Presentation for Birmingham City University's annual research conference, RESCON15. This was part of the Birmingham Ethnography Panel.

1. Social Media Method
Karen Patel
Birmingham Centre for Media and
Cultural Research

2. • Not enough empiricism
• My example – social media and cultural work
• Power of the platform
Social media method

6. Social media ethnography

7. The social media use of cultural workers
• Role of social media in cultural labour (artists)
Presence‘Down time’
Inspiration ‘Listening’
(Crawford, 2009)

8. The social media use of cultural workers

9. Power of the platform
• Temporal
• Structural
• Ownership
“We argue that algorithms are always/already
ideological (Mager, 2012), in the way of all
mediating technology (Postman, 1992)
because they operate for particular interests
(such as Facebook’s capital expansion) and
have been developed through different
histories of power.”
(Skeggs and Yuill, 2015:12)

10. Thank you
karen.patel@bcu.ac.uk
http://karenpatelresearch.wordpress.com
@KarenPatel