SM+S Excerpts Pt. 4 : Changing the Social and the Media

Sam Srauy- The Limits of Social Media: What Social Media Can Be, and What We Should Hope They Never Become: If we are generous and optimistic, we can imagine social media as a liberating forum for self-expression or a medium that might, in its own way, usher in a more democratic form of content distribution or civic participation…or all our hopes and fears about what social media are or could be, they are first and foremost a product or website designed to monetize us in some form or another…”  Read the rest here

Josh Braun-Social Media and Distribution Studies: “Social media increasingly trouble our traditional distinctions between distribution concerns on the one hand and editorial concerns on the other…but as a number of critical scholars…have illustrated, the boundary between editorial and distribution concerns has always been highly porous. Framing social media as centers of reflexive distribution not only opens up sociologically interesting questions …”  Read the rest here

Seth C. Lewis-Reciprocity as a Key Concept for Social Media and Society: “…What might reciprocity…reveal about social media and society? Consider…the case of journalism. Digital media technologies and the generative possibilities they afford for audience participation have created new contexts for journalists to rethink their relationship with audiences.. Users…expected reciprocity from journalists—something in return for their contributions—and the success or failure of such projects often hinged on reciprocal relationship-building…”  Read the whole article here

C.W. Anderson-Up and Out: Journalism, Social Media, and Historical Sensibility: “Does the emergence of social media force us to radically rethink the theoretical and empirical assumptions…much of the modern theorizing about journalism and communication attained its robustness due to a powerful convergence of distinct middle-range scholarly findings…in the 1970s and 1980s. In the present day… we thus need to strike a delicate balance between conducting new qualitative research, re-conceptualizing and re-interrogating the classic conclusions of political communication scholarship…” The the whole article here