Mapping actor roles in social media: Different perspectives on value creation in theories of user participation

Abstract

While media studies have been locked into a classic producer-text-audience model, most theories of social media suggest some degree of collapse between the producer and audience. In this article, we address social media in terms of processes of value creation. The aim of the article is to demonstrate that social media are either addressed in terms of economic and socio-political value creation, that is, power, exploitation and business revenues, or in terms of value creation as sense-making, that is, creative explorations of the self and management of social relationships in everyday life. These different interests in value creation, we argue, have consequences for the conceptualization of the media user as a participatory agent. With specific focus on the notion of value creation in social media, we uncover implicit conceptions of the social media user guiding industry and user-centric perspectives, respectively. We demonstrate that while studying the same phenomenon, the two perspectives operate with very different conceptions of the producer/user nexus. We then discuss whether the literature is inconsequential in the analytic treatment of its own suggested collapse by questioning if, and if so how, this collapse is in fact taking place. Finally, we offer a mapping of the multifarious actor roles identified in the literature review to nuance the understanding of the producer/user nexus in social media and use it to identify and discuss possible opportunities for collapse and cross-fertilization of user-centric and industry perspectives in future studies of social media.

Mediating social media use: Connecting parents’ mediation strategies and social media literacy

“…Distant mediation, in the form of both trusting adolescents with their social media use and monitoring them -as delineated in the study by Zaman and colleagues (2016) -was also present in the arsenal of mediation strategies for adolescents' social media use. Supervision is an often chosen strategy because of the agency adolescents have while using social media, since communication through social media tends to be deinstitutionalized and interactive (Bechmann & Lomborg, 2013). We also found a new manifestation of monitoring media use in our study, with parents using mobile applications and social media accounts only for monitoring purposes.…”

“…As a part of digital media, social media can be defined based on three specific characteristics: (1) communication through social media is deinstitutionalized, as users choose their own communication channels, (2) the receiver also becomes a sender with the rise of user-generated content, and (3) communication through social media is interactive and runs through networks (Bechmann & Lomborg, 2013). Social network sites, as just one type of social media, have three specific aspects according to boyd & Ellison (2008).…”

“…For instance, as communication through social media is deinstitutionalized and interactive (Bechmann & Lomborg, 2013), distant mediation and especially supervision would be a good fit to mediate social media use because of the agency and freedom adolescents experience while using social media. Active mediation could also be an important strategy, as parents discuss and evaluate for example the content their children share on or create with social media.…”

Understanding user participation in online communities: A systematic literature review of empirical studies

“…Online communities have been found to benefit companies in many ways, as they can increase brand loyalty, trust, and interest in the products (Shang et al, 2006;Tsai & Pai, 2012), improve customer relationship, and attract new customers (Kang et al, 2014). Bechmann and Lomborg (2013) have divided studies on participation into user-centric and industry-centric, based on different interests in value-creation. In user-centric studies, the user is given the role of an agent actively shaping and managing the social realities of everyday life, whereas industry-centric studies view users more as means to an end, based on the financial value they create for companies through their creative activity (Bechmann & Lomborg, 2013).…”

Business Models of Media Industries: Describing and Promoting Commodification

“…For reasons of clarity, social and legacy media will be used as the two ends of a continuum. The term legacy media shall describe traditional offline media such as a newspaper or a broadcast channel; the term social media shall describe online platforms that focus on the interactions between their users as defined by Ellison and Boyd (2013) and Bechmann and Lomborg (2013).…”