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Summary of all lectures needed for open book exam for Social Media at Work
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Summary of all lectures of the course Social Media at Work, which has an open book exam at Tilburg University.
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LECTURE 1What is social media?
Note teacher: So what are the challenges that today’s Networked professionals face? According to
Bijlsma, the challenges for today’s Networked Professionals can be best understood by looking at
some of the main principles of ‘new ways of working’.
- Broad definition:
- All mediated interaction
- Narrow definition:
- Many-to-many:
- (to a certain extent) public and visible
- Associations
- User-generated content
- (to a certain extent) editable or commentable
- Persistent
Sociomateriality
Internet: Sociomateriality is a theory built upon the intersection of technology, work and organization,
that attempts to understand "the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material in everyday
organizational life." - de constitutieve verstrengeling van het sociale en het materiële in het dagelijkse
organisatieleven
- Issue with popular thought about social media:
- Focus on technological innovation
- Focus on specific social media applications
- Leads to…
- Little attention to underlying characteristics of technology / application involved
- Little attention to interplay between organization/people perspective & technology
perspective
- Leads to…
- Inability to explain or predict the success of technological innovation (including social
media applications)
- An overly deterministic (often dystopian or utopian view) on the outcomes of
technology use
A sociomaterial view on social media
- Sociomateriality:
- “The entanglement of the social and the material in everyday organizational life”
- Interplay between technology, organization/work, and social
- In organizations, technology/the material is either not observed:
- E.g., effects of seating arrangements, generic IT systems
- Or seen as miracle / key enablers of change
- E.g., social media will change everything
Duality of technology
- Duality of Technology (Orlikowki, 1992)
- Technology structures (i.e., recognizes that technological features affect humans)...
, - … and is structured (i.e., recognizes human agency)
Technological determinism
- Technological Determinism
- Technology gives structure to human thought and behavior
- Technology determines (bepaalt) social change
- Technology = autonomous force
- Technology ≠ neutral
Afbeelding: technology → use
Note teacher: Examples
-> when old technologies were new
Often tied to thinking about technologies in a simplistic way, mostly when technologies are new and
there is a lack of understanding about the diversity in use. e.g., Internet –> affects loneliness without
paying attention to the importance of what people do online (watching porn or talking to their
mother?) e.g., Facebook & depression. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn8fewQlnTU
Central is the idea of a PASSIVE USER who is subjected to the technology.
‘Hard’ Social Constructivism
- Social Construction of Technology
- Technology ≠ autonomous force (autonome kracht)
- Technology = neutral
- Technologies as ‘texts’ …
- ‘Written’ by inventors, investors, competitors, designers, …
- ‘Interpreted’ by users (who live in particular social, governmental, economic, cultural
contexts)
- Technology is structured by human thought and behavior
Afbeelding: people → technology
Sociomateriality in practice: Extremist Chatbot or Racist AI
Note teacher: Human agency becomes most visible when technologies have unintended
consequences, e.g., Germanwings or Microsoft’s AI tweet bot. The company made the Twitter
account as a way of demonstrating its artificial intelligence process. But it quickly started sending out
offensive tweets. “bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have
now,” it wrote in one tweet. “Donald trump is the only hope we've got.” Another tweet praised Hitler
and claimed that the account hated the Jews.
,Affordances of social media
Technological affordances
- In-between determinism & constructivism
- Is the use of an object determined by its properties? → materiality
- Or is its use only determined in use?
- Affordances are perceptions of an object’s materiality
- “Perceptions of an object’s utility, its possibilities for enabling (& constraining)
human action” (Gibson, 1986)
Characteristics of Technological Affordances
- Affordances are functional:
- They enable and constrain action
- Affordances are also relational:
- Need to be ‘perceived’ to become active
- The perception (waarneming) depends on the actor who perceives and uses the
technology
- Not always immediately and completely visible to the user → oftentimes technological
affordances only become visible after ‘being in use’
- Affordances are contextual:
- Which affordances are perceived, depends on social, cultural and economic context
- The context provides concepts and rules that affect how affordances are perceived and
used - De context biedt concepten en regels die de perceptie en het gebruik van affordances
beïnvloeden.
- Technological affordances are learnt by socialization
- A technology is designed well when its affordances are readily perceivable - gemakkelijk
waarneembaar
Affordances concept
- Benefits of the affordances concept:
- Avoids determinism – constructivism debate as it acknowledges both perspectives
(staat er tussen in)
- describes interaction – not an organizational theory, nor a technological theory
- Focuses on functionality rather than on features
- Affordances and networked work
- Organizational change (or changes in the way we work) cannot be attributed solely
to social media
- In order to understand the role of social media in new ways of working, we need to
look at their affordances, and the context in which they are appropriated
Organizational affordances of social media
Enterprise social media:
, - Web-based platforms that allow workers to (1) communicate messages with specific
coworkers or broadcast messages to everyone in the organization; (2) explicitly indicate or
implicitly reveal particular coworkers as communication partners [interaction partner or
audience]; (3) post, edit, and sort text and files linked to themselves or others; and (4) view
the messages, connections, text, and files communicated, posted, edited and sorted by
anyone else in the organization at any time of their choosing
1. Visibility of knowledge, behavior, relations, …
2. Associations (between content, persons, content-person)
3. Editability (a-synchronicity allows editing and revising of content)
4. Persistence (reviewability, permanence of content & communication)
Note teacher: Visibility of
- work behavior (what content is being produced by whom). E.g., wiki: contributions. You make your
work visible to others
- metaknowledge (who has what kind of expertise in the company?). E.g., social tagging/bookmarks
→ what people tag and how they do it, reveals something about their backgrounds, interests, and
activities, …
- activity streams (in what part of the process are we?) E.g., for distant workers – can keep in touch
with what is happening via the Wiki
1. Visibility of knowledge, behavior, relations, …
- Selection methods/opinion expression: tagging, likes, review scores, etc.
- Reputation & reputation management
- Notifications
2. Associations (between content, persons, content-person) - Note teacher: Other CMC also
afford associations’, however; Social media differ from other forms of CMC in that these
technologies oftentimes have algorithms that present or make associations without the
actor’s intervention (e.g., recommendations, prompting related tags/bookmarks, …)
3. Editability (a-synchronicity allows editing and revising of content)
4. Persistence (reviewability, permanence of content & communication, selectivity)
Visibility and other affordances
- Visibility is now seen as the root affordance of social media
- Most important affordance of social media
- Other affordances derive from visibility
- Affordances are not fixed
- For a general perspective on social media, visibility may be enough
- Sometimes a more fine-grained subdivision is necessary when investigating specific
uses of social media (e.g. distinguishing between different types of visibility.
Communication technology affordances
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