Social Media and the Social Self: Individuals and Relationships

This chapter builds on the established platform practices of this book to highlight how individuals and groups of users effectively operate on social media. This chapter highlights the implications of user relationships from dating, to influencing, to political and lobbying practices across the suite of social media platforms. From influential Instagram campaigns, to political X (formally Twitter), vlogging and YouTube, and livestreaming on Momo, users continue to develop new ways of attracting audiences and engaging them for a variety of purposes. It lays the foundation for the future chapters that uses rich ethnographic data to describe how users play the visibility game (Cotter) and engage in cultural intermediation practices to highlight value within cultural production (Hutchinson) on social media platforms.