The history of relationship markers: In the early days, there was the Hit Economy. Information was linked through hits. Every hit and click represented a visitor of a particular web site and revenue was generated through banners. To increase traffic and value, webmasters would buy their way into the listings of search engines. In the late 1990′s, Google introduced the hyperlink as the new value determination mechanism. They weighed the quality and quantity of links using an algorithm. This is called the Link Economy. In the Link Economy, links lost their former function as central relationship markers and could now be traded and sold.

Like Economy: With the emergence of the Social Web, connections were massively made between people and between people and web objects. Digital devices such as social buttons were developed. The most prominent being the “Like” button. This button was made in February 2009 and shortly became integrated onto other web sites. The production, distribution and consumption of online content, thus, transform into a social activity as well as a value producing activity. This is what they call the Like Economy.

Facebook cookies: The cookie is placed on the user’s machine, even if the individual does not actively use the “Like” button. Facebook still manages to retrieve data on the individual user and their user activity. Additionally, the cookie does not merely trace Facebook users but also non-Facebook users, because the cookie is connected to an IP address not to one person’s identity.

Front vs back of social web: They distinguish between the "front" of the social web, or the interface of the social media platform where users interact with each other and upload content, and the "back" of the social web, the users cannot see the databases where all interactions, content and user data is stored and processed, for example, to make recommendations and to display targeted advertisements.

Central argument: Social media platforms set up a data-intensive infrastructure by decentralizing data collection through social plugins and recentralizing data-processing.

Reaction: The historical path to which we arrived at the like economy makes sense to me. I remember each of those times and how the internet functioned. The idea of the back social web, makes me unhappy. Cookies and targeted market have always bothered me. It’s invasive in that most people don’t know this is happening. The blindly go on Facebook and upload content, but they don’t know that the content is being processed in order to target them. I remember in my Persuasion class sophomore year when this was first pointed out to me, how annoyed I was. All of the advertisements on my Facebook, which I hadn’t looked at closely before, were all targeted to me. I agree with the authors that this system of likes spread throughout the internet is allowing for more data collection. It makes sense. I think that I would be less bothered if people understood that this was happening. Where will the internet go next?