A Critical Hypertext Analysis of Social Media: The True Colours of Facebook

Facebook, in just a few years, has become one of the central toolspeople use to communicate with each other in everyday life. However, the perceived freedom of action on the site andthe actual processes that are permitted in Facebook'sset up don't always match up: in this book this gap is examined.This book identifies the interrelations between user textactions and the software environment framing them. It takes a critical perspective on Facebook anddevelops a model that grants methodological access to complex interlacedpractices incorporating media, text and literacies.It shows Facebook users employing idiosyncratic andFacebook-specific literacy practices, and gives weight to the larger hypothesis ofthe software service as an ideological setting designed to calculate andstandardize human behaviour. Specifically, the book examines text action and automation within Facebook to determine how the software serviceintervenes in the communicative flow between/among profile owners and profilerecipients. This is cutting edgework and of huge importance to modern fields of discourse analysis and computer-mediatedcommunication.