Stine Lomborg

Mapping actor roles in social media: Different perspectives on value creation in theories of user participation

While media studies have been locked into a classic producer-text-audience model, most theories of social media suggest some degree of collapse between the producer and audience. In this article, we address social media in terms of processes of value creation. The aim of the article is to demonstrate that social media are either addressed in terms of economic and socio-political value creation, that is, power, exploitation and business revenues, or in terms of value creation as sense-making, that is, creative explorations of the self and management of social relationships in everyday life. These different interests in value creation, we argue, have consequences for the conceptualization of the media user as a participatory agent. With specific focus on the notion of value creation in social media, we uncover implicit conceptions of the social media user guiding industry and user-centric perspectives, respectively. We demonstrate that while studying the same phenomenon, the two perspectives operate with very different conceptions of the producer/user nexus. We then discuss whether the literature is inconsequential in the analytic treatment of its own suggested collapse by questioning if, and if so how, this collapse is in fact taking place. Finally, we offer a mapping of the multifarious actor roles identified in the literature review to nuance the understanding of the producer/user nexus in social media and use it to identify and discuss possible opportunities for collapse and cross-fertilization of user-centric and industry perspectives in future studies of social media.

Using APIs for Data Collection on Social Media

This article discusses how social media research may benefit from social media companies making data available to researchers through their application programming interfaces (APIs). An API is a back-end interface through which third-party developers may connect new add-ons to an existing service. The API is also an interface for researchers to collect data off a given social media service for empirical analysis. Presenting a critical methodological discussion of the opportunities and challenges associated with quantitative and qualitative social media research based on APIs, this article highlights a number of general methodological issues to be dealt with when collecting and assessing data through APIs. The article further discusses the legal and ethical implications of empirical research using APIs for data collection.

Personal internet archives and ethics

In its ethics guidelines, the Association of Internet Researchers advocates a bottom-up, case-based approach to research ethics, one that emphasizes that ethical judgement must be based on a sensible examination of the unique object and circumstances of a study, its research questions, the data involved, and the expected analysis and reporting of results, along with the possible ethical dilemmas arising from the case. This article clarifies and illustrates the mind-set and process of such a bottom-up approach to internet research ethics. Two ethics concepts to think with, namely ‘the distance principle’, and the notion of ‘perceived privacy’, are introduced and applied in a concrete empirical internet study, in which web archives based on personal communications on social media formed the main body of data. The empirical case example serves to highlight the unique challenges of internet research ethics, in light of the blurring boundaries between text and person, and between private and public on the internet, with profound implications and challenges for the definition of human subjects, privacy, and so on.

Self-tracking as communication

Self-tracking has attracted a lot of attention from researchers and public opinion makers owing to its potential for improving life conditions through preemptive action on health, and as a tool of user empowerment vis-à-vis health-care professionals and private and public institutions. Nevertheless, the ‘stuff’ that is typically tracked – exercise and diet being the dominant tracking activities – refers to cultural and social practices that, for the individual user, are utterly mundane and reside in an experiential realm of everyday life. Self-tracking has to be understood in relation to behavior that is predominantly about getting things done in ways that are possible, suitable and meaningful for the individual. To account for this, we propose to conceptualize self-tracking as a communicative phenomenon along three dimensions: communication with the system, the self and social networks of peers. We develop the theoretical framework, drawing upon empirical findings from a qualitative study on how self-tracking is practiced and experienced in the context of exercise by different categories of empirical users. We demonstrate that the meanings of self-tracking practices are, at once, shaped by the motivation of an individual user who is situated in a broader web of everyday activities, and stimulated and augmented by communicative features provided by the technology.

Users across media: An introduction

It is an empirical fact that audiences, or users, as we prefer, are inherently cross-media (Schrøder, 2011). Media users combine, juggle and move almost seamlessly between various media platforms and services to pursue information and entertainment, carry out professional responsibilities, communicate about and act on demands in their everyday lives, and not least to interact with each other. Mobile media, such as smartphones and tablets with ubiquitous Internet access, epitomize this development by converging various media on a single multipurpose platform. A key observation in the current, digital media landscape is that media use, from television to telephones, is increasingly personalized, fragmented and connective (Holt et al., 2016). Traditional conceptions of media users – understood as the individuals or collectives (audiences, publics, spectators, etc.) at the receiving end of mediated communications – are put under pressure by the convergence of mass and interpersonal media on digital platforms and services. Users are increasingly seen as productive and participatory; they curate, share, comment and create digital media content for diverse purposes and in diverse contexts. Studying cross-media from the point of view of users and the roles they undertake when engaging with media, we contend, involves a decentring of media and a centring of the analysis on communicative practices as crystallized in patterns of cross-media use. Various notions of cross-media have emerged in audience and user studies to the enrichment of our theoretical, as well as empirical, understanding of the contemporary media user. As some of these efforts are beginning to consolidate, taking stock of the user’s perspective on the study of cross-media practices appears to be timely. Together, the seven articles compiled in this special issue do exactly this. Thus, we hope this Convergence special issue on ‘Users across media’ will form an important baseline for the future development of conceptual lenses and empirical approaches to studying users across, rather than within, media.

A state of flux: Histories of social media research:

This article sets out to map the broad contours of social media research, teasing out in particular the ways in which the scholarly literature in the fields of media and communication research has addressed social media as a phenomenon since the emergence of the term ‘social media’ in the early 2000s. As a communicative phenomenon and research object, social media would appear to be in flux. Changes to existing services, the emergence of new services, and the disappearance of previously popular services testify to the sense of social media as a moving target. Researchers of social media seem to accept change, rather than continuity, as a condition for the study of social media. This is evident in our choice of research topics and data sources, but also in our discourses on social media. By examining the sense of flux of social media research in a historical perspective, this article aims to provide useful directions for future media and communication research on social media. Specifically, it suggests ways to stabilise social media as an object of study and to install a greater historical awareness in social media research.

The temporal flows of self-tracking: Checking in, moving on, staying hooked:

This article conceptualizes the experience of self-tracking as flow, a central technique, utilized by digital media companies to hook their users. We argue the notion of flow is valuable for understanding both the temporal lock-ins of self-tracking practices in sequences and repetition, and the way self-tracking technologies thrive on data sequences for retaining users and creating viable businesses. To substantiate this, we present a qualitative empirical study of how users experience flow when tracking various aspects of their personal lives. Users find self-tracking technology and the metrics they generate to have much more limited relevance and thus guide their attention elsewhere. If they are hooked, they are so in ways different from those projected by the technology. Users find meaning in their self-tracking in moments of registration, allocution, consultation and conversation, but also problematize their attachment to specific temporal tracking regimes.

“Meaning” in Social Media:

Researchers of social media struggle to stay up to speed: empirical findings are most often very context- and time-specific and quickly become outdated because the object of study changes. By extension, previously solid and well-tested methods and tools may be rendered obsolete, for instance, as social media services change their application programming interfaces (APIs). The stabilizing component in social media research is arguably good theory—about the communicative patterns and bit trails of use, the actions that social media channel and mobilize, the interplay between social and other media, and, of course, the implications of social media for sociality, privacy, and society at large. In this essay, the concept and study of meaning is proposed as a key concern for social media research. “Meaning” highlights the generative process by which users negotiate the communicative potentials and constraints of a text or a medium vis-a-vis the individuals’ preexisting mental models, expectations, and intentions in context.