Selling Social Media: The Political Economy of Social Networking

Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, LinkedIn, and dozens of other services have been described as the vanguard of creative destruction across the media industries-disruptors 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.