Mass media digitization is an unfolding phenomenon, posing novel societal opportunities and challenges that researchers are beginning to note. We build on and extend MIS research on process digitization and digital versus traditional communication media to study how and to what extent social mediaÑone form of digital mass mediaÑare emancipatory (i.e., permitting wide-spread participation in public discourse and surfacing of diverse perspectives) versus hegemonic (i.e., contributing to ideological control by a few). While a pressing concern to activists and scholars, systematic study of this issue has been elusive, owing partially to the complexity of the emancipation and hegemony concepts. Using a case study approach, we iteratively engaged with data on the discourse surrounding the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and source literature to identify six facets of interpretive media packages (i.e., competing social constructions of an issue) as measurable constructs pertinent to emancipation and hegemony. These facets included three structural constraints (on authorship, citation, and influence) and three content restrictions (on frames, signatures, and emotion). We investigated propositions regarding effects of social versus traditional media and lean versus rich social media on these interpretive media package facets by comparing the SOPA discourse across two lean traditional and social media (newspapers and Twitter) and two rich traditional and social media (television and YouTube). Our findings paradoxically revealed social media to be emancipatory with regard to structural constraints, but hegemonic with regard to an important content restriction (i.e., frames). Lean social media mitigated structural advantages and exacerbated content problems. These findings suggest that, as with traditional media, some inevitable evils accompany the societal benefits of social media and that mass media is having a detrimental effect on public discourse. We offer practical steps by which private and public institutions may counter this effect, theoretical implications for wider consideration of the six interpretive media package facets proposed here, and encouragement to MIS researchers to increase their efforts to compare different digitized processes so that a more comprehensive theory of the effects of different forms of digitized processes can be developed.
Organizing vision theory is an institutional alternative to the economic-rationality view of IT innovation diffusion. Institutional theorists have called for more attention to cognitive processes and structures in order to understand institutional mechanisms. Our objective was to unpack the cognitive structure of an organizing vision to understand its role in the diffusion of IT innovations. We focus on the know-why component of organizing visions and on social media as an IT innovation. In a two-stage study, Stage I leveraged schema theory, the Òorders of worthÓ framework's six justificatory principles, and relational class analysis to discover the hierarchical structure of the social media organizing vision. This resulted in a view of the organizing vision as comprised of four schemas, which we conceptualized as visions-in-use, and ten nested business use cases, each comprised of different combinations of the six principles. Based on this understanding, Stage II explored how community appropriations of visions-in-use and business use cases from the repertoire provided by an organizing vision shape four facets of an organizing visionÑcoherence, continuity, clarity, and diversityÑand how these facets influence diffusion of the IT innovation. We found that the two vision facets we surfacedÑ clarity and diversityÑare essential to understanding diffusion and how and why coherence and continuity matter to diffusion. Much as the ÒvisionÓ of a musical jam session emerges from players' multivocal performances, an organizing vision emerges from community members' multivocal discourse about an IT innovation. Just as a jam session depends on a structure of rules and individual player creativity, diffusion of an IT innovation depends on an organizing vision that offers prospective adopters a well-defined repertoire of moves to choose from, yet affords them the freedom to improvise.