Mapping the transnational imaginary of social media genres
Open accessAbstract
This article presents a transnational study of the classification and evaluation of social media content. We conducted a large-scale survey ( N = 4770) in five countries (Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the United States) with open-ended questions about the types of content people like and dislike. Through iterative and inductive coding, we identified 29 topics, or broad areas of interest, and 213 recurrent genres, or narrower categories that share elements of form and content. We compared the results according to country, gender, age, and education level, identifying patterns of cultural difference and commonality. While we found significant differences in the prominence and preferentiality of content, these distictions were less pronounced for disliked topics around which social media users tended to converge. Finally, we discuss genre imaginaries as normative maps that reflect ideas about morality in general and the purpose of social media in particular.
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There were notable absences in top starter packs, including a general lack of right-leaning politics or news groups, mainstream entertainment media apart from Taylor Swift fans, and other prominent social media topics like beauty, gaming, and food.
“There were some notable absences, including a general lack of right-leaning politics or news groups, mainstream entertainment media (apart from Taylor Swift fans), and other prominent social media topics like beauty, gaming, and food (Hallinan et al., 2023).”
From Stuck in the middleware with you: the challenges of capitalizing a market-oriented approach to platform governance (2025) · cites this paper as Hallinan et al., 2023
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- Authors
- Hallinan, B., Kim, B., Scharlach, R., Trillò, T., Mizoroki, S., & Shifman, L.
- Affiliations
- Hebrew University of Jerusalem (IL)
- Corresponding author
- Kim, Bumsoo
- Venue
- New Media & Society
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2021-05-09
- Volume
- 25
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 559-583
- ISSN
- 1461-4448 (ISSN-L)
- 1461-7315
- OpenAlex
- W3160329409
- Cited by
- 24
- References
- 44
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 1
- FWCI
- 1.57
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- New Media & Society (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- Funders
- h2020 european research council (819004)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Networks and Communications › Media and Digital Communication
- Social Sciences › Communication › Media Studies and Communication
- Social Sciences › Communication › Social Media and Politics
- Keywords
- cross-national comparison, content classification, user preferences, cultural differences, gender differences, age differences, educational differences, morality, cross-national survey
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