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Social Media and the Transformation of Public Space

van Dijck, J.; Poell, T.

DOI
10.1177/2056305115622482
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2015
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Final published version
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Social Media + Society
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van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2015). Social Media and the Transformation of Public Space. Social
Media + Society, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115622482

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Download date:24 Aug 2022

622482
research-article2015
SMSXXX10.1177/2056305115622482Social Media + Societyvan Dijck and Poell

SI: Social Media Public Space

Social Media + Society

July-December 2015: 1–5
Social Media and the Transformation © The Author(s) 2015
DOI: 10.1177/2056305115622482
of Public Space sms.sagepub.com

José van Dijck and Thomas Poell

Abstract
This introduction to the Special Issue of Social Media + Society discusses the key theoretical perspectives and methodological
approaches needed to gain insight into how social platforms intervene in public space. It starts by highlighting how in
the emerging platform society public and private communication is reshaped by social media’s commercial mechanisms,
transforming the political economy of the media landscape. Given the complex character of this society, it is essential to
employ different perspectives and approaches to trace the multifaceted forces at work in this new global system. Building
on the seven contributions to this Special Issue, we show the need for multidisciplinary scholarship. More specifically, we
consider the insights produced through historical–cultural, socio-technical, and techno-commercial inquiries into the evolving
relationship between social platforms and public space. The introduction concludes with a reflection on the necessity to
combine these perspectives in one analytical model.

Keywords
social media, publicness, platform society, theoretical perspectives

Introduction
More than 10 years after their emergence, we have reached a mechanisms, transforming the political economy of the media
new phase in the development of large social media plat- landscape. The impact of globally operating platforms on
forms, as well as in the academic scholarship in this area. In local and state economies and cultures is immense, as they
the early years, between 2004 and 2010, most studies focused force all societal actors—including the mass media, civil
on the user and the generous creative space offered by social society organizations, and state institutions—to reconsider
media platforms. The subsequent 5 years (2010–2015) were and recalibrate their position in public space.
especially dedicated to the question of how social platforms Given the complex character of the emerging platform
have become entangled with professional activities, such as society, it is essential to combine different theoretical per-
news production and distribution, health care, education, and spectives and methodological approaches to trace the multi-
law and order; commercial transactions, such as the hospital- faceted forces that shape this new global system. This
ity and transport sector; and civil activities, for example, citi- introduction to the Special Issue of Social Media + Society
zen participation and protest organization. As social media discusses the different perspectives needed to gain insight
are ubiquitously used, they become increasingly interwoven into how social platforms intervene in public space. Building
with various sectors in society. on the different contributions, we show the need for a variety
The first decade of social media has given rise to an online of approaches. We have divided this issue into three sections,
infrastructure that is profoundly shaping the way in which respectively, illuminating historical–cultural, socio-technical
societies are organized and publics are shaped. This global and techno-commercial perspectives on connective plat-
infrastructure is far from finished or complete; on the con- forms. The introduction concludes with a reflection on the
trary, we are in the middle of a contest to define the contours
of what we call the “platform society”: a global conglomerate University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
of all kinds of platforms, which interdependencies are struc-
Corresponding Author:
tured by a common set of mechanisms. In this “platform soci- Thomas Poell, University of Amsterdam, Turfdraagsterpad 9, Amsterdam
ety”—the title of our forthcoming book—public and private 1012 XT, The Netherlands.
communication is reshaped by social media’s commercial Email: [email protected]

Creative Commons Non Commercial CC-BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
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distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.
com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
2 Social Media + Society

need to combine different theoretical perspectives on social Moving from a historiographic to an ethnographic per-
media and publicness in one analytical model. spective, Sara Marino examines the transformation of public
space through a study of Italian online communities in
London, fleeing the financial crisis in their home country.
Historical–Cultural Perspectives Following in the footsteps of important digital ethnographers
Two articles in this issue develop a historical–cultural such as Christine Hine, Marino traces the dynamics of group
approach to social media. Megan Ankerson focuses on a spe- memberships and the “circulation of social capital.” She
cific historical phase (the “prehistory” of social media), aptly reminds us that there are important social media spaces
whereas Sara Marino traces how Italian migrants transform beyond the major commercial platforms such as Facebook
social media into transnational social spaces. Historical and and Twitter. Especially, online forums were vital as ways of
culturally specific approaches may shed light on the intrica- “sharing solidarity and support, while SNSs were used as
cies of platform development in the context of particular sets entertainment tools.” It is crucial to identify such public
of ideas and practices. spaces apart from the mainstream commercial platforms to
Ankerson’s article argues that the World Wide Web’s understand the formation of transnational identities. Marino
common historical periodization as Web 1.0 (“read-only”) shows how Italians created a home-away-from home to
and Web 2.0 (“read/write”) has become the sediment of a adapt to different cultural-economic customs and construct a
mythic narrative, identifying two radically different periods sense of “we-ness.”
in the development of the Web. Social media platforms, with The distribution of private and public space across these
their perceived emphasis on interactivity and interpersonal networks becomes manifest in the organization of this web
communication via platforms, are firmly positioned in the community, as the idea of sharing and supporting gets con-
second era, and the transformation from one phase to the figured by all users. Whereas commercial social media sites
next has fallaciously been caught by revolutionary adjec- such as Facebook are largely preformatted, in these online
tives. However, as Ankerson argues, we have much to gain forums migrants shape their own social space in line with
by not exclusively positing social media platforms as a 21st specific national and transnational concerns. Ankerson’s and
century phenomenon. Looking into the genealogies of Marino’s perspectives are complementary, to some extent
“social media,” the author unravels how the concepts of Web overlapping: the organization and imagining of public space,
1.0 and 2.0 are continually reconfigured through design and audiences, publics, and communities via online platforms
production practices, cultural and technological frameworks, result in the mutual configuration of user needs and platform
institutional arrangements, and professional affiliations. features. Arguing their cases from specific historical and cul-
Two case studies from the 1990s—the era labeled as the tural contexts, both authors highlight the importance of cul-
“read-only” Web—demonstrate the conflicting visions of tural imaginaries in the configuration of social media sites,
what the future of the Web might entail. Day in the Life of and vice versa in the configuration of social connections
Cyberspace, launched on 10 October 1995 by the MIT Media through these sites. Let us now turn to three articles that
Lab, and 24 Hours in Cyberspace, launched on 9 February approach social media from a socio-technical perspective.
1996 by photographer Rick Smolan’s production company,
Against All Odds, serve as prisms onto this historiographical
Socio-Technical Perspectives
debate. This article traces the development and afterlife of
these two commercially sponsored projects, showing not The next three articles, authored by Susanne Almgren and
only the significance of reading and listening in these early Tobias Olsson, Sander Schwartz, and Stefania Milan, focus
Web projects but also of speaking and writing. In contrast, on the socio-technical dimensions of social media and their
Ankerson points out that the practice of blogging, which has impact on the transformation of public space. This is not to
been celebrated as a Web 2.0 model, very much depends on say that they omit or neglect cultural or historical specificity,
listening/reading technologies like RSS feed readers, and on the contrary. Some of their case studies involve national
reverse chronological structures. Thus, rather than making a (Swedish, Danish, and Canadian, respectively) professional
hard distinction between Web 1.0 and 2.0, she maintains that or political movements, but their focus is primarily on how
it is more productive to trace the subtle rather than radical social networking sites (SNSs) shape the daily routines and
shift in the Web’s modes of address “from one that prioritizes everyday practices of these movements.
a social imagination of indefinite strangers, to one that vacil- First, Almgren and Olsson examine how established news
lates between imagined strangers and numerable, identifi- organizations handle the emergence of social platforms and
able, individuals.” Taking a historiographical perspective participatory media channels. Their empirical approach
and being attentive to these shifting modes of address, we involves an analysis of how a Swedish online newspaper
can move beyond the triumphant rhetoric of the social web comes to grips with online participation through implement-
and gain a more precise understanding of how a specific type ing an article comment function. More particularly, the
of “social” revolving around user profiling and targeted researchers examine to what extent users’ comments are
advertising has become installed and naturalized. shaped by the technological features on the site, inviting
van Dijck and Poell 3

them to respond. As it turns out, the news site’s attempts to Alexandra Segerberg’s notion of collective action by analyz-
steer readers toward “lightweight news” such as entertain- ing the organization of protests through social media. She
ment, arts, or sports does not always converge with readers’ argues that the dynamics of collective action are as much
actual interests in commenting on serious news topics, such defined by the politics of platforms as by the intentions of its
as health and politics. This again makes clear that socio-tech- users to achieve a communal (political) goal. Milan offers
nical steering is never a self-evident process. Technological the notion of “cloud protesting” as a framework for empirical
affordances and users’ activities and preferences often articu- analysis, showing how mobile social media are not merely
late each other in unexpected ways. mediating devices in the hands of activists, but how they
The phenomenon of media organizations “nudging” shape and are shaped by communicative actions.
online user participation via technological features toward The example of the Toronto Occupy protests is a case in
safe havens of online commentary raises several important point. Through the use of social media platforms, activists
questions. What exactly do news organizations expect from develop a collective, communal identity that binds them
their audiences in terms of engagement? And how do they together, helping them to turn the performance of few pro-
deploy interface features to implement editorial steward- testing individuals into a large-scale event via real-time web
ship? In online news contexts, the interaction between pro- streaming. Deploying the technical amenities of social media
ducers and consumers is thoroughly reconfigured through platforms, the protestors call people into action by means of
technological interventions and needs to be addressed by tags, citations, mentions, and so on. Popular social media
professionals. Yet, given the unanticipated ways in which practices, such as the use of hashtags and retweets, promote
interaction is reconfigured, such technological interventions instant conversations and continuous content exchange. The
need to be understood as ongoing experiments in the rede- collective identity of protestors is thus extended online,
sign of public space. through a number of online mechanisms that enhance the life
The intricate relationship between technology, producer, cycle of civil action.
and user is also the subject of analysis in Sander Schwartz’s As we have observed in the previous two articles, the
paper about the role of social media in a Danish election downside of social media in the context of collective protests
campaign. Schwartz’s metaphor for this contested relation- is their tendency to echo the voices of like-minded people,
ship is the “dinner table,” where the table represents discouraging critical engagement or dissent. Moreover, as
Facebook as a technical platform; the role of host is per- Milan remarks, the life cycle of social media actionable pro-
formed by the moderator; users serve as the “invited guests” tests is typically very short and tends to disappear as quickly
at the dinner party. Using Dahlberg’s notion of contestation, as it emerged. The visibility of online protests, though, can
the article analyzes citizen’s comments on eight political gain traction through frequent repetition, both online and
candidates’ Facebook pages during the 2011 Danish election offline or via mainstream media. “Cloud protesting,” just as
campaign. As it turns out, the Facebook pages are fan pages commenting on online news and gathering support through
rather than platforms for serious and critical interaction, Facebook fan pages, illustrates the strengths and drawbacks
“leaning towards echo chambers by design.” of social media dynamics. The socio-technical nature of
The technological features of Facebook pages seem to social media communication calls for much more scrutiny as
prohibit serious dialogues and critical interventions, instead we are only beginning to see how defining its features are for
favoring acclamations over political dissent. Examining the organization of democracy in Western societies.
focus groups of respondents, Schwartz concludes that
Facebook pages are successful in connecting politicians with
Techno-Commercial Perspectives
supportive citizens, allowing for strategic political commu-
nication and the effective marketing of partisan views. Whereas the first five articles in this Special Issue focus on
Politicians are in fact moderators of their own political mes- the relationship between technology and users, highlighting
sages, and the technological features of the Facebook plat- historical–cultural and socio-technical perspectives on social
form very much facilitate the “likeable” view of a candidate. media, the last two contributions explore techno-commercial
Hence, as political marketing strategies and social media dimensions. It is not that authors of the previous five articles
marketing instruments become entangled, the space for pub- turn a blind eye on the commercial mechanisms that drive
lic debate is closed down. As in the case of the Swedish most social media platforms; it is simply an aspect of social
newspaper discussed in Almgren and Olsson’s article, the media that seems less relevant to their approaches of plat-
technological features of online platforms and social action forms as historical, cultural, or socio-technical phenomena.
mutually articulate each other. However, as Rob Heyman, Jo Pierson and David Nieborg
If the relationship between producer, technology, and user demonstrate, we cannot ignore the platform-specific and
is fundamentally socio-technical in nature, we need to care- contextual features that drive social media economics.
fully interrogate how such configurations take shape in par- Heyman and Pierson concentrate on ways in which
ticular professional settings. In her contribution to this Facebook, as the biggest commercially operating social net-
Special Issue, Stefania Milan takes on Lance Bennett and work service with the largest number of global users,
4 Social Media + Society

connects users to advertisers and data exploiters. Seemingly, network doubly benefits from the connective properties of
technological features, such as the EdgeRank algorithm, the games by generating traffic and data.
News Feed, and Gatekeeper function, are in fact commercial Like Heyman and Pierson, Nieborg calls attention to the
mechanisms, allowing Facebook to control connections business models underlying social media systems, but the
between users and, more importantly, connectivity between last contribution also sheds light on the political–economic
users and third parties. As we have already noted in context in which the social gaming industry operates.
Schwartz’s contribution, Facebook features channel users Already dominant players like Facebook gain power and
toward a particular “likeable” object while constructing sup- strength through the commercial expansion of much
port and acclaim, and it also does this in a way that opti- smaller players like King and others. Platform owners who
mizes the consumption of commercial messages along the hold central position as gatekeepers in the larger ecosys-
way. Steering users to connect to others and to other pages, tem of social media become vital linchpins between small
Facebook tweaks its techno-commercial system designs to game studios and large and diverse global audiences.
maximize results in terms of data acquisition and advertis- Without the network effects offered by Facebook, they
ing exposure. would never be able to expand their market. As Nieborg
What Heyman and Pierson show is that Facebook’s busi- concludes his contribution, the idea that every startup or
ness models can hardly be seen apart from its socio-techni- every small game studio is an equal player in the world of
cal configurations. Channeling private communication “multisided markets” is a fallacy. All platforms are equal,
between users, the social media platform converts into a but some are more equal than others. Facebook’s capabili-
public space that exposes users to all kinds of commercial ties to leverage network effects are infinitely bigger than
messages, meanwhile extracting information from users’ any other platform currently up and running in the social
behavior as they move along the streets of online social media universe.
traffic. Choosing the Latourian angle of actor–network the-
ory, the authors show how platforms constitute socio-tech-
Heterogeneous Configurations
nical ensembles where users are steered across obligatory
passage points to perform acts of communication. In this All seven articles brought together in this Special Issue
grid, the intimacy of Facebook’s perceived private space show a different aspect of the “platform society.” Looking
distracts from the manipulative design of its commercial through the eyes of a cultural historian, taking a socio-tech-
and public space. nical approach, or finding a techno-economic angle, all
In contrast to Schwartz’s analysis of Facebook’s func- contributors highlight a different aspect of social platforms
tion as a dialogic user space, Heyman and Pierson pay rela- “mediating” between private and public space while recon-
tively little attention to actual users who may resist or figuring society’s online traffic. Indeed, each of these arti-
protest their (in)voluntary engagement with this platform. cles’ succinct approaches demonstrates not only the
However, they draw attention to the techno-commercial potential of applying multiple viewpoints but also the limi-
system that promotes certain dominant commercial fea- tations of letting them stand alongside each other. The chal-
tures at the expense of actual users and their freedom to lenge of studying social media platforms, in our view, is to
interact willfully. Heyman and Pierson’s conclusion that scrutinize how cultural imaginaries, user and professional
Facebook is “colonizing user’s lifeworld” makes one won- practices, technological architectures, and business models
der about the broader economic context of this techno- are constantly and intricately entangled. It is through such
commercial system. heterogeneous configurations that public space is trans-
Which brings us to the last article completing this Special formed. The “platform society” is not a static state, but an
Issue. David Nieborg questions the relationship between emerging dynamics.
affordances, users, and owners of game platforms from a It takes multidisciplinary scholarship to bring together
political economy perspective. He argues that Facebook’s the diverging vistas on these dynamics; the articles in this
economic position in the larger ecosystem of connective Special Issue are vital exercises in applying key theoretical
platforms cannot be underestimated. The world of game perspectives to a moving object of study. The next step is to
developers and game users is largely dependent on social combine them into comprehensive—yet not all-encompass-
networks (first and foremost Facebook) for the accumulation ing—analytical models; most of all, we are interested in
of economic value. Taking the free online game Candy Crush developing models that show how socio-cultural practices
Saga as a case in point, Nieborg explores how app develop- and techno-commercial strategies mutually shape and artic-
ers, such as Candy Crush’s owner King, are pivotal in gener- ulate each other.
ating and stimulating Facebook’s connective value. Arguably, Reflecting on the insights produced by the seven contri-
the network effects gained from online games’ distribution butions, it becomes clear that the central features of the
are equally profitable for both Facebook and King; however, emerging platform society should never be taken as self-
since Facebook profits from King’s activities by both accu- evident. Each actor in the heterogeneous configurations
mulating user value and advertising revenue, the social traced in this Special Issue—from cultural imaginaries to
van Dijck and Poell 5

users and from technologies to business models—plays its Declaration of Conflicting Interests
part in the ongoing transformation of public space. Too The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
often, scholars, including ourselves, have the tendency to to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
focus on one particular set of relations as the key to under-
stand how the whole is constituted. This tendency is par- Funding
ticularly problematic in the current reorganization of
publicness, in which social and cultural activity becomes The author(s) received no financial support for the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.
deeply intertwined with the techno-commercial infrastruc-
tures of social platforms. By focusing on one part of this
configuration, we tend to misinterpret the dynamic forces at Author Biographies
play. One-sided interpretations prevent us not only from José van Dijck (PhD, University of California, San Diego) is
comprehending how the rise of social platforms threatens Professor of Comparative Media Studies at the University of
the democratic character of public space but also from Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her research interests include media
appreciating the space of agency afforded to citizens and technology, media and memory, digital humanities, and digital
public institutions in actively shaping the platform society. culture.
By bringing together vital theoretical perspectives and Thomas Poell (PhD, Utrecht University) is Assistant Professor of
methodological approaches, this Special Issue presents the New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam.
essential building blocks for developing new analytical His research is focused on social media and the transformation of
models, which we hope to be more apt at capturing these public communication around the globe. http://home.medewerker.
seemingly contradictory dynamics. uva.nl/t.poell/