What Social Media means to my research

By Amy Aisha Brown, PhD Blogger

After reading Dr Janet Salmons’s last post (Defining our terms: What is “social media”?), I was inspired to think about what the term means to me but coming up with a definition is not that easy. Is social media defining platforms, the affordances of platforms, something else? Is it the online factor? Because it is participatory? How far does the label extend? I am excited about the #NSMNSS tweetchat we are going to have on 5 December (details here) where we can discuss some of these questions and think about what social media means to us as a group, but after failing to find a personal definition for this potentially all-encompassing term, I thought a better approach might be for me to think about what social media means or brings to my doctoral research.

On a basic level I could say, “social media is data”. That is, I use Twitter as my way into investigating how the English language in Japan is talked about. This is not a common approach in studies of language ideology, but Twitter has a massive active user base (around 10% of the Japanese population if recent statistics from in the loop are accurate), and tweets are both accessible and plentiful. In fact, tweets in Japanese mentioning the English language are so numerous that it is impossible for me to collect them all—a matter for another time. But while these features show the potential of Twitter to collect a vast amount of potentially relevant data, what is it that makes Twitter, as opposed to some other source of information, useful for undertaking my investigations?

I could have chosen to look at how the English language is talked about in Japanese newspaper reports, policy documents, or organisational websites, or used interviews or focus groups. However, what previous studies using these techniques have yet to focus on is how English is talked about across domains, from the mass media, to business, through to daily conversation. And it is at this point that Twitter comes in.

Until recently Twitter’s about page claimed it to be “a real time information network”, and the phrase still appears elsewhere on the site. However, Twitter is not just news and information, it is also a social space where people interact, comment, and chat. This social side of Twitter means that I can look at how ‘official’ information sources (newspapers, organisations, etc) talk about English and how people talk about English in response to those sources, but I can also take into consideration how it is talked about in wider conversation, something that would be near impossible using other kinds of data.

So, for me, the massive user base of Twitter and the online, real-time, accessibility of it cannot be underestimated, but what is really important is the social, collaborative, participatory side of Twitter that enables the talk about my topic (and pretty much any other) to thrive.

Introducing the PhD Blogger: Amy Aisha Brown

I was lucky enough to be chosen as the PhD blogger for #NSMNSS, but before I start posting more about the perks and pitfalls of using social media in my research, I will give a little bit of an introduction to me, my research, and how it all fits under the #NSMNSS umbrella.

To start off, I think I should point out that I wouldn't really class myself as a social media researcher. Rather, I am one of those researchers who has been swayed by the possibilities of what the digital trails of social interaction that social media users leave in their path can tell us about aspects of their daily lives.

My research interest could be described broadly as the English language in Japan. I come to looking at this from the background of applied linguistics, a wide-ranging field of research looking at understanding language related issues in the real world, and I am influenced by work in world Englishes, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and discourse studies.

I am not so interested in the kind of English you can find in Japan (i.e., the grammar people use, their pronunciation, or the effectiveness of their communication), rather I look at the discourses of the English language. In other words, the way that English is talked about and conceptualized.

So, where does social media fit in? Well, I am using Twitter as my source of data. I collect tweets in Japanese that include the word 英語, which means ‘English (language)’. I then use techniques from corpus linguistics to find patterns in how people talk about the language.

I am conducting my research within the Open University’s Faculty of Education and Language Studies under the supervision of Ann Hewings and Philip Seargeant. The various aspects of my study are well supported: Ann brings a knowledge of English language studies and corpus linguistics, and Philip has written extensively on English in Japan and has an interest in language and social media (he is part of the SocialMedia Language research group, which looks at language and communication in social media). However, the lack of precedent in using social media for socially oriented research (especially within applied linguistics) and the ever-changing nature of the field, means that there are a number of theoretical, methodological, and ethical bridges that need to be crossed.

In my time as PhD Blogger I want to illuminate issues that have arisen but also the steps I have taken (or more likely am in the process of taking) to navigate those murky waters. Hopefully, this will give an insight into how the issues associated with research using social media pan out, at least in this my context.