695745 research-article2017
NMS0010.1177/1461444817695745new media & societyStoycheff et al.
Article
What have we learned about social media by studying Facebook? A decade in review
new media & society 1–13 © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817695745 DOI: 10.1177/1461444817695745 journals.sagepub.com/home/nms
Elizabeth Stoycheff, Juan Liu, Kunto A. Wibowo and Dominic P. Nanni Wayne State University, USA
Abstract A recent review published by Rains and Brunner documented an overwhelming preponderance of the Facebook brand in scholarship about social networking sites (SNS). This follow-up analysis shows that Facebook is still over-privileged when examining the broader umbrella of social media brands; the social networking hegemon constitutes over half of all scholarship across an array of social media, including SNS, media sharing sites, (micro)blogging platforms, virtual communities, and others. This study builds upon Rains and Brunner’s critiques about the over-reliance on the Facebook brand and calls for more scholarship that examines social media as part of larger media repertoires, is more inclusive of indigenous social media brands and their users, and provides greater diversity in terms of academic context. In doing, it serves as the most comprehensive review of social media scholarship to date. Implications for future research are discussed. Keywords Social media, social networking sites, Facebook, brands, content analysis
In a recent review published in New Media & Society, Rains and Brunner (2015) conducted a comprehensive content analysis to examine the state of scholarship on social networking sites (SNS) to date and concluded that Facebook is overwhelmingly employed as researchers’ brand of choice. They rightfully identify the many downfalls of Corresponding author: Elizabeth Stoycheff, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202, USA. Email:
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relying so heavily on a single brand, including limited generalizability, privileging particular user groups, undue influence of corporate policies, feature-focus orientation, and the threat of brand extinction. While the Facebook brand has become nearly synonymous with SNS, it also appears to be increasingly endemic of all social media—which encompasses a vast umbrella of interactive platforms that includes everything from SNS to video and photo sharing to virtual worlds (Bechmann and Lomborg, 2013). This review undertook a replication of Rains and Brunner’s analysis by employing a broader lens, that of social media scholarship in general, to investigate just how deep academic reliance on Facebook runs. Even with this extended scope, over half of all social media studies conducted in the past decade relied on Facebook (52%). We extend these authors’ critiques of privileging the Facebook brand and further discuss how it has shaped the academic contexts, geographic diversity, and social science’s collective understanding of social media uses and effects over the past 10 years. In doing, we uniquely identify academic subfields, geographic regions, and media repertoires that are worthy of increased scholarly attention through the most comprehensive review of social media scholarship to date.
Social media defined The past decade has witnessed widespread diffusion of online tools that facilitate greater social presence and a richer mediated experience. These new media platforms have helped bridge the interpersonal-mass media divide, attracting scholars who examine uses and effects across varying levels of analysis. To date, there have been two comprehensive reviews of social science scholarship on Facebook and SNS more generally (Rains and Brunner, 2015; Wilson et al., 2012), in which SNS are best understood as online tools that enable users to create a profile, make one’s connections’ known, interact with streams of content, and emphasize interpersonal communication as the primary activity (Ellison and boyd, 2013; Rains and Brunner, 2015). But SNS are only one sub-genre of a larger umbrella of social media platforms worthy of examination (Beer, 2008). Many other classifications, or sub-genres, of social media have been identified, including, but not limited to blogs (e.g., LiveJournal), microblogs (e.g., Twitter, Weibo), discussion forums (e.g., Yahoo message boards, CafeMom), content-sharing sites (e.g., YouTube, Instagram), bookmarking sites (e.g., Pinterest, Delicious), virtual communities (e.g., Second Life), and online review sites (e.g., Yelp) (Hogan and Quan-Haase, 2010; Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). Collectively, these sub-genres are known as social media (for a review of social media typologies, see Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010; Osatuyi, 2013; Treem and Leonardi, 2012; Wilson et al., 2011). For the purposes of this review, we adapted Bechmann and Lomborg’s (2013) threefold definition of social media. First, social media are deinstitutionalized online platforms, meaning their content is not created and disseminated by media companies and organizations, but instead rely on the internet’s decentralized sharing structures. Second, social media depend primarily on user-generated content, such that ordinary individuals (i.e., not media professionals) are responsible for media creation and dissemination, and third, social media are dynamic, facilitating a two-way interaction with an audience, beyond any specified recipient. This definition is intentionally broad to provide a comprehensive
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examination of various social media sub-genres (e.g., SNS, content-sharing, (micro) blogs, wikis, virtual communities, discussion forums), and closely reflects others’ recent conceptualizations (Carr and Hayes, 2015; Fang et al., 2014; Howard and Parks, 2012; Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010; Marwick and Ellison, 2012; Treem and Leonardi, 2012). It excludes one-to-one computer-mediated communication (e.g., email, instant messaging), content produced by media institutions (e.g., online news sites), simulated or fictional social media sites established only for research purposes, and offline social interactions. Like SNS, social media are—in large part—commercial enterprises that use brands— or unique characteristic names (like Facebook, YouTube, and Google+) to differentiate themselves from competitors in the marketplace (Laroche et al., 2012; McDowell, 2004; also see Rains and Brunner, 2015 for an explication of social network brands). Branding is increasingly important to social media as platforms continue to diversify to attract different user groups and advertisers. Recent research has indicated that the trust individuals bestow to specific social media over time can be transferred to content presented on the site (Pentina et al., 2013), and the use of social media brands in empirical scholarship increases external validity and provides both study participants and study readers with a clear understanding of which social media are included in the investigation.
Methodology To systematically assess scholarship about social media brands, we closely replicated Rains and Brunner’s sampling procedure, but included own our unique set of variables (e.g. academic context, geographic focus, media repertoires) and extended the time frame to include a full decade of scholarship. We content analyzed every article published between 2005 and 2014 in six interdisciplinary journals: Computers in Human Behavior; Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking; Information Communication & Society; Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media; Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication; and New Media & Society. As Rains and Brunner (2015) explained, while other journals have the potential to be included in such an analysis, the main dynamics that drove publication selection were (1) their focus on the social influences of information and communication technologies and (2) scholars who published in these journals have been trained in a myriad of social science fields—most notably communication, psychology, and computer science, providing an array of interdisciplinary perspectives on social media. Viewed in this manner, these six journals contained a considerable number of studies about social media that could provide insights on how patterns of scholarship are upheld across the social sciences more generally. Using these same six journals, Rains and Brunner (2015) found no evidence of social networking studies published from 1997 to 2005, thus our data collection began with studies published in 2005 to provide a longitudinal examination of social media scholarship over the course of the past decade.
Sample Each issue from the aforementioned six journals was reviewed to identify articles that analyzed (broadly defined) one or more social media brands. Employing the social media
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definition presented above, we included studies that examined at least one specific brand of online platforms that relied on user-generated content and facilitated a two-way audience interaction, beyond any specified recipient. This broad definition encompassed a wide range of brands and sub-genres, including SNS (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn), blogs and microblogs (e.g., LiveJournal, Twitter, Weibo), content-sharing websites (e.g., YouTube, Flickr), bookmarking sites (e.g., Pinterest, Delicious), wikis (e.g., Wikipedia), and virtual communities (e.g., SecondLife). Studies that examined general social media sites without specifying a brand name were excluded, as were fictional sites designed for the purposes of academic investigation, and articles that offered no empirical results. A total of 663 articles were identified as using specific social media brands across the six journals, and 344 of them examined Facebook (52%). Building upon Rains and Brunner’s (2015) coding scheme that captured only the brand of SNS and each study’s methodological approach (see also Snelson, 2016), this analysis coded three additional variables: academic context, geographic region, and the presence of media repertoires. The coders inductively generated 11 thematic content areas in which the social media studies were situated, including personality traits and/or memory, interpersonal relationships and/or social capital, political and/or government communication, journalism and/or mass media, health, education, fundraising and/or crowdsourcing, privacy, science and/or environment, organizational and/or corporate uses, and disaster and/or crisis contexts. Categories were not mutually exclusive. The authors also coded this selection of articles to determine whether the social media brand(s) examined were headquartered in the United States or indigenous to another country, and whether the context studied US or non-US participants and social media content. Non-US contexts were additionally classified as either democratic (free) or nondemocratic (partly free, not free) using Freedom House’s 2016 Freedom of the World scoring metric. Finally, coders noted whether each article investigated a brand in isolation or compared two or more social media brands. Ten percent of the total sample was selected to test intercoder reliability using Krippendorf’s α, which met or exceeded .80 for all variables, and after discussion, complete agreement was reached on low-incidence categories.
Results As observed in Table 1, Facebook continues to eclipse all other brands, even after incorporating a vast array of social media sub-genres, including but not limited to, SNS, (micro) blogs, wikis, content-sharing sites, virtual worlds, and review sites. And its dominance grows over time, representing 60% of the social media scholarship in 2014. The microblogging platform, Twitter, and video-sharing site, YouTube, accounted for a respective 16.7% and 7.8% of the total literature, and other brands, including Second Life, Wikipedia, Cyworld, and China’s microblogging platform, Sina-Weibo, were represented in multiple academic investigations. Accounting for
