Persistence and Change in Social Media

In “Star Trek,” Scotty suggests that Transwarp beaming is “like trying to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet, whilst wearing a blindfold, riding a horse” (Abrams, 2009). The study of social media faces similar challenges because new tools are developed at a rapid pace and existing tools are constantly being updated with new features, policies, and applications. Users tend to migrate, in often unpredictable ways, to new tools as well as to adopt multiple tools simultaneously, without showing consistent media preferences and habits (Quan-Haase, 2008). As a result, for scholars it sometimes feels as if the social media landscape changes too quickly to fully grasp and leaves scholars permanently lagging behind. We argue in this article that beyond the ebb and flow of everyday events and seemingly idiosyncratic usage, trends exist underlying long-term trajectories, persistent social practices, and discernable cultural patterns. Overarching findings have emerged within and across disciplines because the study of social media has from its early beginnings necessitated a multidisciplinary approach. From power laws to impression management, from privacy concerns to online social capital, there is a great onrush of scholarship on social media, its properties, and its consequences. Regardless of discipline, all scholars face the challenge of constant change occurring in this arena. This challenge exists on a number of different levels. On a practical level, research and publication timelines continue to be slow relative to the rapid transformation occurring in social media. This rapid change is particularly prominent with the study of social network sites, where both the popularity of certain sites and their privacy policies continue to be in continual flux (boyd, 2006, 2007; Gross & Acquisti, 2005; Tufekci, 2008; Young & Quan-Haase, 2009). On an applied level, challenges exist in teaching social media theory and methods because best practices and understandings quickly become obsolete. On a theoretical level, generalizable claims need to be constantly updated to reflect the new realities in policy, features, and usage. This and papers in the following issue of the Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society on “Persistence and Change in Social Media” compiles a series of papers to identify elements of social media practice that are persistent across platforms, users, and cultures. The goal of the papers is not only to present articles addressing current topics and the current state of knowledge, but also to present research pointing toward the long-term trajectory of social media development and usage. In this article, we propose the term social media practice as a means to overcome the transient nature of the phenomena encountered on social media and identify practices that are stable and universal. We argue that through a focus on the practices involved in the domestication and mainstreaming of social media, it is possible to develop more robust theories and present widely applicable findings. Because social media are a moving target, it is impossible to provide concrete answers to many research questions and to resolve conclusively existing debates about the longterm trajectory of social media. For example, there will never be a single and ideal way to self-present on social network sites (Tufekci, 2008) or a perfect hyperlink to place on one’s website. Despite the intangibility of the subject, recurring insights emerge. We list four examples of findings that have shown some stability: