Social semiotics and platform studies: an integrated perspective for the study of social media platforms

ABSTRACT

The development of web 2.0 was powered by web services that are software systems designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It was the choice of standards enabling such interactions that favored communication among different systems and their mash ups. Facebook was the first social networking site to launch a service for developers that exposed its web services and the correlated APIs (application programming interfaces). This choice allowed programmers to create tools that could live within Facebook and turned the social networking site into a platform by enacting its programmability. In order to investigate the possibilities and the constraints offered by social media platforms, there seems to arise the necessity to integrate the analysis of frontend texts (such as posts or comments) and of social media communicative properties with the exploration of an underlying layer constituted by the network of relationships created within an application ecosystem and developed by using web services. The aim of the paper is to present a multi-layered approach to the study of social media platforms that combines the emerging subfield of Semiotic Technology with Platform Studies. The model is here applied to the analysis of Facebook Login Service.

KEYWORDS:

• APIs
• Facebook login
• platform studies
• social media
• social semiotics
• web services

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Dr. Daniele Badiani for his careful supervision on Programing Architecture and Prof. David Berry for his precious insights during the Perspective of Social Media Technology Seminar organized by the University of Southern Denmark.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Ilaria Moschini is tenured Assistant Professor in English Linguistics at the University of Florence (Italy). Her main research interests are media language, US political and institutional language and US global culture that she investigates using a framework that combines systemic functional linguistics and critical discourse analysis with a socio-semiotic approach to multimodality. She has published several essays on the linguistic/semiotic analysis of texts from different discursive areas and a volume on the evolution of American imaginary. Full CV is downloadable from https://www.unifi.it/p-doc2-2013-200011-M-3f2a3d323a2931-0.html.

ORCID

Ilaria Moschini http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8233-9523

Notes

1 UML diagrams could be the object of semiotic investigation as they are flowcharts, but this would transcend the spatial limits of the present essay.

2 The new version of the Graph API was released on April 4, 2018 (https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/changelog/version3.0) in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytical scandal and just a few days before Facebook CEO's congressional hearings that took place on April 10-11, 2018.