Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism Paperback – June 27, 2014

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Review "This book is welcome contribution from a friend and colleague of this community to the growing critical perspectives that question the artifice of digital communication technologies, practices and social structure. Robert's is a unique perspective in that he posits alternatives to our increasingly digitally-platformed social life." - Hector Postigo, Temple University and author of The Digital Rights Movement."Reverse Engineering Social Media makes its substantial contribution to existing social media criticism by offering a detailed look at how social media operate, as well as a concrete vision for realizing alternatives.... Rather than measure social media platforms against the 'false consciousness' of digital utopianism, the idea is to pinpoint exactly where and how they exclude and exploit in order to 'reverse engineer this system and look for something better.'" - Michael Stevenson, Assistant Professor, University of Groningen.Winner of the 2015 Association of Internet Researchers Nancy Baym Book Award"Gehl uses the 'reverse engineering' metaphor as a framework foranalysis, arguing that we can start with an established social mediasite and then work back with whatever tools are at one's disposal todetermine its logics, constraints, and incentives.... Gehl takes oncentral elements in the political economy of media, including ownershipand advertising. The contradictions of social media -- the dubiousrhetoric of user control while in a corporate-controlled and monetizedsite -- are deeply troubling for democracy and agency to Gehl. Gehl'sbook has strong empirical components.... [E]specially valuable sectionsof the book [are] focused on Gehl's formidable insights about thecommercialization of social media and its noxious effects." - Matthew P McAllister, Chair of Graduate Programs, Professor, Media Studies, Penn State. Read more About the Author Robert W. Gehl is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. He is the co-editor (with Victoria Watts) of The Politics of Cultural Programming in Public Spaces. Read more