Week 2 notes

TTSNDM week 2 The Platform Society.pdf 

week 2 slides for more info 

Theoretical importance:

• Cultural Shifts: Digital media have become an inextricable part of cultural production, distribution, and consumption. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have altered how people create and share cultural artefacts, affecting collective identity and social relations (Castells, 2011). 

• Communication Models: Social networking platforms have moved communication from traditional one-to-many models to a many-to-many paradigm (Boyd and Ellison, 2007). This shift affects how information is distributed and perceived and acted upon. 

• Media Ecology: New media platforms are altering the media ecology, creating an environment where traditional media and new digital forms coexist and interact in complex ways (Jenkins, 2008). 

• Human Agency: The exploration of user-generated content and participatory culture reveals nuanced interactions between technology and human agency, challenging deterministic views of technology's influence on society (Fuchs, 2021).

Practical importance:

• Political Impact: Social media platforms have become tools for political mobilisation, citizen journalism, and grassroots campaigns. However, they pose risks like misinformation, echo chambers, and data privacy concerns (Tufekci, 2017). 

• Economic Models: The digital economy is increasingly driven by data generated from social networking practices. Understanding these practices is crucial for economic policy and business strategy (Srnicek, 2017). 

• Social Well-being: Social media has implications for mental health, community building, and social capital. Research can inform policy and interventions to maximise benefits and mitigate risks (Valkenburg & Peter, 2007). /// Healthy and unhealthy way of using social networking platforms.

• Ethical and Legal Considerations: Data privacy, surveillance, and digital rights are increasingly prominent, requiring academic input for ethical frameworks and legislation (Zuboff, 2019). 

• Technological Literacy: As digital platforms become central to public and private life, understanding how they operate is crucial for digital literacy, a skill becoming as fundamental as traditional literacy and numeracy (Buckingham, 2007).

Four types of social media:

• Social networking sites: Promote interpersonal contact and communication (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+) 

• User-generated content (UGC) sites: promote the exchange of creative content and blur amateur/professional distinction (e.g., YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Wikipedia) 

• Trading and marketing sitesfor exchanging or selling products (e.g., Amazon, eBay, Craigslist) 

• Play and game sites (PGSs): FarmVille, The Sims, Angry Birds//// second life 

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More than half the world uses social media (60%)

The average daily time spent on social media is two hours however will grow in future as young adults and teens have been shown to use social media a lot more. 

Facebook is in the lead because they have a larger target audience that includes older generations of users. 

This came out one year after the birth of YouTube

With a networking society you can get to information more easier, if one channel breaks then you can use another to find that same information

Social media logic 

-Programmability: The automated processes, algorithms, and codes that structure how users interact. 

-Popularity: The mechanisms through which content gains visibility and prominence. 

-Connectivity: The ways social media platforms enable connections among users and between users and content. 

-Datafication: The transformation of social actions into quantifiable data.

Pervasiveness of Data Collection

• Surveillance and Privacy Concerns

-Mass surveillance can subject a population or significant component thereof to indiscriminate monitoring, involving a systematic interference with people's right to privacy and all the rights that privacy enables, including the freedom to express yourself and to protest.

• Personalisation and Customisation 

-Personalization is all about using customer data to create a personalized experience tailored to their preferences and interests. On the other hand, customization creates a sense of ownership and control over the experience, as customers are actively involved in shaping it.

• Algorithmic Decision-Making 

-Algorithmic decision-making is the delegation of decision-making and implementation to machines. For this to be possible, a machine learning model derives conclusions which it learned by identifying patterns in a training data set.

• Economic Commodification 

-Within a capitalist economic system, commodification is the transformation of things such as goods, services, ideas, nature, personal information, people or animals into objects of trade or commodities.

• Social Sorting and Discrimination 

-Social sorting has the effect of confining gender to pre-existing categories and binaries, while at the same time casting aside the uncharacterised/uncharacterizable as “deviant” and “other”.

• Democratic Implications 

-Data from users has been used for political purposes. Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google hold the potential to alter civic engagement, thus essentially hijacking democracy, by influencing individuals toward a particular way of thinking.

• Transforming Human Experience

-The positive changes that social media has brought to human behaviour include making people broad-minded to challenge stereotypes and develop mutual respect. It has made people hungry for expanding knowledge. It has also encouraged people to pursue the career they love, to take care of themselves, and learn new skills.

• Ethical and Philosophical Questions 

-Fundamental practices of concern for direct ethical impacts on privacy include: the transfer of users' data to third parties for intrusive purposes, especially marketing, data mining, and surveillance; the use of SNS data to train facial-recognition systems or other algorithmic tools that identify, track and profile

Individual task. 

Review the ‘Introduction’ of Van Dijck J., Poell T., and de Waal M. (2018). The platform society: public values in a connective world. Oxford University Press. 

Identify the key themes discussed in this introduction, then Write one paragraph relating the topics discussed in this introduction to your everyday experiences

In the introduction the author discusses how we are living in the platform revolution, detailing how specific networking apps have been created to offer personalised services which contribute to innovation and economic growth. This relates to specific services like uber, or trainline that service the user in giving them more ways for travelling across the UK.