Mar
5
Why Theorizing The Web Matters
I took part in the Theorizing the Web conference last weekend, organized by Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey. It was really fun, and I was honored to be on a panel with danah boyd and Zeynep Tufekci, two of my favorite internet thinkers. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see many of the other presentations. But it got me thinking about why it’s important that people like Nathan are theorizing the web*.
Theorizing the web is important because we need people thinking about how the web works who aren’t venture capitalists and start-up people looking to cash in on the next social craze. What you’re seeing with the TtW crowd is the rise of a new kind of social media criticism that is augmenting older media criticism: It’s questioning the assumptions and structures that underpin the production of social media like older media scholars questioned the production of television and newspapers. Social networks are the new television networks, at least when you think it about it in terms of hours of media consumed.
If you read Nathan Jurgenson’s pieces on Snapchat or Instagram, you see someone who really values and understands the technology but is also highly skeptical and curious about how it really works. It all goes back to the question of control: Are we letting these technologies control us while Silicon Valley billionaires get rich? Or can we maintain our critical facilities and agency, while still taking advantage of social media? Theory can help us address the very real issues about social media without falling into the technophobic “is facebook making us lonely” panic that characterizes so much mainstream discourse around social media and the internet.
*I originally typed this up as a comment for this Observer article, but they didn’t make it in because I think I responded too late.
