Studies

Each study offers ethnographic descriptions of people’s engagement with literature in social media environments (i.e. practices) as well as the discourses surrounding these literaire practices (i.e. conversations). Based on the descriptions of the practices the researcher has been able to analyze how literary communication practices are transformed and new understandings of literacy are formulated. By assessing and comparing the discourses about literature and social media the researcher has been able to analyze how dominant practices of literary communication are being contested and how literacy criteria are being redefined.

 

The research builds on a system-oriented approach to art and culture. From a system-oriented perspective, literature is described as the object of a series of communicative actions which give rise to a particular organization of social roles. This constellation or system represents a set of “standards which people invent for specific purposes in specific sociocultural situations, especially for the purpose of drawing distinctions in their experiential reality” (Schmidt, 1997, p. 122). Empirical studies have shown that the variety of communication practices and social roles related to print-based literature are traditionally distributed onto four dimensions or cultural institutions: “production”, “mediation”, “reception” and “post-processing” (see Schmidt, 1997, 2010). Therefore, each study in the research focuses on a specific dimension in order to examine how social media contribute to the negotiation of new standards and the innovation of cultural institutions. This approach adds structure and rigor to the research as a whole.

 

The researcher has added a unique extra by starting the research with a study of the discourse of social media developers. Disregarding the role of the developers would imply skipping a crucial step in the assessment of social media’s effects on culture and society. The research would then immediately focus on the practices and perceptions of users, thus studying social media as neutral rather than intentionally shaped tools. Such an approach increases the risk of developing a technologically deterministic understanding of the effects of media. To avoid this, the researcher began by studying how developers of new media – i.e. designers and promoters – intend to change culture and society. Based on the results of this first study, three social roles were identified: readers, writers and mediators.

 

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