Mode of action perspective on engagements with social media

Ridell, S. (2011). Mode of action perspective on engagements with social media . Zagreb conference: "New challenges and methodological innovations in European media audience research". 7-9 April 2011.

Abstract: Inspired by interpretive sociology, I will develop conceptual tools for exploring the multitude of activities on social media websites. Social media can be seen as platforms for agency where users engage in various modes of action, acting alternately as audiences, producers, community members and publics. In their online engagements, people variously link together activities that represent these modes in order to realize projects that aim at specific ends. The projects are structured complexes of articulations in which the articulated activities retain their distinctive features rather than being fused into hybrid forms. I will offer an ideal-typical reading of projects that the web-based social media enable, focusing especially on the interrelations between activities that represent distinct modes of action. In the reading, YouTube and, to a lesser extent, Wikipedia are used as examples. My overall starting point is that, in studying how the rapid development of forms of social media challenges audience research, it is not tenable to separate discussions on research methods and methodological issues from the way we conceive of and construct our research object. For example, the question of how and with what kind of tools we should analyze what is going on in the networked online spaces becomes formulated quite differently depending on whether we start from the essentialist notion of ‘audiences that act’ or proceed instead, as is proposed in my presentation, from the action theoretical view of people’s moving constantly between audience activities and several other modes of (inter)action.