Qualitative Datacollection on Social Media and

Selfpresentation

∞  Martine Gjede @mgjede

∞  Digital Design and Communication ∞  Main interests while studying: ∞  Social media .. that is... ∞  communication and online selfpresentation on social media ∞  digital identity and privacy on social media ∞  online marketing on social media

Hello there!

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Where I work

www.atcore.dk

∞  Social Marketing Manager ∞  Tweeting: @atcore ∞  Facebooking..pinning..instagramming.. linkedining.. and you get the

point ∞  I market Atcore ∞  I blog... a lot about online marketing and social media:

www.atcore.dk/blog ∞  pressreleases, writing guides etc.

What I do

I am also an author ... to be published this month...

I’m looking for interns...

Spring 2013 You must be fluent in Danish... (sorry) www.atcore.dk/praktikant

∞  A little about what my thesis was about ∞  What is context collapse? ∞  Selfpresentation ∞  Research dilemmas ∞  Creating a new method ∞  Things to consider ∞  Formulating questions ∞  Ethnographic things to consider when you are a researcher on Facebook

Agenda

∞  Significance and consequence of context collapse on Facebook

∞  Problem formulation: How does the private human being experiences context collapse on Facebook and what are the following consequences for the behavior on the medium?

Thesis introduction

∞  In my OFFLINE life people know me from different situations:

∞  Colleagues ∞  School ∞  Family ∞  My mother in law ∞  My drinking buddies ∞  My pole dancing class ∞  My church friends

∞  All different sides of me.. and that’s great because I am used to adjusting my behavior and selfpresentation accordingly

What is context collapse?

That is context collapse!!

How do we deal? Do we deal?

Do we choose a certain selfpresentation?

But on Facebook all my friends, my past and present come together....

∞  1. Network – how do we behave when we are a part of a network?

(synergies, hierachies, roles, messages we send out)

∞  2. Privacy – we apply certain behaviors to feel in control and private

(technological, thing we say/ don’t say, social guidelines and rules)

∞  3. Digital selfpresentation (Goffman( new theory) Facebook is a theatre and everybody is meddling in our performance and also we invent an audience. (Selfpresentation, definition of who is performing and who the audience is)

I define context collapse through three theoretical angles

∞  Selfpresentation through choice: action, interaction and control: ∞  Agency: How well we do it and getting reactions from others ∞  Rhetorical talent and intellect. ∞  Irony, exaggerating ∞  Performing through technological affordances: Tagging, timeline ∞  Technological affordances enhances the selfpresentation ∞  We are not the only ones performing in our own self presentation....

More digital selfpresentation: Performance

∞  Audience is very important in our selfpresentation ∞  The audience confirm and justify our selfpresentation

∞  1. The invisible audience ∞  2. The immediate audience: Announcing themselves ∞  3. The invented audience: ∞  Changes according to who we deal with offline, geographical location, and

the invented audience is also merged with the immediate audience

More digital selfpresentation: Audience

∞  How do I collect qualitative data quantitavely? :-/

∞  quantitative vs. qualitative

∞  what is the state of things vs why is the state of things

∞  macro level (objective) vs. micro level (subjective)

Research dilemmas

∞  I wanted opinions, motivation and insights into the navigation and actions

on Facebook from many

∞  I wanted answers on Facebook

∞  I wanted juicy answers and not pleasing answers from tech savy ITU students (my own network)

More research challenges

∞  Using Facebook as a method-case ∞  Getting in contact with users through private statusupdates ∞  Asking the users questions and getting them engaged ∞  Supplemented with 7 semistructured interviews for more in depth answers

from the results I gained

Presenting ”Qualitative Datacollection on Facebook”

Example

∞  An observation I had made or a presumption I had (theory or an answer to a question)

∞  Purpose: To get as many users to talk to me as possible about networking, privacy and selfpresentation through rhetoric and technological behavior

∞  Open and simple questions (not too academic) ∞  Talking about: How do they perform, who their audience is, gaining a

feeling of control (privacy), synergies in networks and technological affordances

Asking questions

∞  To get into contact with as many users as possible ∞  To weigh in answers: are they thematical, cultural, social? – to use in an

analysis ∞  To keep or discard hypothesis’ I have had through reading the theoretical

material

Purpose of asking questions

∞  I asked a question ∞  I needed to conquer the Edge Rank by attaching a photo

How I did it

∞  I lured them in.. with chance of winning a very nice (and slightly used) book

∞  They could comment (or write to me privately)

How I did it

I collected all answers on a blog collapsedcontexts.blogspot.dk/ structure, accessibility everybody could look at them

How I did it

∞  reaching out to networks that I cant reach ∞  preventing the tech savy ITU students

∞  Choosing them: ∞  Tempted to ask social influences but recruited through asking in a status

update and people volunteered

Targeting other networks: Ambassadors

Example

∞  open questions: such as:

∞  ”Do you share videos on your Facebook wall? Why”

∞  narrow questions: such as:

∞  ”Sometimes you write a status update and sometimes you don’t. And sometimes you want to share, but change your mind. Why do you share and what makes you change your mind?”

Questions

∞  what time should I post a status update?

∞  Users use Facebook at different times. (Smartphones, work, students). ∞  Targeting different networks ∞  Some ambassadors posted statusupdates at 11:30 resulting in ∞  1. Very few answers or ∞  2. Drunk answers

Working with a medium in real time

∞  It is an advantage not a disadvantage to have a pre-knowledge of Facebook:

∞  Understanding the medium, the constant changes in technology, how people navigate

∞  The method supports the ethnographic tradition and embraces the subjectivity: That the ethnographer is also an avid user on Facebook

∞  Although the ethnographer will have established strong ties with some of the users which will include not serious answers, not in depth answers

Ethographic considerations

∞  Advantages: ∞  crossing networks ∞  talking to the users about the medium on the medium ∞  comments generate more comments

∞  Disadvantage: ∞  The spontanousness in answers will be killed by the written format ∞  Users are effected by eachother’s answers ∞  The medium is fleeting and no one is obligated to anything: ”I agree” ∞  Context collapse hinders answers

Some advantages and disadvantages

∞  Thank you for your attention.

connect with me: @mgjede

write to me: mg@atcore.dk

Any q’s for me?