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The rapid expansion of social media has led to the concentration of digitized, networked, and mediated processes into the hands of a few giant corporations (e.g. Google, Facebook, and Amazon), their partners and affiliates. From smart watches to targeted advertising and reputation scores, this new political economy of subjectivation – or subject making – sees an intensification of datafication to sell commodities, manipulate moods, inject ideologies, and influence behaviors. This article argues that in order to understand this new political economy of subjectivation, we need to complicate and build upon framework that focus on the collection of personal data and its risks on individual users. We argue that as social media and digital media giant corporations move away from an enclosed platform model toward a distributed, impersonal infrastructure, the mining of individual data and the shaping of individual attitudes is increasingly geared toward establishing relationships between user data and a plethora of non-human, environmental data. Such an infrastructure invokes impersonal subjects, and thus requires a new politics of relationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a critical alternative to the common equation between participatory culture and democratic communication and argues that power on online participatory platforms should be understood as the governance of semiotic open-endedness. This article argues that the concept of cultural expression cannot be understood solely by looking at users’ cultural practices, but should be revisited to pay attention to the networked conditions that enable it. This involves tracing the governance of disparate processes such as protocols, software, linguistic processes, and cultural practices that make the production and circulation of meaning possible. Thus, communication on participatory platforms should be understood as the management of flows of meaning, that is, as the processes of codification of the informational, technical, cultural, and semiotic dynamics through which meanings are expressed. This makes it possible to understand the logics through which software platforms transform information into cultural signs and shape users’ perceptions and agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses how corporate social media have redefined communication. It is stated that social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have simplified the communication process and expanded the opportunities for communication, and they have also commercialized communications. It is mentioned that social media enhance and promote communication, and social media platforms also promote the patterning of communication by recording the act of communication.

This paper calls for a cultural analysis of the World Wide Web through a focus on the technical layers that shape the Web as a medium. Web technologies need to be acknowledged as not only shaped by social processes, but also deployed, through standardization and automation, as agents that render representation possible by following specific technocultural logics. Thus, the focus is on the relationship between hardware, software, and culture through an analysis of the layers of encoding that translate data into discourse, and vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]