Divide and Share: Taxonomies, Orders and Masses in Facebook's Open Graph

The Open Graph protocol, introduced in 2010, has allowed Facebook to extend its reach far beyond the confines of the platform itself. It provides the basic technical infrastructure of connecting and sharing and encourages specific forms of analysis and usage. We argue that, if Facebook is to be conceptualized as a mass medium, the Open Graph is where media and masses mutually (re-)configure one another. In order to disentangle these relationships, we investigate backend and frontend practices from three different angles – descriptive, analytical and historical – and investigate how seemingly incompatible media promises converge.