Social Media & Citizen Science
Situated Social Media Use:
A Methodological Approach to
Locating Social Media Practices and Trajectories
Thomas Hillman
Department of Education,
Communication and Learning
University of Gothenburg
thomas.hillman@gu.se
ABSTRACT
In this paper we draw upon a number of explorations of
social media activities, trying to capture and understand
them as located, situated practices. This methodological
endeavor spans over analyzing patterns in big data feeds
(here Instagram) as well as small-scale video-based
ethnographic studies of user activities. A situated social
media perspective involves examining how social media
production and consumption are intertwined. Drawing upon
our studies of social media use in cultural institutions we
show how visitors orient to their social media presence
while attending to physical space during a visit, and how
editing and sharing processes are formed by the trajectory
through a space. We discuss the application and relevance
of this approach for understanding social media and social
photography in situ.
Author Keywords
Social media, social photography, Instagram, ethnography,
methodology, trajectories, museum studies.
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI):
Miscellaneous.
INTRODUCTION
Social media use has emerged as a central topic in HCI.
There has been a range of studies of different aspects of
social media use. To a large extent these studies focus on
the online environment, and draw heavily upon interview
data and analyses of usage patterns. This approach has been
facilitated by the relatively easy access to data of online
social media interactions. Researchers can now create large
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CHI 2015, April 1823, 2015, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
Copyright 2015 ACM 978-1-4503-3145-6/15/04...$15.00.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702531
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CHI 2015, Crossings, Seoul, Korea
Alexandra Weilenmann
Department of Applied IT
University of Gothenburg
alexandra.weilenmann@gu.se
databases that can be processed and analyzed, creating new
opportunities for seeing patterns and trends in user behavior
[13]. Big data approaches to social media uses hold great
promise, although they have been criticized for resting on a
mythology that more data is always better and leads to
new knowledge and higher accuracy [2]. This has provoked
some researchers to define their work as small data
studies [14], where the focus is on smaller sets of data from
social media, often in conjunction with interviews or some
form of qualitative content or linguistic analysis.
While a small data approach gives us more qualitative
insight into social media practices, these studies usually
tend to focus on post-production. That is, social media
content (tweets, status updates, etc.) are analyzed and focus
lies on online activities. Because of this, we have very little
knowledge about the implications of social media use on
the local context, and vice versa how local surroundings
shape social media productions. This is where social media
is used, where tweets are produced and shared, where
photos are taken and edited as well as liked and
commented. Recent advancements in mobile technologies
have provided us with new possibilities to study social
media practices in a more detailed fashion [3,11].
In this paper, we argue for a perspective on situated social
media practices, that adds the local context to online social
media use. We present results from a study, where we
continue to explore located social media practices. This
involves a set of methodological challenges. Seeing mobile
social media use as a connective practice [7] we have
developed our methods to incorporate both online social
media activities and situated practices. This approach lets
us answer a range of questions that have emerged from our
empirical studies including: To what extent is there a
connection between the online narrative and the physical
trajectory of a visit to a cultural institution? How is the
orientation towards an online audience affecting the
trajectories the visitors take in a designed exhibition space?
How do visitors choose to structure their visit, compared to
how they present it online? In this note we provide some
answers to these questions, but we put emphasis on
Social Media & Citizen Science
methodology, exemplifying a range of topics that can be
investigated with a situated social media approach.
STUDYING SITUATED SOCIAL MEDIA USE
During the past few years we have been involved in a
number of projects looking at how visitors use their own
mobile technologies and social media in science centers,
museums and zoos. In these studies we have continually
tried to get closer to the phenomenon by experimenting
with different data collection techniques. This
methodological endeavor spans across the analysis of
patterns in big data e.g. Twitter and Instagram feeds,
ethnographic examination of online interactions through
social media, as well as small-scale video-recorded field
ethnographic studies of user activities. We take our starting
point in the field, where we explore how visitors orient to
their social media presence while attending to physical
space and the temporality of a visit.
Our approach is informed by methodological bodies of
work with origins in other disciplines that are now well
established within the CHI tradition, i.e. ethnographic
fieldwork, online ethnography and social network analysis.
In addition to these more established data collection
methods we are also inspired by recent developments in the
study of mobile device use. Researchers with an interest in
understanding the organization of social interaction on the
go are currently exploring new ways of collecting naturally
occurring data of such interaction. For example, the iPhone
in vivo study [3] records users phone screen, and combines
those screen capture videos with video analysis of users
activities and interactions. Using similar data collection
techniques, Licoppe and Figeac [11] have examined gaze
switches between the device and the online environment, in
order to learn more about the temporal organization of
multiple involvements. This data collection approach holds
much promise when it comes to understanding mobile
device use, including the use of social media on the go.
In the next section, we show a few examples of the different
types of data that we have collected as a part of our
methodological experiments getting closer to the
phenomenon of social media practices in situ. We draw
upon material from two different cases. The first example is
a study of the use of Instagram at a natural history museum
[15]. The material collected for that study consists of
instagrams from a group of invited Instagram users, who
visited the museum and posted images on Instagram. These
visitors were then interviewed, but we did not follow them
walking through the museum. In the second example we
provide data from a study of a group of three children who
took photos and posted on Instagram as they visited a
zoological garden. These three study participants were
followed around the zoo, tracked by a GPS, and their phone
screens and interactions were video recorded. In the
following we discuss what we have learned from these
different data collection approaches and how they can be
combined to understand situated social media use.
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SOCIAL MEDIA TRAJECTORIES
Our first step towards understanding social media use in
situ involved an investigation of Instagram use at a
museum. When examining the corpus of instagrams we
noticed that several visitors had created narratives based on
their museum visit and oriented to the audience in various
ways [15]. Analyzing this material and creating a heat
map for Instagram activity during museum visits leads us
to consider social media trajectories, a concept that we
define as the relationship between online activities and
physical movements.
One particularly salient aspect of visitors social media
trajectories in the museum seemed to be the way they
oriented themselves spatially while sharing instagrams from
their visits. Some visitors chose to instagram a series of
objects that are very close to each other in an exhibition
space while others posted instagrams from locations at
much greater distances from each other. For example, one
visitor posted a collection of 16 instagrams from several
different areas of the museum while concentrating his
efforts in the fish and reptile galleries (Fig. 2). This visitor
posted most of his instagrams both physically and
temporarily close together at the beginning of the visit, then
posted far more sporadically later on. These types of
trajectories tell us a lot about the types of exhibits that are
suitable and interesting to share online. It is easy to
conclude that certain parts of a museum are very popular to
share on social media whereas certain exhibits in the
museum are rarely shared. However, what is most popular
to share online does not necessarily reflect the most popular
exhibits. There can be several reasons why things are not
photographed, e.g. the extent of interactive elements, the
light conditions, rules for taking photographs, etc.
Figure 2: Locations of visitor @nomethod's collection of
instagrams from a museum visit.
From this type of data collection approach where we did not
follow the visitor while walking around the museum, we
could not know if they actually posted the instagrams from
the locations represented or posted them later. We still lack
Social Media & Citizen Science
knowledge about the actual sharing circumstances and the
practice of walking through a museum and choosing what
to share. While visualizing the location where the
instagrams were shared (Fig. 2) makes it possible to draw
conclusions about the social media trajectories created
within the museum space, we cannot necessarily say how
these trajectories overlap with visitors physical patterns of
walking through the museum space. Therefore, as part of
our next study we were interested in mapping the paths of
visitors to their instagrams to give us some insight into the
work of walking through a space and sharing objects. When
conducting fieldwork at a zoo we tracked our study
participants by GPS, and combined these traces with
instagrams posted during the visit (Fig 3).
Figure 3: GPS tracking from a visit to the zoo, showing how
long the visitors stayed in certain areas (hot spots).
From this data we can discern certain hot spots in the zoo as
we could at the Natural History Museum. However,
because of the time stamps provided by the GPS, we can
also learn to what extent the spots participants stayed in for
an extended period of time correlate with their online
activities. There can be many reasons why hot spots are
created, for example a hot spot is created on the map where
the study participants had a lunch break. In order to make
sense of and analyze these types of trajectories, we need to
combine them with other types of data, focusing on social
media production and consumption in situ.
SOCIAL MEDIA PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION
In his studies of everyday photography conducted between
1940 and 1980, before the advent of the Internet connected
cameraphone, Chalfen [4] recognized that amateur
photographers were already orienting to an audience when
taking their photos . Today, we have a completely different
technological context, where pictures can be shared and
consumed immediately. Many researchers have argued that
todays widespread multimedia environments have allowed
for a new set of practices where consumption and
production practices merge [8]. In order to study this
phenomenon more closely, we suggest an approach where
we study photographic practices in the field.
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Figure 4: Two young zoo visitors in front of an information
sign while composing captions for their Instagram photos.
We can briefly exemplify with a case from the zoo field
study. Two participants were taking photos of banded
mongoose on their respective mobile devices. This photo
taking was a collaborative and socially organized process.
They discussed the search process (what animal to capture),
how to do it (the need to zoom in and be quick) as well as
assessing the quality of the images (Look, didnt this turn
out great?). They then moved on to sharing these images
online, checking information about the animal including
how to spell its name correctly in the caption (Fig. 4), and
agreeing on what smileys to include. A discussion about
liking the recently posted instagrams then evolved, where
the participants competed to be the first to like the images.
They then went back to assessing the images, and continued
to take some more, moving between producing and
consuming. There were several cases like this where
photographic and editing processes were collaboratively
performed and editing choices were discussed. From this
data we can see how consumption and production are no
longer two distinct processes, rather they are inseparably
intertwined and socially organized. In addition, our data
shows how social media activities have now become an
integrated part of what has been called co-visiting [6].
DISCUSSION
As new media technologies and applications allow for new
practices we need to adapt existing techniques for studying
these practice. Our methodological approach to studying
situated social media use, including examining visitors
social media trajectories, has a number of implications.
First, this approach opens up new opportunities for museum
studies. Mapping out social media trajectories, gives us new
opportunities to understand how visitors engage with
museum content. The traditional approach to measuring
visitor engagement has been to quantify time spent at an
exhibit. This has lead to the common use of concepts such
as museum fatigue derived from comparing the relative
amounts of time visitors spend at exhibits [12]. Yet
literature that uses time spent at an exhibit to measure
visitor engagement has, to a large extent, neglected to detail
the process of museum visiting [1]. Similarly, the practices
we have described in this chapter suggest that we need to
rethink the issue of signs of engagement and dwell time
[6] with exhibits and also study content produced as part of
Social Media & Citizen Science
the visit. By connecting situated activity to social media
practices we can learn more about the impact of a
museums curated exhibitions on visitors practices.
Second, a situated social media approach allows us to reach
a new understanding of social media and social
photography behavior, insight that can be valuable when
designing new tools and services. We can briefly mention
one such example here. Our results suggest that users have
a number of strategies to deal with and play with time in
their social media productions. However, the prevalent
timeline metaphor forces linearity of use and visitors have
to handle timelines when creating narratives. In Instagram,
the focus of this paper, there is currently no way to reorder
images after they have been posted. If we take users
creations of narratives seriously we suggest that we should
not force linearity on the users experience, but instead
allow users to rearrange how experiences are presented.
Another example of a design space that is opened up by this
type of approach relates to social media trajectories. Our
findings using a situated social media approach suggest that
the way users represent their activities on social media is
related to their walking paths through the environment.
Using this approach we can learn more about production
and editing, and examine whether our social media
interactions are affected by our local interactions, and vice
versa. Such knowledge has the potential to inform a range
of HCI studies and applications dealing with the domains of
e.g. storytelling [5,10], and trajectories [9].
CONCLUSION
In this paper we have presented the perspective of situated
social media studies. We have shown a few examples from
our studies of social media use in cultural institutions,
drawing upon different methodological experiments in
order to get closer to the phenomenon of social media
practices in situ. This approach allows us to see how
visiting, in this case a museum, science center or a zoo, has
changed with the ubiquitous use of social media. An extra
layer has been added to the visit that is now also about
documenting the experience and sharing it with others.
Studying situated social media use gives us access to the
ways in which production and consumption of social media
are linked and moves us closer to an understanding of social
media use as a phenomenon that is not only played out
online, but is situated in a particular context.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank our study participants as well as our colleagues
Beata Jungselius and Igor Stankovic for their contribution
to this work.
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