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Tadej Praprotnik[1]

Abstract

The article critically questions popular predictions about how technology (the Internet and especially social media) change society. It focuses firstly on the relation between society and technology in order to explain why technological changes and corresponding social problems are foremost a reflection of the priorities of a culture. The article presents some major shifts (information, datafication) which are the foundation of current transformations. In the second part of the article, the attention shifts towards social media platforms. The actual usage of social media promotes the cultural logic of branding the self. Nowadays, visibility and attention have become the driving force of most social media users. The paper highlights potential obstacles regarding modern usage of social media. The power of the citizens to choose what kind of information best suits them is a welcome novelty but it also might confront us with problematic scenarios. That is to say social media optimism is based mainly on the techno-deterministic viewpoint of empowering technology. Much more attention has to be placed on technology in the sense of discovering what values, competences and scenarios are inscribed into actual usages of technology in order to fully understand how and why is technology implicated in social relations and human knowledge, and in what sense our praxeology of everyday life is technologically driven.

Key words: technology, information, datafication, social network sites, communication