Don't judge a book by its second chapter...

I would like to informally apologize for my lack of patience with Professor Van Dijck’s second chapter. While my first impression of the chapter induced a desire to either go to sleep or crawl into a hole and await the next assigned reading, I was mistaken.

Well, probably not about Van Dijck’s writing style thus far. It was incredibly dry and sleep-inducing. However, Dr. Kennedy kindly made this boring piece of academic pie into an award-winning tasty variety on the “theoretical underpinnings” of social media.

The constructs discussed are perhaps the “platform” of social media platforms. Technology, users, content, owners, governance, and business models are interlinked to support social media usage. It’s kind of scary to think about the underpinnings of such commonly used technology. It could be compared to trying to figure out how a car is made and sold.

As social media users, we eat up new technology. We cry when our Wi-Fi is slow, or Snapchat changes the shape of its ghost, but the lack of knowledge we have about our daily social media interactions is almost disheartening. Some people don’t eat meat or overly-processed foods because of what it does to their bodies, (I am not one of those people, btw). But what are we putting into our brains?! What information are we sharing to our “followers” that consist of people we may not know, or have actually consented to view our information. Is it still mine if it’s on the Internet? I sound like a grandma; that’s fine. In conclusion, thank you to Van DiJck and Dr. Kennedy for their thought-provocation.