In his speech, celebrated Norwegian sociologist Knut Lundby said, “We must be careful not to exaggerate the power of social media in determining social order.” Despite the extreme respect for him in the field, Lundby’s warning was answered by laughter from the crowd: in a conference focused on social media and social order, this is awfully hard to do.
Thanks to the Tufts Undergraduate Research Fund and the Institute for Global Leadership, I was fortunate enough to attend and present research I have been doing with Professor Sarah Sobieraj at the Social Media and Social Order conference in Oslo, Norway. Studded with acclaimed researchers, sociologists, and academics from a range of countries, we heard about projects ranging from the impact of meme collectives in Assam, India to Instagram appropriation in Norway’s Bible Belt; from the threat of Surveillance Capitalism to the empowerment of Palestinian rebels through the use of film and social media publication.
