian users’ tactics, it contributes
to shaping people’s everyday life,
while at the same time this mediated
sociality becomes part of society’s
institutional fabric” (p. 5-6)
• “It is a common fallacy, though, to
think of platforms as merely
facilitating network activities; instead,
the construction of platforms and
social practices is mutually
constitutive” (p. 6)
• “The pinnacle of a company’s
success in permeating a social
activity is when a brand turns into a
verb” (p. 7)
• Every tweak of a platform and/or site
affects another part of the
“ecosystem”

4. Summary 1.3
• In the ‘70s, computers became
seen as potential instruments of
liberation rather than oppression
• Famous Macintosh ad used
computers as sign of
empowerment
• “Produsers”–>creators who were
also users and distributors
• Connectivity is a quantifiable value
(likes, followers, etc.)
• Words like “interactive” and
“participatory” were came into play
with Web 2.0
• Algorithms allowed for sites to
track and manipulate connections
Passages/Quotes/Vocab 1.3
• “Web companies tirelessly
underscored their company’s
mission to benefit the common
good” (p. 11)
• “The meaning of ‘social’ hence
seems to encompass both (human)
connectedness and (automated)
connectivity” (p. 12)
• “Sociality coded by technology
renders people’s activities formal,
manageable, and manipulable,
enabling platforms to engineer the
sociality in people’s everyday lives”
(p. 12)
• “Popularity Principle”: the more
contacts you have and make, the
more valuable you become,
because more people think you are
popular and hence want to connect
with you” (p. 13)

5. Summary 1.4 Passages/Quotes/Vocab 1.4
• Between 2000-2005: platforms
were nonmarket, peer-production,
which were easy to regulate and
keep “clean,” but after 2005 they
became too big to easily regulate
• Between 2005-2008: companies
kept their users as first priority
while they figured out how to
make money and still keep users
happy
• Wikipedia is one of few sites that
has not been co-opted by big
business
• “Perhaps commoditizing
relationships–turning
connectedness into connectivity by
means of coding technologies–is
exactly what corporate
platforms…discovered as the
golden egg their geese produced”
(p. 16)
• “The incorporation of platforms,
some critics, contend, hampered
the development of Web 2.0’s full
potential as an instrument for
participatory culture, self-regulation,
and democracy” (p. 17)

6. Summary 1.5 Passages/Quotes/Vocab 1.5
• Outside physical actions are
increasingly intermixed with social
and sociotechnical norms
• Coded structures are affecting our
ways of connection, creations, and
interactions
• “The power of norms, in the area of
sociality, is much more influential
than the power of law and order” (p.
19)
• “Once new technologies and their
use have gained naturalized
presence, it is much harder to
identify underlying principles and
thus question their raison d’être” (p.
20)
• Ecosystem of connective media: a
system that nourishes and, in turn,
is nourished by social and cultural
norms that simultaneously evolve in
our own world

7. UNDERSTANDING INTERFACE THROUGH CHAPTER 1
• Interface definition: point and/or modalities of communication between two
systems
–>human-computer relationship: physical means to provide input in a
system as well as the feedback produced by the system (switches,
keyboards, mouses)
–>joystick became one of the most popular interfaces in the gaming world
and later words and phrases like “get lamp” were able to transmit actions
to the character in the games
–>later (‘90s)came voice recognition, motion detection, etc.
–>“Manual interfaces such as the Wiimote and Sony Move represent the
most recent incarnation of the natural interface ideal” (p. 308, Hopkins)
• Takeaway: Interfaces are made in an attempt to create more
“connectedness.” But what kind of connectedness? They create a human
to computer connectedness, but we are never physically connected to
other humans through interfaces. We have to use other devices to simply
convey what we wish to say and then the computer “says” it for us.