Context in Social Media Question Asking: A Practice Approach

Recent works have highlighted the complementary advantages and disadvantages of web search and social media question asking (SMQA), and there has been a growing interest in merging these two. To make this idea a success, understanding the context of questions in social media is a prime concern. Yet existing works give us a hint that the positivist approach towards the context of questions is not sufficient in achieving this, and we need to revisit the concept of context regarding SMQA. In this paper, we took a practice based lens [1] to examine existing works along with real-life data of queries in a popular social network to see if it explains the broader contextual factors and associated values. Our data highlighted the importance of understanding the complex social relationship that people make within the structure of social networks, and suggest design strategies to support this through iteratively progressing from phenomenological to representational view of practice.