num_pages: 234
description: Daniel Miller spent 18 months undertaking an ethnographic study with the residents of an English village tracking their use of the different social media platforms. Following his study he argues that a focus on platforms such as Facebook Twitter and Instagram does little to explain what we post on social media. Instead the key to understanding how people in an English village use social media is to appreciate just how English their usage has become. He introduces the Goldilocks Strategy: how villagers use social media to calibrate precise levels of interaction ensuring that each relationship is neither too cold nor too hot but just right.He explores the consequences of social media for groups ranging from schoolchildren through to the patients of a hospice and he compares these connections to more traditional forms of association such as the church and the neighbourhood. Above all Miller finds an extraordinary clash between new social media that bridges the private and the public domains and an English sensibility that is all about keeping these two domains separate.This book is available as a free open access PDF from ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press. Print copies are also available.
language: English
title: Social Media in an English Village
publisher: UCL Press