This piece is cross-posted on Microsoft Research New England’s Social Media Collective Research Blog.
In her recent post here on the Cyborgology blog, Jenny Davis brought the pervasive use of Facebook as a study site back into conversation. In brief, she argued that “studying Facebook—or any fleeting technological object—is not problematic as long as we theorize said object.” The take away from this statement is important: We can hope to make lasting contributions to research literature through our conceptual work – much more so than through the necessarily ephemeral empirical details that are tied to a time, a place, and particular technologies.
In this post, I want to give a different yet complementary answer to why it may be a problem if our research efforts are focused on a single study site. This is regardless of whether it is the currently most popular social network site or an already obsolete technological object. The post made me think of a tweet (by Nicole Ellison) echoing the discussion at the International Conference of Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) a few weeks ago:
Need to examine multiple social media sites, not just one. Studying only 1 social media site is like blind men describing an elephant
#ICWSM— Nicole Ellison (@nicole_ellison) June 6, 2012
In the story, blind men describing the elephant end up with wildly different accounts depending on which part of the animal each happened to stumble upon. While different accounts may all add accurate and relevant information, it is only in combining them that the men can begin to understand what the elephant looks like as a whole.
Similarly, if we focus only on Facebook –or whatever happens to be the most popular study site at any given moment– we will gain insight only into parts of the proverbial beast of how technologies and people go together. So, how might our conceptualizations of social media sites and social interaction change if we explored a wider range of services and used them as tools for our theorizing?
Let’s first consider Couchsurfing.org, a social media site that helps traveling guests to connect with local hosts for free accommodation and shared experiences. As a study site, it may encourage us to envision privacy in ways we wouldn’t come to think of in considering Facebook. Couchsurfing profiles offer users the option of presenting themselves as “several people,” making room for profiles that are not owned by individuals but small groups of people, such as couples, families, and housemates. Studying Couchsurfing may help us unpack what it means for a group to make itself more or less accessible and open to others. Social psychologist Irwin Altman’s definition of privacy as an interpersonal boundary process by which a person or a group regulates interaction with others[1] is quoted often in research on privacy in networked contexts, such as social media sites. However, the focus tends to be on individuals and their interpersonal negotiations, leaving regulation on the group level with scarce attention. Furthermore, what could we learn from studying couchsurfers’ experiences and considering privacy as hospitality, or privacy as politeness?
As another example, let’s think of changes in privacy settings and defaults on social media sites. Over Facebook’s history, changes to privacy settings have caused a number of heated debates (see boyd & Hargittai’s summary). Changes towards increased openness and decreased obscurity get framed as privacy violations. As such, they capture the attention of researchers and advocates focusing on privacy – and, for a reason. According to Altman’s theory of privacy, however, people’s efforts to regulate boundaries may fail both towards achieving too little or too much privacy. Pointing a finger at myself as much as at anyone else, I wonder whether our pressing concerns are biasing the focus of our theorizing.
While the trend among social media sites to tempt and push people to share more and more continues, purposely identifying and investigating counter examples could enrich our conceptual work. Consider Scoopinion, a Finnish news service that recently abandoned its original, automated social sharing model in order to focus on delivering personalized, “crowd-curated” recommendations for feature-length stories. In this process, interestingly for our theorizing purposes, Scoopinion users lost access to the behavioral data of others along with the chance to share their own reading data on the site. If we are to adapt Altman’s theory to the networked, augmented world of today, shouldn’t we look at how users conceive of system changes like this that (unexpectedly) decrease access and visibility, too? Is the sudden end of sharing perceived as a privacy violation? If our studies considered also cases that counter the trend of increased openness, we might come to understand reactions to changes in privacy settings and defaults more comprehensively. More importantly, it could help us see more clearly where prior theories can fail or support theoretical understandings that are situated in the networked context of today.
I argue that we are much better off in theorizing social media and the ways in which they relate to people if we choose to explore varied sites of study. These choices affect what seems illustrative of the phenomena under study. If our theoretical thinking builds on empirical research in only a few dominant study sites (or just one), we risk sailing into the murky waters where what is popular and typical comes to dominate our thinking – even when we know fully well that they are not all there is.
Airi Lampinen (@airi_) is a graduate student in Social Psychology at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and a researcher at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT. Currently, she is interning at Microsoft Research New England.
[1] Altman, I. 1975. The Environment and Social Behavior. Privacy – Personal Space – Territory – Crowding. Brooks-Cole Publishing Company, Monterey, CA, USA.
Comments 6
Behzod Sirjani — August 9, 2012
Airi,
Thanks for a great post here! I think many researchers do often fall into the trap of just looking at one site to make conclusions about what is going on “in social spaces.” While looking at these individual, discrete locations is indeed informative of a certain type of action, the problem is these conclusions are often overstated and over-generalized, which often prevents the researchers (or the research community at large) from trying to connect these studies together and draw larger conclusions about the space.
This reminds me of some of the issues that we have with data. When we start to bring together different data sets, if we don’t have metadata (or context, or in this case, the larger theoretical implications of the study) we will end up having problems drawing connections across sites.
Cheers,
Behzod
jennydavis — August 9, 2012
Great points. I think a key methodological issue is that ALL social media studies should be multi-sited. Not the least, social action and interaction take place both on and offline, and that needs to be addressed. Further, social sites are increasingly interconnected, and websites in general are getting more social.
Facebook is particularly interesting in this regard because it is a hub. It is woven throughout the physical and digital landscape. This makes it a logical base-site for studying social interaction. For the same reason, however, it cannot be studied in isolation.
Dan Greene — August 10, 2012
Airi, this is great and necessary. Thanks much.
I'd add the wrinkle that while attending to the different experiences within and between sites, and the different media in them, it's also important to at some point trace the discourses that links them all together. So Facebook isn't the whole story but why is it so culturally dominant and how do other media position themselves in relation to it? It's a bit like how US political researchers have to deal with American exceptionalism: "Well the US isn't the center of the world, and we shouldn't act like it. But at the same time, we do exert an outsized influence and need to account for it."
-Dan
nathanjurgenson — August 10, 2012
really dig this discussion! bringing in more sites, offline variables, etc is a good thing.
though, the elephant metaphor makes me uncomfortable. why do we assume that there is a single, correct, Truth ("elephant") that will be uncovered if we just add in enough variables, enough other social media sites? i think that overstates what is possible. i say drop the elephant logic, we should not try to tell the single story, the totalizing Truth, the Grand Narrative of all people in all places for all time, but instead focus on much smaller-scale understandings. (this does not challenge the conclusion of these posts, but just downplays it a bit, and asks us to problematize the elephant logic)
once we drop the Grad Theory baggage the elephant metaphor entails, i think we can also make room for less-empirical research. the logic that more variables = more truth precludes work that is more focused on providing new ways to understand the empirical reality other researchers describe. Blumer called these "sensitizing concepts" and more provocatively Baudrillard discussed "pataphysics", fictions that shock people into new understandings of the empirical world. is Baudrillard's simulations theory "true"? was Foucault's historical work in History of Sexuality "correct"? probably not. but each prove to be extremely useful for seeing the world in new ways.
thus, there may be very useful work on social media that does not fit into the logic of more-variables-equals-more-truth being discussed here. i wonder how discussing provocative theorizing fits into these posts? what about fiction? what about art?
jennydavis — August 10, 2012
Nathan, absolutely. This fleshes out some of what I argued in the MySpace post (linked above)--that research findings need not be married to a particular empirical site of study. I think you add a great point by explicitly rejecting the notion that there is a Truth to find. And yes, creative, abstract, and fictional works have an important place.
With that said, when working to understand, or even talk about empirical realities, we have to account for complex webs of relations.
In line with Dan's point, Facebook is not the ONLY site, but right now, it predominates, and it is difficult to study any social media practices without understanding their relation to Facebook (even if that relation is explicit rejection). We might even argue that it is difficult to study any social relations at all without ackknowleding the role of the digital.
Airi — August 10, 2012
Great comments! And yes, I agree largely with Nathan's comment about the elephant - if you take the metaphor far enough, it breaks down and becomes misleading.
Also very good points of the importance of Facebook in a variety of ways: as a hub, a platform, a culturally dominant site etc. What intrigues me is whether we would end up with much richer and much more varied ways of envisioning different phenomena if we made more efforts to look also elsewhere (and of course, already currently many do).
Furthermore, and this is something that would need to happen largely on the research community level, it makes me curious to think what would come out if there was more work trying to bring pieces together, think about how they relate to one another, what the differences between them mean etc.