ABSTRACT
This chapter lays the analytical foundation for the rest of the book by outlining how I study social media as socio-technical negotiations using an infrastructural lens, and the material and methods of the primary research. Through an infrastructural lens, attention is placed on staff practices of pulling on and against different social and technical structures that constitute larger systems or infrastructures of both museum and social media platforms in relation to social inclusion work. It positions infrastructures as ambiguous systems of practice, technologies, and objects which can be static, but also in-flux and impacted, even constituted through staff’s everyday actions. Based on this understanding, I discuss how the critiques of museum social media are partly due to the intersection of museum and social media infrastructures. This intersection poses problems for everyday museum social media practices, encompassing three main challenges: museum culture and values, the unethical terrain of social media, and digital literacies.
Socio-technical practices, therefore, are positioned as contending with and negotiating not only social media affordances but also how they intersect with those of the museum organisation and their implications for the pursuit of social inclusion work. An infrastructural lens focuses attention on staff practices and how staff interact with, navigate, and even constitute their own ad hoc work infrastructures.
