Social media as leisure culture

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to situate the everyday use of social media in the broader cultural practice of leisure. Whereas the use of social media has many different aims and contexts, our main idea is to emphasize how social media practices associated with leisure and playfulness rather than functionality and tasks — therefore seemingly “useless” in a strictly utilitarian sense — are practices which are meaningful. We point to certain dynamics in social media practices which we connect to the culture of twentieth century mass tourism, using observations of central touristic practices to motivate an analysis of social media use as leisure culture. This gives us a nuanced understanding of the activities connecting everyday life and social media. Further, our analysis provides new insights into the basic motivation for engaging in online sociality despite concerns about privacy, time-waste and exploitation.