| Document
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Author Catherine Primrose and Matthew C. Davis |
| Abstract We present a sociotechnical analysis of the 2017 Fyre Festival. The Fyre Festival was marketed as a luxury festival in the Bahamas, promoted heavily through social media, attracting over 4000 attendees. The event was cancelled one day into its inaugural weekend amid chaos and acrimony, resulting in million-dollar losses for the organisers and subsequent law suits. We demonstrate the utility that social media presents for researchers undertaking sociotechnical analysis of business events and failures. Our sociotechnical analysis utilised archival materials, corporate websites, leaked internal documents and documentary accounts. These materials were supplemented with expert interviews with independent event organisers. Relevant twitter posts shared during the Fyre Festival were integrated into the analysis. 58467 tweets were collected in total. We discuss our key findings, drawing out sociotechnical factors and interdependencies that contributed to the failure. We reflect on the methodological challenges and opportunities of working with social media data, considering how this may be integrated within sociotechnical frameworks. We supplement our own interpretation with interviews with experts in the use of social media within social science research. We conclude by discussing the potential to apply sociotechnical frameworks to diverse business events, situations and problems. |
