A Cultural Sociology of Social Media: Social Drama, Cultural Affordances and Blogging in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina

Abstract

Research on social media, networks and collective action currently lacks a strong cultural component, often focusing on network formation and characteristics from afar. At the same time, research in cultural sociology often takes social media for granted, removed from analytical or theoretical attention. We know little about the perspectives of users or the shared meanings, emotions, and codes that inform social media practices and discourses. Addressing this gap requires examining how users imagine, understand and use social media in ways that foment culturally-meaningful social networks and it would “thickly describe” the discourse that they create and share across these networks. This article uses social drama theory to understand the creation of community and collective action among a group of citizen bloggers in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. Informed by their shared grievances and motives, users created a collective social drama across their blogs. This social drama was an important resource with which users developed trusting social ties, voluntary relationships, a sense of community and offline collective actions. These developments were realized in part due to the cultural affordances of the blog platform, the ability to easily, efficiently and effectively communicate and consume richly meaningful and emotive texts unhindered by data limits or media modalities. The cultural affordances of blogs were such that people were able to communicate their shared grievances in the form of social drama, over an extended period of time, and develop meaningful, emotive connections with each other through social media.