15th Annual Walt Fisher Lecture: Clicks as relational work: Social attention in social media environments

Attention is a valuable commodity in contemporary media environments, and signaling attention to specific social connections via social media is a form of social grooming that can help strengthen relationships and facilitate social capital exchanges. How do the affordances of social media platforms shape social practices (such as clicking and commenting) in networked online contexts?

Join USC Annenberg for the 15th annual Walt Fisher Lecture featuring Nicole B. Ellison, Karl E. Weick Collegiate Professor of Information at the University of Michigan. In this talk, Dr. Ellison will describe a stream of empirical work that investigates the social implications of user practices related to social attention, relationship maintenance, social capital, and enjoyable interactions. Studies include published work on Facebook and Snapchat as well as in-progress preliminary insights from newer work exploring the relationship between attention and activity in Facebook. Throughout the talk, she will relate these findings to the larger challenges associated with social media scholarship, such as rapidly changing platform features and uses practices. She will discuss the concept of affordances as a strategy for anchoring research findings and (hopefully) producing scholarship of enduring value, even after the platforms themselves have changed or even disappeared.