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

Gehl, Robert W

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1439910340 ISBN 13: 9781439910344

Publisher: Temple University Press, 2014

Synopsis

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.

 

About this title

About the Author

Robert W. Gehl is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. He is the co-editor (with Victoria Watts) of The Politics of Cultural Programming in Public Spaces.

Edition details

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1439910340
• ISBN 13: 9781439910344
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 236