Specifically attempting to answer “How do ethnographic and qualitative methods allow us to study social media apps?” this project employs methods traditionally used in Social Work and Geography Studies to investigate social media app (SMA) users as inhabitants. Users view their posts and interactions on SMAs through their social value—gaining attention, supporting friends, and connecting with family. However, backend logics that focus on institutional value— collecting, manipulating, repurposing, and disseminating data—are not known or understood by most users. In turn, studying these processes from a user viewpoint, or even asking users about their experiences with these processes, is nearly impossible through traditional media studies methods. This project will adopt and adapt “subjective sketches,” “structured app walks,” and “autoscreenography” with the hope of leading to better conceptions of social and institutional life. Like physical structures, users move through SMAs guided by design choices and cultural norms. SMAs may just be spaces—meaningless and context free. For many, however, they have transformed into places—socially constructed and material, holding memories and emotions (e.g. Tuan, 1977). Scholars have noted the importance of examining how and why spaces are built to uncover motives and baked in cultural norms and expectations (e.g. Alexander, 1979; Gibson, 1979; Norman, 1988). Yet, this logic is often applied to traditionally physical structures like towns or in digital design programs. Gaver (1991) is one of the first to apply this logic to digital spaces, but he is focused on helping designers create spaces that are convenient for users. In the current SMA landscape, however, the primary goal it instead to collect data and to guide users to perform in ways that create salable data (e.g. van Dijck, 2013). Thus, it is important to understand not just the ways that users enter SMAs as spaces, but also how they inhabit them as places—how SMAs have become important parts of social and institutional life to which many users have become attached and have stored memories. This study employs new means of learning about users’ experiences that take backend logics into consideration. Typical Media Studies methods have difficulty achieving this because users do not consciously realize the ways in which they are constantly inhabiting backend spaces and places. When users only speak about their SMA use, they rarely speak about material pieces or structures (e.g. McVeigh- Schultz & Baym, 2015; Neff & Nagy, 2015). “Subjective sketches” asks participants to draw SMAs as well as particular tools and functions. Through “structured app walks” participants are given the opportunity to walk the researcher through how they use SMAs on a daily basis, noting habits, likes, and desires for change. “Autoscreenographies” allow participants to take screenshots while they are using SMAs throughout their day (e.g. Spatscheck & Bremen, 2012). These three methods rely on Social Work and Geography Studies methods like subjective mapping, structured town walks, and autophotography, as well as industry methods including cognitive mapping, task analyses, and photo safaris.

This interactive website is a digital component to Angela's Doctoral Dissertation, The Structured Self: Authenticity, Agency, and Anonymity in Social Networking Sites. Her goal is to have this website act as a more accessible outlet to her research than a dissertation or even an academic book of which few are aware or have access to. Therefore, the site is committed to reaching out to a general audience, removing academic jargon, and catering to as wide of a group of typical social media users as possible.