Engineering Sociality in a Culture of Connectivity
José van Dijck · 2013
Abstract This chapter lays out a historical map of social media’s transformation between 2001 and 2012. The Web 2.0 gradually changed from being an infrastructure for networked communication to offering a wide range of platform services, each occupying a distinct niche of online sociality, particularly social networking and user-generated content services. While the first half decade gave rise to user communities embracing the Web’s potential for collaboration and connectedness, after 2006, the word “social” came to mean: technologically manageable and economically exploitable. Early adopters and theorists of social media welcomed the emergence of a hybrid set of peer-produced, nonmarket principles inside or alongside a commercial model, a model that was embraced by companies like Facebook, Google and Yahoo! But gradually, the economic, political and cultural assumptions on which these platform owners operated, divulged a new set of norms and values staked in the ideology of technological progress and neoliberalism.