Fragmented Digital Infrastructures - The Case of Social (News) Media

Digitization and contemporary use of social media platforms is changing how we perceive and use IT, both in organizations and as citizens or consumers. These developments have also transformed and changed many industries, bringing both opportunities and challenges. One industry that was affected by digitization relatively early is the media industry, leading to studies on online journalism, gatekeeping, reader interaction and other changing practices enabled by IT. This study attempts to highlight the IT infrastructure behind the changing practice to understand the relationship between the IT and the use. Through an online ethnography, this paper investigates the use of social media platforms in the newspaper industry. The findings indicate that newspapers either use an integration strategy, where they relinquish control over the feature to the social media platform, or an appropriation strategy where they take the integration a step further, to have the social media platform work for them.