Abstract
The growth of social media and their pervasive presence in our daily lives poses new challenges for established theoretical frameworks and methodological traditions in audience studies. The prominence of user-generated content sits uneasily with established analytical distinctions between producers and consumers, and demands a different conceptualisation of media texts. In her study of everyday uses of social media, Lomborg proposes to address this problem by approaching and analysing social media from the perspective of genres, and by understanding ‘the communicative practices unfolding on social media as enactments of genre that contribute to an ongoing negotiation among users about the meanings, purposes, and conventions of their social media use’. These enactments, she argues, should also be seen as ‘interwoven in the fabric of meaning of everyday life’ (p. 3, emphases in original). Using a qualitative case study approach, Lomborg examines three such ‘genres’ of social media – blogs, Twitter and Facebook – focusing on the practices and processes of meaning-making within each of them, and on how these are shaped through user’s engagement with genres knowledge in the context of daily life. The chosen case studies are based on examples from Denmark, and draw on a combination of two types of data: web archives and qualitative interviews with ordinary users. While the analytical approach is rooted primarily in a socio-cognitive understanding of reception, Lomborg combines this with insights from sociological literature, emphasising the pragmatic nature of meaning-making and its embeddedness in communicative practices that allow users to ‘do’ particular things within a particular social context. The empirical case studies presented in the book examine the connections between software functionalities of different genres and their specific uses and appropriations in daily life, as well as explore the role of social media in negotiating the boundary between the private and the public. With regard to the latter, Lomborg argues that the three genres offer opportunities for different types of public enactment of personal communication, which are best seen as personal rather than private: blogging enables users to create intimacy through phatic communication, Twitter offers opportunities for ordinary exchanges that ‘augment’ everyday life by representing and sharing it in text, while Facebook allows intimacy at distance. Although sociologically minded readers may miss a wider engagement with the role of social media in everyday routines and their location within the broader media ecology, this book certainly makes significant headway in furthering our understanding of everyday uses of social media.