Social media, visual communication and digital competencies

Kathrine Jensen

HudCRES

It was a great pleasure to welcome Matilda Ståhl, who is a Doctoral student in Educational Sciences at Åbo Akademi, University in Finland. Matilda delivered a talk entitled, ‘Exploring Visual Communication and Competencies through Interaction with Images in Social Media’.

Dr Lisa Russell invited Matilda Ståhl to share her research here at Huddersfield after Matilda had been in touch with her about a recent paper on participatory visual methods. See: Barley, R., & Russell, L. (2018). Participatory visual methods: exploring young people's identities, hopes and feelings.

Mobile phone usage in school

Matilda talked about being part of a larger study exploring how mobile phones are used in upper secondary schools in Finland where students are allowed to use mobile phones in the school setting. The project is called Textmöten and is a collaboration between the University of Helsinki and Åbo Akademi University that focuses on language and writing on mobile phones.

Find out more here and follow the project on twitter @Textmoten

Researchers used software to mirror the screens of the mobile phones so they could capture what the students were using their phones for. Students could turn the mirroring function on and off so they were in control of what was captured and researchers ensured consent from students for all the visual material captured.

HudCRES research seminar, Matilda Stahl, 26th March 2019

One attendee commented:

Interesting to hear about how the young people in the study were applying strategy to their social media interactions, maybe without being aware of doing so, and really made me think about my own interactions with social media, especially visual media like the photographs I like, comment on, or share, and why I choose to interact the way I do.

Visual communication analysis

Matilda’s doctoral research focuses on a student in upper secondary school and how they used their Tumblr and Instagram during their time in school. The research draws on Sarah Pink’s publications on visual ethnography and Roland Barthes’ Rhetoric of the Image, which aims to examine and understand the messages that images contain. Through analysis of the visual content and the student’s interaction with the images (sharing and liking), Matilda showed that the communication with followers could be said to be about indicating:

desire to be part of a group
desire to be different
desire to inspire change
desire to experience

Matilda also discussed how the student’s social media interactions demonstrated four competencies. ‘Visual competency’ to do with understanding colour and contrast, ‘technical competency’ in terms of editing links/code and reblogging, ‘knowledge of social norms’ in terms of the social implications of ‘liking’ posts and images and finally ‘knowledge of self’ exemplified by reflections on adding content that is a mix of what they like and what other people like.

Biography: Matilda Ståhl

Matilda is currently working on an ethnographic thesis by publication on visuality, learning and identity construction in virtual learning environments, such as social media and video games.

The presentation was based upon a paper that is accepted for publication within the Special Issue Smartphones in classrooms in Learning, Culture and Social Interaction. The paper is co-authored with Matilda’s supervisor, Dr Hannah Kaihovirta (University of Helsinki, Finland)

Together with Dr Fredrik Rusk (Nord University, Norway) Matilda intends to submit an ethnographic study on identity construction and co-construction in Counter Strike: Global Offensive for review later this year.

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