To Know Is to Compare: Studying Social Media across Nations, Media, and Platforms

How systematic comparative research can unlock the potential of social media scholarship.

Though diverse and fruitful, social media scholarship too often focuses on single platforms in single countries, disconnected from other media that people use. Mora Matassi and Pablo J. Boczkowski’s alternative approach offers a framework based on the epistemological principle that everything we know emerges from comparing two or more entities. Drawing on a wealth of real-life cases, Matassi and Boczkow...