Selling Social Media: The Political Economy of Social Networking

(Hardback)

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Description

Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, LinkedIn, and dozens of other services have been described as the vanguard of creative destruction across the media industriesdisruptors of established business, heroes of a new economic narrative that supposes that the attention of individual users can be measured, managed, manipulated, backing methods that securitized, patented, and litigated attention in ways impossible before. Selling Social Media catalogues the key terms and discourses of the rise of social media firms with a particular emphasis on monetization, securitization, disruption, and litigation. Tensions between ideas and terms are critical, as the ways that different aspects of social media business are described change depending on the audience, scale, and maturity of the firm. These divergent discourses are bound together into a single story of social media, an industry that challenges the theories and descriptions of media that have come before. Through a reading of social media business this book offers a chance to revisit media theory in the context of a new social media companies and products that depend on a different understanding of media audiences, media industries, and public agency.

Reviews

Selling Social Media offers an important critical, cultural approach to studying the business of social media. By analyzing the discourses social media companies use to talk about themselves, Faltesek tells the story of how platforms are sold to publics, markets, and governments. Faltesek deftly examines the tensions between social media discourses disrupting media industry processes of the past while advancing a suspiciously old new economy. * Melissa Zimdars, Assistant Professor, Merrimack College, USA *
This is a timely intervention into how social media companies theorize their own business practices to convince disparate audiences users, investors, and lawmakers, amongst others of the platforms enduring value. By treating corporate communications, business plans, and related ephemera as serious objects of analysis, Faltesek calls attention to an understudied site of meaning making in the act of selling social media. * Kevin Sanson, Senior Lecturer, School of Communication, Queensland University of Technology, Australia *

Author Bio

Daniel Faltesek is an assistant professor of social media at Oregon State University, USA. His research explores affective and aesthetic connections between regulation, finance, and social media.