Ways of Studying Social Media
Having been in class last week as well as completed the readings, it seems that ethnographic research is the best way to go, in my opinion. As we discussed, the way the user (us) uses social media has been constructed, socially, due to all of our individual participation. How do social constructions occur? Human beings create them over time after repeated actions that start to appear natural, although they have been achieved by many aspects of communication coming together. I believe that the best way to go about studying something as new as social communication is by immersing oneself within it: ethnographic research.
I do think Beer successfully achieved his goal of picking apart previous analytical research from other authors and shedding new light, yet I think if he had more real life experience/ examples, his points would have hinged better. He makes very good points about questioning the “dominant visions of the democratization of the web toward models of ‘collaborative’ or ‘collective intelligence’ and ‘participatory cultures’”, yet I think that if he had made the article even more relatable due to his own experience within the web, it would have been stronger. But I did not have as much problems with Beer’s attempt as I did with the Twitter article.
While I know the Twitter article by Boyd, Golder & Lotan was interesting to some, and partly ethnographic (due to the twitter participation) I thought that all the quantitative research was a bit much. The most amazing thing about social communication is how quick it is advancing. Already, twitter has changed since this article has written; it has a ‘retweet’ button and it has become almost second nature to retweet as often as not. I find that studying specific data structures is even less effective then, say, Hargittai’s survey of college freshman (which isn’t to say that this method is extremely effective either). Why study the technology so much, when you have a whole bunch of other meat in there? What I am trying to say is that I find research of social media extremely timely and sensitive. You have to do it right if you want to get results that are going to be able to stand the test of time, because time is moving so fast now. While every author offers their own attempt at this quickly changing mode of communication we are immersed in, I think the way to really go about it is ethnographically. Communication is about feelings and emotions, and the only way to really understand those, is if YOU, as an AUTHOR, immerses yourself into the medium and reflects on your reactions the medium as well as compare yours to others. I do know that quantitative analysis has its merits, but I wanted to focus solely on the pros of ethnographic in this post and just see what people thought about it.
Sophie G.