Interfaces between Social Media and Qualitative Inquiry in Neoliberal Contexts: Possibilities and Problems

The three papers that follow were developed from, and expand on, presentations made at the 2017 International Congress for Qualitative Inquiry. These presentations were part of a session addressing the theme of “Social media and qualitative inquiry—possibilities and problems with new forms of telling and visibility in neoliberalism contexts.” The aim of the session, and the presentations that comprised it, was to expose and explore interfaces between qualitative inquiry, social media, and the effects of these interfaces on the way we think, do, and work through our positionings and relationality. Critical debate about the benefits and limitations of social media can inform scholars to see how politics and current ontological stances and preferences shape the ways social media is used and talked about in the context of qualitative inquiry. Various uses of social media are only going to get more relevant for qualitative inquiry as rapid developments in technology and associated forms and uses of social media continue to raise many issues for us both as private citizens ¹ and as qualitative researchers.

The impetus for the session arose from an observation that qualitative inquirers have not really engaged with many of the issues around the qualitative inquiry/social media interface in terms of what it might mean for/do to qualitative inquiry itself. Certainly, there have been discussions around the potential use of social media in enhancing the reach of our research by using social media to get our messages to groups that may have been hard to reach without it, such as general public, government officials, policy makers, and various service user groups (Schnitzler, Davies, Ross, & Harris, 2016). Similarly, there have been propositions about the fact that social media opens up new and different ways of collecting data for qualitative inquiry (Byrne, 2017), also including “signature science’ and observable online behaviours (Edwards, Housley, Williams, Sloan, & Williams, 2013). Similarly, there has been an increasing interest in how to use non-research-specific related “everyday” social media texts in our studies, if the ethical issues can be navigated which at this point is work in progress with quite a way to go (see Edwards et al., 2013; Lunnay, Borlagdan, McNaughton, & Ward, 2015)

However, in our opinion, there has not been sufficient and detailed discussions about the ways in which social media impact, and interface with, and rapidly shape qualitative inquiry and qualitative inquirers more widely—that is, beyond the focus of social media as data connected to specific studies. For example, does social media have the potential to affect the way that researchers are positioned and digitally constructed in a competitive research marketplace (Cheek and Øby), and/or in changing our understandings about the interfaces of truth, post-truth, and qualitative inquiry (Koro-Ljungberg, Carlson, and Montana), and/or in the way that qualitative inquiry is published and bought and sold (Allen)? These are the three questions that form the focus of the papers to follow.

Cheek and Øby’s paper speaks to the idea of a digitally based, constructed, and virtual researcher self which is being used, constituted, and potentially questioned differently in different social, media, and professional contexts. Cheek and Øby argue for the resilience and morphing of metrics proposing expanded focus on new and different forms of self and constructed selves driven by the possibilities afforded by social media and social networking. Koro-Ljungberg, Carlson, and Montana, in turn, discuss how different notions of truth are being created, followed, and supported in social media. These authors consider broad conditions that shaped post-truth while focusing on social media as a means and an end to our obsession over “truth.” To destabilize post-truth assumptions, they introduce mental comfort stories, truth carnivals, and heterotopia as tools to process the changing social media landscape. Finally, Allen argues that when publishers emphasize information-sharing and collegiality functions on social media, they potentially mask the commercial nature of the scholarly publishing industry. By tracing the history of marketing scholarly works and by outlining the various social marketing strategies used by scholarly publishers, Allen concludes that scholarly publishing and uses of social media will further blur the boundaries between commerce and community.

We hope that these papers serve as provocateurs to further critically examine, and continue a conversation about, the role of social media in shaping qualitative research practices and scholarship both now and in the future. We invite other scholars to document, experiment with, and think through various ontological, social, spatial, theoretical, and practical implications of continuously changing social media and its impact on qualitative research practices.