How the World Changed Social Media

Diaspora and mapping methodologies: tracing transnational digital connections with ‘mattering maps’

“…While the recent ethnographic scholarship on digital media and the social world has begun to integrate quantitative data into ethnographic analysis (see Hjorth et al 2016;Miller and Sinanan 2017;Miller et al 2016) our case study analysis has contributed to the growing area of mixed-methods research by demonstrating concrete, methodological possibilities and necessities for integrating the use of digital methods tools programmed for large-scale data collection with ethnographic research and ethical practice. By pointing out these possibilities, we aim to demonstrate that this alternative mapping exercise could be further embedded within more traditional, in-depth ethnographic investigation, in the service of building theory that engages with longer-running debates on diaspora from anthropological and cultural studies perspectives.…”

“…The application of traditional ethnographic methods to online or 'virtual' environments is currently the subject of debate, and the notions of 'virtual ethnography', 'digital ethnography', and 'netnography' have emerged to refer to a range of specialized qualitative research techniques and epistemologies (Hine 2015;Kozinets 2009;Pink et al 2016). The recent ethnographic work on digital media use has also included quantitative survey data about digital media use alongside ethnographic insights (see Johnson and McKay 2011;Miller et al 2016), but Diminescu and Loveluck (2015) remark that importing research methodologies suitable for the 'offline' world to the web does not account for the web's main feature of 'connectivity'. Despite their diversity -including ethnographic work (Georgiou 2006;Nakamura and Chow-White 2012) and discourse analysis (Trandafoiu 2013) -qualitative approaches have tended not to engage with the proliferating methodological possibilities presented by tools and approaches oriented towards large-scale, quantitative, digital data-based research, and 'digital methods' (Rogers 2013).…”

Social media supremacy: a force of change paving the way for the next generation of healthcare and research

“…However, social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are increasingly treated as isolated components, rather than as part of an integrated system 3. In addition, “social media should not be seen primarily as the platforms upon which people post, but rather as the contents that are posted on these platforms” (pg x) 4. Social networking sites such as Twitter enable you to reach over 270 million active people each month 5.…”

Diffusion Theories: Media as Innovation

“…In the rise of mobile media globally, for instance, we find very different assumptions operating about what the Internet is-because users are accessing the Internet, and sharing content, on small screens, often facing significant challenges in terms of capacity and costs. If we seek to understand the diffusion of social media across the world, we need to understand how innovation possibilities offered by particular applications and technologies-and how they are implemented-interact with the life worlds and digital repertoires of local communities and users (Miller et al, 2016).…”