The myth of novelty has been accompanied by the myth that social media has radically transformed media use from passive reception to active participation and constant creativity. The Occupy Media! Survey showed that 81.9% of the participating activists watched YouTube videos at least four times per month as the source of political information, but only 28.5% created at least one political YouTube video per month themselves (Fuchs 2014b, 73 and 79). Although social media has bottom-up production potentials that make their affordances somewhat different from those of broadcasting, the reality is that the vast majority tends to use such media more like a television than an user-generated content platform. Only a minority of users is highly active and creative. Social media is both a tool of consumption and “prosumption”. The most followed and active social media creators are not everyday users but the public relations teams of celebrities (Fuchs 2014c). Social media’s potentials differ from their actuality, which is an expression of the power asymmetries of time, skills, motivation, money, influence, attention, reputation, and visibility in contemporary class societies.
Analysing the Internet and social media has become an important dimension of media and communication research. In this contribution, I provide some critical reflections on the status of social media research and argue for a critical turn and paradigm shift. This chapter proceeds by first presenting the dominant paradigm and then looking at theoretical-ontological, epistemological/methodological, and ethical dimensions of a possible alternative paradigm.
178
Themes
1 Data source: alexa.com, accessed on 29 May 2016.
2 Data source for both Alphabet and Facebook: Forbes 2000, 2016 list, www.forbes.com/global2000/list, accessed on 29 May 2016.