This e-flux essay makes a case for looking at social media as more than just a place to post photos:
Social networking is much more than just a dominant discourse. We need to go beyond text and images and include its software, interfaces, and networks that depend on a technical infrastructure consisting of offices and their consultants and cleaners, cables and data centers, working in close concert with the movements and habits of the connected billions. (...)
We treat the internet as something ethereal, but “the cloud” is mostly just rows of humming server racks in giant warehouses. Because we don’t see the physical hardware, it’s easy to miss how much of our digital life is manufactured.
… Before we enter the social media sphere, everyone first fills out a profile and choses a username and password in order to create an account. Minutes later, you’re part of the game and you start sharing, creating, playing, as if it has always been like that [...] The platforms present themselves as self-evident. They just are—facilitating our feature-rich lives.
Before movies matured into a standard format, they were all “experimental,” including plot structures. We now take for granted conventions like following a protagonist through a rising action and climax, but things didn’t have to turn out that way. Social media is the same. The focus on “engagement metrics” and “personalization” isn’t a natural law; it’s a design choice optimized for business incentives.
Treating social media as ideology means observing how it binds together media, culture, and identity into an ever-growing cultural performance (and related “cultural studies”) of gender, lifestyle, fashion, brands, celebrity, and news from radio, television, magazines, and the web—all of this imbricated with the entrepreneurial values of venture capital and start-up culture, with their underside of declining livelihoods and growing inequality.
Software gives us a simplified, imaginary relationship to the hardware it runs on. We don’t interact with transistors; we interact with “desktops” and “recycling bins.” In the same way, social platforms produce a specific kind of “user.”
Software “fulfills almost every formal definition of ideology we have, from ideology as false consciousness to Louis Althusser’s definition of ideology as a ‘representation’ of the imaginary relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence.’”
Software, or perhaps more precisely operating systems, offer us an imaginary relationship to our hardware: they do not represent transistors but rather desktops and recycling bins. Software produces users. Without operating system (OS) there would be no access to hardware; without OS no actions, no practices, and thus no user. Each OS, through its advertisements, interpellates a “user”: calls it and offers it a name or image with which to identify.