Social media : a critical introduction / Christian Fuchs.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fuchs, Christian, 1976- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Social media.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (302 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Thousand Oaks, California : Sage Publication, 2014.

System Details:

text file

Summary:

Now more than ever, we need to understand social media - the good as well as the bad. We need critical knowledge that helps us to navigate the controversies and contradictions of this complex digital media landscape. Only then can we make informed judgements about what's happening in our media world, and why. Showing the reader how to ask the right kinds of questions about social media, Christian Fuchs takes us on a journey across platforms, delving deep into case studies on Google, Facebook, Twitter, WikiLeaks and Wikipedia. The result lays bare the structures and power relations at the heart of our media landscape. This book is the essential, critical guide for all students of media studies and sociology. Readers will never look at social media the same way again. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 What Is a Critical Introduction to Social Media? 1

1.1 What is Social about Social Media? 4

1.2 What is Critical Thinking and Why Does it Matter? 7

1.3 What is Critical Theory? 10

1.4 Critical Theory Approaches 18

Recommended Readings and Exercises 25

I Foundations 29

2 What is Social Media? 31

2.1 Web 2.0 and Social Media 32

2.2 The Need of Social Theory for Understanding Social Media 35

2.3 Explaining Social Media with Durkheim, Weber, Marx and Tönnies 42

2.4 Conclusion 48

Recommended Readings and Exercises 50

3 Social Media as Participatory Culture 52

3.1 The Notions of Participation and Participatory Culture 53

3.2 Online Fan Culture and Politics 58

3.3 Social Media and Participatory Culture 60

3.4 Henry Jenkins and Digital Labour 63

3.5 Conclusion 65

Recommended Readings and Exercises 67

4 Social Media and Communication Power 69

4.1 Social Theory in the Information Age 71

4.2 Communication Power in the Network Society 72

4.3 Communication Power, Social Media and Mass Self-communication 75

4.4 Communication Power in the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement 83

4.5 Conclusion 87

Recommended Readings and Exercises 89

II Applications 95

5 The Power and Political Economy of Social Media 97

5.1 Social Media as Ideology: The Limits of the Participatory Social Media Hypothesis 98

5.2 The Cycle of Capital Accumulation 103

5.3 Capital Accumulation and Social Media 105

5.4 Free Labour and Slave Labour 117

5.5 Conclusion 121

Recommended Readings and Exercises 123

6 Google: Good or Evil Search Engine? 126

6.1 Introduction 127

6.2 Google's Political Economy 128

6.3 Googology: Google and Ideology 132

6.4 Work at Google 141

6.5 Google: God and Satan in One Company 146

6.6 Conclusion 149

Recommended Readings and Exercises 151

7 Facebook: A Surveillance Threat to Privacy? 153

7.1 Facebook's Financial Power 154

7.2 The Notion of Privacy 156

7.3 Facebook and Ideology 160

7.4 Privacy and the Political Economy of Facebook 163

Facebook's Privacy Policy 164

Exploitation on Facebook 169

7.5 Conclusion 171

Recommended Readings and Exercises 175

8 Twitter and Democracy: A New Public Sphere? 179

8.1 Habermas's Concept of the Public Sphere 181

8.2 Twitter, Social Media and the Public Sphere 185

8.3 Political Communication on Twitter 190

8.4 Twitter's Political Economy 198

8.5 @JürgenHabermas #Twitter #PublicSphere 199

8.6 Conclusion 201

Recommended Readings and Exercises 208

9 WikiLeaks: Can We Make Power Transparent? 210

9.1 WikiLeaks and Power 212

9.2 Wikileaks, Liberalism and Socialism 220

9.3 WikiLeaks, Journalism and Alternative Media 225

9.4 Conclusion 231

Recommended Readings and Exercises 233

10 Wikipedia: A New Democratic Form of Collaborative Work and Production? 235

10.1 The Communist Idea 237

10.2 Communication and Communism 242

10.3 The Political Economy of Wikipedia 243

The Subjective Dimension of Wikipedia Production: Co-operative Labour 244

The Objective Dimensions of Wikipedia Production 244

The Effect Dimension of Wikipedia Production: The Pleasure of Co-operative Intellectual Work 247

10.4 Conclusion 247

Recommended Readings and Exercises 249

III Futures 251

11 Conclusion: Social Media and its Alternatives - Towards a Truly Social Media 253

11.1 Social Media Reality: Ideologies and Exploitation 253

11.2 Social Media Alternatives 257

Data Protection Laws 259

Opt-in Advertising Policies 260

Corporate Watch Platforms as a Form of Struggle against Corporatism 261

Alternative Internet Platforms 264

11.3 Towards a Truly Social Media and a New Society 264.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

Local Notes:

Electronic reproduction. Palo Alto, Calif. : ebrary, 2014. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ebrary affiliated libraries.

Other Format:

Print version: Fuchs, Christian. Social media : a critical introduction.

ISBN:

9781446296868

OCLC:

893680940

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.