This is a summary of the course Psychology of Social media in the master communication sciences. The summary contains all the information from the course slides, including my own notes. I also included graphs and other important images, as well as notes on the research articles from the reader.
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PSYCHOLOGY OF SOCIAL MEDIA
INTRODUCTION
Practical details are found in the course Syllabus
Exam: written exam with open questions (4 to 6 questions)
Focus on reflection, application of knowledge and insights on theories, studies and research
domains as discussed in the lectures
No focus on details like numbers but more like motivations of people to use certain media
You can answer the questions in Dutch or in English
Poll in class: what comes to mind when you think about social media
- E.g. pictures, Instagram, influencers, addictive, marketing, comedy, false, insecurities,
Twitter, chatting, quick information, inspiration, family and friends, etc.
SOCIAL MEDIA ARE…
A topic that is of public interest for governments, citizens, politicians, …
E.g. ‘Trump’s social media app follows long line of failed ventures’
E.g. Iran restricts WhatsApp, Instagram as Mahsa Amini protests grow.
And artists
E.g. “Tinderin” Belgian artist Dries Depoorter (https://driesdepoorter.be/ )
Uses open street camera’s to track where Instagram pictures were taken and then posts the camera
footage next to the Instagram pictures.
They are a topic that is intensely studied in communication science –and beyond!
More than 13.300 search results for scientific publications within the last 10 years in CMMC
database
Social media have also been studied in many other fields such as marketing, neurology and
psychology.
TOWARD A CONCEPTUAL DEFINITION
Lasswell’s (1948) communication model
Who the communicator
Say’s What the content of the Message
In Which Channel the medium that transmits the messages
To Whom the recipient
With What Effect? refers to the message’s outcome
Very basic model but it still has value
1
,Article in the reader: Social media conceptualization and taxonomy: A Lasswellian framework
- The purpose of this article is to answer the question: what are social media?
- Applying directed content analysis to a sample of 23 academic definitions retrieved from the
top 179 cited papers on social media in the Web of Knowledge database.
- Articles used are a bit dated
- They researched whether these articles proposed a unique definition of social media: only 23
did, others did not provide a definition or used definitions stated in other articles
- They systematised the definitions, and none of the covered all the elements of social media
- None of the definitions mentioned the audience or the effect of social media
o Did not incorporate the two last parts of the Lasswell communication model
Two contributions:
- Build on previous academic efforts to suggest an inclusive definition of social media based on
Lasswell’s act of communication.
- Using the suggested definition, we categorize social media channels based on three
dimensions, that is, user, content format and function. This taxonomy is illustrated by
presenting a social media cube that aims to help practitioners, managers, researchers and
developers to both classify existing social media platforms, and identify prospective ones.
What they found:
Who:
- Individual users
- Communities of people
- Organizations and industries
Textual units extracted under the code ‘who’ refer to users in general, and seem thus, to
encompass both the communication initiator and the recipient, and to blur the line between
the two. This finding explains why no definition particularly mentioned the recipients, that is,
‘to whom’ the communication act was directed on social media
Says What:
- Information
- Digital user-generated content in several formats: words, static, moving images, audio (no
information on message/content)
In Which Channel
- Some authors focus solely either on the mobile and web-based technologies underlying
social media,
- Platform: several other authors make the distinction between the technologies and the
platforms
To Whom?
2
,With What Effect?
Why?
- Create
- Cocreate
- Exchange
- Share
- Discuss
- Modify
- Consume
- Communicate and disseminate user-generated content; forming communities that engage in
social interaction
A primary finding in this analysis is that existing social media definitions blur the line between the
communication initiator, ‘who’, and the communication recipient, ‘to whom’.
Extracted definitions focus primarily on the use of social media at the micro-level (not organizations
(meso-level) and industries (macro-level))
When content was mentioned, attention was given to its format (so not the content itself)
- Format of the content can be multimedia (words, static, moving images or audio)
Definitions omitted the effect of communication acts involving social media because of its
complexity, it goes beyond the definition of social media
People communicate with the purpose of satisfying a personal or social need
None of the 23 definitions extracted from the top 179 papers cover all four retained Lasswellian
aspects (who, says what, in which channel, to whom)
Defining social media as a set of mobile and web-based platforms built on Web 2.0
technologies, and allowing users at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels to share and geo-tag
user-generated content (images, text, audio, video and games), to collaborate, and to build
networks and communities, with the possibility of reaching and involving large audiences
3
, 3 layers and it follows the Lasswell formula
Who: individual users, organisations and industries
What: images, text, video, audio, games
Why: networking, sharing, collaboration, geo-location
Critical comments: they do not give any reasoning of why they added games and geo-location to the
cube
Another definition (highly cited) is by Carr & Hayes
“Social media are Internet-based channels that allow users to opportunistically interact and
selectively self-present, either in real-time or asynchronously, with both broad and narrow
audiences who derive value from user-generated content and the perception of interaction with
others”
- Social media are internet-based: they are online tools
o Divorcing the definition of social media from current notions of Web 2.0 tools such
as Facebook and Instagram allows for the inclusion of tools that transcend current
notions of the web and online applications yet still include social tools that operate
on the multisite private intranets of organizations
- Provides asynchronous communication tools
o Disentrained, persistent channels: Channel disentrainment is communication
facilitated by a particular channel in which the user participates when he or she can
commit to participating, as opposed to face-to-face communication, when both
members of the communication dyad need to be committed at the same time
o A defining feature of social media is that the channel is persistently available
whether a user is active or not, facilitating disentrained communication
- Comments, shares, likes and interactions with the content on media
o Perceived interactivity
- User-generated value
o A service’s users decide its value
- Masspersonal communication
o Masspersonal communication refers to instances where mass communication
channels are used for interpersonal communication, interpersonal channels are used
for mass communication, and when individuals simultaneously engage in mass and
interpersonal communication
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