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Introduction: Looking Forward and Backward: Heterogeneous Engineering of Social Media Software
- Temple University Press
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Introduction Looking Forward and Backward Heterogeneous Engineering of Social Media Software sumoto.iki’s web2diZZaster Web artist sumoto.iki’s “web2diZZaster” is a collection of bland, muted pastel images containing little more than rectangles and lines.1 The images are unremarkable, even unattractive, and it is hard to determine what they represent. And yet, many of these images seem eerily familiar. A second glance reveals why: these muted rectangles take shape as common social media sites. Digg, the social bookmarking site, is identifiable by the peach tabs that indicate the number of “diggs” that users have given to various stories. The tabs are empty, as is the rest of the page, but this largely empty frame is still recognizable . Myspace, the failed (and resurrected) social-networking site, is identifiable by its blue banner and log-in fields, and directly below it is Facebook’s even more sedate (but much more successful) home page. YouTube is harder to recognize until the viewer sees the iconic red polygon and the two series of four rectangles where featured videos normally appear. Although its design has changed since sumoto. iki made this project, Twitter is perhaps the most recognizable because of its light blue field and narrow, prominent center column. I am having trouble describing the momentarily unsettled response I had to sumoto.iki’s art. However, after a moment of squinting at the 2 Introduction images and contemplating, I realized that sumoto.iki presents all these flagship social media sites without any user content. Without comments, videos, lists of friends, and editorial recommendations, these sites appear as “ghostly forms,” which sumoto.iki describes as a “first impression of a possible apocalypse where only HTML vestiges would remain inside a dehumanized network of all networks.” The disaster in “web2diZZaster ” is the social Web at the end of humanity. It is the tragic silence of a world without tweets, status updates, YouTube videos, diggs, and Facebook connections. When I viewed this art, all I had to go on were the surface manifestations of the most basic elements of HTML, PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, Javascript, and CSS: div tags, positions and floats, colors, and lifeless scripts. Within the “dehumanized network ” and without user-generated content, these social media sites appear as mere frames, and unappealing ones at that. Without content, these sites are lifeless shells. Without it, social media cannot work. Of course, social media are working just fine precisely because users do contribute so much to these frames. Nearly a billion people populate the social network Facebook, creating constant streams of comments, links, “likes,” and applications. Twitter’s meteoric growth is also measured in user-generated content. Social bookmarking and link-sharing sites Digg and Reddit command millions of page views, and an upvoted link posted on their pages can drive traffic to websites . Amazon posts millions of user-written reviews of books and products. LinkedIn is filled with job-seekers and headhunters posting résumés and e-introducing one another. Flickr has billions of photos and comments, and Facebook’s servers contain the largest collection of user-uploaded photographs in the world thanks to its ownership of Instagram. And the company that is perhaps the exemplar of social media is Google, which relies on user-generated links, videos, social connections, and blogs to power its highly profitable search and advertising business. Investors who participated in the 2004 Google IPO have seen their investment grow substantially; the stock was offered at $85 and as of this writing trades for nearly $1,100. Although Facebook’s IPO was much less successful, it still generated $1 billion. Twitter’s recent IPO avoided Facebook’s missteps to raise nearly $2 billion. This rise in value comes directly from user-created content, all [54.197.64.207] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:41 GMT) Looking Forward and Backward 3 within the opposite of sumoto.iki’s “dehumanized” network. Perhaps we should borrow a phrase from networking company Cisco and call it the “Human Network.” Considering the history of the Web, it seems unlikely that social media would be such a commercial success. Just over a decade ago, the term “dot-com” (i.e., commerce on the Web) drew derision from anyone with an interest in business. The 2000–2001 financial/technology bubble burst resulted from irrational exuberance; investors in online commercial sites, such as Pets.com, lost millions of dollars when that business model failed to catch on. Direct-to-consumer sales of pet supplies, groceries, and gardening...