682807

research-article2016
EJC0010.1177/0267323116682807European Journal of CommunicationLomborg

Article

European Journal of Communication

2017, Vol. 32(1) 615
A state of flux: Histories of The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0267323116682807
https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323116682807
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejc

Stine Lomborg
University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract
This article sets out to map the broad contours of social media research, teasing out in particular
the ways in which the scholarly literature in the fields of media and communication research has
addressed social media as a phenomenon since the emergence of the term social media in the
early 2000s. As a communicative phenomenon and research object, social media would appear to
be in flux. Changes to existing services, the emergence of new services, and the disappearance of
previously popular services testify to the sense of social media as a moving target. Researchers of
social media seem to accept change, rather than continuity, as a condition for the study of social
media. This is evident in our choice of research topics and data sources, but also in our discourses
on social media. By examining the sense of flux of social media research in a historical perspective,
this article aims to provide useful directions for future media and communication research on
social media. Specifically, it suggests ways to stabilise social media as an object of study and to
install a greater historical awareness in social media research.

Keywords
Social media definitions, continuity and change, data-driven research, utopian and dystopian
discourses on social media, history of social media research

This article sets out to map the broad contours of social media research, teasing out in
particular the ways in which the scholarly literature in the fields of media and communi-
cation research has addressed social media as a phenomenon since the emergence of
the term social media in the early 2000s. In fact, the digitally networked forms of com-
munication that constitute the basis of social media are as old as the Internet itself.

Corresponding author:
Stine Lomborg, University of Copenhagen, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication. Karen
Blixensvej 4, 2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark.
Email: slomborg@hum.ku.dk
Lomborg 7

Bulletin Board systems, Usenet newsgroups, email and other early forms of computer-
mediated communication (CMC) that facilitate many-to-many communication alongside
communication one-to-one and one-to-many may be considered predecessors of todays
social media Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on. Yet, it is during the past decade
that research on social media has congregated and begun to consolidate its efforts.
As a communicative phenomenon and research object, social media would appear to
be in flux. New services are continuously launched; most never gain a firm foothold, and
many close down or become integrated in more successful social media outlets. Users
migrate (think of the steep decline of MySpace from 2007 and onwards, when users
migrated to Facebook etc.). Existing social media services change their interfaces and
add or remove central features, with possible implications for how the services are used.
They may also change at the back end, as when services make changes to the applica-
tion programming interfaces (APIs) that researchers use to access and retrieve data on
social media use and developers use to create add-on services to specific social media.
As a consequence, researchers seem to accept change, rather than continuity, as the
ground rule when studying social media. This is evident in our choice of research topics
and data sources, but also in our discourses on social media. By examining the sense of
flux of social media research in a historical perspective, this article aims to provide use-
ful directions for future media and communication research on social media. Specifically,
I suggest ways to stabilise social media as an object of study and to install a greater his-
torical awareness in social media research.

Flux in social media research

The sense of flux in social media research manifests itself in three main ways. One, the
launch of new services is typically followed by a great sense of hype around the prospect
of being the next big thing in social media. Researchers of social media, like users and
mainstream media coverage, seem to be attracted by this sense of newness, the possibil-
ity of exploring new grounds, and perhaps the privilege of being a first-mover. In the
early 2000s, blogs was a hot research topic, but it is seemingly a less studied phenome-
non today despite its status as a still-popular genre of social media. In the mid-to-late
2000s, it was social networking sites such as MySpace, Flickr and Facebook, the latter of
which is still in vogue with researchers owing to its global lead position in the social
media market. Then in the 2010s, Twitter hit the research agenda, along with a growing
interest in mobile social media such as FourSquare, Snapchat and Instagram. Indeed,
studies of new social media services have produced valuable insights. Yet, the interest in
newness fuels a focus on the uniqueness of the single service, and, by extension, a ten-
dency of seeing each service in isolation. This distracts us from the commonalities, inter-
play and division of labour in the social media ecology here and now, and from seeing
historical continuities and disruptions in social media (e.g. with previous services, uses,
and business models). A focus on single services is likely to invite researchers to over-
state the implications of social media, for example, by overemphasising the ways in
which specific social media lead to behaviour change among users.
Two, research too often gets seduced by the sheer availability and abundance of data.
Particularly, social media such as Twitter, which are public by default, offer easy access
8 European Journal of Communication 32(1)

to a vast amount of data for media and communication research: profile information, user
networks, posts and comments, and so on can be studied directly on the site or harvested
in large quantities through computer scripts accessing the APIs of the service, and organ-
ised in databases for later analysis. Furthermore, generating these behavioural social
media data sets is non-intrusive to the users under study. Beyond giving their informed
consent, an important ethical issue that is often quite complex and problematic (see e.g.
Lomborg and Bechmann, 2014) and would deserve a more elaborate discussion that can
be provided here, these users need not take part in the data collection as would be the
case for interview, participant observation or survey-based research. The easy access to
Twitter data is likely a main driver of the massive amount of Twitter research that has
accumulated since 2010. Data-driven research on social media is not restricted to Twitter.
To be sure, social media such as Facebook, which requires the creation of a profile to
browse its contents, provides more restrictive data access. Still, these restrictions do not
hinder the qualitative or quantitative study of what users do on these services. It
should be noted that many data-driven studies of social media stem from disciplines
adjacent to media and communication research, for example, computer science. So-called
big data analysis often uses social media data but is seldom framed by a particular inter-
est in the communicative phenomenon of social media in itself. Hence, perhaps because
of the availability of social media data (compared to, say, big data banks of medical or
financial data on users and transactions), research on social media is penetrated by disci-
plines with very different theoretical and analytical concerns than those of media and
communication studies, and with little to offer in terms of conceptual and analytical
development of social media scholarship. Scholars of media and communication are also
increasingly adopting data-driven approaches. While such data-driven research has its
clear merits, it tends to be descriptive, for example, focusing on what features of particu-
lar social media a specific group of users use, or what types of network configurations
they entail (e.g. Bruns and Burgess, 2011; Hanusch and Bruns, 2016; Highfield etal.,
2013; Larsson and Moe, 2012). There appears to be less interpretive and explanatory
work on why users do what they do, and with what implications. Such work would be
necessary to address questions of the possible changes to communicative practices and
social relations brought about by social media.
Third, research tends to work from implicit, and often shifting, definitions of social
media. Initial social media scholarship even seemed to accept the terms put forward by
the industry web 2.0 and social software taken to denote a new era of networked
media often without questioning the ideological underpinnings of these terms. Still
today, a typical and practical strategy for doing away with definitional problems is to
subscribe to a technology-based understanding of social media as digital platforms for
the creation and sharing of user-generated content (e.g. Boyd, 2014). There are surpris-
ingly few attempts in the literature to define and conceptualise social media, perhaps
because the term itself is nonsense all media are social, albeit perhaps in very different
ways (Jensen, 2015). At the same time, conceptual work would help stabilise the phe-
nomenon of social media as we study it and is therefore most needed. A critical, histori-
cal examination of the competing discursive framings of social media by research itself
is thus important, because the way we theorise and analyse social media contributes to
shaping them as an object of study for future media and communication research.
Lomborg 9

Roughly, in a historical perspective, social media research has continuously moved

between utopian and dystopian framings, stressing the potential for empowerment and
emancipation or the risks of deception and commodification of social media, respec-
tively. These reactions of promise and peril replicate much debate scholarly and other
spurred by the broad diffusion of the Internet in the early 1990s (Curran, 2012; Zimmer
and Hoffmann, 2016), and the introduction of new media throughout the history of media
(Carey, 2005). Historically, utopian visions of new media have been closely related to
new opportunities for access to information for diverse social groups. For instance, tel-
evision enabled young children to access and receive information about adulthood, sexu-
ality and so on. These kinds of information had previously been restricted to the literate
parts of the population (Meyrowitz, 1985), and the possibilities of accessing such infor-
mation spurred both hopes of democratisation of the media and moral panics. The diffu-
sion of the Internet in general, and social media in particular not only involved leaps in
the access to information across space and time and at the convenience of the users; it
also facilitated an unprecedented free and easy access for ordinary users to produce and
disseminate content through its networked infrastructure. Social media, which typically
have a very low barrier to entry as they do not require programming and design skills to
develop user profiles and upload content, have thus pushed to the extreme techno-uto-
pian visions of global connectedness, equality, participation, democratic engagement and
so on through the exchange of information and formation of relationships with like-
minded others (e.g. Shirky, 2008). Contrasting these visions, dystopian commentators
have lamented what has been labelled the cult of the amateur the demise of the power
of the establishment, of informational, political and cultural expertise, in favour of the
publication of false news, popular but uninformed opinion pieces and speculations by lay
people, and the overflow of amateur content on everyday trivial matters (e.g. Keen,
2007). All of this, we are to understand, threatens basic democratic values; social media
expose us to less quality content and make us less informed citizens. Other dystopian
visions call less attention to the lack of quality content on social media, but instead
expose the underlying commercial logics of social media (Fisher, 2015; Van Dijck,
2009), as well as dynamics of information control and censorship (Morozov, 2011).
While the visions as described here are extremely polarised and generalising, scholarly
work on social media in specific contexts is more or less implicitly and with different
degrees of nuance undergirded by the kinds of valorisation, positive and negative, of
social media that utopian and dystopian framings entail.
One early influential discourse in studies of social media has been that of a participa-
tory culture in which the power of communication is decentralised and networked
(Benkler, 2006; Jenkins, 2006). Social media users are seen to engage in produsage
(Bruns, 2008), a concept that collapses the roles of producer and user in the production,
circulation and usage of content and software. For instance, users, as citizen journalists,
can participate in news production in and outside of formal media institutions. The dis-
course of participation is equally present in broader theories of digital networks and their
social consequences, for example, as seen in the emphasis on personal freedom to create,
connect and collaborate highlighted in scholarship on networked individualism (Rainie
and Wellman, 2012). Finally, and perhaps chiefly, the discourse is manifest in studies of
social media and politics, for example, studies of the democratising potential and role of
10 European Journal of Communication 32(1)

social media as mobilising tools for social protest movements (Milan, 2015), or social
media as vehicles of more mundane networked cultural and political citizenship (Bennett
and Segerberg, 2012; Dahlgren, 2005; Papacharissi, 2010). These studies have in com-
mon an emphasis on the capacity of social media for giving voice to ordinary citizens
interests, opinions and critique, for spreading their messages through communicative
networks, and thereby enable them to set an agenda for debate with corporations, politi-
cians, and other citizens. Discourses of participation thus place increased agency in the
hands of ordinary users vis-a-vis media and other institutions and actors and thereby
stress the empowering potential of social media. Participatory and emancipatory visions
of social media have, naturally, pushed forward a research agenda with a key interest in
describing users and usage patterns of social media among different types of actors and
collectives (various groups of citizens, media professionals, politicians, etc.). Although
the communicative potentials of social media continue to spur utopian hopes of demo-
cratic mobilisation and grassroots intervention in formal politics, regime change and so
forth, much empirical research so far has found actual participatory practices to be more
narrowly tied to personal interests, and to be less widespread than the utopian vision
would have it (Kuschner, 2016).
Contrasting and contesting the utopian framings of social media, critical discourses
have established several interrelated lines of research. In a particularly influential book,
Jose van Dijck (2013) frames social media as a culture of connectivity that we cannot
escape and opt out of. Centrally, despite their benefits, social media are seen to engineer
sociality through algorithms, and to commodify users through processes of datafication,
the conversion of personal information and social relationships into computerised data
for profiling, personally targeted advertising, social sorting and so on. Similarly, algo-
rithm and software studies perspectives have argued that the underlying logics of social
media systems curate and filter user activity in ways that are opaque (e.g. Bucher, 2012;
Gerlitz and Helmond, 2014; Gillespie, 2010), and thereby challenge the ideological
vision of emancipation; see also more popular notions such as filter bubbles (Pariser,
2011). Another influential critical discourse of social media stems from analyses of the
underlying power structures, surveillance capacities and commercial logics of social
media (e.g. Allmer, 2014; Fuchs, 2015; Fuchs etal., 2012). Common to these critical
framings is an attention to the political economy of social media, and the underlying
mechanisms of software and infrastructures in curating, shaping and monetising user
experience through big data. This has brought fuel to a mainly theory-driven research
agenda with less interest in empirical uses and users, and more emphasis on social media
platforms as technologies with inscribed power inequalities and the underlying political-
economic structures of the social media industry. Arguably, as suggested by Couldry
(2015), critical framings have become so influential that we are witnessing a normative
turn in social media research. A debatable claim, utopian as well as dystopian discourses
easily become the vehicles for normative voices about what social media should be and
could become in the future (for key references with an explicit normative position on
digital and social media, see e.g. Baym, 2015; Turkle, 2015).
Competing discourses of social media co-exist and perhaps co-evolve, but are seldom
reconciled or brought into dialogue. To be sure, some of the conceptualisations referred
to above take note of both participatory and exploitative aspects of social media, albeit
Lomborg 11

emphasising one over the other. Yet, in the mainstream of social media scholarship,
whether aesthetic or empirical, conceptual tensions are not systematically addressed, and
so competing discourses continue to clash and foreground the sense of social media as a
moving target.

Fertile grounds for future research

The acceptance of flux as a condition in the social media landscape and the research
agenda alike carries an inbuilt risk of fragmentation and loss of historicity in media and
communication research on social media. If we want to continue to push the boundaries
of the field, time is ripe for consolidation of our research efforts. For a start, we need to
stabilise what we research and on that basis we can begin to evaluate whether the phe-
nomenon of social media is really as ever-changing as it is often perceived to be. In what
follows, I propose three directions for future social media research in pursuit of stabilis-
ing the object of study and accessing its state of flux.
One, we need a fundamental discussion of what we mean when we talk about social
media in research. In the past year, a number of articles and research essays (Couldry and
Van Dijck, 2015; Jensen, 2015; Livingstone, 2015) have begun pondering the social as
well as the media of social media. A conceptual qualification of the communicative
phenomenon of social media is a much needed and welcome contribution to social media
studies. Specifically, conceptual frameworks that find middle ground perhaps even
agnostic ground between utopian and dystopian visions of social media would be help-
ful to illuminate both the event-based and everyday uses of social media, and their soci-
etal consequences. I have elsewhere proposed a conceptual framework for analysing
social media as communicative genres negotiated at intersection between communica-
tive functionalities inscribed in software, and the communicative practices and purposes
of users (Lomborg, 2014), in an attempt to combine analyses of technical and systemic
aspects with empirical studies of user practices on social media. Jensen and Helles
(2011) definition of social media as many-to-many communication, and Miller and col-
leagues (Miller etal., 2016) conceptualisation of social media between interpersonal,
dyadic communication and broadcast in terms of scalable sociality present equally useful
conceptual frameworks upon which to build analytical models for studying the commu-
nication practices and data flows on social media. Indeed, definitions of social media
should be flexible enough to have continued relevance as the social media landscape
gradually changes.
Two, we need better empirical baselines of social media use against which to judge the
samples of users we study. Apart from systematic and repeated studies such as those from
the Pew Internet and American Life Project in the United States, Ofcom annual reports
and the Oxford Internet Survey in Britain, most statistics on social media use come from
social media companies themselves or commercial media measurement outlets such as
Nielsen or ComScore. There are surprisingly few systematic attempts in the scholarly
literature at mapping the diffusion and use of social media over time and across contexts
on basic demographics such as age, gender and education, letalone the relationship
between social media use and other media (but see Helles etal., 2015). A mapping of
overall social media use would be based on surveys or panel-based web traffic
12 European Journal of Communication 32(1)

measurements of representative samples of the population. Such methods do not privilege

heavy posters and networkers over so-called lurkers, as often found in empirical social
media research. This is crucial since most users are lurkers they may keep several social
media profiles and routinely read their feeds but never post anything themselves.
Finally, we need more theory-driven empirical research using well-tested concepts
from media and communication theory. Reuniting theory and empirical studies would
enable a greater historical awareness of how empirical findings of social media practices
connect back to earlier media-related practices of CMC, but also face-to-face, print-
based and audio-visual communication. Furthermore, theoretically driven empirical
research offers a way to install analytical sensibility to cultural differences in compara-
tive research. To take a few examples, the concept of meaning as intersubjectively
negotiated through communication in specific contexts has proven its viability in audi-
ence and user studies across the history of media (Ang, 1985; Livingstone, 1990;
Lomborg, 2014). Empirical studies of meaning-making in social media would be useful
for illuminating the purposes of social media use vis-a-vis other media and thus, for
instance, informing discussions of whether and how social media substitute or comple-
ment other media. Flow, originally developed in television studies (Williams, 1974),
but later also in the context of digital media (Bordewijk and Van Kaam, 1986), presents
an equally well-tested concept fit for studying the possibly changing patterns of com-
munication in and across networks of users and media. For instance, the analysis of com-
munication flows across interpersonal, broadcast and social media would be a useful
complement to media repertoire analysis (Hasebrink and Popp, 2006) in the effort to
tease out how individuals move seamlessly through the ubiquitous media landscape of
today, and what kinds of communication purposes social media are specifically geared to
serve vis-a-vis other media. Flow would be equally relevant in analysis of social media
software, business models and political economy, by offering a lens for studying the
interoperability of services and the exchange and circulation of data in the social media
market. From a media production and platforms perspective, concepts such as curation
(Davis, 2016), sharing (John and Stzl, 2016) and labour (Fuchs, 2015) would be
helpful to delineate and disentangle changes to actor roles, filtering and circulation of
content from studies of legacy media to platform studies. A common denominator for
these suggested middle range concepts is that they emphasise communication practices
over technological features as the analytical focus in the study of social media.
Communication practices may each acquire different expressions across the (social)
media menu, but are not limited to a specific service; practices may change over time,
but not with the kind of pace with which specific technological features of social media
services change and become out-dated. Conceptually driven empirical work, along the
lines suggested here, occasionally pops up, but has yet to consolidate and crystallise into
mainline research trajectories for social media studies.

Conclusion
I have suggested that social media are currently seen as a phenomenon in constant flux,
and that research contributes to creating this sense of change by being seduced by hyped
services, available data and by leaving definitional tensions of social media unaddressed.
Lomborg 13

In response to this condition of flux, I have proposed three directions for future social
media research: (1) more systematic inquiry into what is meant by the constituent com-
ponents social and media, (2) the systematic production of empirical baseline research
on social media diffusion and use, and (3) a stronger commitment to theoretical frame-
works to help us frame, interpret and explain empirical studies. With these pointers in
mind, I envision research to commit more strongly to examine and explain both continu-
ity and change when writing future histories of social media.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article.

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