Social media research methods
There are numerous ways a researcher can go about studying the relationship between culture and social media technologies. I don’t believe there is an ideal method, since much of the way you research is dependent on the questions you’re asking. However, based on last week’s readings, it seems that ethnographic research is a preferable method if one is interested in truly learning about the inner workings of a specific social media culture.
As we learned from these articles, ethnography involves immersing oneself in a culture in an attempt to study it. Nardi and Boellstorf became a part of the respective communities they were researching, and through participating, both had to navigate the cultures of World of Warcraft/Second Life and thus learned from their own experiences. Ethnography also allows a researcher to compare these self-reflexive experiences with those of other participants and draw a more well-rounded conclusion about how the culture operates. Survey-only methods of research are helpful in getting specific data sets from a large group of people, but as we discussed in class, you can only get answers to the questions you asked. Data collected from surveys may also not be 100% accurate, since survey participants may alter their answers knowing that a researcher is analyzing them. It’s like that old adage about not judging a book by its cover—sometimes it really is necessary to go beyond the surface and get involved with the story (or in this case, social media culture) firsthand to have a valid point of view on it.
The authors of these articles each conducted their research in different ways, and thus would probably have a lot to say to one another regarding their methods. Nardi, for example, who says that ethnography is a ‘go with the flow’ method of research in which one can “follow the interesting and the unexpected as they are encountered in the field” (Nardi 27) might argue that Hargittai’s survey of college freshmen’s SNS use is too limited because doesn’t allow for the chance to observe the phenomenon of social media in action, and thus doesn’t afford the opportunity to delve deeper into other facets of SNS use that Hargittai may not have originally considered. Boellstorff, on the other hand, would probably applaud boyd, Golder & Lotan’s research into Retweeting culture. He cites Boas’s “cosmological approach to knowledge,” which says that every phenomenon is worthy of being studied for its own sake, and says that ethnographic research “connects seemingly isolated incidents of cultural exchange” (Boellstorff 69). Although boyd et al.’s research was not fully ethnographic in nature (it was partially because the “survey” question regarding purposes of retweeting was sent out via Twitter), it certainly does study retweet culture for its own sake, and works to establish a connecting thread among each incident of retweeting.
There isn’t one “right” way of conducting social media research; however, I feel that each author from last week chose the correct method for the questions they wished to answer. Ethnographic or not, each brought a unique perspective to the social media culture they studied and allowed for greater insight into their respective topics.