Critical Analysis of Blurring the Boundaries

In the article blurring the boundaries: New Social Media, New Social Science (NSMNSS), the author Blank builds a clear structure to explain an important idea about the advantages and disadvantages of social media data. But the expounding and analysis of this idea is neither logical enough nor solid enough to support the thesis of the whole article.

The thesis Blank claims in this article is that NSMNSS network has been facing the challenges of new social media (NSM); these challenges will affect two significant scientific researches, namely quantitative research and qualitative research. In the majority following parts of article, he describes these challenges as advantages and disadvantages of NSM.

The structure of this whole article is particularly clear although this article has only a little more than two pages. The article is divided in 5 parts with subtitles. The first one is “Advantages of social media data” and the second one is disadvantages of social media data”. Thus, readers can grasp this idea about strengths and weaknesses of social media data, even though readers just give a superficial glance at the article. Furthermore, between these two subtitles there is a paragraph as a connecting link between the preceding and the following. Another paragraph also comes at the end of the second subtitle as the summary of the contents under these two subtitles. It makes us much easier to know what Blank wants to show to readers.

Since the contents about merits and demerits of social media data under these two subtitles account for about 70% of whole article, readers can usually understand main idea more easily, if the structure of these contents is very clear. However, the description and analysis of advantages and disadvantages of social media data is not logical or strong enough to support the thesis of the whole article.

If seeing in details, there is a contradiction between some parts of analysis. When Blank writes about the advantages of social media data, he implied one of advantages is that no “biased respondent selection” exists because the collection of social media data is based on “an entire population of Tweets, email message or Wikipedia edits”. But when Blank analyzes the disadvantages of social media