Mapping the transnational imaginary of social media genres

This article presents a transnational study of the classification and evaluation of
social media content. We conducted a large-scale survey (N = 4770) in five countries
(Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the United States) with open-ended questions
about the types of content people like and dislike. Through iterative and inductive
coding, we identified 29 topics, or broad areas of interest, and 213 recurrent genres,
or narrower categories that share elements of form and content. We compared the
results according to country, gender, age, and education level, identifying patterns
of cultural difference and commonality. While we found significant differences in the
prominence and preferentiality of content, these distictions were less pronounced for
disliked topics around which social media users tended to converge. Finally, we discuss
genre imaginaries as normative maps that reflect ideas about morality in general and the
purpose of social media in particular.