A Decade of 'Social Media' and What to Do About It: Methodological Challenges of Historicising the Proprietary Web
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Paper presented at the Internet Histories preconference at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Denver October 2013
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A Decade of 'Social Media' and What to Do About It: Methodological Challenges of Historicising the Proprietary Web
- 1. A DECADE OF ‘SOCIAL MEDIA’ AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT Methodological Challenges of Historicising the Proprietary Web JEAN BURGESS QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY @JEANBURGESS
- 4. Dynamics of change "Historical studies are often the result of a fundamental wonderment: Why was there something and not just nothing? Why was there not something else? And why did it change? In other words, a genuine part of historical studies is often answering the question: What forces made things happen?" (Brügger, 31)
- 5. Dynamics of change What changes, and how?
- 10. social media: the platform paradigm social media platforms as new media institutions •coordinating function •logics (van Dijck & Poell 2013) •affordances, constraints
- 12. the stuff of platforms •Interface design, aesthetics, affordances •User practices, behaviours, norms •Software, algorithms, APIs •Business models, licensing, partnerships, revenue streams
- 19. Dynamics of Change What changes, and how?
- 20. Dynamics of Change And how would we know?
- 21. the stuff of social media histories •Interface design, aesthetics, affordances •User practices, behaviours, norms •Software, algorithms, APIs •Business models, licensing, partnerships, revenue streams
- 22. Beyond the archive •oral histories (users, third party developers, employees) •self-memorialisations e.g. platform birthday celebrations (cf. Hartley, Burgess & Green, 2007) •media coverage of controversies and other events as moments of acute change •biographies of material elements - e.g. the hashtag, the like button
- 23. Twitter Over Time project (with Nancy Baym)
- 24. Twitter Over Time project (with Nancy Baym) •interviews •wayback machine •wikipedia (+ talk pages + edit history) •early tweets archive •tech blogs, news media •personal blogs, youtube
- 25. Challenges • ‘Web history’ in general: very recent/micro changes and long-range macro changes easier to track than mediumterm ‘meso’ changes • Proprietary social media platforms present challenges in addition to all the problems noted by Brügger (2012) • ephemerality & erasure • data access • ethics • But this commercial ephemerality is nothing new (Hartley, Burgess & Green 2008; Ankerson, 2012)
- 26. References Ankerson, Megan Sapnar (2012). Writing web histories with an eye on the analog past. New Media & Society 14(3), 384-400. Brügger, Niels (2012) "Web historiography and Internet Studies: Challenges and perspectives." New Media & Society 15(5): 752-764. Hartley, John, Burgess, Jean, & Green, Joshua (2007) 'Laughs and Legends,' or the Furniture That Glows? Television as History? Australian Cultural History 26: 15-36. van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2013). Understanding Social Media Logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2-14.