Mapping the transnational imaginary of social media genres

Abstract

This article presents a transnational study of the classification and evaluation of social media content. We conducted a large-scale survey ( N = 4770) in five countries (Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the United States) with open-ended questions about the types of content people like and dislike. Through iterative and inductive coding, we identified 29 topics, or broad areas of interest, and 213 recurrent genres, or narrower categories that share elements of form and content. We compared the results according to country, gender, age, and education level, identifying patterns of cultural difference and commonality. While we found significant differences in the prominence and preferentiality of content, these distictions were less pronounced for disliked topics around which social media users tended to converge. Finally, we discuss genre imaginaries as normative maps that reflect ideas about morality in general and the purpose of social media in particular.

“It’s Like the Fridge Magnet of the Internet”: Platform Aesthetics, Generational Taste, and the Cross-Cultural Valuation of Good Morning Memes

“…Value-based distinctions between generations of users like the one surfaced by "OK, Boomer" memes have important implications for the ways in which people imagine and relate to social media (Hallinan et al, 2021;van Es & Poell, 2020), as they often result in heuristic associations between audiences, content types, and platforms. The audience-content-platform association is arguably crucial to Manovich's (2016) notion of "Instagram-ism," coined to describe the atmospheric, pristine, and emotional aesthetic dominating Instagram's mainstream because of its popularity among a "new global digital youth class that emerges in early 2010s" (p. 119, emphasis in the original).…”

“…In conclusion, I reflect on how these divergences are core to the classification struggles that produce imagined connections between users, content types, and platforms. In turn, I suggest that these associations infuse the visual component of how people think of and relate to social media (Hallinan et al, 2021; van Es & Poell, 2020), coalescing into specific platform aesthetics : notions of what platforms look like based on who we believe inhabits them and the content they value.…”

Meaning multiplicity and valid disagreement in textual measurement: A plea for a revised notion of reliability

“…For instance, observing the same text FULL PAPER being coded five times not only offers valuable insights into the "decidability" 11 of the coding task, but also into the relative prominence of multiple or alternative meanings (Baden, 2018). Still more can be learned from having the material coded by diverse populations of coders (e.g., representing different identity groups), revealing how differences in cultural context affect the textual measurement (e.g., Hallinan et al, 2021).…”

How information and communication overload affect consumers’ platform switching behavior in social commerce

“…Nevertheless, while social media provides tremendous convenience to users, its negative aspects are becoming increasingly apparent. User satisfaction with platforms is declining, causing declining loyalty towards a specific platform and choosing from multiple platforms [ 4 ]. This trend has led to platform-switching behavior.…”