Meaning in the Age of Social Media

Ganaele Langlois is Assistant Professor in the Communications Program at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada.

• Introduction: Meaning and Social Media 1. Governing Meaning 2. Meaning Machines 3. Meaningfulness and Subjectivation 4. Social Networking and the Production of the Self 5. Being in the World Afterword: Social Data and the Politics of Existence

"Whatever you thought, meanings are not restricted to humans but are part of the business of technological platforms and corporations. Ganaele Langlois' excellent analysis tells the story of materiality of meaning in software culture. Its scholarly, rich analysis of the semiotechnological life has far reaching implications and will be a key text in social studies of software." - Jussi Parikka, Reader, Media and Design, University of Southampton, UK "One could think of this book as social media criticism 2.0. Langlois ... applies a broad array of semiotic, psychoanalytic, and political theory to social media and other modern communications technologies, which she calls 'semiotechnologies - machines that make meaning ... By examining how platforms such as Google and Facebook rank search results and curate user posts, Langlois contests oversimplified accounts of social media, taken as a whole, as a tool that simply liberates and empowers users. She provides a nuanced account of how meaning is generated on social media as individual users interact with corporate forprofit technologies designed to 'financialize and commodify psychic life'. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper division undergraduates through faculty? general readers." - CHOICE