Studying Social Media and Politics: What Is ‘Social’ About Our Research?

Researching social media often presents the challenge of dealing with the discourse around its overwhelming newness and disruptions, prompting researchers to pin down the focus on radical shifts, spectacular diversions, and novel arrangements of political action. While no study is naively techno-deterministic, studying social media and politics tends to veer towards ‘media’ as new technologies and networks of communication than the very prefix that accompanies it – ‘the social’ as a complex assemblage of historically sedimented structures of power, practices, and institutions. This chapter uses examples from social media in India to highlight studies that systematically engage with sociological factors such as gender, religion, caste, language, class, and age, to ground the studies on social media. These categories are not static or discrete, but they are intertwined, dynamic, and multiscalar, which could be examined with the lenses of practice theory, intersectional theory, and the critical analytics of decolonial thinking.