"I'm an addict" and other sensemaking devices: a discourse analysis of self-reflections on lived experience of social media

TY - GEN

T1 - "I'm an addict" and other sensemaking devices

T2 - #SMSociety

AU - Tiidenberg, Katrin

AU - Markham, Annette

AU - Pereira, Gabriel

AU - Rehder, Mads Middelboe

AU - Dremljuga, Ramona-Riin

AU - Sommer, Jannek K.

AU - Dougherty, Meghan

N1 - Conference code: 17

PY - 2017/7/28

Y1 - 2017/7/28

N2 - How do young people make sense of their social media experiences, which rhetoric do they use, which grand narratives of technology and social media do they rely on? Based on discourse analysis of approximately 500 pages of written data and 390 minutes of video (generated by 50 college students aged 18-30 between 2014-2016) this article explores how young people negotiate their own experience and existing discourses about social media. Our analysis shows that young people rely heavily on canonic binaries from utopian and dystopian interpretations of networked technologies to apply labels to themselves, others, and social media in general. As they are prompted to reflect on their experience, their rhetoric about social media use and its implications becomes more nuanced yet remains inherently contradictory. This reflects a dialectical struggle to make sense of their lived experiences and feelings. Our unique methodology for generating deeply self-reflexive, auto-ethnographic narrative accounts suggests a way for scholars to be able to understand the ongoing struggles for meaning that occur within the granularity of everyday reflections about our own social media use.

AB - How do young people make sense of their social media experiences, which rhetoric do they use, which grand narratives of technology and social media do they rely on? Based on discourse analysis of approximately 500 pages of written data and 390 minutes of video (generated by 50 college students aged 18-30 between 2014-2016) this article explores how young people negotiate their own experience and existing discourses about social media. Our analysis shows that young people rely heavily on canonic binaries from utopian and dystopian interpretations of networked technologies to apply labels to themselves, others, and social media in general. As they are prompted to reflect on their experience, their rhetoric about social media use and its implications becomes more nuanced yet remains inherently contradictory. This reflects a dialectical struggle to make sense of their lived experiences and feelings. Our unique methodology for generating deeply self-reflexive, auto-ethnographic narrative accounts suggests a way for scholars to be able to understand the ongoing struggles for meaning that occur within the granularity of everyday reflections about our own social media use.

KW - Autoethnography

KW - Discourse analysis

KW - Sensemaking

KW - Social media

KW - Young people's social media use

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85028707872&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1145/3097286.3097307

DO - 10.1145/3097286.3097307

M3 - Article in proceedings

BT - 8th International Conference on Social Media and Society

PB - Association for Computing Machinery

Y2 - 28 July 2017 through 30 July 2017

ER -