Social media and the McDonaldization of friendship
-
Maria Bakardjieva
Abstract
This article employs the concept of McDonaldization introduced by George Ritzer (1993) in his Weberian analysis of the processes of formal rationalization characteristic of late modern consumer society to reflect on the social and cultural implications of the most recent wave of communication technologies – social media. It argues that social media smuggle formal rationality into the elementary forms of social interaction, most clearly illustrated through the way they redefine the notion of friendship. In an attempt to lay the ground for a “multiperspectivist approach” (Kellner, 1999) to this phenomenon, the article enters the Weberian argument into a conversation with other styles of theorizing social media such as Marxism, Critical Theory and sociological phenomenology.
©2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin Munich Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Debate
- Social media and the McDonaldization of friendship
- >Articles
- Parental mediation of internet use and cultural values across Europe: Investigating the predictive power of the Hofstedian paradigm
- Who bullies whom online: A social network analysis of cyberbullying in a school context
- A question of credibility – Effects of source cues and recommendations on information selection on news sites and blogs
- Between Europeanization and De-Europeanization: A Comparative Content Analysis of the Pre-election Presentation of the EU Agenda in the Czech Quality Press
- Reader comments on mainstream online newspapers in Turkey: Perceptions of web editors and moderators
- Book Review
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Debate
- Social media and the McDonaldization of friendship
- >Articles
- Parental mediation of internet use and cultural values across Europe: Investigating the predictive power of the Hofstedian paradigm
- Who bullies whom online: A social network analysis of cyberbullying in a school context
- A question of credibility – Effects of source cues and recommendations on information selection on news sites and blogs
- Between Europeanization and De-Europeanization: A Comparative Content Analysis of the Pre-election Presentation of the EU Agenda in the Czech Quality Press
- Reader comments on mainstream online newspapers in Turkey: Perceptions of web editors and moderators
- Book Review
