Social media – New challenges and approaches for communications research

This issue of the European Journal of Communication comprises revised versions of papers first given at a symposium convened and hosted by the journal, and held at the University of Minho, Braga, Portugal, in May 2016. We are extremely grateful to the University, and especially to the Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade (Communication and Society Research Centre). The discussion prompted by the presentation of papers at the symposium allowed for the revision of the papers into their present form. The topic of social media has been a recurrent one in papers published or received by the Journal in recent years. Many such papers have derived from relatively small-scale research on the use of social media by homogeneous groups, or have taken a particular interest in the presumed ways in which such media have affected, even transformed, the nature of political communication, whether this means the methods by which politicians communicate with the electorate or by which political mobilisation among embryonic social movements is developed. It seemed to us essential to take stock of where much of this work is going, and of the assumptions that were often left unstated within it. In particular, we were struck by four aspects of research on social media. The first was the uncertainty of the term itself. Like many, we were unclear what its opposite – unsocial media – could possibly mean. Are all media not social in their very nature? Sometimes, perhaps quite commonly, the term was used as a loose shorthand for one or two notable platforms that had come to engage so much of people’s lives (especially better off and younger users), to such an extent that replacing the term social media with ‘Facebook or Twitter’ would serve perfectly well in many reports. Second, we were struck by the sheer scale and speed of the development of these forms of communication, however defined. The statistics are often jaw-droppingly large. By September 2016, Facebook, by some distance the largest of the social media, could claim 1.7 billion regular users (meaning at least once a month), while WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, QQ, WeChat, QZone, Tumblr and Instagram each had 500 million or more such regular users.1 The most popular ‘social networking sites’ in another list also included YouTube (1 billion users), LinkedIn (255 million) and Pinterest (250 million).2 Definitions change and, as these examples show, vary from analyst to analyst, and data raise as many questions as answers, but these figures are startling and appear in sentences that would have been incomprehensible to a reader a decade or two ago. Facebook, after all, began as an attempt by an ambitious 19-year-old student at Harvard to replace the university 682801 EJC0010.1177/0267323116682801European Journal of CommunicationEditorial research-article2017