CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON SOCIAL MEDIA
In this final post, I will be presenting two critical perspectives on social media, while reflecting on Fuchs and Van Dijck’s texts. Fuchs’ criticism on Jenkins’ “participatory culture” draws on the concept of “participatory democracy”. For participatory culture is meant the collaboration and the interaction of several users in any online platform, who are enabled to create and share new content (Jenkins in Fuchs, 2014). According to Fuchs (2004), this idea appears to be too idealistic and utopian. Indeed, Jenkins limits his theory of participatory culture when neglecting the fact that platforms are own by certain actors, whereas users are only able to access them (Fuchs, 2014). As an example, Fuchs mentions big platforms, such as Facebook and Google: he argues that users are certainly excluded from economic and political decisions of such platforms. Fuchs (2014) stresses on capitalism as the main leading force which drives companies into production and profit-making. Moreover, the author claims that domination by a specific group is inevitable when speaking about internet culture as it is always monopolized by big corporations. Hence, it is misleading to talk about Jenkins’ “empowerment” of consumers, as Fuchs (2014) argues: in fact, only powerful actors are able to buy more visibility than others. Political blogs and corporate newspapers, such as CNN and The New York Times might be an example of disparity in terms of visibility: “Statistics of the most frequently accessed web platforms […] show that popular political blogs tend to get much less visibility and attention than mainstream news websites” (Fuchs, 2014, p. 62). This argument may be related to an earlier criticism by Van Dick and Nieborg (2009), as they also claim that data of big platforms such as YouTube and Google are not accessible for consumers. Furthermore, their argument addresses to another relevant aspect that also Fuchs considers crucial: the exploitation of audience labour. More precisely, Van Dijck and Nieborg (2009, p. 864-865), present the “co-creation” model, where users work on communal projects, as related to “consumer markets”, which refers to users who freely help companies to market and advertise their products by creating online communities which share the same tastes and lifestyles. Therefore, big companies take advantages of users’ contributions in their advertising process, which might be a simple post of a specific product, that can consequently reach more audience: as Van Dijck and Nieborg state, “Life has never been easier for marketers” (2009, p. 865).
Van Dijck and Nieborg (2009) argue that marketing discourse has aimed to touch customers by using “magic” words, such as “communities”, “collaboration”, “co-creation”. Among these strategic terms, “participation” and “experience” have definitely persuade the consumer to feel always more attached to companies and its producers (Van Dijck and Nieborg, 2009). As Fuchs’ criticism on Jenkins’ participatory culture, Van Dijck and Nieborg investigate the blurry distinction between customer and producer and the misleading concept of reciprocal benefit achieved by both. The authors present the logic of two manifestos, texts which aim to warn their readers about a new revolutionary era, guiding them into what Van Dijck and Nieborg (2009) call “brave new world”. These two manifestos are “Wikinomics” and “We-Think”, and they celebrate the success of the Web 2.0 when creating the perfect idea of community, where no distinction among users exists (Van Dijck and Nieborg, 2009). Whereas Fuchs (2014) investigates the equality between producer and consumer that Jenkins stresses on, Van Dijck and Nieborg (2009) aim at questioning the generalisation of the term “user” in the two manifestos. The similarity of the two arguments lies on criticising the misleading concepts of communal creation and sharing, while claiming that online communities have not achieve total participation by users yet. On the contrary, users mainly “[…] participate simply to satisfy their individual curiosities […]” (Van Dijck and Nieborg, 2009). According to Van Dijck and Nieborg (2009), both Jenkins and the two manifestos limit their arguments to the transformation of consumers into users within a convergence to producers. As a consequence, Jenkins, as well as the two manifestos, do not mention the ways online platforms make profit within the creation of new business models (Van Dijck and Nieborg, 2009). According to the authors, Jenkins, Wikinomics and We-Think do not distinguish the logic of culture from the logic of economics, when combining commercial values and cultural ones. Alike, Fuchs (2014) argues that Jenkins does not take into consideration dominated corporations that exploit users in order to make always more profit.
List of References
Fuchs, C. (2014) Social Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage.
Van Dijck, J., & Nieborg, D. (2009). Wikinomics and its Discontents: A Critical Analysis of Web 2.0 Business Manifestos. New Media & Society, 11(5).