Money is an important means for distributing power, positions, reputation, and influence in academia. Research funding is the academic system’s key monetary resource. In social media research, we can find a distributional inequality of funding: There tend to be special programmes focused on funding big data analytics. This approach is a form of digital positivism and administrative research.
I have, in this chapter, argued for a paradigm shift from administrative, positivist big data analytics towards critical digital/social media research that combines critical social media theory, critical digital methods, and critical-realist social media research ethics. Advancing such a paradigm is a material question whose solution requires not just changes of attitudes but also institutional transformations and a change of funding practices.
Acknowledgement
This chapter has benefited from the discussion at the European Journal of Communication (EJC) symposium on social media (University of Minho, Braga, Portugal, 26–27 May 2016). I thank the editors for the invitation and organisation and all participants for interesting discussions.
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Themes