social media

drawings of a musical.ly user using hand signs
social media

Hand signs on musical.ly = emoji for video

You know how we add emoji to texts?  In a face-to-face conversation, we don’t communicate simply with words, we also use facial expressions, tone of voice, gestures and body language, and sometimes touch. Emojis are pictograms that let us express some of […]

Jilltxt discovers musical.ly

I’ve been fascinated by musical.ly recently. It’s an app that is extremely popular among tweens and young teens, and is mostly used for lip-syncing. There’s a lot to be said about the app, but here is a short thing I said about […]

What if the web is almost over?

Nearly ten thousand researchers and no doubt thousands more students have quoted danah boyd and Nicole Ellison’s 2007 definition of social media: We define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within […]

social media

Researchers on Snapchat

I’ve been posting research stories on Snapchat most weekdays this month, and I’m really enjoying it. I know it doesn’t fit with the ephemerality of Snapchat, but I’ve been saving the stories and posting them on YouTube in a special playlist so […]

social media

How Can Scholars Use Snapchat Stories?

Snapchat has changed since the last time I tried it. You know, back in 2011 when I was simply too old for it. Now Snapchat has stories and has become a channel for everything: as expected it’s excellent for silly selfies and personal […]

Representation or Presentation?

I recently finished writing a chapter for The Sage Handbook of Social Media, which is being edited by Jean Burgess, Alice Marwick and Thomas Poell. My chapter is about self-representations in social media, like blogs and selfies and such, but in the table […]