Social media originally appealed through collective joy, now threatened by commercial management
Evidence
More positively, it also means intensifying the pleasures of sociality (solidarity, even) that not even datafication has been able to suppress. One reason we all flocked to social media platforms originally was because they reminded us of the joys of collectivity at a time when mass media seemed to offer only individualistic isolation. That pleasure risks being extinguished now as we become ever clearer that social media outlets are managed by vast commercial interests. But we don’t need to forget everything that has been learned during our time on digital networks. We can develop forms of solidarity that extend what we have learned online but turn them toward values that are no longer aligned to data colonialism. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 633
Categorization
- XREF: Parallels the attention-surveillance school’s account of platform optimization; the solidarity frame is the departing point from that school. — connects to: Early Twitter norms pressured public accounts because privacy defeated self-promotion. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 234; Social media fracturing produces fragmented collective time held together by affective endorsement; Social media platforms simulate a public sphere they now merely exploit. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 580 (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Social media platforms simulate a public sphere they now merely exploit.
#expands(0.82) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 580 - Early Facebook users protested News Feed as invasive but later embraced it
#exemplifies(0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1461 - Overcommercialized attention harvesting provokes strong social backlash
#corroborates(0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 69 - Social media fracturing produces fragmented collective time held together by affective endorsement
#qualifies(0.72)