Social Media for Development: Outlining Debates, Theory and Praxis

A commonly used definition of social media derived from the business and management litera- ture refers to a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technologi- cal foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010 ). Today there is an extensive literature on the broad social media topic that crosses several disciplines. The literature on business and management has focused on how practitioners may embrace social media technology for knowledge management, forming close bonds with customers and for marketing purposes (e.g. Culnan, McHugh, & Zubillaga, 2010 ). Focused special issues of journals in information systems have improved our understanding of the relationship between social media networks and business transform- ation (Aral, Dellarocas, & Godes, 2013 ; Kane, Alavi, Labianca, & Borgatti, 2014 ). There are also several journals with ongoing discourses on the cultural and political dimensions of social media (see e.g. Information Society, Media Culture and Society and Information Com- munication and Society ). However, to date there has been limited attention specifically to the theoretical and empirical linkage between social media and development. We intend to contrib- ute to the emerging field of social media for development not only by identifying the knowledge gap in this area, but also by offering new avenues which may lead to new conceptual frameworks on social media for development through empirical cases. We also have practical ambitions, that is, addressing business, policy-makers and NGOs, as well as raising the interest of academic col- leagues in the field of ICT for development.