Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism

4. Standardizing Social Media: Technical Standards, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and the Rise of Social Media Templates

It is claimed that standards were based in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger. —Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks. —Jeff Hammerbacher, quoted in Ashlee Vance, “This Tech Bubble Is Different” 4 Standardizing Social Media Technical Standards, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and the Rise of Social Media Templates When it comes to discussions of the history and politics of social media, technical standards are, oddly enough, downright sexy.1 Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), the communications standards that structure the Internet, have been pointed to as the source of the Internet’s politics of academic freedom and entrepreneurialism.2 Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the standards that structure the Web, are touted as the source of the Web’s meteoric growth and thus its fundamental challenge to mass media.3 BitTorrent and other decentralized peer-to-peer technical standards are proclaimed to be one of the most valuable tools for undermining central authority and enabling innovation and user-led production.4 Many scholars and pundits have consistently argued that these protocols are major determinants of the politics made possible by social Standardizing Social Media 93 media. The argument: since the communications protocols underlying the Web are distributed and decentralized, social media built on top of the Web are almost necessarily distributed, decentralized, and thus democratic to their core. Along with concurrent technological developments , particularly the “bazaar” style of open-source software production ,5 social media are presented as a democratizing force. In some extreme views, political protests and revolutions are branded “Twitter Revolutions” and “Facebook Revolutions,” made possible (only) by SNS standards, “Web-as-platform”-based Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and the network effects of those social media.6 This chapter takes its inspiration from studies of social media that connect technical standards and technological politics. However, I take a different tack: I discuss the less-acknowledged role of advertising technical standards in the history of social media. Part of what enable the movement of data from one site to another are, of course, communications protocols and standards. Advertising standards form part of this equation and should be seen as another (metaphorical ) layer in the stack of network protocols. Certainly, advertising standards are just as distributed and decentralized as, say, TCP/IP or HTTP. They are produced by consensus—theoretically, anyone can contribute to their design—just like any protocols established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). And the particular advertising standards consortium I examine here, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), is remarkably open about how its standards work and what they are intended to do, just like any public goods–producing standards consortium should be. However, in our euphoria over networks, decentralization, participation , and consensus, we often forget that standards are by no means inherently democratic. At the very least, advertising standards produced by the IAB have in part determined the rise of what Kristin Arola calls “template-driven”—that is, standardized—social media, such as Facebook and Twitter.7 As heterogeneous as the content of these services is, their forms (or maybe I should draw from protocolspeak and say “wrappers”) are rigid and unalterable by users. Why? At first glance, we might say that this is simply because these sites are “user-friendly” and that the best way to allow many users to partici- 94 Chapter 4 pate in the media is to produce push-button templates so that they do not need to worry about learning to code. As we saw in Chapter 3, Myspace died under the weight of its pimped, hacked, user-frightening profiles. But here I argue that these standardized templates are, in fact, glistening façades hiding what increasing numbers of media scholars recognize as the infernal machinery of surveillance. Moreover, I argue that social media surveillance itself is not possible without standards, because to be effective it relies on gathering standardized data and storing such data in rationalized archives. The IAB has produced the standards necessary for effective social media surveillance. Recognizing this, social media sites, such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter—which live, of course, off capturing user data...