| dc.description.abstract | Social media as a social concept is becoming a prominent fixture in social life and is taking on a significant increase in social relevance, both academically and in popular discourse. The academic research is often focused on either the online content itself or the macro societal implications, more than the real-life social aspect of social media. People using social media are now simultaneously producing content about their life online, whilst they are, in fact, living it. The new social feature of creating content for social media when being social with others in physical-social situations can have considerable implications for social interactions on a micro level. The volume and significance of social media production in social situations have become progressively substantial in social life for certain individuals. Therefore, the specific ways in which meaning is constructed and the individual handles the phenomenon can have substantial implications for social interaction. In this thesis participants in the age group of independent adults that most frequently use social media (18-30), explain how they handle themselves in social situations and maintain social relationships when they themselves or others in social interactions concurrently produce content for social media. The exploration of the subject is concentrated around the following research questions: (1) How are social media use and production in social situations in general understood as socially significant by the participants? (2) How do the participants describe specific social media use and production in social situations? (3) And finally, how do the participants normatively legitimize and criticize their degree of social media use and production in social situations? By imploring researcher-provoked data generated through interviews with participants who had varying degrees of use, I attempted to answer these research questions. Erving Goffman’s efforts on social framework, face-work, and spontaneous involvement, and George Simmel’s understanding of social forms with a focus on exchange and sociability, in particular, function as the theoretical frame for analysis. Goffman’s perspectives are applied to consider how social interaction is structured around common understandings of social frames, how the individual is considered and face is maintained during said interaction, and how participants become spontaneously involved and misinvolved. Simmel’s social forms IV exchange and sociability specify how the content of social interactions can have implications for meaning of the interaction and how the participants perceive it. In the first chapter of analysis, I identify two main ways that social media production is socially significant for the participants: 1) The encompassing presence of social media in social life, and 2) social media as an extension of social life. The participants’ experienced social media as substantially present in their social life, but also as an extension of social life itself. Some of the participants considered social media as a significant social frame whilst others did not. In the second chapter of analysis, I discuss how the participant’s understandings of social media are relational to how they react emotionally when they experience social media production in social situations and how they respond to each other. In the last chapter of analysis, I argue that the participants legitimize and criticize personal use by utilizing their understanding of social media production in social situations. Some of the participants with little and average social media production argue that social media production makes “real-life” private moments unnecessarily public, and by producing content about social life on social media paradoxically the “real-life” social life is disrupted. This public aspect is exactly what contributes to the positive feature of broadcasting and legitimizing the real-life social relationships to other social relations on social media for the more avid users. | eng |