This article is a critical examination of how capitalism has adapted to the explosion of websites devoted to user-generated content (commonly referred to as social media or Web 2.0). The author proceeds by reviewing how Marx applies the concepts of alienation and exploitation to his paradigmatic example (i.e., the factory); the author then attempts to extend the logic of both concepts to determine what they might reveal about the structural conditions of social media. A difference of prime importance between the two case studies is that factory work is wage labor coerced by economic necessity, whereas use of social networking sites is apparently voluntary and done freely. The author concludes by arguing that social media users are subject to levels of exploitation relatively consistent with industrial capitalism, whereas the structural conditions of the digital economy link profitability to a reduction in the intensity of alienation. Finally, he infers that social media is not economically beneficial to most users.

Abstract-Social-media-supported academic conferences are becoming increasingly global as people anywhere can participate actively through backchannel conversation. It can be challenging for the conference organizers to integrate the use of social media, to take advantage of the connections between backchannel and front stage, and to encourage the participants to be a part of the broader discussion occurring through social media. As academic conferences are different in nature, specialized tools and methods are needed to analyze the vast amount of digital data generated through the backchannel conversation, which can offer key insights on best practices. In this paper we present our two fold contribution to enable organizers to gain such insights. First, we introduce Conference Monitor (CM), a real time webbased tweet visualization dashboard to monitor the backchannel conversation during academic conferences. We demonstrate the features of CM, which are designed to help monitor academic conferences and its application during the conference Theorizing the Web 2012 (TtW12). Its real time visualizations helped identify the popular sessions, the active and important participants and trending topics during the conference. Second, we report on our retrospective analysis of the tweets about the TtW12 conference and the conference-related follower-networks of its participants. The 4828 tweets from 593 participants resulted in 8.14 tweets per participant. The 1591 new follower-relations created among the participants during the conference confirmed the overall high volume of new connections created during academic conferences. We also observed that on average a speaker got more new followers than a non-speaker. A few remote participants also gained comparatively large number of new followers due to the content of their tweets and their perceived importance to the conference followers. There was a positive correlation between the number of new followers of a participant and the number of people who mentioned him/her. The analysis of the tweets suggested that remote participants had a significant level of participation in the backchannel and live streaming helped them to be more engaged.

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Abstract-This paper presents a three-part experiment designed to investigate the motivations of users of a community safety and neighborhood watch social networking website. The experiment centers around an intervention into the invitation system that current users employ to invite nonmembers to join the site, and involves several versions of an invitation email which differ by expressing one of four possible motivations for using such a site. The research presented investigates how potential users' choice of whether or not to join the site is affected by the use case presented by the invitation. It also includes an investigation of the motivations of current users of the site, as reported in an online survey. The experiment yielded no significant difference in responses to the emails. Overall, invitations that included a specific motivation slightly outperformed those which did not, but not to a statistically significant degree. We conclude that although users have specific motivations for using the site, as reported in the survey, attempting to increase response rates to invitation emails by suggesting use cases of the site is surprisingly unlikely to be successful.