How the World Changed Social Media

Abstract

This book is one of a series of 11 titles. Nine are monographs devoted to specific field sites in Brazil, Chile, China, England, India, Italy, Trinidad and Turkey. These will be published during the course of 2016–17. The series also includes this volume, our comparative book about all of our findings, and a final book which contrasts the visuals that people poston Facebook in the English field site with those on our Trinidadian field site. When we tell people that we have written nine monographs about social media around the world, all using the same chapter headings (apart from Chapter 5), they are concerned about potential repetition. However, if you decide to read several of these books (and we very much hope you do), you will see that this device has been helpful in showing the precise opposite. Each book is as individual and distinct as if it were on an entirely different topic. This is perhaps our single most important finding. Most studies of the internet and social media are based on research methods that assume we can generalise across different groups. We look at tweets in one place and write about ‘Twitter’. We conduct tests about social media and friendship in one population, and then write on this topic as if friendship means the same thing for all populations. By presenting nine books with the same chapter headings, you can judge for yourselves what kinds of generalisations are, or are not, possible. Our intention is not to evaluate social media, either positively or negatively. Instead the purpose is educational, providing detailed evi dence of what social media has become in each place and the local con sequences, including local evaluations. Each book is based on 15 months of research during which time most of the anthropologists lived, worked and interacted with people in the local language. Yet they differ from the dominant tradition of writing social sci ence books. Firstly they do not engage with the academic literatures on social media. It would be highly repetitive to have the same discussions in v vi all nine books. Instead discussions of these literatures are to be found here in this single, overall comparative volume. Secondly the mono graphs are not comparative, which again is the primary function of this volume. Thirdly, given the immense interest in social media from the general public, we have tried to write in an accessible and open style. This means the monographs have adopted a mode more common in his torical writing of keeping all citations and the discussion of all wider academic issues to endnotes. We hope you enjoy the results and that you will also read some of the monographs–in addition to this summary and comparative volume.