A Decade of 'Social Media' and What to Do About It: Methodological Challenges of Historicising the...
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JEAN BURGESS QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY @JEANBURGESS A DECADE OF ‘SOCIAL MEDIA’ AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT Methodological Challenges of Historicising the Proprietary Web
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Paper presented at the Internet Histories preconference at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Denver October 2013
Transcript of A Decade of 'Social Media' and What to Do About It: Methodological Challenges of Historicising the...
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.
