The Materialities and Imaginaries of Apps, Social Networks, and Web 2.0

Abstract

Reviews the books, The App Generation: How Today's Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World by H. Gardner and K. Davis (see record 2013-34562-000); Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture by H. Jenkins, S. Ford, and J. Green (2013); and Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age by A. E. Marwick (2013). These books are aimed at different audiences, engage different research methods, examine different if overlapping topics, and require different investments from their authors as researchers, they do share commonalities. Throughout this review, we point to their common concerns but then emphasize the book’s differences as driven, ultimately, by each text’s underlying metaphor. The first thing these books have in common along with most books in the field of Internet Studies is that they’re clearly time-stamped, reflecting a particular moment of engagement with and reflections on a hyper-evolving media. All of the books dismiss technological determinism, the reductionist and mostly abandoned theory that presumes that technology is responsible for a society’s structure and cultural values, but the relationship between technology and society is such that it’s difficult to juggle without sometimes falling into the determinist trap. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)