Abstract
Internet-based forms of communication such as blogs, social network sites and text messages have become pervasive and inextricably embedded in everyday life, from work tasks to entertainment and the maintenance of relationships. The growth of these social media presents theoretical challenges to classic models of text that regard audiences’ ability to respond and feed back as limited: with the blurring of the distinction between media user and producer, texts undergo a continuous process of development, revision and change. In light of this, Social Media, Social Genres expands the concept of text to encompass both the communicative contributions of users and the software dimension of social media, and further develops a framework for analyzing social media in terms of genres embedded in the fabric of everyday life and society at large.
The introductory Chapter 1 conceptualizes communicative practices unfolding on social media as enactments of genre that involve an ongoing negotiation among participants about the meanings, purposes and conventions of their social media use. The remainder of the book consists of two main parts: a theoretical part (Chapters 2 and 3) that sketches the methodological and theoretical framework for empirical studies of social media as communicative genres, and an empirical part (Chapters 4–7) that analyzes the everyday uses of personal blogs, Twitter and Facebook as communicative genres.
In Chapter 2, the author takes a functional perspective on genre to devise a pragmatic approach to genre analysis, which includes four interrelated dimensions: composition (structures of participation and the social organization of communicative practices), content (predominant topics of communication), style (the specific tone participants must master in order to enact the genre competently) and pragmatic function (the underlying social purposes or motives the genre serves). By relating the genre perspective to foundational discussions about the social and psychological processes of sense-making in audience studies, Chapter 3 elaborates the meta-theoretical foundations of a socio-cognitive approach to communication and media use. On the basis of schema theory and social representation theory, Lomborg reconceptualises genre to analyze how ordinary users make sense of social media by invoking genre knowledge and establishing shared understandings of the communicative situation with other users.
Chapters 4–6 employ both exploration of web archives and qualitative interviews with ordinary users to understand specific media. Chapter 4 analyzes the resources, expectations and conventions participants use to orient themselves in their interactions in three personal blogs, finding that blogs enable participants to transcend their spatial and temporal dispersion and create a sense of mutual social presence and commitment. Chapter 5 explores the four interwoven dimensions of composition, style, content and pragmatic uses to describe the spontaneity, directness and liveliness that characterize Twitter, fostering a highly dynamic and fluctuating communicative environment. Unlike the more focused platform of blogging, Twitter is adopted for a broad set of purposes, from sociability and curiosity to professional interest. Chapter 6 takes up an examination of the multiple audiences whose contexts collapse on Facebook; while this platform offers small oases of relaxation from other activities, the embeddedness of communication in networks creates pressure for nurturing social relationships and poses challenges to appropriate genre enactment.
Chapter 7 discusses the sociocultural implications of the intersection between private and public communication on social media. Adhering to the principle of being ‘personal, not private’ (p. 175), sociability takes on different nuances in personal blogs, Twitter and Facebook, partly owing to the network configuration, spatio-temporal and topical organization of each genre. Personal blogs create a sense of intimacy through phatic communication over time, while Twitter encompasses fluctuating and shifting relationships with mundane exchanges, and Facebook creates a space for intimacy at a distance with its fast-paced and interstitial nature. Chapter 8 concludes the book by expanding the concept of text to incorporate communicative practice at the levels of media, genre, text and software, and revisiting the notion of active media user to integrate sense-making activities both at the individual and social levels.
A key contribution of the book is its conceptual framework for defining social media as communicative genres, constituted by the interplay between interactive functionalities configured at the software level, and the appropriation of those functionalities to achieve certain purposes through users’ communicative practices. In contrast to traditional views of genres as institutionalized and stable practices, the communicative genres of social media are continuously shaped, adjusted, stabilized and destabilized through participants’ active engagement. The framework helps reveal the dynamic and participatory character of social media and the shifting roles of producers and recipients in communicative practices. The second strength of the framework is its integration of network, compositional, thematic and stylistic dimensions into the study of communicative practices on social media. Integrating both communicative practices and cognitive processes in its pragmatic theory of sense-making, the framework can be applied not only to empirical studies of how software is socially negotiated in different contexts, but also to comparative analysis between different types of social media.
Also important is the revision of the notion of the active media user by integrating theories of interpersonal communication that underscore the social uses of media. Drawing on pragmatic theories from microsociology and socio-cognitive reception theory, the activity of sense-making in social media is theorized as two interrelated dynamics: an individual process, in which the media user applies cognitive-psychological frameworks for interpreting experience, and a social process, in which the user actively negotiates meanings with fellow media users. By emphasizing the socially negotiated nature of genre, the framework enables the balancing of the individual-psychological and the social-collaborative components of the sense-making process.
Finally, the book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of everyday uses of social media. It examines the specific uses and appropriations of personal blogs, Twitter and Facebook in daily life, and their roles in negotiating the boundary between the private and the public. The book should therefore prove an invaluable resource for advanced students and researchers in computer-mediated media, communication and discourse studies.