Webinar: To Know Is to Compare: Studying Social Media across Nations, Media, and Platforms

Social media research has often been limited by siloed approaches that focus on single countries, single media, or single platforms. In To Know Is to Compare: Studying Social Media across Nations, Media, and Platforms, Mora Matassi and Pablo J. Boczkowski propose a novel epistemological framework that expands the way we study and understand social media. Drawing on real-life cases, they explore how comparison across nations, media, and platforms—alongside historical and linguistic dimensions—can provide a global, de-westernized, transmedia, and multiplatform perspective on social media. In this webinar, the authors will discuss the importance of holding comparative epistemologies, illustrating their approach with concrete examples that connect multiple media forms, diverse platforms, and cultural contexts. They will also outline key opportunities brought by comparative epistemologies when it comes to dealing with the continued fragmentation of the field of media and communication.

Presenters

Mora Matassi is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Universidad de San Andrés.

She holds a Ph.D. in Media, Technology, and Society from Northwestern University and an Ed.M. in Technology, Innovation, and Education from Harvard University. Her work explores topics at the intersection of communication, technology, wellbeing, and digital culture. Mora's doctoral dissertation examined, from a comparative perspective, why and how people in Argentina leave (and sometimes return to) different social media platforms, as well as the social implications of these processes.

Pablo J. Boczkowski has doctorates in Clinical Psychology (Universidad de Belgrano, 1994) and Science and Technology Studies (Cornell University, 2001). He completed a four-year interdisciplinary residency in mental health at the Alvear Hospital in Buenos Aires, Argentina, before moving to the United States to retrain in S&TS. He was an assistant professor at MIT from 2001 until 2005, and since then has been at Northwestern University, with a primary appointment in the Department of Communication Studies. His research program examines digital culture from a comparative perspective, with a special focus on Latin America and Latinx USA.

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