Call into the platform!

In this article António Granado and I introduce the proposal of calling into the platform which is an invitation to conduct communication and social research through the lens of medium-specificity. The article offers a practical walk-through the possibilities of repurposing the technicity of networks for studying societal (institutional) phenomenon on Facebook. From the repurpose of simple like connections to the affordances of computer vision APIs.

Beyond proposing innovative techniques to approach digital networks, the case study explored in the article about the visuality of Portuguese Universities over the years (2009-2018) bring valuable insights on institutional communication and social media. We found out that “Portuguese universities are using Facebook as just another platform to shout out their activities. At the same time, most universities seem to be not spending enough time building their social media networks or giving attention to some aspects of their missions. Research activities or accomplishments, for instance, are very seldom referred, which means that science communication is practically inexistent. Connection with the outside world is also neglected. When seeing the dominant images shared by Portuguese universities, we find mostly Portugal Sentado (people seated while listening to conferences) and conference posters, showing very little imagination and a somewhat careless attitude towards social media best practices and potentialities for communication. By using the same type of photos time and time again, universities are perpetuating the stigma of a boring academic environment. The “institutional” visuality of academia reproduced by Portuguese universities fails in getting advantage of the attention economy of Facebook. In other words: no “clickworthy” and “shareable” content.”

Read the abstract bellow or read the full article here.

[ABSTRACT] This paper introduces a medium-specific research perspective as fundamental basis for Social Sciences and Communication fieldwork. It points to the importance of combining knowledge on platform grammatisation with data research practices (capture, mining, analysis and visualization) to study digital networks. That is what we refer to as call into the platform; an effort to account for the technical fieldwork and digital methods in an interdependent position to research. In this conception, and through the case of Portuguese Universities on Facebook, we interrogate how digital networks contribute to the research contexts of communication and social sciences studies. To respond to this question, two distinctive digital networks were explored, shedding light in the institu-tional connections and the visual culture of the higher education in Portugal. The first comprises all connections made by a given Page – the act of liking other pages or being liked in return (Page like network). The second is built upon the affordances of computer vision APIs – the connections between images and their descriptive labels (Page timeline image-label network). Beyond providing new ways to design and implement research that can be repurposed for different studies, the main contribution of this study lies in embracing the methods of the medium as key component for digital social sciences.