As promised, if somewhat belatedly, here’s our monthly Reading Group update for September.

Our shared featured reading was this new piece by Jose van Dijck and Thomas Poell:

van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2013). Understanding Social Media Logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2-14.

I chose it because I was intrigued by and very much admired the effort to look backward to media scholarship from the broadcast era and to think through what, if any, of that work can be translated into the context of social media. In this case, the authors first elaborate and then experimentally apply the idea of ‘media logic’ to social media platforms, cultures, and industries. We had a lively discussion about this and if we weren’t 100% sure of how well the experiment works, I think it provoked a lot of ideas about how we might try to approach the social media environment in more holistic and systematic ways. This whole exercise inspired me to re-read Raymond Williams’s great book Television, which is notable for the way it successfully combined political economy, cultural analysis and materialism in an attempt to grapple with the then-new medium of TV, way back in the day.

And here in no particular order is the full list of what the Social Media Research Group members have been reading over the past month. It’s a bumper crop!

• Simon, P. (2013). Too Big to Ignore: The Business Case for Big Data. Wiley. com. Amazon link |
• QUT library ebook full text
• Zuckerman, E. (2013). Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (1 edition.). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
• Barney, K. (2010). Gendering Aboriginalism A Performative Gaze on Indigenous Australian Women. Cultural Studies Review , 212-239.
• Bimber, B., Flanagin, A. J., & Stohl, C. (2005). Reconceptualizing Collective Action in the Contemporary Media Environment. Communication Theory , 365-388.
• Chadwick, A. (2007). Digital Network Repertoires and Organizational Hybridity. Political Communication , 283-301.
• Flanagin, A. J., Stohl, C., & Bimber, B. (2007). Modeling the Structure of Collective Action. Communication Monographs , 29-54.
• Van Dijck, J. (2013). The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press.
• Volviv, Z., & Erjavec, K. (2012). Commercial and sexualized nationalism on Serbian reality tv. International Journal of Cultual Studies , 1-18.
• Meeder, B., Karrer, B., Sayedi, A., Ravi, R., Borgs, C., & Chayes, J. (2011). We Know Who You Followed Last Summer: Inferring Social Link Creation Times in Twitter. In WWW ’11: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on the World Wide Web. New York: ACM. 517-526. doi:10.1145/1963405.1963479.
• Bauman, Z., & Lyon, D. (2013). Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation. Polity.
• Mergel, Ines (01/04/2013). Social media adoption and resulting tactics in the U.S. Federal Government.   Government information quarterly , 30 (2), 123-130.
• Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0740624X13000063
• Siegel, E. (2013). Predictive Analytics. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons.
• Given, J., & Radywyl, N. (2013). Questions & Answers & Tweets. Communication, Politics & Culture, 46, 1-21.http://www.rmit.edu.au/browse;ID=t8dzoos720ck1
• Qualman, E. (2013). Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business (2nd ed.). Hoboken: Wiley & Sons.
• Booth, P. (2010). Digital Fandom: New Media Studies. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
• Mejias, Ulises A. (2010). The limits of networks as models for organizing the social. New Media & Society, 12(4), 603-617.
• Beer, D., & Burrows, R. (2013). Popular culture, digital archives and the new social life of data. Theory, Culture & Society. 30(4), 47-71 http://tcs.sagepub.com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/content/30/4/47
• Gillespie, T. (2013). The relevance of algorithms. Media Technologies, forthcoming. http://6.asset.soup.io/asset/3911/8870_2ed3.pdf
• Langlois, G., & Elmer, G. (2013). The Research Politics of Social Media Platforms. Culture Machine, 14. http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewDownloadInterstitial/505/531
• Latour, B., Jensen, P., Venturini, T., Grauwin, S., & Boullier, D. (2012). ‘The whole is always smaller than its parts’–a digital test of Gabriel Tardes’ monads. The British Journal of Sociology, 63(4), 590-615. http://www.tommasoventurini.it/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/TheWhole.pdf
• McCosker, A. (2013). Trolling as provocation: YouTube’s agonistic publics. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 1354856513501413. http://con.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/09/11/1354856513501413.abstract
• Rogers, R. Debanalizing Twitter: The Transformation of an Object of Study. http://www.govcom.org/publications/full_list/rogers_debanalizingTwitter_websci13.pdf
• Venturini, T. (2012). Building on faults: how to represent controversies with digital methods. Public Understanding of Science, 21(7), 796-812.
• http://pus.sagepub.com/content/21/7/796.short
• Venturini, T., & Latour, B. (2010). The Social Fabric: Digital Traces and Quali-quantitative Methods. Proceedings of Future En Seine, 30-15. http://www.tommasoventurini.it/web/uploads/tommaso_venturini/TheSocialFabric.pdf
• Yaneva, A., & Heaphy, L. (2012). Urban controversies and the making of the social. Architectural Research Quarterly, 16(01), 29-36. http://journals.cambridge.org.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/action/search?searchType=CITEADVANCE&journals=ARQ&volume=16&issue=01&page=29&author=Yaneva&year=2012

And the featured reading for October’s meeting, chosen by Theresa Sauter, is:

Ruppert, E., Law, J., & Savage, M. (2013). Reassembling Social Science Methods: the challenge of digital devices. Theory, Culture & Society, 30(4) 22–46. doi: 10.1177/0263276413484941.