Harvey Sacks, membership categorization and social media

During the course of this chapter, I reflect on Sacks’s ideas concerning membership categories and categorization in terms of social media practices and interaction. The chapter argues that his ideas surrounding membership categorization and their development by key ethnomethodologists provide a live apparatus that generates insight into routine practices associated with the everyday use, practical experience and navigation of prominent social media platforms such as Twitter. The chapter considers some of these through a number of illustrative empirical examples and reflects on how social media culture-in-action represents an increasingly important site for ethno-inquiries that have a focus on membership categorization analysis in digitally networked times.