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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton November 2, 2014

Social media and the McDonaldization of friendship

  • Maria Bakardjieva EMAIL logo
From the journal Communications

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.

Published Online: 2014-11-2
Published in Print: 2014-11-1

©2014 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin Munich Boston

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