Keynote by Noortje Marres, Goldsmiths at the Digital Methods Summer School 2013

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The birth of social media methods
DMI Summerschool,
University of Amsterdam
July 1 2013
Noortje Marres, Goldsmiths

2. 1. A ‘problem of method’ in social media research
2. What is social about social media?
3. Detecting the social (empirically)
This talk

3. Social media are both:
- a social phenomenon in their own right
- a source of data about social life
1. An ambiguity in social media research

4. [Social media] studies : social media as object of research
Social [media] research : social media as site/means of analysis
It is both necessary to
a) establish the difference
b) recognise the precarity & instability of the distinction
Bruns & Stiglitz (2012)

5. Problem of method in social
media research:
Two partly contradictory constraints:
- Different aims require different methods
- It is not always possible to neatly distinguish object and instrument
in social media research
Two different objectives in social media research:
1. to expose relevant features, dynamics, aspects of the medium
2. to gain empirical access to phenomena that do not coincide with it

6. To address this problem, we have to ask again:
what is social about social media?
Dictum
“Just because it’s called social, doesn’t make it social!”
Emma Uprichard, about working with mathematicians on
modelling social data

7. 2. What is social about social media?

8. What counts as ‘social’ depends on the formal features of digital architectures
social media as what allows the creation and exchange of user-generated content
(Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010)
a. platform features
Example:
Twitter’s following, re-tweets and @replies
Problem:
platform studies risk to equate the logics of the medium and the logics
of the social

9. sociologists tend to locate the promise of social media for social
research here
b. content
Example: researching London’s Shuffle wars
Problem: social media never just disclose a social phenomenon;
there are significant formatting effects (recommendation culture)

10. c. context
Example:
Daniel Miller on Facebook/Instagram/.. in Trinidad
Problem:
Social methods are disconnected from media-based methods
The social refers to the settings - the larger whole - inside
which social media practices take place

11. examples: friends, mentions, likes, followers ...anything metricizable
problem: same as content; + a highly formatted definition of the
social, risks reducing the social to performance indicators
d. social (meta-)data

12. Example:
Mapping ego-networks with Facebook
Problem:
collapses methods of the medium and social methods
Question:
what is the relation between methods-of-the medium
and our own research methods?
e. method
Methods inform sociality in social media
the social as network; the social as matching profile
attributes

13. f. All of the above?
Multiple entities participate in the enactment of
sociality in/with social media?
The same applies to social [media] research?

14. A different starting point:
the "social" is not necessarily already accomplished in social media.
The social is at stake in social media.
3. Detecting the Social
What makes social media "social" is in part an empirical question
(not just a question of theory)
The answer is likely to be different in different cases

15. Associational Profiling
with Erik Borra, Carolin Gerlitz, Bernhard Rieder, Esther Weltevrede

16. Mapping WCIT2012/Profiling WCIT

17. a. query design
- Top hashtags according to Twitter
- Top issues according to respondents
What makes a profile ‘social’?

18. Mapping WCIT2012/Profiling WCIT

19. Mapping WCIT2012/Profiling DPI

20. b. indicators of ‘sociality’
- User diversity?
- para-institutional language? #behindcloseddoors;
#becauseilikethat
- transdiscursivity (actors and issues crossing
domain boundaries)

21. Mapping WCIT2012/Profiling privacy

22. c. units of analysis
Whole platform:
biases analysis towards the detection of media effects?
To get to the social:
it could help to demarcate the analytic object differently
(users, issues, devices)?

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what follows for [social] [media] research:
researching the social (with media) vs researching (social) media
as a difference of degree:
they require different ways of aligning platform, data, context,
technique, visualisation, etc...
Conclusion (1)

24. WCIT12
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Conclusion (2)
- social media methods as modular methods:
they involve the flexible adjustment of platform, measure, data,
context, question, visualization.
- social media methods must be adjustable:
they aren’t new methods, they are a distinctive type
of method-assemblies

25. Thank you
n.marres@gold.ac.uk