Chapter
The social media paradigm
Histories and Pre-Histories
Platforms, Technologies and Business Models
Social and Economic Domains
Part I-Histories and Pre-histories
1-Pushing Back: Social Media as an Evolutionary Phenomenon
Social media: Long story!
Economy vs culture: ‘most important’ or ‘worst mistake’?
Which came first – base or superstructure?
Children must be scene but
not earn?
Sciron – or cultural science?
2-Early Social Computing: The Rise and Fall of the BBS Scene (1977–1995)
Community Memory and the first bulletin board systems
Bulletin board systems
arrive on the scene
Bulletin board systems
in the mainstream
The rise of commercial
online services
Bulletin board systems
and sex
Increasingly global reach
Bulletin board systems
and legal hassles
The short-lived boom: Internet killed the video star
3-Alternative Histories of Social Media in Japan and China
4-From Hypertext to Hype and Back Again: Exploring the Roots of Social Media in Early Web Culture
1. Early visions of digital culture
Berners-Lee’s Information Universe
The Virtual Community
and the WELL
2. The politics of dot.com euphoria: Web exceptionalism and cyberlibertarianism
3. Defining ‘web-native’ culture
Designing a ‘Professional’
Web in the dot.com Bubble
The Rise of Blogging: Personal Publishing, Content Management and Web Filtering
4. Open-source software and
the data turn
Slashdot as Early Example of a Participatory Media Platform
5. Web 2.0 and social media
Part II-Approaches and Methods
5-Digital Methods for Cross-platform Analysis
Digital methods after social media
Hashtag and (liked) page studies
From single platform to
cross-platform studies
Cross-platform analysis: Co-linked, inter-liked and cross-hashtagged content
Research strategies for
cross-platform analysis
Conclusions: Digital methods for cross-platform analysis
6-A Computational Analysis of Social Media Scholarship
Collecting and describing
data from the web
Our Application: The Scopus Bibliographic Database
Our Application: Citation
Networks
Our Application: Identifying
Topics in Social Media Research
Our Application: Predicting
Paper Citation
7-Digital Discourse: Locating Language in New/Social Media
Core organizing principles
Language as a Metadiscursive Resource
Language as a Metrolingual Resource
Language as a Multimodal Resource
Language as a Technologizing Resource
Existing approaches to
social media
Users and reactivity
and power
9-Analysing Social Media Images
Large-Scale Image Analysis
Working with Images at
Different Scales
In-Depth Qualitative Analysis
of Images
Case study: The death of Alan Kurdi on Twitter
Data, research questions
and methods
Research Questions and Methods
Large-Scale Image Analysis:
The Spread and Diffusion of
the Alan Kurdi Images
Working with Images at Different Scales: The 100 Most Shared Alan Kurdi Images
In-Depth Qualitative Analysis of Images: The Adaptation of the Original Alan Kurdi Images
Social media and
ethnographic process
Relationships of trust to inform grounded theory
Social media and the ethnographic product
Downloadable Digital Ethnography
Can A ‘Tweet’ be Ethnographic?
Conclusion: What does social media mean for ethnography?
11-Web History and Social Media
Web history – what is
the difference?
From Online Web to
Archived Web
Screen shots and individual webpages in a static form
Screen movie and downloaded video/audio
Where to Find the Web
of the Past
Social media and archived Web
High-Speed Updating and APIs
Integrated Digital Media Environments
Looking back – examples of social media Web histories
More Social Media, More
Complex Sources
The Challenges When
Looking Back
12-The Incomplete Political Economy of Social Media
The facets and functions of social media: Architecture and infrastructure
Social engineering in India
Beyond social media: The operating system of our lives
Part III-Platforms, Technologiesand Business Models
13-The Affordances of Social Media Platforms
Conceptualizing affordances
Social media research
and affordances
High-Level and Low-Level Affordances
Re-assembling affordances
A Relational and Multi-layered Approach to Affordances
Platforms as Environments
A platform-sensitive approach
The Case of Twitter Platform Changes
Expanding the Notion of the User
Platform Users and their Interfaces
The Adaptability of Platform Surfaces
(Non)human Agency Affording Things to Technology
14-Regulation of and by Platforms
The Myth of the Impartial Platform
The Pressures on Safe Harbor
Where the Lines are Drawn
Enforcement and the
Problem of Scale
The Human Labor of
Content Moderation
Conclusion: The question of responsibility
15-Social Media App Economies
Social media revenue models
‘Networked media’: The facilitation of interoperability and data-sharing
16-Labor and Social Media: The Exploitation and Emancipation of (almost) Everyone Online
Shifting grounds, shifting perspectives
Natural Labor of Sociality
17-Silicon Valley and the Social Media Industry
The Californian ideology and the history of Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley as global imaginary
18-Alternative Social Media: From Critique to Code
Critiques of corporate
social media
Technical Infrastructures
Technical Infrastructures
Appendix: A selection of currently active alternative social media
Part IV-Cultures and Practices
19-Our Networked Selves: Personal Connection and Relational Maintenance in Social Media Use
Friends, followers, and
circles: The characteristics
of connection
Making friends: The dynamics of connection
Birthday reminders and newsfeeds: Relational management and
boundary work
Boundary Work and the Rules
of Social Media Connection
Unfriending: The art of relationship dissolution
Conclusion: Connecting
the networked self
20-Television Viewing and Fan Practice in an Era of Multiple Screens
Theorizing audiences, fans,
and participatory practice
Social media and the power
of participatory dirt
Interactivity: It’s Just a
Tweet Away
21-Trolling, and Other Problematic Social Media Practices
Going meta: Reviewing literature reviews
Definition <-> Contextualization
There’s no trolling in China
Memes as political practice
Memes in Authoritarian Regimes
Memes in Democratic Regimes
Another kind of politics:
Memes as activist practice
The meme-industrial complex
23-Self-Representation in Social Media
Representations or presentations?
Blogs and writing about
the self
Selfies and visual
self-representations
Quantified and automated
self-representations
Abundant self-representations
24-Sexual Expression in Social Media
Recent histories of online sexual expression
Sexuality, intimacy and
social media affordances
Off-label uses and workarounds in sexual/
social media
Social media and the micropolitics of gendered sexual expression
Young people’s sexual expression: Legal and
ethical and social contexts
Geo-location, sexual expression and queer world-making
Sexual community,
safety and stigma
Sexuality, stigma and security in social media: The case
of FetLife
25-Privacy and Surveillance
Introducing surveillance
and visibility
An emerging typology of user-led surveillance practices
What does surveillance
bring to our attention?
Privacy and social media:
A primer
Social media privacy
in practice
Critical engagements
with privacy
Part V-Social and Economic Domains
26-Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing’s
holy trinity
Evaluating the social
media marketing mix
Regulating social media content
27-Social Media and Journalism
Social media and the news
The professional adoption
of social media
Social media and journalism practices
Social media and
journalism norms
28-Social Media and the Cultural and Creative Industries
Creative industries and social media: Close friends or distant relatives?
Cultural and creative industries: Academic and
policy debates
Social media and the
CCIs: Three scenarios
Social media as Amplifier: Broadcasting and Twitter
Social Media as Disruptor:
The Continuing Crisis of News
Social Media as Transformer: Algorithmic Screen Media
29-Politics 2.0: Social Media Campaigning
What are campaigns doing?
Persuasion in Social Media
Micro-targeting and
Mobilization
The unforeseen consequences of adopting digital strategy
Inviting Participation,
Losing Control
Public Platforms and
Changes to Interfaces
Limits to Data and Analytics
Implications and conclusion
30-Social Media and New Protest Movements
Leadership and collectivity
Techno-commercial strategies
Personalization and Virality
Challenges for future
research
31-Lively Data, Social Fitness and Biovalue: The Intersections of Health and Fitness Self-tracking and Social Media
Self-tracking and the quantified self
Technologies for self-tracking fitness, health and medicine
Personal health data
and social media
The exploitation of
personal health data
Discussion: Digitised bodies, surveillance and biocapital
32-Social Media Platforms and Education
Social media’s impact on education: Tools or platforms?
Datafication: AltSchool as a platform for primary education
Commodification: Coursera
and the impact of MOOCs on higher education
The platformization of education
33-Scholarly Communication in Social Media
Basics of Scholarly
Communication
Effects of Social Media in
Scholarly Communication
Academic uses of social
media platforms
Text-based social media platforms as additions to scholarly publications
Networking and content-sharing platforms for
general audiences that
are used by academics
Specific social media platforms for academic audiences
Challenges and drawbacks of using social media in academia
Assessing scholarly communication with
social media metrics
Footprints, Shadows and
Digital identities
What do social media metrics measure – and how?
The SAGE Handbook of Social Media
( 1 )
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