A Sociomateriality Practice Perspective of Online Social Networking

Social networking using social media has fundamentally changed the way people maintain friendship networks, and the way people interact and communicate with others on their social networks. Traditional research on social networking uses associations between or relationships among actors. Using a sociomateriality perspective in this paper, we address calls to the IS research community to explore new ways of seeing and theorizing IS in society, inspired and enabled by an emerging sociomaterial world view. We argue that in the case of social networking, actors (social users and their friendship networks, social network designers etc.) and artifacts (hardware, social network interface / software, Internet, social media devices etc.) are so entangled with each other that studying them as one entity instead of two makes more sense than treating them as distinct or interdependent entities. In this paper, we aim to address how sociomateriality entails itself in the phenomenon of social networking.