Disputation med Beata Jungselius; Using social media

Social media has changed how people interact and its use has exploded in the last decade. Key among the shifts in this period is the mass adoption of smartphones with built-in, high-quality cameras that have offered new possibilities for people to document and share their everyday lives, helping to blur the line between online and offline. 

This thesis explores social photography, a specific and central part of social media interaction that refers to how people plan, produce, share, and interact around pictures in social media. Drawing upon data collected in 2012 and 2017, this thesis provides empirical findings from four papers. By returning to the same informants and conducting stimulated recall interviews five years apart, it provides insights into ways that social media use changed over time during the period that social photography was popularized. 

The results show how using social media, users rely upon modal, technical and social affordances and develop idioms of practices on platforms, each of which has its own platform vernacular. It highlights how through social participation within their community of practice, users learn the vernacular of a platform and how to interact with it and each other. In particular, this thesis shows that a lot of work goes into constructing what others see in social media. As levels of engagement in social media vary from active involvement to more passive ways of planning and monitoring social media, a revised conceptualization of social media use is proposed.

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