People now have various types of social media platforms available to them that they use to quench their thirst for sharing and getting information. But not all the platforms are the same in terms of the features they offer. Users also attribute different meaning to define the personality of these sites.
To understand how young people in Argentina manage the proliferation of social media platforms in their everyday lives, Pablo Boczkowski and Mora Matassi of Communication Studies department at the Northwestern University, and Eugenia Mitchelstein of Social Sciences department at the Universidad de San Andrés in Argentina conducted 50 interviews between March 2016 and July 2017, and surveyed 700 respondents in October 2016 in Argentina.
The authors found that Argentine youth manage their social media use partly by attributing different meaning constellations to each platform. WhatsApp is constructed as a multifaceted communication space housing multiple information flows and types of content. They see Facebook as a platform in which social interaction centers on the construction of a tidy, polished, and socially acceptable self-presentation. Instagram is a space for an even more polished self-presentation via the creation of stylized and carefully shaped visual portraits.
Twitter, on the other hand, revolves around information and informality, and Snapchat is visually focused on spontaneous and lucidre social interaction. These constellations of meaning relate divergent perceptions of types of audiences and temporal rhythms.
To read the full text of the study:
Boczkowski, P. J., Matassi, M., & Mitchelstein, E. (2018). How Young Users Deal With Multiple Platforms: The Role of Meaning-Making in Social Media Repertoires. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 23(5), 245-259.
