Introduction to Articles from the 2014 Conference on Social Media & Society

Data, data everywhere. With faster computers and cheaper storage, bigger data sets are becoming abundant. Social media is a key source of Big Data in the form of user and system generated content. What do we do with all of the social data and how do we make sense of it? How does the use of social media platforms and the data that they generate change us, our organizations, and our society? What are the inherent challenges and issues associated with working with social media data? The Big Data & Society (BD&S) special theme on Social Media & Society is focusing on addressing these and related key questions.

This theme is built around work presented at the International Conference on Social Media & Society (#SMSociety) hosted by the Ryerson University Social Media Lab in Canada. The Conference features both quantitative and qualitative work related to the broad theme of “Social Media & Society.” The work presented at the Conference crosses interdisciplinary boundaries and expands our understanding of the current and future trends in social media research. The first set of papers, published under this theme and being announced here, came from the 2014 Conference held at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada on September 27–28.

This special theme is unique in a number of ways. First, it includes works that specifically focus on the intersection of Big Data and social media research. Second, papers in this theme take a user-centric perspective to studying Big Data practices. They do this by examining how or why different user groups rely on social media and in turn contribute to the rapid growth of user-generated Big Data. Finally, this special theme presents studies that take a more granular look at “big” data through careful sampling and the application of both quantitative and qualitative methods. The following is a brief overview of what you will find in the 2015 special theme on Social Media & Society.

To understand why certain user groups participate and contribute to social media, Quan-Haase, Martin, and McCay-Peet examined the use of social media by one scholarly community in their paper entitled “Networks of digital humanities scholars: The informational and social uses and gratifications of Twitter.” Specifically, through a thematic content analysis of in-depth interviews, the researchers discovered that digital humanities scholars use Twitter for both social and informational, formal and informal reasons. Furthermore, by examining a “who follows whom” network among the scholars, the authors were able to uncover scholars’ “invisible” colleges and confirmed that online connections formed on Twitter closely resemble offline networks among academics; thus, supporting the idea that at least for some sectors of our society, social media data may be used as a proxy for studying offline networks.

In another paper entitled “Connected or informed?: Local Twitter networking in a London neighbourhood,” Bingham-Hall and Law also relied on Twitter data, but they studied a somewhat different population. In their work, the authors combined Twitter data with users’ location information to test a hypothesis of whether so-called “hyperlocal social media,” social media used by residents of a physical neighborhood, can be an effective community building tool. The paper used Social Network Analysis to study “who follows whom” on Twitter among local businesses and residents of a neighborhood in London. The authors found that in this particular case, Twitter was not used to support localized social connectivity among residents of the same neighborhood. The study also found local businesses used Twitter primarily as a broadcasting platform, but despite this, the platform did facilitate the formation of smaller cliques among geographically closed businesses in the neighborhood.

In the next paper by Dumas and her colleagues, we turn from scholarly and hyperlocal use of social media to social media use for social change and political engagement, and from a microblogging platform to a different participatory platform designed to support e-petitions. More specifically, the paper entitled “Examining political mobilization of online communities through e-petitioning behavior in We the People” examined the use of “We the People,” a social media platform in the United States developed to enable people to propose new social policies to the White House and at the same time to seek support of their proposals from other social media users. The authors used a number of quantitative methods including a data mining technique called Market Basket Analysis and Social Network Analysis to uncover whether and how people mobilize and create online communities around policy issues. The paper specifically examined political mobilization practices of people through e-petitions and co-signing behavior around a controversial issue in the United Stated related to gun control. The results showed the potential of a social media-based e-petition platform to support democratic processes in society, citizen involvement, and in particular the formation of online communities, either in support of or against a particular issue such as “gun control.”

The three studies above demonstrate how user-generated data can provide valuable insights about how different groups in our society connect online and offline. The fourth and last paper in this special theme issue, “Big Data and The Phantom Public: Walter Lippmann and the fallacy of data privacy self-management” by Obar, examines ethical and privacy implications of using user-generated data in research and decision making. In particular, the author provides a very timely examination and discussion regarding the role of individuals, governments and businesses in managing and safeguarding user-generated data. This thought-provoking paper re-conceptualizes Walter Lippmann’s 1925 influential work on the “fallacy of democracy” in the modern context of the Internet and social media. By conducting a policy analysis, the author argues that the current legislative efforts which are in favor of informed consumer choice models might not serve social media users well because of what Obar refers to as the “fallacy of data privacy self-management,” that is users’ inability to properly consent or manage access to their personal data due to their inability to fully comprehend the complexity of underlying and ever changing systems and their infrastructure. Obar’s paper shows how Lippmann’s work can be a useful prism for examining the thorny and complicated questions about user-generated data and their sovereignty; the paper also explores other alternative approaches and views.

In sum, as more and more people are continuing to join and engage one another through various social media websites and contribute to the rapid growth of Big Data, so will continue this special theme of BD&S. The theme will continue to feature work on the use of Big Data to study both online and offline communities as well as continue exploring questions and solutions as to how user-generated data in social media should be properly collected, stored, used and by whom.