Social Media Symbolism

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In the online world, social media will be the primary platform through which the individuals are facilitated to interact and negotiate with the virtual networked public. Therefore, similar to offline world, through the process of interaction, in social media online users will use symbols in different forms and will be involved in a meaning making process.
Executives in my research will also develop an online self by interacting with their virtual networked public. Symbols that executives generated in the online world will be different to the offline world subjected to the features and tools of the social media platform. So by using SI, it will facilitate me to identify the particular symbols which executives have used to generate meanings and …show more content…

To study human behaviour, as a researcher, it demands me to observe and take the role of the other as Mead (1934) suggested. By taking the role of the other, it enabled me to reflect on my fieldwork thereby construct interpretations of my encounters in both online and offline world to demonstrate how executives articulate their selves in online and offline world (Burke & Stets, 2000; Gusfield, 2016). Therefore, I used qualitative method as the major approach assisted by observation and semi structured interviews as primary methods in order to gain a deep insight about the phenomena in question about self and symbols which will be discussed under below …show more content…

It is strongly associated with human values and is committed to capture the everyday life of people while providing flexibility and sensitivity to the social context and build explanations and arguments to understand phenomena in detail (Mason, 2002; Atkinson et.al, 2003). Qualitative research demands high levels of reflexivity to think critical about each and every aspect of doing a research in order to generate meaningful outcome (Bryman, 2008).
In my research, utilization of qualitative method was a good decision which I have taken because I realized it was the suitable method to understand the self in both online and offline worlds because it has enabled me to understand, build explanations and also to produce arguments on how the executives articulated their self in both the worlds. Furthermore, qualitative method provided me the flexibility to understand how the executives actively constructed symbols in the two contexts of online and offline world. Importantly, utilizing a qualitative approach unfolded my research by its own enabling me to take in to account different things which I have not even initially planned. For example, the themes which I derived in the data analysis section were not previously determined. Only after my encounters in field, because I didn’t limit myself to structured quantities and numbers, I was able to generate different themes

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