Silicon Valley’s minority culture shapes global social media’s presumptions

Evidence

The social norms of the tech scene are, in many ways, the social context of social media. Many of the loudest voices in public discourse around technology belong to this group: they appear on television and radio to discuss new technology, meet at South by Southwest and Foo Camp, write op-eds and bestselling nonfiction books, and read each other’s blogs. The whirlwind of hype around social media, both positive and negative, comes from the people most acquainted with these technologies, with the most to gain from their use. It is also the people who create Web 2.0 technologies who share these norms and values. While social media is used in a dizzying variety of ways around the world, many of the presumptions about use and users follow from Silicon Valley and San Francisco culture. This book sheds some light on these taken-for-granted assumptions. Understanding the presumptions and discursive notions of self, other, friendships, and status promoted within the technology scene helps us to uncover some larger notions embedded in social media applications themselves, even if users do not receive or act on these notions in the same way that the technology scene does. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 45

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how much of this Valley-to-global transmission is deliberate design intent versus emergent - it implicitly claims norms are embedded in the affordances themselves, testable against non-Western platform usage.
• XREF: Connects to platform studies (van Dijck, Gillespie) and the claim that platforms encode their designers’ values in affordances. — connects to: Web 2.0 ideology fuses Silicon Valley capitalism with countercultural activism while embracing capitalism — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 55; Silicon Valley culture shapes global assumptions embedded in social media platforms. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 45

Broader Connections

• Web 2.0 ideology fuses Silicon Valley capitalism with countercultural activism while embracing capitalism #expands (0.72) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 55