Social Media Mashups: The Ordering and Disordering Role of Social Media Technologies in Organizations

This study explores how mashups (disconnected and mutable interactions from multiple locales to merge into communicative events) and social media (SM) exhibit interdependent agency across technologies, spaces and times. This study draws on communication constitutes organization (CCO), affordances and ethnographic perspectives to investigate the hybrid use of multiple SM in two organizations. The contributions of the study are twofold: Firstly, the findings detect practices of cross-association (‘exporting’ data across platforms) and cross-integration (‘importing’ content across technologies) that are specific to hybrid SM use. Secondly, the findings indicate how the uses across, and communication through, SM enable forms of agency that could not or would not otherwise exist. This study advances organizational research by providing analytical insights concerning how SM introduce interconnected and hybrid forms of organizing in which multiple actors are tied together.