Den digitala tidsålderns Hermes: Sociala medierplattformar och dess inverkan på reflexiv kontroll

Sammanfattning: This thesis has examined how reflexive messages can be influenced by embedded functions on social media platforms. The purpose of the study has been to understand if, and how social media platforms can facilitate various kinds of reflexive control through their embedded functions. The study was conducted through comparing two social media platforms, Facebook and TikTok using a constructed framework based on reflexive control theory. The results of the study found that while the feedback-loop for Facebook is partly influenced by the user’s friendship-network, with an analogue representation, TikTok’s newsfeed are based solely on the users own feedback-loop. Most importantly, the study found that social media platforms can influence a message to perform both cognitive and informatic reflexive control. The result is a first step on understanding social media, not only as one broad concept, but their differences in embedded functions, thus influencing messages in diverse ways for practicing reflexive control.