a decade of 'social media' and what to do about it: methodological challenges of...

JEAN BURGESSQUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY OF

TECHNOLOGY @JEANBURGESS

A DECADE OF ‘SOCIAL MEDIA’ AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT ITMethodological Challenges of Historicising the Proprietary Web

Narratives of enclosure

Narratives of enclosure

Dynamics of change

"Historical studies are often the result of a fundamental wonderment: Why was there something and not just nothing? Why was there not something else? And why did it change? In other words, a genuine part of  historical studies is often answering the question: What forces made things happen?" (Brügger, 31)

Dynamics of change

What changes, and how?

•materialist•co-evolutionary•conjunctural

social media: the platform paradigm

social media platforms as new media institutions

•coordinating function•logics (van Dijck & Poell 2013)•affordances, constraints

•Interface design, aesthetics, affordances•User practices, behaviours, norms•Software, algorithms, APIs•Business models, licensing, partnerships, revenue streams

the stuff of platforms

methodological challenges

differences between platforms

methodological challenges

change over time

Photo: Yahoo! News

What changes, and how?

Dynamics of Change

And how would we know?

Dynamics of Change

the stuff of social media histories

•Interface design, aesthetics, affordances•User practices, behaviours, norms•Software, algorithms, APIs•Business models, licensing, partnerships, revenue streams

Beyond the archive

•oral histories (users, third party developers, employees)•self-memorialisations e.g. platform birthday celebrations (cf. Hartley, Burgess & Green, 2007)•media coverage of controversies and other events as moments of acute change•biographies of material elements - e.g. the hashtag, the like button

Twitter Over Time project (with Nancy Baym)

Twitter Over Time project (with Nancy Baym)

•interviews•wayback machine•wikipedia (+ talk pages + edit history)•early tweets archive•tech blogs, news media•personal blogs, youtube

• ‘Web history’ in general: very recent/micro changes and long-range macro changes easier to track than medium-term ‘meso’ changes

•Proprietary social media platforms present challenges in addition to all the problems noted by Brügger (2012) • ephemerality & erasure •data access• ethics

•But this commercial ephemerality is nothing new (Hartley, Burgess & Green 2008; Ankerson, 2012)

Challenges

References

Ankerson, Megan Sapnar (2012). Writing web histories with an eye on the analog past. New Media & Society 14(3), 384-400.Brügger, Niels (2012) "Web historiography and Internet Studies: Challenges and perspectives." New Media & Society 15(5): 752-764.Hartley, John, Burgess, Jean, & Green, Joshua (2007) 'Laughs and Legends,' or the Furniture That Glows? Television as History? Australian Cultural History 26: 15-36.van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2013). Understanding Social Media Logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2-14.