Putting Social Media in Its Place: A Curatorial Theory for Media’s Noisy Social Worlds

Abstract

The quest to make sense of media’s impact—what it does to us—dominates communication theories and popular discourse about media. But the impulse to collar, cultivate, domesticate, or measure the impact of media on individuals and society can have pernicious effects, too. This essay calls for a set of new analytical models to account for media as messy instantiations of social interaction transforming before our very eyes. We need to shift from a media effects paradigm that narrowly focuses on the brightest signals of social media use and turn to what I will call here a curatorial theory of social media. This approach, inspired by research from several founding editors of Social Media + Society, focuses on media’s cultural work and myriad manifestations—from its technologies to the discourses that flow through and from them. Let us attend to the more elusive, noisy cultural and social forces that bring some aspects of media sharply into focus while obscuring others. And, above all, let us pay attention to the curatorial reworking of media that happens in particular places—nations, towns, bodies.