OK, here’s the problem:
The book that we are starting today, Miller’s How the World Changed Social Media, is the main book of a series that looks at the global social media impact project from University College London.
But before we get there, let’s wrap up boyd’s It’s Complicated. boyd says: “the mere existence of new technology neither creates nor magically solves cultural problems. In fact, their construction typically reinforces existing social divisions” (boyd 2014, 156). We’ve already read and talked about this as critiques of technological determinism, so there’s nothing new there. But while we can accept that the internet is not as different a social place as we dreamed it would be, what is actually happening on the internet and on social media? Is online communication amplifying the social issues that exist in the physical world? boyd leans towards the amplifying property of social media and the internet (boyd 2014, 162); for more of how this plays out in terms of internet style or aesthetics, see her discussion of MySpace vs. Facebook starting on pg. 166. In closing out boyd, also think about the implications of “The Politics of Algorithms.”
