Folk classification of social media services as grounds for explaining or predicting trends in use

Social media as a class of communication platforms has been investigated in terms of user intentions, or why people use them, in terms of depth or kind of interaction, and in terms of the demographic character of users across various services. There is little understanding however of how and on what grounds people sort the services in which they participate into categories that can explain or predict their patterns of use. One user may sort Twitter.com, Tumblr.com, and Pinterest.com together because of opportunities for interaction, and aggregators like Reddit.com, or StumbleUpon.com because of content. We propose a seed- and-snowball sample that begins with users in two demographic categories, twenty somethings and forty somethings, that asks participants to free pile-sort cards that represent social media services popular in Canada into groups. We will use a short structured interview collected from the initial participants to develop grounds to explain the categorizing criteria the participants demonstrate. We believe the results of the study can explain or predict trends in patterns use, for example the exodus of younger users from Facebook. This is a research work-in-progress though we expect to have results in the form of data and analyses to present at the conference.