Social representations and social media: exploring facebook and shared meanings of migration among filipino migrants in Germany

Abstract

This dissertation employs social representations (SR) theory (Moscovici, 1961/2008, 1988, 1984/2001a) to conceptualize social media as digital public spheres or online (trans)formative sites of everyday social knowledge. The thesis further relates social media to the three dimensions that make a public sphere according to Jovchelovitch & Priego-Hernandez (2015)—political, spatial, and psychosocial. This dissertation also introduces time as a fourth dimension (temporal) that brings the three dimensions together, emphasizes how social media have revolutionized people’s relationship with time and (virtual) space, and highlights how the interrelation among social media, time, and (virtual) space influence the way people as members of a community jointly develop meanings of social objects, interactions, or events—for instance, migrants and their collective constructions of their home and host lands anchored in space and time. To substantiate the above conceptualizations, this dissertation presents three empirical studies conducted through an overarching digital ethnographic methodology. Facebook is employed as the principal social media platform and research base, migration (and migration-related phenomena) as focal object of social knowledge, and Filipino migrants in Germany as the partner community and sample group. Data were gathered using mainly qualitative methods, especially participant observation, online ethnographic routines and data gathering techniques (Postill and Pink, 2012), and focus group discussions. Qualitative techniques were also used to analyze the data, except for the first empirical study where text mining methods were also employed. Overall, findings illustrate the multiple aspects of Facebook as an actively evolving and multifaceted digital site of social representations of migration in its different forms (i.e., as pragmatic-discursive content, identity and positioning dynamics, and embodied, spatio-temporal norms and artifacts) among Filipino migrants in Germany. These empirical insights in turn provide a richer, dialogical, and contextually sensitive framework by which to investigate shared meaning-making—whether as content, process, and practice—as it develops within social media, while these interactive platforms are likewise continuously transformed by the communities who use them.