Studying the messiness of visual social media practices. An aggregated auto-ethnographies approach

Description

Visuality is central in people’s experiences of social media and to people’s enactment of sociality, but incredibly complex and messy to research. This messiness complicates units of analysis and concepts established in classic visual studies: authorship and ownership are difficult to pin down – original content is often remixed with appropriations of third-party material, reshared, endorsed or reframed, which does not only impact the location of the field or object of one’s analysis, but how one might conceptualize methods. As visual media move through times, space, and contexts, their meaning can obviously change, as interpretation is always situational, but also what they refer to might not always be entirely clear: representation of someone or something can be iconic and indexical, but only be accessible as such for specific interpretive communities. Moreover, to overcome a simplistic, causal understanding of media effects, one needs to focus on how people relate to images in different ways. This is why our own and colleagues’ earlier work has argued that to study social media visuality, one needs to take seriously what people are doing, saying, and feeling in, on, and with visual content – e.g. their practices, focusing specifically on social media social practices and social media visual practices. Not every research design is well suited for that. Moreover, to make sense of social media visuality, then, we need to find ways of both aggregating and integrating conceptual frameworks used in different fields – classic visual studies concepts regarding negotiated interpretations, indexicality, representation, and intertextuality continue to be relevant, but intersect with notions of platform vernaculars, socio-technical affordances, attention economies, and algorithmic imaginaries. We propose a large-scale ethnographic approach called aggregated auto-ethnography for making sense of socially mediated visual vernaculars, practices, norms, and the messy flows they are enacted and experienced in. The approach starts from guided auto-ethnographies, which empower participants to explore their own experiences and build thick descriptions. Participants are trained in documenting their own visual and digital practices, collect digital visual material, and record their perspectives and reflections. This form of data collection generates particularly rich data, as it is able to capture visual materials as well as their perception, and the perspectives and reflections of the participants. The paper will focus on the practical realisation of the method in the European project "TRAVIS: Trust and Visuality – Everyday digital practices". Based on examples from our data, we will illustrate how aggregated auto-ethnographies provide incredibly rich insights, which enable the kind of granularity and nuance otherwise difficult to attain in researching visual practices.

Period	27 Sept 2024
Event title	ECREA: ECC Ljubljana
Event type	Conference
Location	Ljubljana, SloveniaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International