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Social Media, Quo Vadis?
(2020)
Over the past two decades, social media have become a crucial and omnipresent cultural and economic phenomenon, which has seen platforms come and go and advance technologically. In this study, we explore the further development of social media regarding interactive technologies, platform development, relationships to news media, the activities of institutional and organizational users, and effects of social media on the individual and the society over the next five to ten years by conducting an international, two-stage Delphi study. Our results show that enhanced interaction on platforms, including virtual and augmented reality, somatosensory sense, and touch- and movement-based navigation are expected. AIs will interact with other social media users. Inactive user profiles will outnumber active ones. Platform providers will diversify into the WWW, e-commerce, edu-tech, fintechs, the automobile industry, and HR. They will change to a freemium business model and put more effort into combating cybercrime. Social media will become the predominant news distributor, but fake news will still be problematic. Firms will spend greater amounts of their budgets on social media advertising, and schools, politicians, and the medical sector will increase their social media engagement. Social media use will increasingly lead to individuals’ psychic issues. Society will benefit from economic growth and new jobs, increased political interest, democratic progress, and education due to social media. However, censorship and the energy consumption of platform operators might rise.
A growing body of research has demonstrated negative effects of sexualization in the media on adolescents' body image, but longitudinal studies and research including interactive and social media are scarce. The current study explored the longitudinal associations of adolescents' use of sexualized video games (SVG) and sexualized Instagram images (SII) with body image concerns. Specifically, our study examined relations between adolescents' SVG and SII use and appearance comparisons, thin- and muscular-ideal internalization, valuing appearance over competence, and body surveillance. A sample of 660 German adolescents (327 female, 333 male;M-age = 15.09 years) participated in two waves with an interval of 6 months. A structural equation model showed that SVG and SII use at Time 1 predicted body surveillance indirectly via valuing appearance over competence at Time 2. Furthermore, SVG and SII use indirectly predicted both thin- and muscular-ideal internalization through appearance comparisons at Time 1. In turn, thin-ideal internalization at Time 1 predicted body surveillance indirectly via valuing appearance over competence at Time 2. The results indicate that sexualization in video games and on Instagram can play an important role in increasing body image concerns among adolescents. We discuss the findings with respect to objectification theory and the predictive value of including appearance comparisons in models explaining the relation between sexualized media and self-objectification.
Analysis of social media using digital methods is a flourishing approach. However, the relatively easy availability of data collected via platform application programming interfaces has arguably led to the predominance of single-platform research of social media. Such research has also privileged the role of text in social media analysis, as a form of data that is more readily gathered and searchable than images. In this paper, we challenge both of these prevailing forms of social media research by outlining a methodology for visual cross-platform analysis (VCPA), defined as the study of still and moving images across two or more social media platforms. Our argument contains three steps. First, we argue that cross-platform analysis addresses a gap in research methods in that it acknowledges the interplay between a social phenomenon under investigation and the medium within which it is being researched, thus illuminating the different affordances and cultures of web platforms. Second, we build on the literature on multimodal communication and platform vernacular to provide a rationale for incorporating the visual into cross-platform analysis. Third, we reflect on an experimental cross-platform analysis of images within social media posts (n = 471,033) used to communicate climate change to advance different modes of macro- and meso-levels of analysis that are natively visual: image-text networks, image plots and composite images. We conclude by assessing the research pathways opened up by VCPA, delineating potential contributions to empirical research and theory and the potential impact on practitioners of social media communication.