Participation in Social Media: Studying Explicit and Implicit Forms of Participation in Communicative Social Networks

Abstract

The diverse forms of participation in social media raise many methodological and ethical issues that should be acknowledged in research. In this paper, participation in social media is studied by utilising the framework of explicit and implicit participation. The focus is on the communicative and communal aspects of social media. The aim of the paper is to promote the reconsideration of what constitutes participation when online users create connections rather than content. The underlying argument is that research on social media and the development of methods should concentrate more on implicit forms of participation.

Media work in change: Understanding the role of media professionals in times of digital transformation and convergence

“…The audience, especially in social media, represents a labour power that produces attention to ads as well as data, which then feeds into the production of ads (Fisher, , 65). Importantly, much of the user work or audience labour in social media is associated less with production and more with communication and interaction (Villi & Matikainen, , 111).…”

“…This contradiction is also reflected at the conceptual level: Journalists have conventionally conceived people as audiences, readers, viewers, and listeners, whereas marketing staff refer to consumers, customers, and target groups. In addition, now with the advance of online communication and social media services, people can be increasingly understood as users of media content (Villi & Matikainen, 2016).…”

More Inclusion Through Participation?

“…Interaction can be considered the possibility to communicate and consume content with others. In contrast to interaction, participation also has a political dimension (e.g., spreading information about the rights of people with disabilities) (Matikainen, 2015), but can also be defined as an interaction with others where the political dimension plays a subordinate role (e.g., creating own content, reacting on hate speech; Jenkins, 2006;Villi & Matikainen, 2016).…”

Micromobilization through live streaming: the Elin Ersson case

“…I exercised caution, however, with the comments that were posted to the video. I preferred to protect the users' privacy by treating their participation as implicit (Villi & Matikainen, 2016) and, therefore, completely anonymized their identity. Anonymization was achieved by paraphrasing and collecting common words rather than quoting or specifying comments, thus rendering the words and expressions used for analysis untraceable and their users unidentifiable.…”