Dear community, I'm writing on a chapter about *using social media as an ethnographic source*. I'm trying *to understand such media from a social/cultural anthropological point of view*. It's mainly questions about methodology, epistemology, operationalization, ethics, etc. Before I come to my questions let me give you some context. Concretely, when I talk about social media, in my research I am refering to Facebook. For me, using social media (in my case Facebook) as a source means more than "just" analyzing content that people in my field keep sharing (symbols, discourses, etc.). Foremost, social media usage is practice, it is a "doing". By this I mean someone, a person (or a bot), is typing something, sharing something, commenting on something, etc. And this someone has relations within a group, he/she has a history and a context (as does his/her group). These relations, history and contexts have to be considered when analyzing social media usage. Then, this whole social media practice is also embedded into an algorithmic network as I would call it. So the person is not only interacting with other individuals, but also with an algorithm that delivers the networks content to him/her resp. that delivers his/her content to the network. When doing (ethnographic) research in any field where social media is used (again, in my case Facebook), I think we need to keep this social-technological context in mind. Now, here come the questions / doubts... 1.) Do you know of any *("ethnographic-driven") overviews on how to use social media**(activity) as empirical material?* Any text that gives a summary about the diverse approaches a qualitative researcher might use when dealing with social media (usage) in his/her field? Such overviews might come from social/cultural anthropology, but I'm also open to other qualitative (sub-)disciplines. 2.) A first specific problem I then have is about how to deal with *privacy/publicness issues and their ethics* (privacy settings of social media, etc.). Any literature about this would be highly appreciated. My stance would be: * that a "public" post is a public post meaning I can and will use its content like any other public source (of course there are always exceptions). * a "friend's only" post, in contrast, I would treat the same way I would treat any information that I have gathered during participant observation, which means I would apply the same ethical standards (let people know I do research, anonymization when using material, in some circumstances official consent agreements, etc.) * and a "private" message is a private message. When I want to use its content I will have to always specifically ask the person who sent me the message. Just to be clear: of course you may challenge me on "my" stance (maybe using some literature to back your arguments) :) I'm very happy to being convinced otherwise! "My" stance seems kind of a trade-off between ethics and usability... 3.) Any ideas on *how to integrate, **from a (practical) point of view, the whole algorithmic aspect*? * "(Practically)" in parenthesis because I'm interest in literature that actually tells me how to qualitatively research "algorithmic networks" like Facebook. The question is how to research or take into account the algorithms or algorithmic effects/aspects that seem mostly invisible when researchers and users use social media. But since I'm very desperate about *finding such **"practical" approaches* ("first you need to do this, then...")... * I would also be happy to find literature that at least reflects on the problems that algorithms produce for a researcher. I give you one example on such problems: a lot of my colleagues use their social media accounts to "get" material from other users or to have a look who shares what ("person xy just shared event z"). They use social media as some sort of empirical quarry. Dig, and dig, and dig... However, every individual sees different things on their screens when e.g. using Facebook: 10 interfaces = 10 realities. Not that I believe in purely "objective" and "neutral" research, but with social media and algorithms the methodological claim to e.g. use a methodology that might be reproduced by other researchers in order to then be able to get the same results, such a claim is just impossible to hold up when dealing with "algorithmic networks". *Any literature that reflects on such epistemological and/or methodological problems when dealing with algorithmic social media networks would be highly appreciated!* 4.) *How is one to deal with the **information / ethnograhic overload**social media produce? *As you be might familiar: every link leads to another link and so on and so forth. The empirical material that I am able to "discover" is (metaphorically) killing me, and it is (literally) killing my software (MAXQDA, etc.). Any text about how to deal with this? My stance: first, I have to consider (and reflect on) that my field has to deal with the same kind of problems with this never-ending social media material that I have. This will already tell me something about my field. And second, loosely refering to A-N-T, I would consider that I, being the researcher, am the one who will open and close the black boxes I want to understand. It would be something like an "I-am-my-field" kind of approach if you know what I mean. This means that I decide if a link (to a video or a newspaper article) is still part of my field. I will open such connections until the point where I stop. Such a stance, of course, cannot be arbitrary, but refers to "older" methodological concepts like "saturation" or "relevance" (with regards to ones research question, etc.). I don't know if ANTish researchers have any literature about this sort of operationalization ("the link as a black box", etc.). And of course, I also welcome different approaches on how to, methodologically, deal with this big social media mess maybe refering to such "older" methodological concepts like "saturation" or "relevance" that I have just mentioned. 5.) Last but not least, any literature on researchers that treat *"social media as an archive"* meaning they *apply a historical approach to social media's methodologies*? I know I wrote that social media is a practice. But researching social media also seems to have kind of parallel to doing research in an archive (with algorithms, admins, etc. being the gatekeepers, etc.). We might also consider its content as "congealed practice". I think one might find a fruitful approach applying historical methods and/or reflecting on them when dealing with social media as an ethnographic source. Maybe someone has already done it :) If you can't think of anyone any brief and good texts about doing (ethnographic) research in an archive in general? Since I haven't done this kind of research until now. As I've done it before I will collect all your answers here so everyone may find a (complete) literature list: https://danielderkunzelmann.piratenpad.de/socialmediaethnography. Feel free to also put your stuff directly in there, and of course, check it once in a while :) Any names, literature, keyword, etc... Feel also free to only address 1 or 2 questions, or even to add more questions. I will try to copy and other questions (and possible answers) to the "pad" too. As always, thanks a lot for all your ideas. I'm already excited to hear what you suggest! all the best from Munich (Germany), Daniel https://unibas.academia.edu/DanielKunzelmann