Experiences of Social Media as Space or Place

The next speaker in this 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium is Angela Cirucci, who is exploring the question of place and space in social media apps. How do users perceive the social media environments in which they engage, from a quasi-geographic perspective?

This research considers users as experts on their own experiences, and investigates the digital identities they have created for themselves. Such identity creation involves performance and exhibition, building on the data and infrastructures available to them, and their understanding of these practices can be explored through structured sketching, structured app walks, and autoscreenography (involving users capturing screenshots of their experience).

Working with a small group of diverse participants, the project asked participants to draw or sketch the platform they used, on paper, and this extracted a wide variety of depictions of the essential experience of a platform; notably this often didn’t involve a reproduction of the user interface design, but sometimes very abstract aspects (e.g. a dislike button to represent Facebook, or red and blue flags to represent political argument on Twitter. The study also repeated this for specific interface functions of the various platforms. Generally, older (40+) participants tended to produce more abstract representations.

Using the app walkthrough method, the project also probed participants’ level of experience with different platforms – and generally people failed at the harder tasks (finding the Facebook user agreement, or downloading their entire Instagram data file). There was no significant age difference here.

This may map onto people’s understanding of the physical spaces they live in: more seasoned residents will have an understanding of the layout and structure of the place, whose ‘content’ changes over time, while younger residents may attach their sense of space to the content they’ve experienced there, rather than having a fuller understanding of how the different spaces fit together. Yet neither group knew exactly how this space or place worked from an institutional perspective – so perhaps social media are only ever pseudo-places, even for users who do experience them as places.