Blog Post #2- The best way to study the culture of SNS

It seems that there are a lot of useful tools for studying culture and social media technologies and to pick an ideal one would depend on the research question. As Hargittai points out, social network sites are incredibly complex because they exist online and offline, affecting relationships in both the digital and physical spaces. For this reason, it seems that ethnography is the most useful mode of research for studying social network sites and culture, especially if the researcher is unfamiliar with the culture and the technology of the network he or she is studying. It is also useful to point out that due to the relatively nascent nature of social networking sites, and the extremely high rate at which culture on social network sites can change, most researchers will be unfamiliar with the site of their study to a certain degree.

Being immersed in the culture of the social network site, as one would be through the ethnography process, the subtle and important rules, customs and norms of the site would be more apparent. An example that comes immediately to mind deals with the recent Facebook layout changes. A researcher doing a study like boyd, Golder and Lotan, where the results yield quantifiable analyses of the social network site, might not realize that a massive change in Facebook technology happened during the study. That is unless one or all of the researchers were observing Facebook as a participant. Having experienced the layout change, the researcher would be able to take into account the amount of “flaming” going on around the change.

boyd, Golder and Lotan on the other hand might be wary of the bias a participant observer might have in an ethnography like Nardi’s or Boellstorff’s. Nardi admits that “In a game world, the overwhelming need to play dominates interaction much of the time” (35). Going back to the example of Facebook’s recent layout change, there might be a similarly overwhelming frustration with the change that the ethnographer would be hard-pressed to think objectively about. When studying Facebook as a social network site through the veil of numbers and statistics, a researcher might be able to see the picture more clearly.

 

Roxy Dyer

@roxyredstar