The Values of Online Social Relations
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Don't Hate the Business, Become the Business!
Presentation Title:
- The Values of Online Social Relations
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Panel: DON’T HATE THE BUSINESS: BECOME THE BUSINESS!
The development of an information economy, and in particular its more recent ‘social economy’ phase, has seen the pluralization of conceptions of value (Stark, 2009). The rise of brands, the growing importance of reputation, both for individuals and for companies, the need to attract affective investments and in general to establish a positive large-scale recognition for companies are all manifestation of this. While companies have clearly identified the strategic importance of these “intangible assets”, an adequate and broadly accepted interpretation of how such immaterial wealth is transformed into tangible monetary value still lack. The issue of the new forms of value creation has grown in importance with the diffusion of online social media. This is because social media, such as Facebook and Twitter allow these subjective perceptions of “value”, like the experience of or affective ties that people can construct with a company or a brand, to acquire an objective existence as observable and measurable forms of value. As a consequence, several new data mining techniques, such as opinion mining and sentiment analysis have emerged in the last few years. Among other things, such as marketing and profiling, these algorithms are aimed to create a common “measure” of social affective investments around a brand or a company which can serves as a base to establish a new “general equivalent”, i.e. general sentiment (Arvidsson, forthcoming). My presentation will try to disentangle how the online social relations are integrated into the process of value creation and in the monetary circuit.
