Social Media, Social Genres

Book excerpt: Internet-based applications such as blogs, social network sites, online chat forums, text messages, microblogs, and location-based communication services used from computers and smart phones represent central resources for organizing daily life and making sense of ourselves and the social worlds we inhabit. This interdisciplinary book explores the meanings of social media as a communicative condition for users in their daily lives; first, through a theoretical framework approaching social media as communicative genres and second, through empirical case studies of personal blogs, Twitter, and Facebook as key instances of the category of "social media," which is still taking shape. Lomborg combines micro-analyses of the communicative functionalities of social media and their place in ordinary people’s wider patterns of media usage and everyday practices.