“Post-demographics? Leading research into social networking sites considers such issues as presenting oneself and managing one’s status online, the different ‘social classes’ of users of MySpace and Facebook and the relationship between real-life friends and ‘friended’ friends (Boyd & Ellison, 2007). Another set of work, often from software-making arenas, concerns how to make use of the copious amounts of data contained in online profiles, especially interests and tastes. I would like to dub this latter work ‘postdemographics’. Post-demographics could be thought of as the study of the data in social networking platforms, and, in particular, how profiling is, or may be, performed. Of particular interest here are the potential outcomes of building tools on top of profiling platforms, including two described below. What kinds of findings may be made from mashing up the data, or what may be termed meta-profiling? [from Rogers, “Post-demographics Machines”]
A chapter on “Social Media and Post-demographics Machines” in [Rogers, Digital Methods, The MIT Press, 2013)
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