Facebook as a third space? The challenge of building global community

Pages: 171-185

ISBN: 9781789903089

DOI: 10.4337/9781789903096.00027

Abstract:

Most research to date has focused on relatively open platforms such as Twitter, often focusing on political actors (for example, members of parliament), events (for example, elections), political spaces (for example, politics forums) or crowds (for example, #auspol). This is all worthwhile and important research. This chapter argues, though, that this research misses the vast majority of political talk. Research is sorely needed into everyday political talk in ‘non-political’ online third spaces, such as football or gardening forums. Furthermore, it argues that research needs to capture the political in ‘hard to reach’ spaces such as WhatsApp, Facebook ‘walls’ (personal pages) and groups, and Instagram. It argues that while such research is challenging, particularly in an era of denuded application programming interfaces (APIs) and scholarly pressure to produce ever-larger numbers of outputs, citations and other metrics, such research must be removed from the ‘too difficult’ box. The chapter concludes by suggesting some potential avenues by which such a research agenda might be prosecuted.

Source: Scopus