Robert W. Gehl, “Reverse Engineering Social Media” (Temple UP, 2014)

Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism (Temple University Press, 2014) by Robert Gehl (University of Utah, Department of Communication) explores the architecture and political economy of social media. Gehl analyzes the ideas of social media and software engineers, using these ideas to find contradictions and fissures beneath the surfaces of glossy sites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. The book draws upon software studies, science and technology studies, and political economy to contextualize the institutionalization of user labor in our growing social media landscape. Looking backward at divisions of labor and the process of user labor, he provides case studies that illustrate how binary “Like” consumer choices hide surveillance systems that rely on users to build content for site owners who make money selling user data, and that promote a culture of anxiety and immediacy over depth. Gehl also goes beyond a critique of these inherently undemocratic systems to outline proposals that can shape our collective online future for the better. An idealized social data system, he argues, should be “decentralized, transparent, encrypted, antiarchival, stored on free hardware, and geared toward collective politics over atomization and depth over immediacy and surfaces.”

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