Communicative Informatics: A Social Media Perspective for Online Communities

Abstract

Individuals are active audience members that use Internet-based social media technologies to create and negotiate social action in online spaces. Communicative informatics is the key to constructing, describing or critiquing social media. Communicative informatics is the discovery of the audience, text/image, technology, negotiated place relationships that create symbolic meaning. Four propositions focus on the communication of the audience: 1) the audience is active; 2) the audience is creative; 3) the audience interacts with technology and 4) place is negotiated in online communication.