Beyond the screen shot: Applying Filmic Methods to Online Identity Production

Social media offers qualitative researchers volume, richness and the promise of direct access to the lived experience of the individual. However, the scale and complexity of social media data presents a “little big data” challenge in terms of data collection, aggregation and interpretation (Esomar 2014). Social media identity production is located within an online infrastructure that reproduces a world “out there” (Pridmore & Lyon 2011) and involves the curation of numerous data fragments within ongoing episodic narration. Established qualitative data collection and analysis can struggle to capture fully this longitudinal and iterative process. We contend that new methods of qualitative data collection and analysis are needed to capture the longitudinal adjustment to social norms; self-censorship and the translation of the self into content in order to provide a holistic understanding of the online identity production.