A Critical Hypertext Analysis of Social Media

Facebook, in just a few years, has become one of the central tools people use to communicate with each other in everyday life. However, the perceived freedom of action on the site and the actual processes that are permitted in Facebook's set up don't always match up: in this book this gap is examined.

This book identifies the interrelations between user text actions and the software environment framing them. It takes a critical perspective on Facebook and develops a model that grants methodological access to complex interlaced practices incorporating media, text and literacies.

It shows Facebook users employing idiosyncratic and Facebook-specific literacy practices, and gives weight to the larger hypothesis of the software service as an ideological setting designed to calculate and standardize human behaviour. Specifically, the book examines text action and automation within Facebook to determine how the software service intervenes in the communicative flow between/among profile owners and profile recipients. This is cutting edge work and of huge importance to modern fields of discourse analysis and computer-mediated communication.