Varieties of European universities’ engagement with social media platforms

• In Event: The platformisation of education

Proposal

This paper focuses on European universities’ use of social media platforms. It compares the universities’ uses of four different social media; and examines the infrastructural qualities of these platforms.
Our exploratory research on graduate employability and social media in Europe (Komljenovic, Hartmann, & Mackenzie, 2018) found that the four most popular social media platforms which universities use are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. Moreover, we found that the type of economy in which a university is based (Variety of Capitalism) is related to the extent and form of universities’ use of social media for supporting graduate employability. This paper takes the study further by examining in more detail how universities engage differently with different social media platforms depending on the type of economy that they are based in, as well as depending on the type of social media. Empirically, the paper will examine one case university from each of the six types of the market economy and follow their digital profiles including postings on the four most popular platforms that were identified (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube). More specifically, the paper will critically compare different engagements of universities with social media using digital methods.
As a second move, the paper will analyse the standardising, structuring and classifying qualities of the four platforms. It appears that social media platforms work in different ways in allowing the kind of content that universities can post on their profiles, and the level of control and autonomy that they have. For example, LinkedIn’s flagship product, the university pages, is created part by university, part by LinkedIn based on its algorithms and feeding from real time data updates by individuals on the network. In other words, the platform uses network effects (Langley & Leyshon, 2017) to standardise information and competition in the sector.
The paper brings the two moves (of studying universities digital activity and of platforms’ infrastructures) together to examine how the four social media are platformizing higher education and the kind of infrastructuring that we are witnessing.

References:
Komljenovic, J., Hartmann, E., & Mackenzie, A. (2018). Graduate employability and social media: Universities survey data analysis. Lancaster: Lancaster University.
Langley, P., & Leyshon, A. (2017). Platform capitalism: the intermediation and capitalisation of digital economic circulation. Finance and Society, 3(1), 11–31.

Author

• Janja Komljenovic, Lancaster University