This paper investigates political homophily on Twitter. Using a combination of machine learning and social network analysis we classify users as Democrats or as Republicans based on the political content shared. We then investigate political homophily both in the network of reciprocated and nonreciprocated ties. We find that structures of political homophily differ strongly between Democrats and Republicans. In general, Democrats exhibit higher levels of political homophily. But Republicans who follow official Republican accounts exhibit higher levels of homophily than Democrats. In addition, levels of homophily are higher in the network of reciprocated followers than in the nonreciprocated network. We suggest that research on political homophily on the Internet should take the political culture and practices of users seriously.

The concept of brand community has been used to understand how consumers create value around brands online. Recently consumer researchers have begun to debate the relevance of this concept for understanding brand-related communication on social media. Based on a data set of 8949 tweets about Louis Vuitton gathered on Italian Twitter in 2013, this article addresses these discussions by developing the alternative concept of brand publics that differ from brand communities in three important ways. First, brand publics are social formations that are not based on interaction but on a continuous focus of interest and mediation. Second, participation in brand publics is not structured by discussion or deliberation but by individual or collective affect. Third, in brand publics consumers do not develop a collective identity around the focal brand; rather the brand is valuable as a medium that can offer publicity to a multitude of diverse situations of identity. The conclusion suggests that brand publics might be part of a social media–based consumer culture where publicity rather than identity has become a core value.

The link between affect, defined as the capacity for sentimental arousal on the part of a message, and virality, defined as the probability that it be sent along, is of significant theoretical and practical importance, e.g. for viral marketing. A quantitative study of emailing of articles from the NY Times (Berger and Milkman, 2010) finds a strong link between positive affect and virality, and, based on psychological theories it is concluded that this relation is universally valid. The conclusion appears to be in contrast with classic theory of diffusion in news media (Galtung and Ruge, 1965) emphasizing negative affect as promoting propagation. In this paper we explore the apparent paradox in a quantitative analysis of information diffusion on Twitter. Twitter is interesting in this context as it has been shown to present both the characteristics social and news media (Kwak et al., 2010). The basic measure of virality in Twitter is the probability of retweet. Twitter is different from email in that retweeting does not depend on pre-existing social relations, but often occur among strangers, thus in this respect Twitter may be more similar to traditional news media. We therefore hypothesize that negative news content is more likely to be retweeted, while for non-news tweets positive sentiments support virality. To test the hypothesis we analyze three corpora: A complete sample of tweets about the COP15 climate summit, a random sample of tweets, and a general text corpus including news. The latter allows us to train a classifier that can distinguish tweets that carry news and non-news information. We present evidence that negative sentiment enhances virality in the news segment, but not in the non-news segment. We conclude that the relation between affect and virality is more complex than expected based on the findings of Berger and Milkman (2010), in short 'if you want to be cited: Sweet talk your friends or serve bad news to the public'.

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In this article, the author argues that customer coproduction should be understood as an expression of a large-scale trend toward the increasing power and relevance of social production. Social production consists in the self-organized systems of (mostly immaterial) production that have evolved around the diffusion of networked information and communication technologies. An analysis of the genealogy of social production is shared; this includes tracing it to the process of re-mediation of social relations put in motion by the expansion of the capitalist economy into the fields of culture and consciousness and the concomitant socialization of production relations. The author then argues that social production, including customer coproduction, follows a very particular economic logic—that is, an ethical economy where value is related to social impact rather than monetary accumulation. A detailed analysis of the logic of this ethical economy is offered; it draws out some implications for the successful management of ever more customer-centric brands, whereby the consumers are directly involved in the processes that add value.

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This article will make one argument and one suggestion. The first part will argue that practices of customer co-production raise a serious challenge to established theories of value. The second part will suggest that these new practices, although widely disparate in nature, do move according to a common logic of value, and that this new value logic can be fruitfully organized around the concept of ‘ethics’. Let me clarify already here that I intend ‘ethics’ in the sense of the ability to create the values that ‘make a multitude into a community’ (Marazzi, 2008: 66). As I will further elaborate below, this concept of ethics is closer to the original Aristotelian sense of that term, than to the Kantian ethics that has been central to modern, enlightenment discourse. My use of ‘ethics’, in this, Aristotelian sense, is not taken out of the blue. Rather, I propose that a notion of value based on ethics is already emerging within a range of cutting-edge economic practices involving aspects of customer co-production — from corporate social responsibility (CSR) to Open Source production and brand valuation. In other words, I am not proposing a new notion of value as I would like it to be, but I am pointing at actually existing trends and developments. However, since these developments are emergent they cannot be grasped as fully formed facts. My ambition in the second part of this paper is thus limited to suggesting a theoretical framework within which these emergent tendencies can be read in a novel way; and from which a more definite shape can be discerned.

This article suggests that Facebook embodies a new logic of capitalist governance, what has been termed the ‘social logic of the derivative’. The logic of the derivative is rooted in the now dominant financial level of the capitalist economy, and is mediated by social media and the algorithmic processing of large digital data sets. This article makes three precise claims: First, that the modus operandi of Facebook mirrors the operations of derivative financial instruments. Second, that the algorithms that Facebook uses share a genealogy with those of derivative financial instruments – both are outcomes of the influence of the ‘cyber sciences’ on managerial practice in the post-war years. Third, that the future potential of Facebook lies in its ability to apply the logic of derivatives to the financial valuation of ordinary social relations, thus further extending the process of financialization of everyday life.