Reverse Engineering Social Media

Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism

Robert W Gehl

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781439910351, 9781439910344
• eBook ISBN: 9781439910368
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human-Computer Interaction
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

 

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Looking Forward and Backward: Heterogeneous Engineering of Social Media Software
• 1. The Computerized Socialbot Turing Test: Noopower and the Social Media State(s) of Mind
• 2. The Archive and the Processor: The Internal Hardware Logic of Social Media
• 3. Architecture and Implementation: Engineering Real (Software) Abstractions in Social Media
• 4. Standardizing Social Media: Technical Standards, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and the Rise of Social Media Templates
• 5. Engineering a Class for Itself: The Case of Wikipedia’s Spanish Fork Labor Strike
• 6. A Manifesto for Socialized Media
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index