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Social Media: A Critical Introduction
Now more than ever, we need to understand social media - the good as well as the bad. We need critical knowledge that helps us to navigate the controversies and contradictions of this complex digital media landscape. Only then can we make informed judgements about what′s happening in our media world, and why. Showing the reader how to ask the right kinds of questions about social media, Christian Fuchs takes us on a journey across social media, delving deep into case studies on Google, Facebook, Twitter, WikiLeaks and Wikipedia. The result lays bare the structures and power relations at the heart of our media landscape. This book is the essential, critical guide for all students of media studies and sociology. Readers will never look at social media the same way again.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published December 6, 2013
34 people are currently reading
366 people want to read
About the author
Christian Fuchs
125 books55 followersChristian Fuchs is a leading critical theorist of communication and society. He is a Professor at the University of Westminster, co-editor of the open access journal tripleC: Communication, Capitalism and Critique, and the author of Digital Demagogue (Pluto, 2018) and Social Media: A Critical Introduction (Sage, 2017) amongst other works.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
August 18, 2016
A must read for the social media researcher.
April 1, 2015
Crap. Typically critical theory infused with Marxist propaganda. Criticisms of social media are valid, but exaggerated beyond hyperbole. Author ignores positive externalities of social media by assuming they must be universal to be worthwhile. Ignores that criticisms of social media could also be levied against mainstream media and the coffee shops of Habermas' public sphere. Alternatives offered are either already partly in existence or so idealistic as to be fantasy. In short, favors what sounds nice over what actually works.
September 29, 2016
Christian Fuchs'un "Social Media: A Critical Introduction" isimli kitabının Notabene tarafından özenle yapıldığı belli olan bu çevirisi akademik olarak bir ders kaynağı olarak da kullanılabilecek türden. Özellikle sosyal ağlara ilişkin özgün ve Marksist temelli bir kavrayış oturtmak istiyorsanız bana kalırsa mantıklı bir başlangıç olacaktır.
December 1, 2016
Discusses so much that I want to examine in my research. The recommended readings and exercises at the end of each chapter is a great tool.
May 25, 2018
1 – What is a Critical Introduction to Social Media?
p.2 – The Huffington Post (HP) is the most popular news blog in the world. Arianna Huffington started it in 2005. It has been based on the contributions of many unpaid voluntary bloggers. In 2011, AOL bought HP for US$315 million and turned it into a profit-oriented business.
p.15 – How can one define critical theory? Ben Agger (2006) argues that critical social theory is based on seven foundations:
• It argues for the possibility of a better future without domination and exploitation
• It sees domination as a structural phenomenon
• It shows how humans, who live in structures of domination, tend to reproduce these structures in false consciousness
• It is interesting in everyday life such as the workplace and the family
• It conceives structure and agency as dialectical
• It sees liberation as a process that must be accomplished by the oppressed and exploited themselves
Critical theory questions all thought and practices that justify or uphold domination and exploitation. Domination means that one group benefits at the expense of others and has the means of violence at hand that they can use for upholding the situation where the one benefits at the expense of others. Exploitation is a specific from of domination, in which one group controls property and has the means to force others to work so that they produce goods or property that they do not own themselves, but that the owning class controls.
p.16 – Dialectical reasoning is a philosophical method for understanding the world. The dialectical method identifies contradiction. Contradictions are “the source of all dialectics” (Marx 1867, 744). A contradiction is a tension between two poles that require each other to exist, but have opposing qualities.
In a contradiction, one pole of the dialectic can only exist because the opposing pole exists: they require and exclude each other at the same time.
p.20 – Critical theory is ethical. It has a “concern with human happiness” ( Marcuse 1988, 135). It is a critique of domination and exploitation.
The goal of critical theory is the transformation of society as a whole so that a “society without injustice” emerges (Horkheimer 2002, 221).
p.23 – Capitalist media are modes of reification in a double sense. First, they reduce humans to the status of consumers of advertisements and commodities. Second, culture is, in capitalism, to a large degree connected to the commodity form: there are cultural commodities that are bought by consumers and audience commodities that the media consumers become themselves by being sold as an audience to the capitalist media’s advertising clients.
2 – What Are Social Media and Big Data?
p.34 – The term “web 2.0” was coined in 2005 by Tim O’Reilly, the founder of the publishing house O’Reilly Media, which focuses on the area of computer technology. He lists the following main characteristics of web 2.0:
• Radical de-centralization
• Radical trust
• Participation instead of publishing
• Users as contributors
• Rich user experience
• Web as platform
• Control of one’s own data
• Collective intelligence
• Play
p.35 – In 2000, a crisis of the Internet economy emerged. The inflow of financial capital had driven up the market values of many Internet companies, but profits could not hold up with the promises of high market values. The result was a financial bubble (the so-called dot-com bubble) that burst in 2000, resulting in many star-up Internet companies going bankrupt. They were mainly based on venture capital financial investments and the hope of delivering profits in the future, and this resulted in a gap between share values and accumulated profits.
Web 2.0 is based on the exploitation of free labour (Terranova 2004).
Alice Marwick (2013) argues that social media foster status-seeking behaviour and thereby “promote the infiltration of marketing and advertising techniques into relationships and social behaviour” (93). Social media “is predicated in the cultural logic of celebrity, according to which the highest value is given to mediation, visibility, and attention” (14).
p.36 – Social capital is, according to Pierre Bourdieu (1986, 122), “a capital of social connections, honourability and respectability,” whereas cultural capital has to do with reputation. Competitive social media foster the branding, quantification, marketization, commodification, capitalization of the self. Although we speak of “social” media, many contemporary “social” media platforms’ logic is quite individualistic.
Corporate imperialism – corporate media chains dominate the Internet economy.
Marketing and sharing ideology – Web 2.0 and social media constitute a marketing ideology (Scholz 2008) that aims at attracting investors by trying to convince them that the Internet is constantly renewing itself and thereby bringing about new business opportunities.
Simplistic notion of participation – Web 2.0 discourse advances a minimalist notion of participation
Techno-determinism – social media optimism is based on techno-deterministic ideologies of cyber-utopianism and Internet-centrism that only postulate advantages for businesses and society without taking into account the realities of exploitation and the contradictions of capitalism.
p.37 – Matthew Allen (2012) and Trebor Scholz (2008) argue that social media applications are not new and that their origins can be traced back to years earlier than 2005. Blogs were already around at the end of the 1990s, the wiki technology was suggested by Ward Cunningham in 1994 and first released in 1995, social networking sites already existed in 1995 (Classmates) and in 1997 (Sixdegrees), Google was founded in 1999.
p.38 – Social media means “networked information services designed to support in-depth social interaction, community formation, collaborative opportunities and collaborative work” (Hunsinger and Senft 2014, 1).
p.42 – Ferdinand Tönnies argues that “the very existence of Gemeinschaft [community] rests in the consciousness of belonging together and the affirmation of the condition of mutual dependence” (Tönnies 1988, 69)., whereas Gesellschaft (society) for him is a concept in which “reference is only to the objective fact of a unity based on common traits and activities and other external phenomena (67). Communities are about feelings of togetherness and values.
p.45 – Information (cognition), communication and co-operation are three nested and integrated modes of sociality (Horkheimer 2013).
p.52 – Big data refers to the movement to analyze the increasingly vast amounts of information stored in multiple locations, but mainly online and primarily in the cloud (Mosco 2014, 177), in order to analyze and predict the development of certain aspects of society or nature.
p.54 – Facebook and Google are not communications companies. They do not sell access to communications, they sell big data for advertising purposes. They are the world’s largest advertising agencies that operate as big data collection and commodification machines.
p.56 – Environmental problems – Big data is an exacerbation of environmental problems because of the consumption of the large amounts of energy needed for keeping data centers and cloud storage going and the increase of digital media technology use with short-life-time that is as e-waste dumped into developing countries. In 2012, data centers used electricity that equals the output of 30 nuclear power plants. Data centers tend to use diesel generators as back-up power supply systems. They produce pollutants that are released into the air and the soil.
3 – Social Media as Participatory Culture
p.67 – Henry Jenkins defines participatory as a culture with:
• Relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
• Strong support for creating and sharing creations with others
• Some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
• Members who believe that their contributions matter
• Members who feel some degrees of social connection with one another
p.74 – Scholars like Jenkins tend to overstate the creativity and activity of users on the web. Creativity is a force that enables Internet prosumers commodification, the commodification and exploitation of the users’ attentions, activities and the data they generate. Creativity is not outside or alongside exploitation on web 2.0. it is its very foundation.
p.76 – The digital labor debate is a discourse that has emerged in Critical Media and Communication Studies with the rise of social media. It focuses on the analysis of unpaid user labor and other forms of labor (such as slave labor in Africa, highly-exploited ICT manufacturing work) that are necessary for capital accumulation in the ICT industries.
p.81 – To talk about participation means for me to always ask questions about democracy; that is, how economic, political and cultural power in social systems is distributed.
p.82 – Henry Jenkins reduces the notion of participation to a cultural dimension, ignoring the broad notion of participatory democracy and its implications for the Internet. An Internet that is dominated by corporations that accumulate capital by exploiting and commodifying users can never, in the theory of participatory democracy, be participatory and the cultural expressions of it cannot be expressions of participation. Jenkins especially neglects ownership as an aspect of participation and does not give attention to aspects of class and capitalism.
5 – The Power and Political Economy of Social Media
p.149 – Contemporary social media are not participatory: large companies that centralize attention and visibility and marginalize politics, especially alternative politics, dominate them.
p.150 – Corporate social media use capital accumulation models that are based on the exploitation of of the unpaid labor of Internet users and on the commodification of user-generated data and data about user behavior that is sold as commodity to advertisers. Targeted advertising and economic surveillance are important aspects of this accumulation model.
The exploitation of the Internet prosumers’ digital labor is an expression of a stage of capitalism, in which the boundaries between play and labor have become fuzzy and the exploitation of play labor has become a new principle. Exploitation tends to feel like fun and becomes part of free time.
p.2 – The Huffington Post (HP) is the most popular news blog in the world. Arianna Huffington started it in 2005. It has been based on the contributions of many unpaid voluntary bloggers. In 2011, AOL bought HP for US$315 million and turned it into a profit-oriented business.
p.15 – How can one define critical theory? Ben Agger (2006) argues that critical social theory is based on seven foundations:
• It argues for the possibility of a better future without domination and exploitation
• It sees domination as a structural phenomenon
• It shows how humans, who live in structures of domination, tend to reproduce these structures in false consciousness
• It is interesting in everyday life such as the workplace and the family
• It conceives structure and agency as dialectical
• It sees liberation as a process that must be accomplished by the oppressed and exploited themselves
Critical theory questions all thought and practices that justify or uphold domination and exploitation. Domination means that one group benefits at the expense of others and has the means of violence at hand that they can use for upholding the situation where the one benefits at the expense of others. Exploitation is a specific from of domination, in which one group controls property and has the means to force others to work so that they produce goods or property that they do not own themselves, but that the owning class controls.
p.16 – Dialectical reasoning is a philosophical method for understanding the world. The dialectical method identifies contradiction. Contradictions are “the source of all dialectics” (Marx 1867, 744). A contradiction is a tension between two poles that require each other to exist, but have opposing qualities.
In a contradiction, one pole of the dialectic can only exist because the opposing pole exists: they require and exclude each other at the same time.
p.20 – Critical theory is ethical. It has a “concern with human happiness” ( Marcuse 1988, 135). It is a critique of domination and exploitation.
The goal of critical theory is the transformation of society as a whole so that a “society without injustice” emerges (Horkheimer 2002, 221).
p.23 – Capitalist media are modes of reification in a double sense. First, they reduce humans to the status of consumers of advertisements and commodities. Second, culture is, in capitalism, to a large degree connected to the commodity form: there are cultural commodities that are bought by consumers and audience commodities that the media consumers become themselves by being sold as an audience to the capitalist media’s advertising clients.
2 – What Are Social Media and Big Data?
p.34 – The term “web 2.0” was coined in 2005 by Tim O’Reilly, the founder of the publishing house O’Reilly Media, which focuses on the area of computer technology. He lists the following main characteristics of web 2.0:
• Radical de-centralization
• Radical trust
• Participation instead of publishing
• Users as contributors
• Rich user experience
• Web as platform
• Control of one’s own data
• Collective intelligence
• Play
p.35 – In 2000, a crisis of the Internet economy emerged. The inflow of financial capital had driven up the market values of many Internet companies, but profits could not hold up with the promises of high market values. The result was a financial bubble (the so-called dot-com bubble) that burst in 2000, resulting in many star-up Internet companies going bankrupt. They were mainly based on venture capital financial investments and the hope of delivering profits in the future, and this resulted in a gap between share values and accumulated profits.
Web 2.0 is based on the exploitation of free labour (Terranova 2004).
Alice Marwick (2013) argues that social media foster status-seeking behaviour and thereby “promote the infiltration of marketing and advertising techniques into relationships and social behaviour” (93). Social media “is predicated in the cultural logic of celebrity, according to which the highest value is given to mediation, visibility, and attention” (14).
p.36 – Social capital is, according to Pierre Bourdieu (1986, 122), “a capital of social connections, honourability and respectability,” whereas cultural capital has to do with reputation. Competitive social media foster the branding, quantification, marketization, commodification, capitalization of the self. Although we speak of “social” media, many contemporary “social” media platforms’ logic is quite individualistic.
Corporate imperialism – corporate media chains dominate the Internet economy.
Marketing and sharing ideology – Web 2.0 and social media constitute a marketing ideology (Scholz 2008) that aims at attracting investors by trying to convince them that the Internet is constantly renewing itself and thereby bringing about new business opportunities.
Simplistic notion of participation – Web 2.0 discourse advances a minimalist notion of participation
Techno-determinism – social media optimism is based on techno-deterministic ideologies of cyber-utopianism and Internet-centrism that only postulate advantages for businesses and society without taking into account the realities of exploitation and the contradictions of capitalism.
p.37 – Matthew Allen (2012) and Trebor Scholz (2008) argue that social media applications are not new and that their origins can be traced back to years earlier than 2005. Blogs were already around at the end of the 1990s, the wiki technology was suggested by Ward Cunningham in 1994 and first released in 1995, social networking sites already existed in 1995 (Classmates) and in 1997 (Sixdegrees), Google was founded in 1999.
p.38 – Social media means “networked information services designed to support in-depth social interaction, community formation, collaborative opportunities and collaborative work” (Hunsinger and Senft 2014, 1).
p.42 – Ferdinand Tönnies argues that “the very existence of Gemeinschaft [community] rests in the consciousness of belonging together and the affirmation of the condition of mutual dependence” (Tönnies 1988, 69)., whereas Gesellschaft (society) for him is a concept in which “reference is only to the objective fact of a unity based on common traits and activities and other external phenomena (67). Communities are about feelings of togetherness and values.
p.45 – Information (cognition), communication and co-operation are three nested and integrated modes of sociality (Horkheimer 2013).
p.52 – Big data refers to the movement to analyze the increasingly vast amounts of information stored in multiple locations, but mainly online and primarily in the cloud (Mosco 2014, 177), in order to analyze and predict the development of certain aspects of society or nature.
p.54 – Facebook and Google are not communications companies. They do not sell access to communications, they sell big data for advertising purposes. They are the world’s largest advertising agencies that operate as big data collection and commodification machines.
p.56 – Environmental problems – Big data is an exacerbation of environmental problems because of the consumption of the large amounts of energy needed for keeping data centers and cloud storage going and the increase of digital media technology use with short-life-time that is as e-waste dumped into developing countries. In 2012, data centers used electricity that equals the output of 30 nuclear power plants. Data centers tend to use diesel generators as back-up power supply systems. They produce pollutants that are released into the air and the soil.
3 – Social Media as Participatory Culture
p.67 – Henry Jenkins defines participatory as a culture with:
• Relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement
• Strong support for creating and sharing creations with others
• Some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most experienced is passed along to novices
• Members who believe that their contributions matter
• Members who feel some degrees of social connection with one another
p.74 – Scholars like Jenkins tend to overstate the creativity and activity of users on the web. Creativity is a force that enables Internet prosumers commodification, the commodification and exploitation of the users’ attentions, activities and the data they generate. Creativity is not outside or alongside exploitation on web 2.0. it is its very foundation.
p.76 – The digital labor debate is a discourse that has emerged in Critical Media and Communication Studies with the rise of social media. It focuses on the analysis of unpaid user labor and other forms of labor (such as slave labor in Africa, highly-exploited ICT manufacturing work) that are necessary for capital accumulation in the ICT industries.
p.81 – To talk about participation means for me to always ask questions about democracy; that is, how economic, political and cultural power in social systems is distributed.
p.82 – Henry Jenkins reduces the notion of participation to a cultural dimension, ignoring the broad notion of participatory democracy and its implications for the Internet. An Internet that is dominated by corporations that accumulate capital by exploiting and commodifying users can never, in the theory of participatory democracy, be participatory and the cultural expressions of it cannot be expressions of participation. Jenkins especially neglects ownership as an aspect of participation and does not give attention to aspects of class and capitalism.
5 – The Power and Political Economy of Social Media
p.149 – Contemporary social media are not participatory: large companies that centralize attention and visibility and marginalize politics, especially alternative politics, dominate them.
p.150 – Corporate social media use capital accumulation models that are based on the exploitation of of the unpaid labor of Internet users and on the commodification of user-generated data and data about user behavior that is sold as commodity to advertisers. Targeted advertising and economic surveillance are important aspects of this accumulation model.
The exploitation of the Internet prosumers’ digital labor is an expression of a stage of capitalism, in which the boundaries between play and labor have become fuzzy and the exploitation of play labor has become a new principle. Exploitation tends to feel like fun and becomes part of free time.
August 25, 2021
Lacks a counter argument imo. Uni reading. Full notes on notion.
December 22, 2025
Holy snoozefest
August 18, 2015
Es un manual muy interesante para aproximarse al análisis cualitativo de las redes sociales. Se estructura en temas importantes para el mundo académico, si bien el lenguaje está enfocado también para trabajadores del Social Media que quieran ir más allá. Trata incluso temas sobre el poder y el control, lo cual es de muy agradecer.
En el final de cada capítulo propone ejercicios y lecturas complementarias, como si fuera un libro para profesores de Social Media de estudios superiores, aplicable para debates en grupo, lo cual puede ser muy enriquecedor.
Tiene análisis muy interesantes y me ha servido estos meses para abrir mi apetito sobre el estudio en Social Media, y profundizar en la aplicación de la sociología y la antropología sobre este ámbito, con adaptaciones metodológicas. Sin embargo, es un poco intransigente con algunos autores (especialmente con Manuel Castells), otras veces ofrece críticas muy interesantes sobre autores bestselleros sobre lo digital que se toman como palabra de santo y son muy sesgadas sus aportaciones, lo cual siempre es positivo para enriquecer nuestra visión sobre la Sociedad de la Información.
Advertir que es un arduo defensor de la escuela marxista, ofreciendo aplicaciones congruentes -al menos ahora me lo parece- en los estudios de Social Media, introduciendo conceptos de análisis socioeconómicos también muy apropiados, si bien en ocasiones puede parecer un poco reiterativo, especialmente hacia la segunda mitad.
Es un libro que debe considerarse como un manual para ir trabajando y tenerlo para consultar.
Lo recomiendo encarecidamente para trabajadores Social Media que quieran ir más allá de lo que ya se hace :)
En el final de cada capítulo propone ejercicios y lecturas complementarias, como si fuera un libro para profesores de Social Media de estudios superiores, aplicable para debates en grupo, lo cual puede ser muy enriquecedor.
Tiene análisis muy interesantes y me ha servido estos meses para abrir mi apetito sobre el estudio en Social Media, y profundizar en la aplicación de la sociología y la antropología sobre este ámbito, con adaptaciones metodológicas. Sin embargo, es un poco intransigente con algunos autores (especialmente con Manuel Castells), otras veces ofrece críticas muy interesantes sobre autores bestselleros sobre lo digital que se toman como palabra de santo y son muy sesgadas sus aportaciones, lo cual siempre es positivo para enriquecer nuestra visión sobre la Sociedad de la Información.
Advertir que es un arduo defensor de la escuela marxista, ofreciendo aplicaciones congruentes -al menos ahora me lo parece- en los estudios de Social Media, introduciendo conceptos de análisis socioeconómicos también muy apropiados, si bien en ocasiones puede parecer un poco reiterativo, especialmente hacia la segunda mitad.
Es un libro que debe considerarse como un manual para ir trabajando y tenerlo para consultar.
Lo recomiendo encarecidamente para trabajadores Social Media que quieran ir más allá de lo que ya se hace :)
August 30, 2022
was a listed reading for Uni
slightly outdated and also mildly pessimistic
I would agree with others in the reviews that it lacked counter argument which is what makes this book feel less objective and more opinionated.
But it still introduces all social + media related topics and theories that can be critically researched further by the reader. There's tons of listed readings in it for that too!
And I do agree with the argument in the book that the current internet is class-divided because of the capitalistic nature of our society.
slightly outdated and also mildly pessimistic
I would agree with others in the reviews that it lacked counter argument which is what makes this book feel less objective and more opinionated.
But it still introduces all social + media related topics and theories that can be critically researched further by the reader. There's tons of listed readings in it for that too!
And I do agree with the argument in the book that the current internet is class-divided because of the capitalistic nature of our society.
September 18, 2018
A surprisingly well-written and entertaining book that effectively presents a different view on the world of social media.
December 28, 2020
Emphasis on the "critical" :)
Fuchs is an amazing scholar and this works shows it in great detail. Just be aware that this work is highly critical of social media and big tech corporations, just as Fuchs has always been very critical of capitalism more broadly. It focuses a lot on economic perspectives.
I would consider assigning selections from this to a class on social media, but I would likely balance it with readings coming from other perspectives and theoretical backgrounds as well.
Fuchs is an amazing scholar and this works shows it in great detail. Just be aware that this work is highly critical of social media and big tech corporations, just as Fuchs has always been very critical of capitalism more broadly. It focuses a lot on economic perspectives.
I would consider assigning selections from this to a class on social media, but I would likely balance it with readings coming from other perspectives and theoretical backgrounds as well.
October 3, 2020
Not my wheelhouse. I would not have tackled this were it not for an assignment. I will admit, though, that the assignment left five chapters untouched, which I could not abide and so I finished the book on my own. I did learn some things about the internet and social media platforms, but wow - this critical theory literature is beyond my ken. Didn't like it.
February 16, 2019
Very biased. The author thinks that Social Media is the latest evil invention of Capitalism. It can be summarized in one sentence «We all work for Google». I gave the book two stars because it has some interesting discussions.
June 29, 2021
In a world that people always look at the benefits of social media we must and we need to look on the other side of the social media.this book discuss about the disadvantage of the social media and I think everyone should read this book because we need the critical mind to prevent dogmatism
Want to read
April 8, 2024302.23 Fuc
September 22, 2018
Very interesting book, that's help me a lot in my PhD studies
it talks about sociology of web 2.0 and the power of each social network sites
....I recommended it for social media researchers
it talks about sociology of web 2.0 and the power of each social network sites
....I recommended it for social media researchers
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews