Temporality in Social Media Events and Multiples Layers of Accountability

This paper focuses on social media accountability exploring the importance of temporality, in terms of frequency and temporal orientation, in influencing multiple layers of accountability. Relying on the empirical case of the National Museum in Brazil, which changed the social media approach to recover its image in front of stakeholders after a fire accident in 2018, the paper explores temporality (i.e. frequency and temporal orientation) in the digital relationship on social media with multiple forums. Results show the existence of two main layers of accountability operating simultaneously: a dyadic layer between the Museum and each stakeholder that took place outside social media and a dialogic layer between the museums and multiple stakeholders that occurred on social media. The top down, framed, linear, and recursive dyadic accountability evolved into an emergent and ephemeral social media accountability with different temporal dynamics. We didn't observe organizational attempts to integrate them, social media (dialogic layer) is managed by communication staff, and each accountability tie (with Court of Accounts, project funders, University, etc) in the dyadic layer is manage by the accounting staff. Implications are discussed.