Paper presented at the Internet Histories preconference at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Denver October 2013

1. A DECADE OF ‘SOCIAL MEDIA’
AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT
Methodological Challenges of
Historicising the Proprietary Web
JEAN BURGESS
QUEENSLAND UNIVERSITY OF
TECHNOLOGY
@JEANBURGESS

2. Narratives of enclosure

3. Narratives of enclosure

4. Dynamics of change
"Historical studies are often the result of
a fundamental wonderment: Why was
there something and not just nothing?
Why was there not something else? And
why did it change? In other words, a
genuine part of historical studies is
often answering the question: What
forces made things happen?" (Brügger,
31)

5. Dynamics of change
What changes, and how?

9. •materialist
•co-evolutionary
•conjunctural

10. social media: the platform paradigm
social media platforms
as new media
institutions
•coordinating function
•logics (van Dijck & Poell 2013)
•affordances, constraints

12. the stuff of platforms
•Interface design,
aesthetics, affordances
•User practices,
behaviours, norms
•Software, algorithms, APIs
•Business models,
licensing, partnerships,
revenue streams

13. methodological challenges
differences
between platforms

14. methodological challenges
change over time

15. Photo:Yahoo! News

19. Dynamics of Change
What changes, and how?

20. Dynamics of Change
And how would we know?

21. the stuff of social media histories
•Interface design,
aesthetics, affordances
•User practices,
behaviours, norms
•Software, algorithms, APIs
•Business models, licensing,
partnerships, revenue
streams

22. Beyond the archive
•oral histories (users, third party developers,
employees)
•self-memorialisations e.g. platform
birthday celebrations (cf. Hartley, Burgess &
Green, 2007)
•media coverage of controversies and other
events as moments of acute change
•biographies of material elements - e.g. the
hashtag, the like button

23. Twitter Over Time project (with Nancy Baym)

24. Twitter Over Time project (with Nancy Baym)
•interviews
•wayback machine
•wikipedia (+ talk pages +
edit history)
•early tweets archive
•tech blogs, news media
•personal blogs, youtube

25. Challenges
• ‘Web history’ in general: very recent/micro changes and
long-range macro changes easier to track than mediumterm ‘meso’ changes
• Proprietary social media platforms present challenges in
addition to all the problems noted by Brügger (2012)
• ephemerality & erasure
• data access
• ethics
• But this commercial ephemerality is nothing new (Hartley,
Burgess & Green 2008; Ankerson, 2012)

26. References
Ankerson, Megan Sapnar (2012). Writing web histories
with an eye on the analog past. New Media & Society
14(3), 384-400.
Brügger, Niels (2012) "Web historiography and Internet
Studies: Challenges and perspectives." New Media &
Society 15(5): 752-764.
Hartley, John, Burgess, Jean, & Green, Joshua (2007)
'Laughs and Legends,' or the Furniture That Glows?
Television as History? Australian Cultural History 26:
15-36.
van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2013). Understanding Social
Media Logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2-14.