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Tag: wikipedia

  • Michelle Moravec — The Endless Night of Wikipedia’s Notable Woman Problem

    Michelle Moravec — The Endless Night of Wikipedia’s Notable Woman Problem

    Michelle Moravec

    Millions of the sex whose names were never known beyond the circles of their own home influences have been as worthy of commendation as those here commemorated. Stars are never seen either through the dense cloud or bright sunshine; but when daylight is withdrawn from a clear sky they tremble forth. (Hale 1853, ix)

    As this poetic quote by Sarah Josepha Hale, nineteenth-century author and influential editor, reminds us, context is everything.   The challenge, if we wish to write women back into history via Wikipedia, is to figure out how to shift the frame of reference so that our stars can shine, since the problem of who precisely is “worthy of commemoration” so often seems to exclude women.  This essay takes on one of the “tests” used to determine whether content is worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia, notability, to explore how the purportedly neutral concept works against efforts to create entries about female historical figures.

    According to Wikipedia “notability,” a subject is considered notable if it  “has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject.” (“Wikipedia:Notability” 2017)   To a historian of women, the gender biases implicit in these criteria are immediately recognizable; for most of written history, women were de facto considered unworthy of consideration (Smith 2000). Unsurprisingly, studies have pointed to varying degrees of bias in coverage of female figures in Wikipedia compared to male figures.  One study of Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia concluded,

    Overall, we find evidence of gender bias in Wikipedia coverage of biographies. While Wikipedia’s massive reach in coverage means one is more likely to find a biography of a woman there than in Britannica, evidence of gender bias surfaces from a deeper analysis of those articles each reference work misses. (Reagle and Rhue 2011)

    Five years later, another study found this bias persisted; women constituted only 15.5 percent of the biographical entries on the English Wikipedia, and that for women born prior to the 20th century, the problem of exclusion was wildly exacerbated by “sourcing and notability issues” (“Gender Bias on Wikipedia” 2017).

    One potential source for buttressing the case of notable women has been identified by literary scholar Alison Booth.  Booth identified more than 900 volumes of prosopography published during what might be termed the heyday of the genre, 1830-1940, when the rise of the middle class and increased literacy combined with relatively cheap production of books to make such volumes both practicable and popular (Booth 2004). Booth also points out that, lest we consign the genre to the realm of mere curiosity, the volumes were “indispensable aids in the formation of nationhood” (Booth 2004, 3).

    To reveal the historical contingency of the purportedly neutral criteria of notability, I utilized longitudinal data compiled by Booth which reveals that notability has never been the stable concept Wikipedia’s standards take it to be.  Since notability alone cannot explain which women make it into Wikipedia, I then turn to a methodology first put forth by historian Mary Ritter Beard in her critique of the Encyclopedia Britannica to identify missing entries (Beard 1977). Utilizing Notable American Women, as a reference corpus, I calculated the inclusion of individual women from those volumes in Wikipedia (Boyer and James 1971).  In this essay I extend that analysis to consider the difference between notability and notoriety from a historical perspective.  One might be well known while remaining relatively unimportant from a historical perspective.  Such distinctions are collapsed in Wikipedia, assuming that a body of writing about a historical subject stands as prima facie evidence of notability.

    While inclusion in Notable American Women does not necessarily translate into presence in Wikipedia, looking at the categories of women that have higher rates of inclusion offers insights into how female historical figures do succeed in Wikipedia.  My analysis suggests that criterion of notability restricts the women who succeed in obtaining pages in Wikipedia to those who mirror “the ‘Great Man Theory’ of history (Mattern 2015)  or are “notorious”  (Lerner 1975).

    Alison Booth has compiled a list of the most frequently mentioned women in a subset of female prosopographical volumes and tracked their frequency over time (2004, 394–396).   She made this data available on the web, allowing for the creation of Figure 1 which focuses on the inclusion of US historical figures in volumes published from 1850 to 1930.

    Figure 1. US women by publication date of books that included them (image source: author)
    Figure 1. US women by publication date of books that included them (image source: author)

    This chart clarifies what historians already know: notability is historically specific and contingent. For example, Mary Washington, mother of the first president, is notable in the nineteenth century but not in the twentieth. She drops off because over time, motherhood alone ceases to be seen as a significant contribution to history.  Wives of presidents remain quite popular, perhaps because they were at times understood as playing an important political role, so Mary Washington’s daughter-in-law Martha still appears in some volumes in the latter period. A similar pattern may be observed for foreign missionary Anne Hasseltine Judson in the twentieth century.  The novelty of female foreign missionaries like Judson faded as more women entered the field.  Other figures, like Laura Bridgman, “the first deaf-blind American child to gain a significant education in the English language,” were supplanted by later figures in what might be described as the “one and done” syndrome, where only a single spot is allotted for a specific kind of notable woman (“Laura Bridgman” 2017). In this case, Bridgman likely fell out of favor as Helen Keller’s fame rose.

    Although their notability changed over time, all the women depicted in figure 1 have Wikipedia pages; this is unsurprising as they were among the most mentioned women in the sort of volumes Wikipedia considers “reliable sources.” But what about more contemporary examples?  Does inclusion in a relatively recent work that declares women as notable mean that these women would meet Wikipedia’s notability standards? To answer this question, I relied on a methodology of calculating missing biographies in Wikipedia, utilizing a reference corpus to identify women who might reasonably be expected to appear in Wikipedia and to calculate the percentage that do not. Working with the digitized copy of Notable American Women in the Women and Social Movements database, I compiled a missing biographies quotient for individuals in selected sections of the “classified list of biographies” that appear at the end of the third volume of Notable American Women. The eleven categories with no missing entries offer some insights into how women do succeed in Wikipedia (Table 1).

    Classification % missing
    Astronomers 0
    Biologists 0
    Chemists & Physicists 0
    Heroines 0
    Illustrators 0
    Indian Captives 0
    Naturalists 0
    Psychologists 0
    Sculptors 0
    Wives of Presidents 0

    Table 1. Classifications from Notable American Women with no missing biographies in Wikipedia

    Characteristics that are highly predictive of success in Wikipedia for women include association with a powerful man, as in the wives of presidents, and recognition in a male-dominated field of science, social science and art. Additionally, extraordinary women, such as heroines, and those who are quite rare, such as Indian captives, also have a greater chance of success in Wikipedia.[1]

    Further analysis of the classifications with greater proportions of missing women reflects Gerda Lerner’s complaint that the history of notable women is the story of exceptional or deviant women (Lerner 1975).  “Social worker,” which has the highest percentage of missing biographies at 67%, illustrates that individuals associated with female-dominated endeavors are less likely to be considered notable unless they rise to a level of exceptionalism (Table 2).

    Name Included?
    Dinwiddie, Emily Wayland

    no

    Glenn, Mary Willcox Brown

    no

    Kingsbury, Susan Myra

    no

    Lothrop, Alice Louise Higgins

    no

    Pratt, Anna Beach

    no

    Regan, Agnes Gertrude

    no

    Breckinridge, Sophonisba Preston

    page

    Richmond, Mary Ellen

    page

    Smith, Zilpha Drew

    stub

    Table 2. Social Workers from Notable American Women by inclusion in Wikipedia

    Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge’s Wikipedia entry describes her as “an American activist, Progressive Era social reformer, social scientist and innovator in higher education” who was also “the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in political science and economics then the J.D. at the University of Chicago, and she was the first woman to pass the Kentucky bar” (“Sophonisba Breckinridge” 2017). While the page points out that “She led the process of creating the academic professional discipline and degree for social work,” her page is not linked to the category of American social workers (“Category:American Social Workers” 2015).  If a female historical figure isn’t as exceptional as Breckinridge, she needs to be a “first” like Mary Ellen Richmond who makes it into Wikipedia as the  “social work pioneer” (“Mary Richmond” 2017).

    This conclusion that being a “first” facilitates success in Wikipedia is supported by analysis of the classification of nurses. Of the ten nurses who have Wikipedia entries, 80% are credited with some sort of temporally marked achievement, generally a first or pioneering role (Table 3).

    Individual Was she a first? Was she a participant in a male-dominated historical event? Was she a founder?
    Delano, Jane Arminda leading pioneer World War I founder of the American Red Cross Nursing Service
    Fedde, Sister Elizabeth* established the Norwegian Relief Society
    Maxwell, Anna Caroline pioneering activities Spanish-American War
    Nutting, Mary Adelaide world’s first professor of nursing World War I founded the American Society of superintendents of Training Schools for Nurses
    Richards, Linda first professionally trained American nurse, pioneering modern nursing in the United States No Richards pioneered the founding and superintending of nursing training schools across the nation.
    Robb, Isabel Adams Hampton early leader (held many “first” positions) No helped to found …the National League for Nursing, the International Council of Nurses, and the American Nurses Association.
    Stimson, Julia Catherine first woman to attain the rank of Major World War I
    Wald, Lillian D. coined the term “public health nurse” & the founder of American community nursing No founded Henry Street Settlement
    Mahoney, Mary Eliza first African American to study and work as a professionally trained nurse in the US No co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses
    Thoms, Adah B. Samuels World War I co-founded the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses

    * Fredde appears in Wikipedia primarily as a Norwegian Lutheran Deaconess. The word “nurse” does not appear on her page.

    Table 3. Classifications from Notable American Women with no missing biographies in Wikipedia

    As the entries for nurses reveal, in addition to being first, a combination of several additional factors work in a female subject’s favor in achieving success in Wikipedia.  Nurses who founded an institution or organization or participated in a male-dominated event already recognized as historically significant, such as war, were more successful than those who did not.

    If distinguishing oneself, by being “first” or founding something, as part of a male-dominated event facilitates higher levels of inclusion in Wikipedia for women in female dominated fields, do these factors also explain how women from classifications that are not female-dominated succeed? Looking at labor leaders, it appears these factors can offer only a partial explanation (Table 4).

    Individual Was she a first? Was she a participant in a male-dominated historical event? Was she a founder? Description from Wikipedia
    Bagley, Sarah G. “probably the first”  No formed the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association headed up female department of newspaper until fired because “a female department. … would conflict with the opinions of the mushroom aristocracy … and beside it would not be dignified”
    Barry, Leonora Marie Kearney “only woman” “first woman” KNIGHTS OF LABOR “difficulties faced by a woman attempting to organize men in a male-dominated society.
     Employers also refused to allow her to investigate their factories.”
    Bellanca, Dorothy Jacobs  “first full-time female organizer”  No 0rganized the Baltimore buttonhole makers into Local 170 of the United Garment Workers of America, one of four women who attended founding convention of Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America   “ “men resented” her
    Haley, Margaret Angela “pioneer leader”  No  No dubbed the “lady labor slugger”
    Jones, Mary Harris  No KNIGHTS OF LABOR IWW “most dangerous woman in America”
    Nestor, Agnes  No WOMEN’S TRADE UNION LEAGUE founded  International Glove Workers Union
    O’Reilly, Leonora  No WOMEN’S TRADE UNION LEAGUE founded the Wage Earners Suffrage League “O’Reilly as a public speaker was thought to be out of place for women at this time in New York’s history.”
    O’Sullivan, Mary Kenney the first woman AFL employed WOMEN’S TRADE UNION LEAGUE founder of the Women’s Trade Union League
    Stevens, Alzina Parsons first probation officer KNIGHTS OF LABOR

    Table 4. Classifications from Notable American Women with no missing biographies in Wikipedia

    In addition to being a “first” or founding something, two other variables emerge from the analysis of labor leaders that predict success in Wikipedia.  One is quite heartening: affiliation with the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), a significant female-dominated historical organization, seems to translate into greater recognition as historically notable.  Less optimistically, it also appears that what Lerner labeled as “notorious” behavior predicts success: six of the nine women were included for a wide range of reasons, from speaking out publicly to advocating resistance.

    The conclusions here can be spun two ways. If we want to get women into Wikipedia, to surmount the obstacle of notability, we should write about women who fit well within the great man school of history. This could be reinforced within the architecture of Wikipedia by creating links within a woman’s entry to men and significant historical events, while also making sure that the entry emphasizes a woman’s “firsts” and her institutional ties. Following these practices will make an entry more likely to overcome challenges and provide a defense against proposed deletion.  On the other hand, these are narrow criteria for meeting notability that will likely not encompass a wide range of female figures from the past.

    The larger question remains: should we bother to work in Wikipedia at all? (Raval 2014). Wikipedia’s content is biased not only by gender, but also by race and region (“Racial Bias on Wikipedia” 2017).   A concrete example of this intersectional bias can be seen if the fact that “only nine of Haiti’s 37 first ladies have Wikipedia articles, whereas all 45 first ladies of the United States have entries” (Frisella 2017).  Critics have also pointed to the devaluation of Indigenous forms of knowledge within Wikipedia (Senier 2014; Gallart and van der Velden 2015).

    Wikipedia, billed as “the encyclopedia anyone can edit” and purporting to offer “the sum of all human knowledge,” is notorious for achieving neither goal. Wikipedia’s content suffers from systemic bias related to the unbalanced demographics of its contributor base (Wikipedia, 2004, 2009c). I have highlighted here disparities in gendered content, which parallel the well-documented gender biases against female contributors (“Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering Systemic Bias” 2017).   The average editor of Wikipedia is white, from Western Europe or the United States, between 30-40, and overwhelmingly male.   Furthermore,  “super users” contribute most of Wikipedia’s content.  A 2014 analysis revealed that  “the top 5,000 article creators on English Wikipedia have created 60% of all articles on the project.  The top 1,000 article creators account for 42% of all Wikipedia articles alone.”   A study of a small sample of these super users revealed that they are not writing about women.  “The amount of these super page creators only exacerbates the [gender] problem, as it means that the users who are mass-creating pages are probably not doing neglected topics, and this tilts our coverage disproportionately towards male-oriented topics” (Hale 2014).  For example, the “List of Pornographic Actresses” on Wikipedia is lengthier and more actively edited than the “List of Female Poets” (Kleeman 2015).

    The hostility within Wikipedia against female contributors remains a significant barrier to altering its content since the major mechanism for rectifying the lack of entries about women is to encourage women to contribute them (New York Times 2011; Peake 2015; Paling 2015).   Despite years of concerted efforts to make Wikipedia more hospitable toward women, to organize editathons, and place Wikipedians in residencies specifically designed to add women to the online encyclopedia, the results have been disappointing (MacAulay and Visser 2016; Khan 2016). Authors of a recent study of  “Wikipedia’s infrastructure and the gender gap” point to “foundational epistemologies that exclude women, in addition to other groups of knowers whose knowledge does not accord with the standards and models established through this infrastructure” which includes “hidden layers of gendering at the levels of code, policy and logics” (Wajcman and Ford 2017).

    Among these policies is the way notability is implemented to determine whether content is worthy of inclusion.  The issues I raise here are not new; Adrianne Wadewitz, an early and influential feminist Wikipedian, noted in 2013 “A lack of diversity amongst editors means that, for example, topics typically associated with femininity are underrepresented and often actively deleted”(Wadewitz 2013). Wadewitz pointed to efforts to delete articles about Kate Middleton’s wedding gown, as well as the speedy nomination for deletion of an entry for reproductive rights activist Sandra Fluke.   Both pages survived, Wadewicz emphasized, reflecting the way in which Wikipedia guidelines develop through practice, despite their ostensible stability.

    This is important to remember – Wikipedia’s policies, like everything on the site, evolves and changes as the community changes. … There is nothing more essential than seeing that these policies on Wikipedia are evolving and that if we as feminists and academics want them to evolve in ways we feel reflect the progressive politics important to us, we must participate in the conversation. Wikipedia is a community and we have to join it. (Wadewitz 2013)

    While I have offered some pragmatic suggestions here about how to surmount the notability criteria in Wikipedia, I want to close by echoing Wadewitz’s sentiment that the greater challenge must be to question how notability is implemented in Wikipedia praxis.

    _____

    Michelle Moravec is an associate professor of history at Rosemont College.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] Seven of the eleven categories in my study with fewer than ten individuals have no missing individuals.

    _____

    Works Cited

  • Michelle Moravec — The Never-ending Night of Wikipedia’s Notable Woman Problem

    Michelle Moravec — The Never-ending Night of Wikipedia’s Notable Woman Problem

    By Michelle Moravec
    ~

    Author’s note: this is the written portion of a talk given at St. Joseph University’s Art + Feminism Wikipedia editathon, February 27, 2016. Thanks to Rachael Sullivan for the invite and  Rosalba Ugliuzza for Wikipedia data culling!

    Millions of the sex whose names were never known beyond the circles of their own home influences have been as worthy of commendation as those here commemorated. Stars are never seen either through the dense cloud or bright sunshine; but when daylight is withdrawn from a clear sky they tremble forth
    — Sarah Josepha Hale, Woman’s Record (1853)

    and others was a womanAs this poetic quote by Sarah Josepha Hale, nineteenth-century author and influential editor reminds us, context is everything.   The challenge, if we wish to write women back into history via Wikipedia, is to figure out how to shift the frame of references so that our stars can shine, since the problem of who precisely is “worthy of commemoration” or in Wikipedia language, who is deemed notable, so often seems to exclude women.

    As as Shannon Mattern asked at last year’s Art + Feminism Wikipedia edit-a-thon, “Could Wikipedia embody some alternative to the ‘Great Man Theory’ of how the world works?” Literary scholar Alison Booth, in How To Make It as a Woman, notes that the first book in praise of women by a woman appeared in 1404 (Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies), launching a lengthy tradition of “exemplary biographical collections of women.” Booth identified more than 900 voluanonymous was toomes of prosopography published during what might be termed the heyday of the genre, 1830-1940, when the rise of the middle class and increased literacy combined with relatively cheap production of books to make such volumes both practicable and popular. Booth also points out, that lest we consign the genre to the realm of mere curiosity, predating the invention of “women’s history” the compilers, editrixes or authors of these volumes considered them a contribution to “national history” and indeed Booth concludes that the volumes were “indispensable aids in the formation of nationhood.”

    Booth compiled a list of the most frequently mentioned women in a subset of these books and tracked their frequency over time.  In an exemplary project, she made this data available on the web, allowing for the creation of the visualization below of American figures on that chart.

    booth data by date

    This chart makes clear what historians already know, notability is historically specific and contingent, something Wikipedia does not take into account in formulating guidelines that take this to be a stable concept.

    Only Pocahontas deviates from the great white woman school of history and she too becomes less salient over time.  Furthermore, by the standards of this era, at least as represented by these books, black women were largely considered un-notable. This perhaps explains why, in 1894, Gertrude Mossell published The Work of the Afro-American Woman, a compilation of achievements that she described as “historical in character.” Mossell’s volume itself is a rich source of information of women worthy of commemoration and commendation.

    Looking further into the twentieth-century, the successor to this sort of volume is aptly titled, Notable American Women, a three-volume set that while published in 1971 had its roots in the 1950s when Arthur Schlesinger, as head of Radcliffe’s College council, suggested that a biographical dictionary of women might be a useful thing. Perhaps predictably, a publisher could not be secured, so Radcliffe funded the project itself. The question then becomes does inclusion in a volume declaring women as “notable” mean that these women would meet Wikipedia’s “notability” standards?

    Studies have found varying degrees of bias in coverage of female figures compared to male figures. The latest numbers I found, as of January 2015, concluded that women constituted only 15.5 percent of the biographical entries on the English Wikipedia, and that prior to the 20th century, the problem was wildly exacerbated by “sourcing and notability issues.” Using the “missing” biographies concept borrowed from a 2010 study of Wikipedia’s “completeness,” I compared selected “classified” areas for biographies of Notable American Women (analysis was conducted by hand with tremendous assistance from Rosalba Ugliuzza).

    Working with the digitized copy of Notable American Women in Women and Social Movements, I began compiling a “missing” biographies quotient,  the percentage of entries missing for individuals by the “classified list of biographies” that appeared at the end of the third volume of Notable American Women. Mirroring the well-known category issues of Wikipedia, the editors finessed the difficulties of limiting individuals to one area by including them in multiple, including a section called “Negro Women” and another called “Indian Women”:

    missing for blog

    Initially I had suspected that larger classifications might have a greater percentage of missing entries, but that is not true. Social workers, the classification with the highest percentage of missing entries, is a relatively small classification with only nine individuals. The six classifications with no missing entries ranged in size from five to eleven.  I then created my own meta-categories to summarize what larger classifications might exacerbate this “missing” biographies problem.

    legend missing blog

    Inclusion in Notable American Women does not translate into inclusion in Wikipedia.   Influential individuals associated with female-dominated professions, social work and nursing, are less likely to be considered notable, as are those “leaders” in settlement houses or welfare work or “reformers” like peace advocates.   Perhaps due to edit-a-thons or Wikipedians-in-residence, female artists and female scientists have fared quite well.  Both Indian Women and Negro Women have the same percentage of missing women.

    Looking at the network of “Negro Women” by their Notable American Women classified entries, I noted their centrality. Frances Harper and Ida B. Wells are the most networked women in the volumes, which is representative of their position as bridge leaders (I also noted the centrality of Frances Gage, who does not have a Wikipedia entry yet, a fate she shares with the white abolitionists Sallie Holley and Caroline Putnam).

    negro network colors

    Visualizing further, I located two women who don’t have Wikipedia entries and are not included in Notable American Women:

    missing negro women

    Eva del Vakia Bowles was a long time YWCA worker who spent her life trying to improve interracial relations. She was the first black woman hired by the YWCA to head a branch. During WWI, Bowles had charge of Y’s established near war work factories to provide R & R for workers. Throughout her tenure at the Y, Bowles pressed the organization to promote black women to positions within the organization. In 1932 she resigned from her beloved Y in protest over policies she believed excluded black women from the decision making processes of the National Board.

    Addie D. Waites Hunton, also a Y worker and founding member of the NAACP, was an amazing woman who along with her friend Kathryn Magnolia Johnson authored Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces (1920), which details their time as Y workers in WWI where they were among the very first black women sent. Later, she became a field worker for the NAACP, a member of the WILPF, and was an observer in Haiti in 1926 as part of that group

    Finally, using a methodology I developed when working on the racially-biased History of Woman Suffrage, I scraped names from Mossell’s The Work of the Afro-American Woman to find women that should have appeared in Notable American Women and in Wikipedia. Although this is rough result of named extractions, it gave me a place to start.

    overlaps negro women

    Alice Dugged Cary does not appear in Notable American Women or Wikipedia.  She was born free in 1859 became president of the State Federation of Colored Women of Georgia, librarian of first branch for African Americans in Atlanta, established first free kindergartens for African American children in Georgia, nominated as honorary member in Zeta Phi Beta and was involved in its spread.

    Similarly, Lucy Ella Moten, born free in 1851, became principal of Miner Normal School, earned an M.D., and taught in the South during summer “vacations, appears in neither Notable American Women nor Wikipedia (or at least she didn’t until Mike Lyons started her page yesterday at the editathon!).

    _____

    Michelle Moravec (@ProfessMoravec) is Associate Professor of History at Rosemont College. She is a prominent digital historian and the digital history editor for Women and Social Movements. Her current project, The Politics of Women’s Culture, uses a combination of digital and traditional approaches to produce an intellectual history of the concept of women’s culture. She writes a monthly column for the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities, and maintains her own blog History in the City, at which an earlier version of this post first appeared.

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  • All Hitherto Existing Social Media

    All Hitherto Existing Social Media

    Social Media: A Critical Introduction (Sage, 2013)a review of Christian Fuchs, Social Media: A Critical Introduction
    by Zachary Loeb
    ~
    Legion are the books and articles describing the social media that has come before. Yet the tracts focusing on Friendster, LiveJournal, or MySpace now appear as throwbacks, nostalgically immortalizing the internet that was and is now gone. On the cusp of the next great amoeba-like expansion of the internet (wearable technology and the “internet of things”) it is a challenging task to analyze social media as a concept while recognizing that the platforms being focused upon—regardless of how permanent they seem—may go the way of Friendster by the end of the month. Granted, social media (and the companies whose monikers act as convenient shorthand for it) is an important topic today. Those living in highly digitized societies can hardly avoid the tendrils of social media (even if a person does not use a particular platform it may still be tracking them), but this does not mean that any of us fully understand these platforms, let alone have a critical conception of them. It is into this confused and confusing territory that Christian Fuchs steps with his Social Media: A Critical Introduction.

    It is a book ostensibly targeted at students. Though when it comes to social media—as Fuchs makes clear—everybody has quite a bit to learn.

    By deploying an analysis couched in Marxist and Critical Theory, Fuchs aims not simply to describe social media as it appears today, but to consider its hidden functions and biases, and along the way to describe what social media could become. The goal of Fuchs’s book is to provide readers—the target audience is students, after all—with the critical tools and proper questions with which to approach social media. While Fuchs devotes much of the book to discussing specific platforms (Google, Facebook, Twitter, WikiLeaks, Wikipedia), these case studies are used to establish a larger theoretical framework which can be applied to social media beyond these examples. Affirming the continued usefulness of Marxist and Frankfurt School critiques, Fuchs defines the aim of his text as being “to engage with the different forms of sociality on the internet in the context of society” (6) and emphasizes that the “critical” questions to be asked are those that “are concerned with questions of power” (7).

    Thus a critical analysis of social media demands a careful accounting of the power structures involved not just in specific platforms, but in the larger society as a whole. So though Fuchs regularly returns to the examples of the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, he emphasizes that the narratives that dub these “Twitter revolutions” often come from a rather non-critical and generally pro-capitalist perspective that fail to embed adequately uses of digital technology in their larger contexts.

    Social media is portrayed as an example, like other media, of “techno-social systems” (37) wherein the online platforms may receive the most attention but where the, oft-ignored, layer of material technologies is equally important. Social media, in Fuchs’s estimation, developed and expanded with the growth of “Web 2.0” and functions as part of the rebranding effort that revitalized (made safe for investments) the internet after the initial dot.com bubble. As Fuchs puts it, “the talk about novelty was aimed at attracting novel capital investments” (33). What makes social media a topic of such interest—and invested with so much hope and dread—is the degree to which social media users are considered as active creators instead of simply consumers of this content (Fuchs follows much recent scholarship and industry marketing in using the term “prosumers” to describe this phenomenon; the term originates from the 1970s business-friendly futurology of Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave). Social media, in Fuchs’s description, represents a shift in the way that value is generated through labor, and as a result an alteration in the way that large capitalist firms appropriate surplus value from workers. The social media user is not laboring in a factory, but with every tap of the button they are performing work from which value (and profit) is skimmed.

    Without disavowing the hope that social media (and by extension the internet) has liberating potential, Fuchs emphasizes that such hopes often function as a way of hiding profit motives and capitalist ideologies. It is not that social media cannot potentially lead to “participatory democracy” but that “participatory culture” does not necessarily have much to do with democracy. Indeed, as Fuchs humorously notes: “participatory culture is a rather harmless concept mainly created by white boys with toys who love their toys” (58). This “love their toys” sentiment is part of the ideology that undergirds much of the optimism around social media—which allows for complex political occurrences (such as the Arab Spring) to be reduced to events that can be credited to software platforms.

    What Fuchs demonstrates at multiple junctures is the importance of recognizing that the usage of a given communication tool by a social movement does not mean that this tool brought about the movement: intersecting social, political and economic factors are the causes of social movements. In seeking to provide a “critical introduction” to social media, Fuchs rejects arguments that he sees as not suitably critical (including those of Henry Jenkins and Manuel Castells), arguments that at best have been insufficient and at worst have been advertisements masquerading as scholarship.

    Though the time people spend on social media is often portrayed as “fun” or “creative,” Fuchs recasts these tasks as work in order to demonstrate how that time is exploited by the owners of social media platforms. By clicking on links, writing comments, performing web searches, sending tweets, uploading videos, and posting on Facebook, social media users are performing unpaid labor that generates a product (in the form of information about users) that can then be sold to advertisers and data aggregators; this sale generates profits for the platform owner which do not accrue back to the original user. Though social media users are granted “free” access to a service, it is their labor on that platform that makes the platform have any value—Facebook and Twitter would not have a commodity to sell to advertisers if they did not have millions of users working for them for free. As Fuchs describes it, “the outsourcing of work to consumers is a general tendency of contemporary capitalism” (111).

    screen shot of Karl Marx Community Facebook Page
    screen shot of a Karl Marx Community Page on Facebook

    While miners of raw materials and workers in assembly plants are still brutally exploited—and this unseen exploitation forms a critical part of the economic base of computer technology—the exploitation of social media users is given a gloss of “fun” and “creativity.” Fuchs does not suggest that social media use is fully akin to working in a factory, but that users carry the factory with them at all times (a smart phone, for example) and are creating surplus value as long as they are interacting with social media. Instead of being a post-work utopia, Fuchs emphasizes that “the existence of the internet in its current dominant capitalist form is based on various forms of labour” (121) and the enrichment of internet firms is reliant upon the exploitation of those various forms of labor—central amongst these being the social media user.

    Fuchs considers five specific platforms in detail so as to illustrate not simply the current state of affairs but also to point towards possible alternatives. Fuchs analyzes Google, Facebook, Twitter, WikiLeaks and Wikipedia as case studies of trends to encourage and trends of which to take wary notice. In his analysis of the three corporate platforms (Google, Facebook and Twitter) Fuchs emphasizes the ways in which these social media companies (and the moguls who run them) have become wealthy and powerful by extracting value from the labor of users and by subjecting users to constant surveillance. The corporate platforms give Fuchs the opportunity to consider various social media issues in sharper relief: labor and monopolization in terms of Google, surveillance and privacy issues with Facebook, the potential for an online public sphere and Twitter. Despite his criticisms, Fuchs does not dismiss the value and utility of what these platforms offer, as is captured in his claim that “Google is at the same time the best and the worst thing that has ever happened on the internet” (147). The corporate platforms’ successes are owed at least partly to their delivering desirable functions to users. The corrective for which Fuchs argues is increased democratic control of these platforms—for the labor to be compensated and for privacy to pertain to individual humans instead of to businesses’ proprietary methods of control. Indeed, one cannot get far with a “participatory culture” unless there is a similarly robust “participatory democracy,” and part of Fuchs’s goal is to show that these are not at all the same.

    WikiLeaks and Wikipedia both serve as real examples that demonstrate the potential of an “alternative” internet for Fuchs. Though these Wiki platforms are not ideal they contain within themselves the seeds for their own adaptive development (“WikiLeaks is its own alternative”—232), and serve for Fuchs as proof that the internet can move in a direction akin to a “commons.” As Fuchs puts it, “the primary political task for concerned citizens should therefore be to resist the commodification of everything and to strive for democratizing the economy and the internet” (248), a goal he sees as at least partly realized in Wikipedia.

    While the outlines of the internet’s future may seem to have been written already, Fuchs’s book is an argument in favor of the view that the code can still be altered. A different future relies upon confronting the reality of the online world as it currently is and recognizing that the battles waged for control of the internet are proxy battles in the conflict between capitalism and an alternative approach. In the conclusion of the book Fuchs eloquently condenses his view and the argument that follows from it in two simple sentences: “A just society is a classless society. A just internet is a classless internet” (257). It is a sentiment likely to spark an invigorating discussion, be it in a classroom, at a kitchen table, or in a café.

    * * *

    While Social Media: A Critical Introduction is clearly intended as a text book (each chapter ends with a “recommended readings and exercises” section), it is written in an impassioned and engaging style that will appeal to anyone who would like to see a critical gaze turned towards social media. Fuchs structures his book so that his arguments will remain relevant even if some of the platforms about which he writes vanish. Even the chapters in which Fuchs focuses on a specific platform are filled with larger arguments that transcend that platform. Indeed one of the primary strengths of Social Media is that Fuchs skillfully uses the familiar examples of social media platforms as a way of introducing the reader to complex theories and thinkers (from Marx to Habermas).

    Whereas Fuchs accuses some other scholars of subtly hiding their ideological agendas, no such argument can be made regarding Fuchs himself. Social Media is a Marxist critique of the major online platforms—not simply because Fuchs deploys Marx (and other Marxist theorists) to construct his arguments, but because of his assumption that the desirable alternative for the internet is part and parcel of a desirable alternative to capitalism. Such a sentiment can be found at several points throughout the book, but is made particularly evident by lines such as these from the book’s conclusion: “There seem to be only two options today: (a) continuance and intensification of the 200-year-old barbarity of capitalism or (b) socialism” (259)—it is a rather stark choice. It is precisely due to Fuchs’s willingness to stake out, and stick to, such political positions that this text is so effective.

    And yet, it is the very allegiance to such positions that also presents something of a problem. While much has been written of late—in the popular press in addition to by scholars—regarding issues of privacy and surveillance, Fuchs’s arguments about the need to consider users as exploited workers will likely strike many readers as new, and thus worthwhile in their novelty if nothing else. Granted, to fully go along with Fuchs’s critique requires readers to already be in agreement or at least relatively sympathetic with Fuchs political and ethical positions. This is particularly true as Fuchs excels at making an argument about media and technology, but devotes significantly fewer pages to ethical argumentation.

    The lines (quoted earlier) “A just society is a classless society. A just internet is a classless internet” (257) serve as much as a provocation as a conclusion. For those who ascribe to a similar notion of “a just society” Fuchs book will likely function as an important guide to thinking about the internet; however, to those whose vision of “a just society” is fundamentally different from his, Fuchs’s book may be less than convincing. Social Media does not present a complete argument about how one defines a “just society.” Indeed, the danger may be that Fuchs’s statements in praise of a “classless society” may lead to some dismissing his arguments regarding the way in which the internet has replicated a “class society.” Likewise, it is easy to imagine a retort being offered that the new platforms of “the sharing economy” represent the birth of this “classless society” (though it is easy to imagine Fuchs pointing out, as have other critics from the left, that the “sharing economy” is simply more advertising lingo being used to hide the same old capitalist relations). This represents something of a peculiar challenge when it comes to Social Media, as the political commitment of the book is simultaneously what makes it so effective and that which threatens the book’s potential political efficacy.

    Thus Social Media presents something of a conundrum: how effective is a critical introduction if its conclusion offers a heads-and-tails choice between “barbarity of capitalism or…socialism”? Such a choice feels slightly as though Fuchs is begging the question. While it is curious that Fuchs does not draw upon critical theorists’ writings about the culture industry, the main issues with Social Media seem to be reflections of this black-and-white choice. Thus it is something of a missed chance that Fuchs does not draw upon some of the more serious critics of technology (such as Ellul or Mumford)—whose hard edged skepticism would nevertheless likely not accept Fuchs’s Marxist orientation. Such thinkers might provide a very different perspective on the choice between “capitalism” and “socialism”—arguing that “technique” or “the megamachine” can function quite effectively in either. Though Fuchs draws heavily upon thinkers in the Marxist tradition it may be that another set of insights and critiques might have been gained by bringing in other critics of technology (Hans Jonas, Peter Kropotkin, Albert Borgmann)—especially as some of these thinkers had warned that Marxism may overvalue the technological as much as capitalism does. This is not to argue in favor of any of these particular theorists, but to suggest that Fuchs’s claims would have been strengthened by devoting more time to considering the views of those who were critical of technology, capitalism and of Marxism. Social Media does an excellent job of confronting the ideological forces on its right flank; it could have benefited from at least acknowledging the critics to its left.

    Two other areas that remain somewhat troubling are in regards to Fuchs’s treatment of Wiki platforms and of the materiality of technology. The optimism with which Fuchs approaches WikiLeaks and Wikipedia is understandable given the dourness with which he approaches the corporate platforms, and yet his hopes for them seem somewhat exaggerated. Fuchs claims “Wikipedians are prototypical contemporary communists” (243), partially to suggest that many people are already engaged in commons based online activities and yet it is an argument that he simultaneously undermines by admitting (importantly) the fact that Wikipedia’s editor base is hardly representative of all of the platform’s users (it’s back to the “white boys with toys who love their toys”), and some have alleged that putatively structureless models of organization like Wikipedia’s actually encourage oligarchical forms of order. Which is itself not to say anything about the role that editing “bots” play on the platform or the degree to which Wikipedia is reliant upon corporate platforms (like Google) for promotion. Similarly, without ignoring its value, the example of WikiLeaks seems odd at a moment when the organization seems primarily engaged in a rearguard self-defense whilst the leaks that have generated the most interest of late has been made to journalists at traditional news sources (Edward Snowden’s leaks to Glenn Greenwald, who was writing for The Guardian when the leaks began).

    The further challenge—and this is one that Fuchs is not alone in contending with—is the trouble posed by the materiality of technology. An important aspect of Social Media is that Fuchs considers the often-unseen exploitation and repression upon which the internet relies: miners, laborers who build devices, those who recycle or live among toxic e-waste. Yet these workers seem to disappear from the arguments in the later part of the book, which in turn raises the following question: even if every social media platform were to be transformed into a non-profit commons-based platform that resists surveillance, manipulation, and the exploitation of its users, is such a platform genuinely just if to use it one must rely on devices whose minerals were mined in warzones, assembled in sweatshops, and which will eventually go to an early grave in a toxic dump? What good is a “classless (digital) society” without a “classless world?” Perhaps the question of a “capitalist internet” is itself a distraction from the fact that the “capitalist internet” is what one gets from capitalist technology. Granted, given Fuchs’s larger argument it may be fair to infer that he would portray “capitalist technology” as part of the problem. Yet, if the statement “a just society is a classless society” is to be genuinely meaningful than this must extend not just to those who use a social media platform but to all of those involved from the miner to the manufacturer to the programmer to the user to the recycler. To pose the matter as a question, can there be participatory (digital) democracy that relies on serious exploitation of labor and resources?

    Social Media: A Critical Introduction provides exactly what its title promises—a critical introduction. Fuchs has constructed an engaging and interesting text that shows the continuing validity of older theories and skillfully demonstrates the way in which the seeming newness of the internet is itself simply a new face on an old system. While Fuchs has constructed an argument that resolutely holds its position it is from a stance that one does not encounter often enough in debates around social media and which will provide readers with a range of new questions with which to wrestle.

    It remains unclear in what ways social media will develop in the future, but Christian Fuchs’s book will be an important tool for interpreting these changes—even if what is in store is more “barbarity.”
    _____

    Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently working towards an MA in the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ethical implications of technology, alternative forms of technology, and libraries as models of resistance. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian” Loeb writes at the blog librarianshipwreck. He previously reviewed The People’s Platform by Astra Taylor for boundary2.org.
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