The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media

by José van Dijck

Social media penetrate our Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and many other platforms define daily habits of communication and creative production. This book studies the rise of social media, providing both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of major platforms in the context of a rapidly changing ecosystem of connective media. Author José van Dijck offers an analytical prism that can be used to view techno-cultural as well as socio-economic aspects of this transformation as well as to examine shared ideological principles between major social media platforms. This fascinating study will appeal to all readers interested in social media.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Sociology, Academic, Technology, Research, Social Media

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

José van Dijck is a professor of Comparative Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam.

Reviews

[Jacqueline · Rating 5 out of 5]

*Update* re-read this 2 years later (for a class I teach). Still love it & need to go back and incorporate it into some of my current research.

It's been a long time since I've written "yes" and "!!!" in the margins of a book as frequently as this one. If you study social media at all, I highly recommend this book. She does a great job mapping out the complex nuances and broader contexts of the contemporary social media ecosystem. I really appreciate her organized & conceptual model of analysis.

[Olivia Regis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es un buen libro pero un poco repetitivo por momentos.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author clearly presents the history of six social media platforms in order to show their interconnected nature and determine what lessons can be learned for future sites and connections.

[Fernando · Rating 5 out of 5]

He quedado más decepcionado de las redes sociales después de leer este libro . Desde un principio he sido partidario de usarlas no sólo para afianzar las amistades y la lista de conocidos sino para promover y compartir información útil. Twitter era concebido así en un principio, pero pronto todas las plataformas adoptaron los mismos criterios de socialidad: popularidad, estandarización, inmediatez, publicidad, comercialización, tendencias etc. Es decepcionante observar como las redes sociales de prestan a la corrupción del debate público, lo extreman en visiones militantes o en simple ignorancia. Cómo escapar de tanta falsedad y banalidad. Hay que tener un criterio formado y aún así pierdes el horizonte en un mar de "información" de dudosa calidad y cooptada por "líderes de opinión" que en la realidad offline suelen coincidir con los liderazgos de farándula, moda o carisma. Sin duda un interesante libro que permite formar un juicio crítico de los medios conectivos.

[Anssi Grekula · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a fascinating, although semi heavy read. The author presented a 6-fold model to dissect a given social media platform, and then applied this model to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and Wikipedia. For each "microsystem" she also reassembled, or drew together a new perspective on each case. The model, inspired by Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Manuel Castell's political economy, felt useful to me as a reader. However, it was quite difficult to follow the logic of the reassemblage. In the end van Dijck painted a picture of the whole ecosystem, the culture of connectivity, as emerging from the interlinkedness of the aforementioned as well as other platforms together.

My key takeaway from the book was this: Social media platforms recode, recast, or engineer people's social interactions and connectedness into measurable, digital connectivity, which has an effect on how people interact with each other. The effect follows the business imperatives (or other factors such as owners' interests) of said platforms and not necessarily what the people see as moral, useful or meaningful.

One thing that bugged me was van Dijck's use of the expression "coding technologies". I wasn't sure whether she was meaning different ways to "code" a body of text, as in qualitative research methods, or programming. I decided to think "software technologies" instead. But I had missed the point. What she refers to is the technologies of coding (or casting) social activities into computational architectures. I was about to justify one-star drop from 5 to 4 by this, but now I can't, so let's just say that the only reason I don't give 5/5 stars is that the book was not mind-blowing.

But when Wikipedia was characterized as an "adhocracy", I laughed :)

[Anjar Priandoyo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good book on Social Media Analysis, as this book written in 2013, therefore it already captures Web 2.0 phenomenon. It used "platforms as microsystem perspective" that based on ANT and political economy. The analysis based on FB, Twitter, Flickr, Google, and Wiki. I think the most important thing from this book is the argument on "Connectivity", basically, Social Media will not replace "traditional communication" e.g phone, email and "traditional entertainment" e.g book, movie, but creating a new layer of interaction which a complement of a currently available form of exchanging information.

[W. D. Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this methodology is brilliant. I loved her critical look at the systems and cycles that develop social media.

It is a textbook in the sense that it’s densely written. I would have loved more narrative in her analogy. It’s also incredibly outdated. My hope is that she will be motivated to write a new book using these same methodology. It’s sincerely dope. Get thru the techy language and you will have a much better vocabulary around the science, technology, and business operations involved with social media.

[Miroslaw Aleksander · Rating 3 out of 5]

A worthwhile book covering the emergence of social media, paying attention more to the issue of monetizing user data, and the conflict between platform owners and users. However, the book was a slog to read through - perhaps because some of it reiterated technical issues I know about, or because of the structure (both can be seen as str0ng points: the first fills in gaps of knowledge for those less knowledgeable on the subject, the other facilitates the independence of chapters, which is useful if somebody wants to just read one chapter).

[Thục Yên · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good start for anyone who wants to understand social media from a sociological perspective. The beginning of the book seems to be a bit dry with a lot of theories and paradigms, but the book gets more and more interesting when the author uses this framework to scrutinize 5 major social network sites in the following chapters. My only wish is that the author wrote this book in 2018, not 2013, so she could provide analysis with up-to-date functions and changes in those social networks.

[Kristupas Čeilutka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good albeit somewhat outdated. Also at times somewhat superficial, focusing too much on the biographical details (so to say) of various platforms rather than their implications for sociality. Still, an important read.

[Olena Churanova · Rating 4 out of 5]

Basic read for social media researchers

[Luciano · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish there was a 2017 sequel.

[Jesse Couture · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful, with well-articulated arguments that invite serious reflection about the ways in and through which we (and those around us) engage with social networks.

[Heyyawn · Rating 1 out of 5]

看的是中文版《连接：社交媒体批评史》。这本书知识太浅了，收获非常少，在两节45分钟的课上就看完了，心疼浪费的49元。

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book to better know social media.

[David Sanchez · Rating 4 out of 5]

U

[Madi Thompson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although there were some insightful points, this book is vastly outdated considering how far ai and social media has grown within the last decade since publication

[guyyak · Rating 1 out of 5]

pure academia | the writer invents unnecessary polysyllabic words instead of using clear and concise english | perhaps because she is not a native speaker | the book bored this reader to sobs ||

the book gets one star simply for its jacket design | which is unnecessary because i read via an epub ||

[Marai · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vaya, esto cambia un poco las cosas...

[Cassey · Rating 4 out of 5]

All kinds of interesting and useful.

[jeni b · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another essential resource addition for my advanced research paper regarding social media and human connections. Keenly informative.