Características deseables en levaduras para la producción de etanol

With the discussion of this dissertation’s theoretical lens complete, this chapter focuses more directly on the relationship between users and a specific kind of

technology: social media sites (SMSs). In order to describe this relationship, this chapter first defines “social media sites,” a term used to refer to a genre of web-based

technologies that have appeared within what O’Reilly (2005a) has called the recent history of “Web 2.0.” Many SMSs technologies have common characteristics, including shared technical characteristics, common economic/network properties, and similar monetization practices. As part of this definition and broad descriptive account of SMSs, this chapter lays out the argument that users play a unique role within these spaces. On SMSs, users are not just consumers of the technology, but are also frequently the producers of the informational content that populates the platforms. Further, most for- profit SMSs are reliant on users’ work in order to generate revenue, and, as a result, users’ information creation and consumption practices are often directly tied to the profitability of these platforms. This chapter argues that, as a result, users’ information creation and consumption practices are a critical component of many of today’s popular SMS technologies.

After this brief introduction to SMS technologies and the role users play within them, the chapter turns to the issue of power in the user-SMS relationship. In reviewing the ways certain authors identify and describe power in the user-SMS relationship, two divergent strains of thought emerge: one that describes SMS technologies as power enhancing for users and another that suggests that users are often disempowered in their

relationships with SMSs. Of the latter, authors critical of user-SMS relationship dynamics often argue that users are put at a disadvantage in this relationship as a result of the business practices of the platforms, by specific technical configurations of the material technologies, and by the technological discourse that frequently surround the platforms. Further, many of these critics suggest that these impediments to user power result from social media sites’ reliance on users as a source of labor and ultimately, revenue. In looking across these critiques of the user-SMS relationship, this chapter argues that one of the problems critics consistently identify is that users are inhibited in their

development of knowledge and control over the information flows that exist on these platforms. However, this chapter also argues that this body of literature often only tacitly recognizes this issue as a problem of informational power.

The final section of this chapter argues for further empirical study into users’ informational power on SMSs and suggests that the social media site Twitter makes for a timely and relevant space in which to pursue more detailed study into this area. To make this argument, this section introduces the Twitter, highlighting its current significance in the Web 2.0 landscape, and provides some anecdotal evidence as to why users’

informational power in this space may be an issue. It also provides a brief overview of the extant research on Twitter and users, making note of a number of gaps in the way the user-Twitter relationship has been studied. Through the identification of these gaps, this final section demonstrates how this dissertation will make a unique and needed

contribution to the scholarly work on informational power and on Twitter.

Social media sites (SMSs) are a genre of web-based technologies that have grown prominent during what some have referred to as the boom of the Web 2.0 Internet. There are many competing definitions for SMSs (Fuchs, 2014), though for this dissertation’s purposes they can be broadly defined as, “a group of Internet-Based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user generated content” (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010, p. 61). This user-generated content will also be referenced throughout this dissertation more generally as “user-generated information” or more simply “information.” Examples of social media sites include places like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Digg, Google Plus, Blogger, and hundreds (if not thousands) of others. Each of these sites vary in terms of the exact configuration of the material technology itself (such as the code, algorithms, protocols, and data structures of the site), the types and numbers of users on the sites, the types of informational content that can be shared within a platform (such as text, images, videos, etc.), the ownership status of the platform (such as publicly owned companies, privately held corporations), the governance of the technology (such as different terms of service and privacy policies), and the business models of the platform (van Dijck, 2013).

While SMSs are each distinct entities, many SMSs share common attributes. These shared attributes often stem from the sites’ common grounding in the “ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0” (to use Kaplan and Haenlein words).

Therefore, the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0 are of relevance to understanding the user-SMS relationship as these common foundations shape and influence the configurations of both the material artifact the user interacts with and the

properties of the sociotechnical system the user is in relation with. Comprehensively accounting for the ideological foundations of Web 2.0 is beyond the scope of this chapter.13 Instead, this chapter will focus on identifying a number of the common technological and economic foundations of Web 2.0 sites, of which, SMSs are a subset.

Common technical and economic foundations of Web 2.0 sites.

In 2004, Tim O’Reilly, the publisher of the O’Reilly technology books series, famously14 promoted the term “Web 2.0” to describe what he saw as a new generation of web-based technologies. He defined Web 2.0 as:

…the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform:

delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of

participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences. (O’Reilly, 2005a)

Generally speaking, Web 2.0 sites include technologies such as blogs, wikis, social bookmarking sites, video-sharing websites, and social media sites. Andersen (2007), building from O’Reilly’s definition, suggests that there are six important common technical and economic properties underlying Web 2.0 technologies: they are platforms for individual information production, they are platforms that harness the power of crowds, they are platforms that often manage large volumes of data generated by users, they are spaces built to be nearly-ubiquitously accessible platforms for participation and user contribution, they are platforms that benefit from network effects, and finally, there

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For an exploration of the ideological foundations of Web 2.0, see: Fuchs, 2010a, 2014; van Dijck & Nieborg, 2009.

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is an openness element to the platforms. The following paragraphs describe each of these aspects in more detail.

Web 2.0 platforms, generally, do not have a staff that populates the content found within these sites. Instead, site users produce much of the information that makes up the Web 2.0 world. Andersen (2007) argues that within Web 2.0 environments, the historic capabilities of the “user” undergo a dramatic shift: users move from being the “passive” consumers of content to having the capabilities for “participatory” or “active”

engagement.15 Unlike television or radio users, Andersen argues Web 2.0 users can participate as both consumers of information and the producers of it. This particular aspect of Web 2.0 technologies has been described and debated heavily by scholars such as Jenkins and Deuze (2008), Bruns (2008), Shirky (2011a), Fuchs (2010b, 2014), and van Dijck (2009) (to name just a few). Neologisms such as “produser” (Bruns, 2008) and “prosumer”16

(Quan-Haase & Young, 2010; Ritzer & Jurgenson, 2010) have been used to signify this relative shift in user capabilities. This chapter returns to discussing how power is involved in these “expanded capabilities” later.

Building from O’Reilly’s comments that position Web 2.0 as a way of harnessing “the wisdom of the crowd,” Andersen observes that many Web 2.0 platforms allow for the aggregation of collective intelligence or group work/production. Wikipedia, the collectively edited web-based encyclopedia, is frequently touted as an example of this sort of “crowd-sourced” effort. The term crowdsourcing was coined by Wired journalist

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There is, of course, a large body of work that argues that audiences are never actually “passive.” Instead, many media theorists have suggested that different media facilitate different levels of engagement, sense- making and meaning-making; that audiences’ ability to engage varies by individuals; and that engagement occurs even when an audience member cannot directly “talk back” through the media. See, for example, the differentiation made between hot and cool media by Marshall McLuhan (1964) and the work on

differentiating audiences by television scholar John Fiske (1987).

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Jeff Howe “to conceptualize a process of Web-based out-sourcing for the procurement of media content, small tasks, even solutions to scientific problems from the crowd gathered on the Internet” (Andersen, 2007, p. 16). While there may be a command and control structure of moderators and administrators that coordinate such crowd-sourced efforts, participation in most Web 2.0 spaces and crowd-sourced efforts therein is theoretically open to anyone who can connect. This particular facet of Web 2.0 technologies is also reliant on the positioning of the user as the producer of the informational content that makes up these spaces.

As users connect, browse, interact, and communicate (or “produse,” to use Bruns terminology) within Web 2.0 spaces, they generate vast amounts of information, which the Web 2.0 platforms then house. While Andersen focuses more on how services such as Google and Amazon take advantage of such data rather than focusing on the statistics, Web 2.0 purveyors such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have reported gargantuan volumes of user-generated content being submitted to their sites. By the end of 2011, Facebook was the largest photo-sharing website on the Internet with over 250 million photos being uploaded by users per day (Horaczek, 2012). In 2013, Twitter received over 400 million messages (Tweets) from users per day (Tsukayama, 2013). In 2013,

YouTube was receiving over 144000 hours of video from users per day (YouTube.com, 2013). These volumes are worthy of mention not just because of their magnitude, but also because there are particular economic benefits for Web 2.0 companies that can be derived from hosting large amounts of data. O'Reilly (2005b) suggests this when he states the value of Web 2.0 spaces is explicitly tied to the “scale and dynamism of the data [the technology] helps manage” (para. 15).

Andersen argues that one of the key characteristics of Web 2.0 sites is that they are vehicles for individual participation (as previously mentioned) and at the same time are also not dependent on users having specific technologies other than a device capable of accessing the Internet. Many Web 2.0 technologies offer ubiquitous access either directly through the user’s web-browser, or more commonly today, through web-enabled mobile devices. Unlike traditional software that depends on the client’s operating system and often, specific hardware, Web 2.0 technologies have been far more device

independent. This has meant users frequently just need a device capable of connecting to the Internet in order to gain access to the platforms. According to Andersen, this allows a wider variety of individuals to participate in Web 2.0, as it reduces barriers traditionally associated with space, time, and place.

From an economic perspective, Web 2.0 platforms benefit from two types of network effects according to Andersen. The first is the traditional “network effect” in which the social and economic value of a communication network grows as new users are added. The greater the number of nodes in the network, the greater the overall value of the network, as the possibilities for connections between nodes grows in factorial size with every new node addition17 (also called Metcalfe’s Law). The second effect comes from “The Long Tail” phenomenon. Long-tail effects, as Andersen describes them, are essentially the ability to produce value from materials that are niche or of interest to very small populations. To illustrate this concept, consider a physical record store versus a digital record store like iTunes. A physical record store’s shelf-space limits the catalog it can offer. It can only profit from what they can manage to fit on their shelves and are likely to therefore prioritize the most popularly selling materials in order to generate the

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most revenue. As a result, they will profit, but mostly likely only from what is popular with the majority of store-goers. iTunes, on the other hand, does not have these same kinds of space limitations and can essentially offer an unlimited catalog. Therefore, iTunes can benefit economically from selling both the most popular and the not as popular albums. They are able to extract profit from the “long-tail” of the niche,

unpopular, or obscure. Web 2.0 platforms benefit from similar “long-tail” characteristics as the huge volumes of information that are created by users do not necessarily have to be curated, which more easily allows for niche information resources to thrive in these spaces and for value to be extracted from them. As a result, a platform like YouTube can benefit economically from hosting both popular videos such as Psy’s 2012 “Gangnam Style” which has had billions of views since its uploading, as well as the 30 percent of all YouTube videos which have had less than 100 views (Frommer & Angelova, 2009).

Finally, Andersen argues that Web 2.0 platforms are “open” in a number of different senses of the term. He writes:

The development of the Web has seen a wide range of legal, regulatory, political and cultural developments surrounding the control, access and rights of digital content. However, the Web has also always had a strong tradition of working in an open fashion and this is also a powerful force in Web 2.0: working with open standards, using open source software, making use of free data, re-using data and working in a spirit of open innovation. (p. 25).

It is worth noting however, that the openness that Andersen claims is inherent to Web 2.0 technologies is a highly contested notion and is a notion that this dissertation will

challenge. This is discussed later as part of a review of critiques that have made of the user-SMS relationship. With some of the common technical and economic foundations of Web 2.0 having now been introduced, the next section of this chapter discusses another

common characteristic of Web 2.0 technologies which Andersen does not address: monetization practices.

Monetization of user-generated information.

While manufacturing is still an important aspect of the global economy, some have argued that countries such as the United States are now operating in a “knowledge economy” (Mokyr, 2004), an economic state where information, knowledge, and

intellectual capital play a more predominant role in what makes up the overall economy. The shift towards a knowledge economy includes a change in the predominant

commodities being produced. The critical political economists Hardt and Negri (2005) have argued that “immaterial goods” such as “ideas, knowledge, forms of communication and relationships” (p. 94) have become the dominant goods of production. Ideas,

knowledge, forms of communication and relationships are also predominant outputs of users on most SMS sites and the businesses that run these spaces are frequently key players in extracting economic value from this information.

“Web 2.0 transforms the economics of knowledge-based businesses

everywhere,” writes Shuen (2008) in her book Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business

Thinking and Strategies Behind Successful Web 2.0 Implementations (p. 107). As much

as O’Reilly (among others) argues that Web 2.0 is about specific features of material technologies, Web 2.0 is also heavily associated with certain ways that businesses generate value through the monetization of users’ use of the technologies, and in particular, their information creation and consumption (Fuchs, 2014). For example, Scholz (2008) describes Web 2.0 as a phenomenon involving businesses profiting from “networked social production, amateur participation online, fan cultures, social

networking, podcasting, and collective intelligence” (p. 2). The commodification of user- generated information and information consumption has become strongly associated with the major players in the Web 2.0 world, most notably SMSs like Facebook and Twitter. Of the most popular Web 2.0 sites as measured by site-traffic (Alexa.com, 2015), almost all of these are run as for-profit businesses.18 Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest—all SMSs ranked in the top 50 of overall global web traffic—are all

technologies put forward and run by companies that generate revenue from user generated information as well as users’ consumption of information.

Many of the activities that users participate in within a SMS environment provide opportunities for the SMS business purveyor to generate revenue. There are two ways this generally occurs: through the sale of advertising displayed through the SMS to users and through the sale of access to information generated by users to third parties. Users’ content creation and consumption practices are relevant to advertising as the information users generate serves as the “draw” for other users that will, in turn, consume both the informational content and the site’s advertising content. Advertising is often displayed in close proximity to the user-generated content, sometimes blurring the line between the two. On Facebook, for example, advertisements appear on a scroll on the right hand side of the screen and within the users’ timeline. N. Cohen (2008) describes this process generally, stating: “[b]y uploading photos, posting links, and inputting detailed

information about social and cultural tastes, producer-consumers provide content that is used to generate traffic, which is then leveraged into advertising sales” (p. 7). The second way that some SMSs generate revenue is by taking the informational content that users create and then selling, sharing, or renting access to this data in its raw form or in

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aggregated user profiles to third parties. Twitter, for example, sells access to their

“firehose,” a pipeline of real-time user updates, and also through the company’s Certified Products Program.

Based on these models of revenue generation, it is relatively straightforward to see how users’ information creation and consumption practices can influence a platform’s profitability. The more content users consume, the more they spend time also looking at advertising. The more content users create, the more that can be sold to third parties, or that can serve as content for other users to consume (and thus, those consumers spend more time looking at advertising). Users, however, generally do not share in any of the profit produced by these activities. Nick Bilton, a writer for the New York Times, glibly remarks on this reality in an article on Facebook’s initial public offering of stock by stating:

By my calculation, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, owes me about $50 . . . Facebook laid the foundation of the house and put in the plumbing, but we put up the walls, picked out the furniture, painted and hung photos, and invited everyone over for dinner parties. (2012, para. 1)