Jose Van Dijck - The Culture of Connectivity

The culture of connectivity refers to sharing of information beyond the privacy settings of the user. While the user is concerned with being connected with networks of friends on the front end of the platform, at the back end all activities are catalogued, processed and eventually, in various ways, sold to the paying customers. 

However, van Dijck is concerned with social media or, as she prefers to call it, connective media, as automated systems engineering and manipulating connections, tracking and coding relationships between people, ideas and things. 

Given time, Facebook tends to wear down such resistance. Van Dijck sums up 'the platform pushes three steps forward before users' demands force them to take one backward' (p. 54). In an important discussion on the rhetorical practices regarding privacy, van Dijck finds that Facebook has successfully transformed the norm of sharing so that it now includes connectivity, automatic sharing with third-party corporations.

The narrative presentation gives each member page the look and feel of the magazine – a slick publication, with you as the protagonist. With the introduction of timeline Facebook has crept deeper into the texture of life, its narrative principles imitating proven conventions of storytelling, thus binding users even more tightly to the fabric that keeps it connected (p. 55).

The following five chapters go deeper into the analysis of the main social platforms currently used. By focusing respectively on Facebook, Twitter, Flick, YouTube and Wikipedia, the author discloses details about the functioning of each social media as well as about their role in the broader ecosystem of connective media. Each chapter follows the same structure: first, the platform under consideration is introduced and its overall definition and purposes are presented. Then, its techno–cultural elements are discussed. More specifically, the platform is analysed in terms of its users, technology and content. This techno–cultural analysis is followed by the examination of the socioeconomic structures that shape social media: ownership, governance and business models. Finally, the chapter is concluded by the reassembling of the discussed platform, through which its parts are reconsidered in broader social, political and economic contexts.

The strength of van Dijck’s work lies in her ability to explain both the micro and macro dimensions of mediated communication in straightforward and yet complete ways. By comparing and contrasting new media in terms of forms, uses and governance, the book addresses complex issues about social interactions and networked communication. The questions raised throughout the chapters are extremely relevant in face of the obscure and muddy ground in which both social media and mediated sociality are currently embedded. However, some of the questions raised by José van Dijck are left either open or superficially answered, which makes The culture of connectivity very interesting and elucidating in some aspects, but a bit frustrating in some others. Further attention to issues of privacy and privilege, for instance, would have considerably added to the strengths of the book. Although van Dijck’s focuses on the history of social media, these themes are of vital importance in the critical assessment of social platforms.

We are so consumed by social media, every Instagram or Facebook post has to be self-constructed and perfect so we can create this hyper reality realm, but realistically, there is over 3 billion users on social media where our identities can be revealed but one photograph being taken is a problem. Just as Jose Van Dijck stated in ‘The culture of connectivity’ “Facebook is business model is most certainly a contentious balancing act between stimulating users’ activity and exploring it. Maybe my final project could explore the connectivity between humans and technology and show why it is destroying our identities as humans.