The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media
连接文化：社交媒体批判史
Authors: Jose van Dijck（何塞·范·迪克）
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication Year: 2013
Pages: 240
About Book:
Social media has come to deeply penetrate our lives: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and many other platforms define many of our daily habits of communication and creative production. The Culture of Connectivity studies the rise of social media in the first decade of the twenty-first century up until 2012, providing both a historical and a critical analysis of the emergence of major platforms in the context of a rapidly changing ecosystem of connective media. Such history is needed to understand how these media have come to profoundly affect our experience of online sociality.
The first stage of their development shows a fundamental shift. While most sites started out as amateur-driven community platforms, half a decade later they have turned into large corporations that do not just facilitate user connectedness, but have become global information and data mining companies extracting and exploiting user connectivity. Author and media scholar Jose van Dijck offers an analytical prism to examine techno-cultural as well as socio-economic aspects of this transformation. She dissects five major platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Each of these microsystems occupies a distinct position in the larger ecology of connective media, and yet, their underlying mechanisms for coding interfaces, steering users, and filtering content rely on shared ideological principles.
At the level of management and organization, we can also observe striking similarities between these platforms' shifting ownership status, governance strategies, and business models. Reconstructing the premises on which these platforms are built, this study highlights how norms for online interaction and communication gradually changed. "Sharing," "friending," "liking," "following," "trending," and "favoriting" have come to denote online practices imbued with specific technological and economic meanings. This process of normalization, the author argues, is part of a larger political and ideological battle over information control in an online world where everything is bound to become social. Crossing lines of technological, historical, sociological, and cultural inquiry, The Culture of Connectivity will reshape the way we think about interpersonal connection in the digital age.
关于书籍
社交媒体已深入渗透到我们的生活中：Facebook、YouTube、Twitter 以及许多其他平台定义了我们许多日常交流和创意生产的习惯。《连接文化》研究了 21 世纪前十年直至 2012 年社交媒体的兴起，在连接型媒体生态系统快速变化的背景下，对主要平台的出现进行了历史性和批判性的分析。要理解这些媒体如何深刻影响我们的在线社交体验，这种历史梳理是必要的。
它们发展的初级阶段显示出一种根本性的转变。虽然大多数网站最初是业余爱好者驱动的社区平台，但短短五年后，它们已转变为大型企业；它们不仅促进用户的联结感，而且已成为提取和利用用户连接性的全球信息和数据挖掘公司。作者兼媒体学者何塞·范·迪克提供了一个分析棱镜，以此考察这一转型的技术文化及社会经济面向。她剖析了五个主要平台：Facebook、Twitter、Flickr、YouTube和Wikipedia。这些微系统中的每一个都在更大的连接型媒体生态中占据独特位置，然而，它们用于编码界面、引导用户和过滤内容的底层机制依赖于共享的意识形态原则。
在管理和组织层面，我们也可以观察到这些平台在不断变化的所有权状态、治理策略和商业模式之间存在惊人的相似之处。通过重构这些平台赖以建立的前提，本研究强调了在线互动和交流的规范是如何逐渐改变的。“分享”、“加好友”、“点赞”、“关注”、“上热搜”和“收藏”已开始指代那些被赋予特定技术和经济含义的在线实践。作者认为，这种规范化过程是关于在线世界信息控制的更大的政治和意识形态斗争的一部分，在这个世界里，一切注定要变得“社交化”。《连接文化》跨越了技术、历史、社会学和文化探究的界限，将重塑我们在数字时代思考人际连接的方式。
About Author：
José van Dijck, female, is a Professor at the Institute for Comparative Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She previously served as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. She is also the first female President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2016, she was named the Most Influential Dutch Woman of the Year by the renowned Dutch magazine Opzij. Her published works include Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (2007) and The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging (2005)
关于作者
何塞·范·迪克（José van Dijck），女性，是荷兰阿姆斯特丹大学比较媒体研究学院的教授。她曾担任阿姆斯特丹大学人文学院院长。她也是荷兰皇家艺术与科学学院的第一位女性院长。2016 年，她被荷兰著名杂志《Opzij》评为年度最具影响力的荷兰女性。她出版的作品包括《数字时代的媒介化记忆》（2007）和《透明的身体：医学成像的文化分析》（2005）。
编译：任艳林、刘鑫
