Duration: 56:51

1,532 views

26

Social media platforms have become influential in every sphere of communication, from the intimate and mundane to the public, professional, and political. It’s tempting to view a platform as a single “technology”—a static object that can be cast as a causal agent of societal change. But a closer look reveals that platform companies, their technologies, and the cultures that form through and around them constantly push against and reshape one another. If platforms are always changing, then how do we theorize, study, and compare them?

In this webinar, based on the book Twitter: A Biography, Microsoft Senior Principal Researcher Nancy Baym and Queensland University of Technology Professor Jean Burgess introduce an original approach to this problem: the Platform Biography, a systematic framework for analyzing social media platforms. The framework provides a toolbox of concepts and empirical methods to diagnose patterns of past and emerging change in the cultures, politics, and governance of platforms. The Platform Biography approach can be used and understood by researchers, students, and everyday users without privileged insider access to social media companies. Through its application to Twitter, Burgess and Baym will model how the approach can be used to study other platforms and apps.

In this webinar, you’ll learn how to:

■ Develop strategies for observing and understanding how user practices shape a platform’s technologies and business model, even as those forces shape user practices
■ Identify the elements continuously influencing one another to make a platform
■ Collect appropriate materials to conduct a Platform Biography
■ Narrow analytic focus to a platform’s most distinctive features

𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝘀𝘁:

■ Social Media Studies (group page): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/theme/social-media-studies
■ Twitter: A Biography (book): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/twitter-a-biography
■ Twitter and Society (publication): https://nancybaym.com/TwitterandSociety.pdf
■ Connect with Your Audience! The Relational Labor of Connection (publication): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/connect-with-your-audience-the-relational-labor-of-connection/
■ Playing to the crowd and other social media mandates with Dr. Nancy Baym (Podcast): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/theme/social-media-studies/
■ Nancy Baym (profile page): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/baym/
■ Jean Burgess (profile page): https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/people/jean-burgess/

*This on-demand webinar features a previously recorded Q&A session and open captioning.

This webinar originally aired on November 12, 2020

Explore more Microsoft Research webinars: https://aka.ms/msrwebinars