"What social media ""likes"": a discourse analysis of the Google, Facebook and Twitter blogs"

Google, Facebook and Twitter are arguably synonymous with social media (Vaidhyanathan, 2011; Yakolev, 2007; Levy, 2009). Selling the attention spans of internet users to advertisers using content almost entirely created by the labour of others, makes these organizations leaders in a media environment that is beginning to redefine the relationship between consumers (or prosumers), technology, and the modern digital organization (Drache, 2008; Lessig, 2008; Rainie & Wellman, 2012; Castells, 2010; Shirky, 2010). As such, these organizations often get caught in between public action and other forms of online protest, such as the Arab Spring (Castells, 2012) and their practical business needs to maintain discursive control. This dissertation examines the tension between corporate control and user participation as it manifests on the official Google Facebook and Twitter corporate blogs. This research employs critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995) supported by corpus linguistics techniques (Stubbs, 1996) to analyze each entry from the official Google, Facebook and Twitter corporate blogs between 2006 and 2011. When taken together, the discourses from these three corporate blogs reveal an underlying media logic, otherwise known as social media logic (van Dijck, 2013) that drives these sites, and directs the actions of people who engage with these sites. Put simply, all three sites have an organizational discourse on the blogs which makes technological develop seem both necessary and inevitable. They construct a techno-centrism which often comes at the expense of the people who both develop the technologies, and the end users. These discourses support the commercialization of these sites, but do not support the view that these technologies are somehow inherently democratic (Shirky, 2010). Fortunately however, the fact that the business models of social media sites depend on the free contributions of user-generated content, means that should the people who use these sites decide to fight for change with respect to these organizations, they would be uniquely positioned to do so