New York Times book review of “Status Update”

Putting People First has been following the work of Alice E. Marwick for a while, first when she published her PhD dissertation, then when her book “Status Update” came out.

Now the New York Times has published Walter Kirn’s extensive but not so positive review of her book:

“Alice E. Marwick, an academic observer of American online culture who teaches at Fordham University, would have us believe that the phenomenon of social media functions less as a revolutionary instrument of human liberation than as a peculiarly insidious agent of obedience and conformity. For Marwick, Web 2.0 is a promoter of what, following Foucault, she terms “technologies of subjectivity.” In other words, they turn its users into self-promoting, competitive, superficial “good corporate citizens” whose values are those of the very businesspeople behind the leading social media sites. She sees us as an army of little Mark Zuckerbergs, emulating without our conscious knowledge the highly effective, market-driven habits of “neoliberal” capitalism.”