Reverse Engineering Social Media : Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism

Robert Gehl's timely critique, __**Reverse Engineering Social Media**__, rigorously analyzes the ideas of social media and software engineers, using these ideas to find contradictions and fissures beneath the surfaces of glossy sites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Gehl adeptly uses a mix of software studies, science and technology studies, and political economy to reveal the histories and contexts of these social media sites. Looking backward at divisions of labor and the process of user labor, he provides case studies that illustrate how binary "Like" consumer choices hide surveillance systems that rely on users to build content for site owners who make money selling user data, and that promote a culture of anxiety and immediacy over depth. __**Reverse Engineering Social Media**__ also presents ways out of this paradox, illustrating how activists, academics, and users change social media for the better by building alternatives to the dominant social media sites. "Robert Gehl's timely critique, Reverse Engineering Social Media, rigorously analyzes the ideas of social media and software engineers, using these ideas to find contradictions and fissures beneath the surfaces of glossy sites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Gehl adeptly uses a mix of software studies, science and technology studies, and political economy to reveal the histories and contexts of these social media sites. Looking backward at divisions of labor and the process of user labor, he provides case studies that illustrate how binary "Like" consumer choices hide surveillance systems that rely on users to build content for site owners who make money selling user data, and that promote a culture of anxiety and immediacy over depth. Reverse Engineering Social Media also presents ways out of this paradox, illustrating how activists, academics, and users change social media for the better by building alternatives to the dominant social media sites. "-- Provided by publisher Contents 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction: Looking Forward and Backward: Heterogeneous Engineering of Social Media Software 14 1. The Computerized Socialbot Turing Test: Noopower and the Social Media State(s) of Mind 34 2. The Archive and the Processor: The Internal Hardware Logic of Social Media 54 3. Architecture and Implementation: Engineering Real (Software) Abstractions in Social Media 84 4. Standardizing Social Media: Technical Standards, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and the Rise of Social Media Templates 105 5. Engineering a Class for Itself: The Case of Wikipedia’s Spanish Fork Labor Strike 130 6. A Manifesto for Socialized Media 154 Notes 180 Bibliography 204 Index 228