Meaning in the Age of Social Media

G. Langlois

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137356611
• Categoría: Scienze sociali
• Categoría: Scienze della comunicazione

The search for meaning is an essential human activity. It is not just about agreeing on some definitions about the world, objects, and people; it is an ethical process of opening up to find new possibilities. Langlois uses case studies of social media platforms (including Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon) to revisit traditional conceptions of meaning.

Chapter 1

Governing Meaning*

In the introduction, I defined meaning as the space where the transition from signification to making sense problematically unfolds, where words, images, and sounds potentially cease to be simply signs and become existential markers through which we experience belonging (or not) in the world, our being (or failing to be) with others. In the social media environment, meaning has become a technological and commercial process. We now have a handful of social media corporations (Google, Facebook, and Twitter in North America) that dominate the field and market of participatory communication. There is, of course, the notable exception of Wikipedia as a not-for-profit entity, but the fact is that what we understand as social media are corporations that derive a profit out of users’ communication.

Curiously enough, the corporate aspects of social media tend not to be included in many analyses examining the formation of new communicative practices on social media, for instance, the practices that shape participatory culture (Jenkins 2006b). We could say that the field is divided between the study of social media communication on the one hand, and the political economy of social media on the other. On the one hand, we have analyses of how users harness the power of social media in order to make themselves heard, be it at the political or intimate level. On the other hand, we have analyses of the economic and technological structure of corporate social media that draw an altogether grimmer picture of invasion of privacy and widespread commodification of personal data. On the one hand, there is a celebration of free communication, and on the other, a series of warnings about our loss of control over our data. Or to put it another way, on the one hand, a focus on the human users, and on the other, a focus on the technological and economic structure of software platforms. My main point in this chapter is to reconcile these two positions, because meaning is not simply a human process anymore, but a technological, and by extension, a commercial one.

This divide in the field is important if we want to understand the conditions within which meaning making takes place on social media platforms. The question that I would like to raise in this chapter is about which processes are now involved in meaning making beyond what we human users produce as content.

My approach here is to look at the context of meaning before delving into an analysis of the processes that are involved in the transition from signification to making sense. By context, I mean the specific dynamics and elements that create the possibility of meaning (Slack and Wise 2005a, 128). A strict separation between the context of meaning and meaning itself is artificial. However, I find it necessary to make this separation because common theoretical and methodological approaches to meaning, especially those dealing primarily with signification, tend to ignore the question of context altogether—that is, the material, technological, economic, political, and nonlinguistic processes that form the architecture, or, as I will later define it, the platform through which a phenomenon such as meaning is made possible. By looking at the current participatory context of meaning, I want to raise the following questions: Who are the actors, organizations, and processes that invest in the production and circulation of meaning and create the social media context? What kinds of communication architecture are being developed to make online meaning possible and what interests do they reflect? What are the emerging agreed upon understandings of meaning, both as a cultural, social, political, human, and technological practice and, increasingly, as a profitable commodity? And finally, what kinds of limitations and possibilities does this context impose on the general concept of meaning? In pursuing these questions, I want to get away from the idea that the participatory environment is just about users being free to express themselves, and I want to highlight that the participatory model that we are now experiencing is developed by specific commercial interests.

For our purposes, context includes not only a diverse set of processes and elements such as media technologies and existing cultural norms, values, and practices, but also economic and political processes such as structures of ownership, content regulations, technical regulations, industry standards, and media policies. Meaning is not a stable or homogeneous set of processes. Rather, the internal logics of meaning are dependent on the context that makes meaning possible in the first place. For instance, the possibilities for meaning differ depending on whether we are dealing with a face-to-face or phone conversation. So media technologies, along with the institutional, political, economic, and cultural dynamics within which they are developed, build a specific context for meaning. In particular, the proliferation of content on social media—where anybody can post anything—introduces a radically different communication context, which in turn affects how we approach meaning. Therefore, examining the changes in meaning production, storage, and circulation introduced by social media technologies is crucial. However, I will also argue in this chapter that examining only the cultural impact of participatory technologies does not provide the full picture; it is also important to consider economic and political factors. In particular, the fact that social media provide greater freedom of expression has to be squared with the for-profit motive behind the most popular platforms.

For this reason, I want to insist on questions of political economy, because the development of business models that primarily invest in user-produced content and behaviors on social media have a definite influence on how meaning is shaped and defined. My argument is that the largely for-profit environment that characterizes the participatory environment has created a new context for meaning, a context that requires the ever- intensifying production and circulation of meaning in order to advance a commercial imperative. One could say that with the rise of commercial media in the twentieth century, meaning became a business, and that social media are not new in this respect. Indeed, the more meaningful and popular a media content is for an audience, the more that audience is likely to stick with the platform that delivers this content and constitute itself into a target for advertising and marketing. Yet, if we look at the specific technologies and communicative possibilities offered by social media, we can see that there has been a radical shift in the treatment of meaning within a broader commercial context. The uniqueness of the social media model with regard to the commercialization of meaning is as follows:

1. No limitation on content: Whereas previous corporate media, for economic and technical reasons, had to limit their production of meaning and balance quality and cost of production, the social media environment is characterized by the proliferation of many kinds of meaning. A Hollywood director might post an excerpt from his or her upcoming feature on YouTube, while I can upload low-quality short footage taken with my cell phone.

2. Lessened interest in content: This proliferation of meaning produced by users is key, because it means that social media platforms are moving away from focusing on the content of a message: they are less in the business of regulating what is being posted and have been refusing legal responsibility for it. To continue with the example of YouTube, for instance, it is up to the copyright owner to flag a video as breaking copyright law. YouTube and most other social media platforms are reluctant to become censors or content regulators except, sometimes, in specific and limited cases involving extremely sensitive content, such as hate speech or pornography. Indeed, social media corporations are not in the business of producing content: they are in the business of hosting and retrieving large amounts of information.

3. A business of establishing meaningful connections through personalization: Social media platforms may have distanced themselves from content, but that does not mean they have given up on meaning altogether. Their business model is still largely advertising based, and their task is to make sure the right advertisement goes to the right potential consumer (and as we will see in chapters 3 and 4, their task is also to transform the user into a consumer). Social media platforms exist to match users and objects of consumption through creating personalized user profiles. They therefore focus on generating what is meaningful for us.

4. A focus on meaningfulness: Social media platforms are less involved in the content of meaning, but are more focused on assigning degrees of meaningfulness for different types of content and practices, both user-produced and advertising-based. What needs to be studied, therefore, is the question of how meaningfulness is articulated with economic value. From a platform perspective, what matters is not the actual content; rather, it is its relevance for different types of users. The same content might be meaningful to me, but meaningless to you, and the platform is in charge of figuring out such differences.

These four characteristics form the core of the argument in this chapter. They will be used to further understand what I call the politics and governance of meaning on participatory platforms. I define politics in a broad sense as the ensemble of power relations that form the specific context within which meaning can take place. Power relations should not be understood solely as restrictive or controlling, but also as productive, in that they define the conditions under which meaning is possible (Foucault 1980a). By governance, I mean a set of processes used to manage the production and circulation of meaning. Politics and governance are complementary concepts: examining the politics of meaning is helpful to understand how specific modes of meaning production and distribution appear, while focusing on the question of governance serves to identify who and what is being favored in these specific modes of meaning production and circulation. In other words, in order to understand what meaning in the participatory environment is, we need, first, to identify the actual processes and relations that make meaning possible in the first place (the politics of meaning), and second, to understand who has control over these processes and relations and can therefore shape them (the governance of meaning).

From Meaning to Meaningfulness

The social media context is made up of many online entities, among which a handful have risen to prominence. Most of these entities have a recognizable focus—social connections on Facebook and other social networks, video upload and sharing on YouTube, picture uploading and sharing on Flickr, microblogging on Twitter, encyclopedic articles on Wikipedia—although there are all-purpose social media entities, such as Google, that act as a search engine, social network, email provider, and multimedia-content provider. All social media entities allow for the publishing and sharing of multimedia content and the building of relationships among users and between users and content. For instance, one can share with friends and comment on a YouTube video on Facebook. Oftentimes, social media are so simple to use that the question of how they actually work is never raised. However, it is crucial to go beyond first impressions at the user-interface level and to have a closer look at the technological infrastructure of social media. The development, from the early 2000s onward, of the so-called Web 2.0 (O’Reilly 2005) and subsequent rise of a participatory culture (Jenkins 2006b) was based on two new characteristics (Langlois et al. 2009). The first was to rely primarily on users to produce content, rather than on specialists (i.e., journalists, editors). Wikipedia, for instance, invites anybody to participate in the writing of encyclopedia articles, and Amazon relies mostly on users to review and rate products, while YouTube has become a hub for amateur video production. The second characteristic follows from the first: the development of software platforms that simplify the publication process at the user level. Previously, in order to post a text, video, or picture online, one had to learn HTML coding. In the social media environment, by contrast, one has only to type or copy and paste an image or sound file and press the “publish” button. As Cramer and Fuller (2008, 148–149) note, this simplification of publishing on the user side leads to more complexity on the software side. Whereas the Web 1.0 environment was characterized by a fairly simple code for publishing content online based on the HTML/HTTP protocols, in the Web 2.0 environment there has been a multiplication of code and software to automatically publish content online and manage information. Each social media entity tends to develop its own type of software applications and modules that connect to each other. The overall set of connected software modules is commonly called a software platform.

As explained in the introduction, software is the key to understanding new media in general: software links hardware to users, and software creates the symbolic environment through which users can express themselves (Chun 2005). All the functions that we interact with when we communicate online—file folders, buttons, home page, and so on—tend to be symbolic functions. The software is in charge of transforming those symbolic functions into commands that can be understood by other pieces of software and hardware. This is the general model for understanding how new media work. With social media platforms, however, there tends to be a proliferation of software talking to other pieces of software or Application Programming Interfaces. Simply put, a participatory platform is made up of software applications that talk to each other. This is the way the Facebook application model works: developers can create applications on Facebook and therefore connect to the Facebook platform. This latter point is crucial to understanding how profit can be generated out of the circulation of meaning: the ability to create third-party applications to connect to a social media software platform is what allows for the creation of target markets and audiences. For instance, the popular Facebook game Farmville is an application that allows a third-party developer to tap into the immense pool of Facebook users and gather profile information, which can then be used to create targeted advertising. Hence the problem with social media platforms: they rely on the gathering of user data to create revenues, but in so doing raise important questions about privacy.

The social media model is built on the idea of inviting large number of users to express themselves: the larger the number of users posting texts, updates, videos, or pictures, the more successful the participatory platform. It would be shortsighted, however, to stop the analysis of social media here. The kind of individual and collective freedom of expression offered by social media is but one aspect of the new communication context that we now have to deal with. It is not the most important technological aspect of social media if we want to understand the new power relations that are now emerging in this new communication context. Social media platforms do more than accommodate vast amounts of information: they make it possible to find meaning in that seemingly infinite sea of online information. That is, the role of social media platforms is to help us navigate large amounts of information, and to help us find ways to make our information meaningful and visible to others. In that sense, social media mix two principles of online communication: the linking principle and the personalization principle. The linking principle is about defining associations between different types of information. This principle has been present ever since Vannevar Bush’s exploration of the Memex (1945) as an associative device that would allow for the creation of meaningful links between disparate bits of content and information. Bush’ vision was further developed through Ted Nelson’s work on hypertext (1981) and through Tim Berners-Lee’s early conceptualization of the hyperlink (1999). As Bush argued, the problem is not so much having access to information, it is about what to do with it. In order to make information relevant and meaningful, Bush argued that it is necessary to be able to craft unique trails of association that mimic the way the creative and engaged mind works. This would ensure the discovery of new meanings and new possibilities (political, scientific, economic, and so on) for living together. For instance, when I create a link on my blog post to a story on a news website, this means that I find this story relevant and meaningful for understanding and perhaps supporting the arguments made in my post. This hyperlink thus creates an associative path between two different types of content, and therefore makes information navigable.

The personalization principle is more recent and is a characteristic of the social media environment: early conceptualization of the Internet and the World Wide Web focused on the user’s ability to be either anonymous or free to craft his or her online identity. The early discussion forums all gave the option of choosing a nickname, and early forms of online gaming were based primarily on the possibility of radically altering one’s real identity. The rise of social networking (Friendster, MySpace, Facebook in North America) produced shift toward personalization, where increasingly users had to identify themselves and were discouraged from inventing online personae. For instance, the Google search engine was anonymous at first: I could type in a keyword search, and my search results would have been the same as any other user. Now, the Google search engine, much like the Facebook platform, returns results based on my specific profile: results that are geographically close to me are featured first, for instance. On Facebook, results relevant to my network of Facebook friends are featured first. The personalization process gives primacy to first-person perspectives (Langlois et al. 2009) whereby each experience of being online is increasingly unique in terms of content that the platform provides each user. Such a personalization process links together a specific logic of meaningfulness and a commercial imperative: implementing an information retrieval logic that is closely tied to my personal profile, my personal likes and networks further enables gathering of information about me that can then be analyzed and returned back to me as suggested recommendations.

Linking and personalization work together on social media platforms: linking is the process of building meaningful traces that obey the logic of personalization. The main point to remember is that personalized linking is not just a process of retrieving meaning—it is primarily a process of retrieving meaningful information. That is, while there might be a lot of content and meaning published on social media platform, the main problem that should occupy us concerns how such meanings are made available to other users. While in the previous Web 1.0 environment, users were in charge of ensuring that information was made available to others through linking and defining metatags and keywords, in the social media environment, such process is increasingly done by software. Indeed, there are many kinds of software modules that help sorting out information and finding its meaningfulness—tags help further define and categorize information, ranking systems such as search engines implement criteria for attributing degrees of importance and meaningfulness to information, personalization software scans correlate our personal profiles and criteria and compare them with informational objects so as to customize our experience of communicating online. If we look at a photograph that is shared online on Flickr, for instance, we notice quickly that what we are dealing with is not just an image, but a series of information that helps place the image in different contexts: identification number, information about the author, the type of camera, date, time and place the picture was taken, tags that identify the theme of the picture, licensing information, and other pictures related to the image.

Social media platforms, then, manage all kinds of information associated with an object (a picture, a text, a video, a sound file, for instance). It is this management that helps users find the meaning of different pieces of information: the software platforms are in charge of making this information visible and meaningful, which implies a system of information hierarchy, from the most meaningful to the least meaningful. In so doing, there is an industrialization of meaning production and circulation on social media platforms: while users can create some meaning, the software modules are in charge of finding meaningful content and meaningful connections within a social media ecology that can include not only one’s user-generated content and other user-generated content, but also advertising content and personalized content generated by the platform itself. What this involves, with regard to rethinking common understandings of meaning in the social media context, is a bifurcation between the production of meaning and the management of meaningfulness: we are free to produce as many meanings as we want, but the ranking of the meaningfulness of these meanings is out of our hands, as it is mediated and controlled by software platforms.

To sum up, the social media model is based on allowing as many users to create content as possible, and this involves the creation of sophisticated software platforms to take over and automatize the creation, publication, and distribution of content. Furthermore, the social media model offers ways of making content meaningful by making sure that it is not only stored and s...