Social Media in Everyday Life: A global perspective

Many of the current developments in social and mobile media take place in what is often called the Global South. Innovations such as mobile money (see for example the successful platforms M-Pesa and G-Cash) and crowdsourcing platforms (such as Ushahidi) have emerged from countries such as the Philippines and Kenya where over 25 per cent of the country’s GNP flows through M-Pesa.
Most new social media users are based in developing countries. But how can we understand the social consequences of social and mobile media? Are new communication technologies opportunities for social change, as it is often claimed, or do they amplify existing inequalities? This module takes an empirically grounded and comparative approach to understanding the social uses and consequences of social media in non-Western contexts.
Theoretically, the module brings together the interconnected literatures on globalization and social shaping of technology while we will also address contemporary debates on digital media, consumption, social change and power. The lectures will follow a trajectory from the mediation of personal processes (such as intimacy through social media) to the relationship between social media and structural processes such as migration, social class formation and inequality.
Ultimately, rather than reporting on a collection of international case studies, the module aims to showcase the local appropriations of digital technologies revisit assumptions about social media as well as about key concepts in social science, such as intimacy and social class. The tension between cultural particularism and social change is central to the module which will end with a broader theorisation of social media.