Social Media & Image-Sharing:

Relationships and Self-Representation Online

With the emergence of social media platforms and smartphones with enhanced photographic capabilities, creating and sharing photos has become a new vehicle of communication. Social network services have intensified the use of pictures as a means of communication, drastically changing the landscape of how people articulate, understand, and communicate all kinds of information to one another. In this project, our team investigated the motivations behind why users post pictures and how it affects the way they interact with others, how it plays into the way people represent themselves, and how a particular social media platform can influence overall usage. 

Conducting research on this topic works to facilitate a deeper understanding of how society increasingly utilizes visual images as modes of self-expression and representation. In examining communication through visual storytelling, there is the potential for fostering a deeper understanding of how creative expression manifests in the social media environment. Below is a slideshow of the various infographics that our team developed to visually communicate the data from our research process. 

The information in the infographic slides will provide an overview of our findings to and highlight some of the key conclusions we were able to make. For more information on the various aspects of the research process or the steps in which we took to create the infographic presentation, please scroll down below or contact me directly.

THE RESULTS OF THE RESEARCH PROJECT:

Part 1: The Research Question:

The Original Research Question: How has technology influenced the value we place in photographs? "By looking into the interactions between people, technology and photographs (a form of visual information), we can expand our understanding of the changes happening in the information field."

How do people use images on social media as it relates to their identity and relationships?

Part 2: The Literature Review:

The literature review gave me a foundation to build upon my original exploration on the topic of photographic value. In the process of writing this narrative report, I found previous research done by others and identified the gaps and mistakes that were made so that I could build upon their contributions in the field/topic. After completely this review, I re-evaluated my topic of concern and narrowed the idea down so that I could specifically investigate a singular aspect of the topic. 

Part 3: Data Collection Instruments:

For this research, we elected to conduct interviews and circulate questionnaires. Our intention is to collect data from a variety of age groups in order to better compare how the use and motivations behind the sharing of images on social media platforms differ. We aim to gather information from individuals between the ages of 18 and 55+. At a minimum we will conduct 8x 30-minute interviews (or the equivalent in 15 minute intervals) and collect 40 responses to the questionnaire, though we anticipate the response to be somewhat greater than our expectations.

Our interviews followed a multi-tested guideline we created specifically for this process and were largely conducted in person. We decided to use interviews within our research as a data collection instrument in the hope that initiating rich discussions with our participants will allow us to gain deeper insights into how people feel about their use(s) of images across social media platforms. We felt that interviews were appropriate because, unlike questionnaires, interviews will allow us to get more personal responses with the interviewee, as a widely open and semi-guided conversation.

While the interviews we conducted took place within Washington state, our questionnaire was administered via social media and through other digital resources and thus encompassing a wide range of geographic locations. In circulating our questionnaire on social media, we will be able to collect information from people we would otherwise be unable to reach, given our timeframe and resources. We chose to pair interviews with a questionnaire as a data collection instrument because questionnaires will generate a lot of data over a short period of time, and provide a general overview of trends in the data.

Part 4: Data Collection:

Data collection was conducted through 7 in-person interviews and 329 responses on our online questionnaire, which was shared through multiple social media platforms, email, and text message. The online questionnaire retrieved an abundance of quantitative data in a short amount of time, and interviews were where qualitative data was mined. Due to the personal nature of interviews, we were able to gather more richly detailed information to supplement the responses extracted from the questionnaire. This topic is important to investigate as it addresses an interesting fundamental link between information sharing and our self-curated digital environments.

Part 5: Data Synthesis:

After all the data was collected, we had to organize the information so that the data was interpretable and explicit deductions and inferences could be made. In this stage of the research process, we had to condense the results from our questionnaire and concisely summarize and link the ideas brought up by the different interviewees. Due to the high volume of responses in our questionnaire and the nature of many of the responses themselves (i.e. short answer/input text format), our team had to individually sort through the responses in order to get an accurate read on the data. This not only took a long time to complete but it also brought up collocating issues as it is difficult to accurately categorize and group personal responses together.

For more details and explicit research materials for this project, please reach out directly to me through the Contact page.