ABSTRACT
The personal lives of researchers play a key role in the choice of research topics and their approaches to data, and many of the chapters that follow begin with a degree of self-reflexivity and an anecdote about what sparked an academic interest in each particular platform or app. Social media research is a new and emerging field, particularly in the African context where the social movements of the Arab Spring gave rise to what was sometimes referred to as Twitter uprisings or Facebook revolutions. The primary critique levelled against social media researchers in general is that the population of social media users may not be demographically representative of the broader population. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on South Africans’ use of social media platforms and apps in three main areas of everyday life: Relationships, Space and place and Community and Citizenship.
