bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
VIRAL MUSICKING: AESTHETICS AND ITERATIONS IN ONLINE CONTAGION
Authors: Harper Paula Clare
Published: October 2020

Cats at keyboards. Dancing hamsters. A photo of a dress, and videos set to “Harlem Shake.”  The above are recognizable as “viral” phenomena—artifacts of the early twenty-first century whose production and dissemination were facilitated by the internet, proliferating social media platforms, and ubiquitous digital devices. In this paper, I argue that participation in such phenomena (producing, consuming, circulating, or “sharing” them) constitutes a significant site of twenty-first-century musical practice: viral musicking, to borrow and adapt Christopher Small’s foundational 1998 coinage. In this paper I analyze instances of viral musicking from the 2000s through the 2010s, tracking viral circulation as heterogeneous, capacious, and contradictory—a dynamic, relational assemblage of both “new” and “old” media and practices. The notion of virus as a metaphor for cultural spread is often credited to computer science and science fiction, with subsequent co-option into marketing and media; such formulations run adjacent to the popularization of "virus" in philosophical models for globalization and pervasive capitalism across the late twentieth century, from Derrida to Baudrillard and Deleuze. In this paper, I seek to braid these lineages with the work of scholars reading cultural contagion through lenses of alterity and difference, situating music as a particularly felicitous vector for viral contagion, exceeding and preceding Internet circulation. Ultimately, I argue that viral musicking activates utopian promises of digital advocates, through the cooperative social operation of “sharing,” even as it resonates through histories and presents of racialization, miscegenation, appropriation, and the realities of porous, breachable borders, cultures, and bodies.
THE INTERNET IS A SERIES OF ANALOGIES: COMPARATIVE LANGUAGE AS POWER	IN ONLINE GOVERNANCE
Authors: Horne Chelsea , Sinnreich Aram
Published: October 2020

In 2006, Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens became a laughingstock and enduring meme for arguing during legislative deliberations that the Internet could be understood as "a series of tubes" and “not a big truck" (Belson 2006). The unintended humor of his analogies was ridiculed as evidence that this older lawmaker was too out of touch with modern communications technology to effectively govern them. Yet the episode itself can be understood as evidence of a larger truth—one that both exculpates Stevens somewhat and underlines a broader challenge for internet governance: Namely, that nearly all internet laws and regulations necessarily rely on imperfect metaphor and analogy to keep them in accordance with pre-digital law and constitutional principles, and that even lawmakers and judges with considerable expertise in the field must also rely upon such figurative language. Furthermore, because rhetorical comparisons are fundamentally interpretive, rather than indexical reflections of the things they describe, their use in internet governance amplifies the risk that the prevailing laws and regulations will benefit some users over others, and some uses over others. The internet, in other words, is like a series of analogies. In this article, we catalog many of these analogies and metaphors, document their use in internet governance and policy, and critically investigate how the choice of comparative rhetoric to render the internet knowable introduces hidden bias into the governance process, benefiting some stakeholders over others.
DISABILITY AND MENTAL HEALTH AS A PROFESSIONAL LIVE STREAMER
Authors: Johnson Mark Richard
Published: October 2020

In this paper I explore economic and inclusion opportunities for people with disabilities and mental health issues afforded by ‘live streaming’ ‒ the live broadcast of one’s activities over the internet to a globally dispersed audience. In both 2016 and 2017, the leading live streaming platform Twitch.tv broadcast over 500,000 years of video, which were produced by over two million regular broadcasters (‘streamers’), and consumed by an audience of several hundred million viewers. Streamers can profit, up to and including a full-time living ‘wage’ for those at the highest levels. Numerous successful streamers with chronic health issues have discussed the personal and professional benefits streaming brings them. Utilising data from a research project with 100 interviews, alongside approximately 500 hours of ethnographic observation, this paper examines the experiences of live streaming for broadcasters with disabilities, mental health issues, or physical health issues. Firstly, I explore the positive elements of streaming for these broadcasters, focusing on the many conditions represented in this demographic, and the benefits streaming gives for inclusion and community. Secondly, I consider the negative experiences of these streamers, focused on entanglements of health and technology that make their streaming lives potentially more challenging than their colleagues. Thirdly, I focus on the economic opportunities, and the potential for entrepreneurial activity, the platform affords. I conclude the analysis by exploring how these aspects make live streaming a potentially exemplary emancipatory and entrepreneurial space for these individuals, but not one without challenges.
WHO REMAINS OFFLINE AND WHY? THE EVOLUTION OF INDIVIDUAL FACTORS	INFLUENCING INTERNET NON-USE FROM 2011 TO 2019 IN A HIGHLY DIGITISED SOCIETY
Authors: Kappeler Kiran , Festic Noemi , Latzer Michael
Published: October 2020

Switzerland is one of the countries with the highest internet penetration rates worldwide. Nevertheless, 600,000 people or 8% of the population remain offline. Being digitally excluded is problematic as internet use yields many advantages in everyday life. Obtaining real-time traffic information, applying for jobs, buying things or being an informed citizen increasingly requires internet use. Offline alternatives are often inferior, more expensive or non-existent. In countries where internet adoption is almost universal, the disadvantages of not being online are likely to increase and become even more detrimental to life chances. The choice of appropriate public policies to bridge digital divides, i.e., gaps between internet users and non-users, requires the empirical assessment of internet non-use in highly digitised societies. Therefore, this article investigates how digital divides have evolved from 2011 to 2019. Based on survey data representative of the Swiss population, binary logistic regressions show that structural inequalities significantly influence digital divides: lower income and educational level consistently predicted internet non-use and the age gap between users and non-users increased. Gender did not significantly affect non-use. The main self-reported reason for not using the internet was a perceived lack of usefulness. Proxy internet use, i.e., asking someone to do something online, significantly correlated with an increased intention to use the internet. Thus, an increased interest in the internet as well as indirect exposure to it are key enabling factors for internet use. These representative, long-term results form an input for more evidence-based public policies to mitigate the risks of digital exclusion.
RENAME AND RESIST COLONIAL EXTRACTION: TWITTER’S TOPONYMIC	POLITICS
Authors: Karsgaard Carrie , Hockenhull Michael , MacDonald Maggie
Published: October 2020

In Canada, known to Indigenous peoples as Turtle Island, the proposed Trans Mountain pipeline would more than double transport of bitumen from Alberta’s oil sands, and though national legitimation of the project is strong, it relies on economic discourse that overwrites environmental concerns, as well as Canada’s lack of consultation with Indigenous peoples. Rejecting settler-colonial authority, pipeline protestors have turned to on-the-ground tactics including petitions and demonstrations - and also to social media, where they share information, organize, and express resistance. On Twitter, user profiles are associated with a diversity of locations including places like Vancouver and Ottawa, recognized under “official,” colonial names. Twitter’s free-form location field, however, enables users to self-select their locations, and connect with one another by situating themselves according to anti-colonial or Indigenous place names, such as “Secwepemcul’ecw” and “Unceded Syilx Territory.” Considering the colonial nature of resource extraction in Canada (Preston, 2017), our project addresses: in what ways does anti-pipeline sentiment correlate with anti-colonial or Indigenous-affiliated toponymic identifiers on Twitter? Applying digital methods, we found empirically that these locations map onto the hashtag discursive space consistently with the issue alignment of discourses, suggesting that users on Twitter do indeed engage in toponymic politics (Rogers, 2015). As a space of resistance and expression of marginalized perspectives, Twitter’s free-form user location enables political expression in ways that unavailable on platforms insisting on geolocation or geotagging. By design, Twitter enables users to establish geographies of trust beyond colonial hegemony as users identify according to Indigenous place names.
SOCIAL MEDIA INSECURITIES IN EVERYDAY LIFE AMONG YOUNG ADULTS – AN	ETHNOGRAPHY OF ANONYMOUS JODEL DISCLOSURES
Authors: Larsen Malene Charlotte
Published: October 2020

This paper analyzes what makes young adults feel insecure when they use social media in everyday life as a means to socialize and connect with peers. The analysis is based on a two-year online ethnography (Hine, 2015) conducted on Jodel, an anonymous location based social media app popular among young adults across Europe. The paper focuses on Jodel users’ anonymous disclosures about their social media related insecurities – shedding light on discourses related to social media practices that are often hidden or neglected in interview studies. The analysis finds that it is often the affordances of the social media platforms (Bucher & Helmond, 2018) or changes in the design of apps such as Snapchat, Instagram or Tinder that lead to feelings of insecurity or uncertainty in relational maintenance or in the forming of new relationships. Thus, the codes of everyday actions become unclear and different expectations as to the affordances of social media platforms result in diffuse interaction orders (Goffman, 1983) in various situations. Put in other words: Because of the platforms, young adults sometimes find it difficult to know why peers behave like they do online resulting in unfounded worries and feelings of insecurity.
IN THE RING AND ONLINE: RELATIONAL LABOR AND AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT IN	THE WWE
Authors: Lingel Jessa
Published: October 2020

Professional wrestling has long been of interest to cultural and media theorists (Barthes, 2015; Canella, 2016; Olson, 2018). Long before reality TV, the performativity and scripted drama of professional wrestling allowed theorists to unpack questions of fictionality and narrative authenticity. In the context of internet studies, professional wrestling raises additional questions: How do performers use social media to maintain relationships with fans? How do gender norms manifest in on-stage versus online performances of professional identity? In this extended abstract, I present key concepts and guiding research questions for an investigation of fan culture and gender norms. I then provide a brief overview of related work and describe my mixed-methods approach. As this research project is ongoing, I present preliminary findings and implications as a concluding section.
EXPLORING NETWORKED IDENTITY AND TRANSNATIONAL MOBILIZATION IN	UKRAINE’S EUROMAIDAN PROTEST
Authors: Lokot Tetyana , Boichak Olga
Published: October 2020

Social media are a prominent space for diasporic mobilization and activism, opening new avenues for studying transnational communities living outside of their countries of origin. This study uses a hybrid methodological approach to consider how Ukrainians living in the United States engaged with homeland politics during the 2013-2014 Euromaidan protest and how their use of social media intervened in their transnational protest politics. This study contributes to the broader scholarship on studying transnational mediated protest participation by examining a case of diasporic mobilization of the Ukrainian community in the United States. Triangulating semantic mapping data from online diasporic communities on Facebook with in-depth interviews, we show how diaspora members engaged in the protest despite distance and how their activity and tactical decisions were mediated by social networks. We specifically examine how diasporic personal networks and networked technologies enmesh into a set of hybrid networked practices, circumscribing how Ukrainian Americans interpret political engagement and how they strategically use the affordances of social media for protest participation.
“EXACTLY WHAT I NEEDED FOR A GOOD NIGHT’S REST”: TRANSACTIONAL TINGLES	AND ASMR AS EMERGING MEDIA GENRE
Authors: Maddox Jessica
Published: October 2020

ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, has become an international phenomenon. But what exactly ASMR is remains misunderstood. ASMR itself is a relatively new term, coined by scientists in 2010, but it describes an age-old feeling: the sensation of tingling on the scalp and spine. Biologically, it has been compared to fission or paresthesia. ASMRtists refer to this feeling as tingles. To this end, this research is informed by the results of a three-year long participant observation and ethnographic study in YouTube’s ASMR community in order to analyze ASMR as an emerging media genre. I argue ASMR is best understood as a genre, situated between the varying content possibilities of the text and the specific affordances of YouTube. By analyzing the relationship between platform governance, algorithms, monetization, care, and creativity, I identify a key component of the ASMR genre as transactional tingles. I define transactional tingles as the interaction between ASMRtist and viewer, in which the viewer receives a form of relaxation in exchange for clicks, likes, and views in the internet’s attention economy. , ASMR and transactional tingles have more in common with the artist/patron system of the Renaissance era or the Kickstarter campaigns of the twenty-first century, in which entertainers draw on their audiences for financial support. The culmination of my ethnography was the announcement of the ASMR app, Zees, which shows how creators harness the affordances of participatory culture to push the boundaries of genres while maintaining committed to the key principles for creator and viewer.
ECHOLOCATING THE DIGITAL SELF: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
Authors: Markham Annette N
Published: October 2020

This paper explores echolocation as a conceptual framework to extend our understanding of digital sociality. Echolocation is a process whereby the characteristics of an echo build a map of location and relation. Most often we think of how bats, whales, and dolphins echolocate to navigate. If we think of radar, sonar, or lidar, we might think of submarines, autonomous vehicles, or even geolocation on our mobile devices. In this paper, I discuss echolocation as a symbolic interaction framework for describing how the Self is negotiated and identified in and as a part of social space. It focuses attention on the character and function of pings, push notifications, red dots on device screens, and other responses in ongoing interactions between people in social media or between humans and nonhuman or more than human elements of media ecologies. The interpretive qualitative analysis is part of a six year ethnographic study of youth. The analysis of echolocation emerges from a subset of the larger study, those who feel anxiety and even existential vulnerability when disconnected. Based on this qualitative analysis of narratives, the paper builds and extends echolocation as a theory of digital sociality that pays close attention to the response versus the performance in the interaction model.
COUNTERING THE COUNTERPUBLIC? THE GERMAN #METOO NETWORK ON	TWITTER
Authors: Martini Franziska
Published: October 2020

Certain varieties of feminism have become more popular, and so have anti-feminist reactions to it with both sides competing for visibility. However, the (gendered) interplay between feminist and anti-feminist counterpublics is still uncharted. At the same time, research in the field of feminist media studies is beginning to address questions of power inequalities $2 feminist publics on social media platforms. This study sheds light on the networked structure of the German-language #MeToo protest on Twitter in order to reveal who succeeded in becoming visible and influential in this digital protest and in order to show differences in networking practices among those involved. Analyzing the Twitter interaction network around #MeToo over a period of three month, we find that – as expected – this network consists of some highly connected hubs and a majority of nodes with only few connections. The most central nodes, only 1.1 percent of the Twitter users involved, account for 35 percent of interactions within the network. Applying qualitative and quantitative content analyses, this study shows that Twitter accounts of traditional news media play a central role in the #MeToo network from the very beginning, indicating that protest networks are less equal and horizontal than often assumed. At the same time, k-core decomposition reveals that most Twitter users in the network’s core published mostly racist and anti-feminist content, indicating that few but very loud and well-connected voices used the #MeToo protest to strategically mobilize against migration in Germany and Austria.
LIVING WITH ROBOTS: AN ONTOLOGICAL LEAP?
Authors: Mays Kate K. , Lei Yiming , Katz James E.
Published: October 2020

Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics applications have proliferated primarily in the industrial sphere, and social scientific studies emphasized robots’ functionality and appropriateness for certain roles, especially those related to work and most particularly to robots replacing humans’ jobs. Notably, robot studies are often premised on negative prognostications, emphasizing how robots threaten livelihoods and are disruptive. As AI and robot technologies advance, however, more positive possibilities arise for robots’ social integration. However, there is an ontological divide between humans and machines that will likely influence people’s responses to and interactions with these emerging technologies. People may logically know and intend to treat robots as mere technological tools, but reflexively respond to them socially. This study explores these possible dynamics and examines how people perceive robots as social and human-like entities. A qualitative analysis of open-ended comments (N=591) collected through a survey on robot perceptions was conducted. Five main themes about social life with robots were revealed: robot as tool/machine (32.5% of comments), human-robot relationships (26.9%), social adjustment (19.0%), robot rights (10.7%), and robots’ aliveness/appearance (10.0%). The findings show that human-robot ontology is an important consideration for robots’ social acceptance and integration. AI-supported robotic technology presents great promise; however, its advancement challenges the ontological divide that has implications not only for human-machine interaction but also for self-identity and ultimately human-human relations. In terms of suggestions, these dynamics should be explored in tandem with ways to improve human-machine communication and considered from usability and design standpoints.
CAREFUL ATTUNEMENTS: THE CHOREOGRAPHING OF CARE THROUGH SMARTPHONE	PRACTICES DURING, AND AFTER, CRISIS
Authors: McGrane Caitlin , Hjorth Larissa
Published: October 2020

In this paper we explore how smartphone users in Victoria (Australia) used mobile and non-mobile media to find and manage information, emotions and networks during the 2019-2020 Australian summer bushfire crisis. Through arts-based methods that deployed drawing, critical reflection and group discussion, we sought to use techniques that elicit the emotional responses and motivations of our participants in and after the crisis. We draw on the concept of affective witnessing (Papailias, 2016; Richardson and Schankweiler, 2019) as a process whereby the boundaries between mourner and witness blur through the affective intensity of mobile media. We contextualise affective witnessing in terms of feminist materialism of care practices (Pols, 2012; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011; Lupton and Hjorth, forthcoming) to focus on the importance of taking seriously care—care at a distance of family and friends, self-care and care of intimate digital publics.
HUMOR WITHOUT BOUNDARIES? A TYPOLOGY OF GLOBALLY SPREAD HUMOR ON	TWITTER
Authors: Nissenbaum Asaf , Freud David , Shifman Limor
Published: October 2020

Our study examines user-generated global humor through an analysis of comic items spread on Twitter. By addressing the inherent conflict between the locality of humor and the globalizing digital participatory sphere, we aim to uncover the features of global user-generated humor. A long-term sample of humor keywords in multiple languages was used to locate 734 items reaching global audiences, which were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively (a subset of 143). We found that such items focused on “the universal,” rather than a multicultural exchange. Additionally, the texts were characterized by five types of comic failures, each accompanied by some form of redemption: $2 – slapstick acts featuring shortcomings in basic human behavior but accompanied by daring attitudes; $2 , displaying “backstage” unattractive behavior but enjoying an aura of authenticity; $2 – lacking popularity or charisma but inviting sympathy; $2 – misinterpreting the world and your place in it but compensating through basic human communicability; and $2 – using nonsense humor that is nevertheless appreciated through communal understanding. Our findings chart the meaning of human failure in the digital age as a balancing act: while individuals fail in fundamental aspects of life, shared laughter through social media offers collective ways for overcoming their failures. This dynamic exists in a liminal space, seeming to existing both everywhere and nowhere. By building on globally recognizable content and situations, global humor evokes empathy or identification from broad crowds without committing to specific identities.
GOING IN A DIFFERENT DIRECTION: CRITICAL ARTS-BASED APPROACHES TO	GOOGLE MAPS
Authors: Noone Rebecca
Published: October 2020

These days, wayfinding is often associated with ‘asking’ Google Maps for directions. Over one billion people per month use Google Maps and Google estimates that one-in-three mobile searches is location-related. Whose routes does Google Maps direct one towards and what types of pathways become naturalized? I approached these questions through performance- and drawing-based research. In the early 1960s, artist Stanley Brouwn stood on a street corner in Amsterdam and asked people for directions with pen and paper in hand. Over the course of the project, Brouwn amassed a collection of hand drawn maps. Now, in contemporary conditions of geomedia, I reactivated Brouwn’s work as an exploratory research project in Toronto, New York City, London, and Amsterdam. I also collected drawings and notes, spontaneously produced in situ, which I analyzed in relation to the location-awareness and real-time feedback of digital mapping technologies. The encounters produced notes and drawings that point to the information literacies used in street-level wayfinding and situate these in relation to the mobilities and spatial perceptions prioritised by Google Maps’ interface and affordances. The paper presents a theoretical framework to assess the types of calibrations at play when proprietary mapping platforms broker spatial information. The paper uses alternative research methods to explore how Google Maps is more than a guide but an orientation towards a Google spatial imaginary while at the same time complicated by the ad hoc layering of other wayfinding strategies.
CYBERLIBERTARIANISM IN THE MID-1990S
Authors: Pace Jonathan
Published: October 2020

This paper analyzes libertarian internet discourse in the mid-1990s, focusing on the events surrounding the passage of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which criminalized obscene and indecent content on the internet. During this episode, hackers, early adopters, computer professionals, technology lobbyists, and civil society advocates embraced a libertarian way of thinking about the internet and the state — a way of thinking I refer to as cyberlibertarianism. These groups had long-standing libertarian dispositions, although their anti-statism ranged from a left-libertarianism, concerned with concentrations of power in the state and in the market, to a civil-libertarianism, concerned with the integrity of constitutional protections, to a right-libertarianism, concerned with laissez-faire market conditions. In responding to the events of the decade, and following from their established dispositions, these groups converged on a libertarian narrative about the internet and the state. According this narrative, the state was overbearing, intrusive, compromised, and uninformed — and therefore a threat to the internet as a sphere of freedom, individualism, competition, and innovation. This libertarian narrative structured their arguments against specific acts of state intervention. In the case of the Communications Decency Act, they argued that the regulatory measure undermined the promise of the internet as a venue of free speech, an object of the free market, and a conduit for the free flow of information.
ONE OF THESE THINGS_IS_LIKE THE OTHERS: WHAT BIG TECH PLATFORMS CAN	LEARN FROM LIBRARIES, BOOKSTORES, AND SUPERMARKETS
Authors: Petre Caitlin , Weber Nicole
Published: October 2020

Large technology platforms are facing mounting public pressure to be more transparent and proactive about their approach to content moderation. Existing research on platform governance often focuses on the ways in which the platforms are unprecedented (e.g., their size, scale, and use of algorithmic systems to sort and filter information), and thus contend with unique challenges as they attempt to manage their outsize role in shaping the contemporary public sphere. However, their distinctive features notwithstanding, platforms are currently grappling with questions that have long been fundamental to democracies with heavily marketized media systems. How can information intermediaries best operate in the public interest? Can for-profit platforms reconcile their private interests with the public good? Through what kinds of organizational infrastructures and shared value systems might this reconciliation be accomplished? Using a comparative case study approach, this paper addresses these questions by examining institutions that have historically inhabited a structural position in the public information landscape that is similar to large technology platforms. Specifically, we look at how bookstores, libraries, and supermarkets decide what to stock on their shelves and magazine racks, and how they respond when controversies arise. The study maps several considerations each of these intermediaries have faced in order to develop a typology of approaches to information curation and moderation. By examining a variety of oft-overlooked approaches to information curation and outlining their respective benefits and drawbacks, we hope to contribute a historical and conceptual perspective to scholarly and industry conversations about platform governance.
THE TURN TO TRADE AGREEMENTS IN GLOBAL PLATFORM GOVERNANCE
Authors: Pohle Julia , Gorwa Robert , Miller Hailey
Published: October 2020

In the past few years, a growing number of proposals have been developed to govern major platforms for user-generated content through formalized legislation as well as voluntary self-regulatory initiatives. This paper focusses on the increasingly significant use of trade agreements for the governance of these platforms. While trade agreements have been analysed by academics working on internet governance, copyright, and other issues, they still have underexplored implications for national governments that are trying to craft regulation designed to address a host of perceived democratic externalities posed by dominant technology firms and platform providers like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. Presenting the first results of an interdisciplinary project bringing together digital communication scholars, internet governance researchers, and international relations academics to look at the nexus of digital governance and international trade, the paper seeks to understand how different political actors are using trade agreements to ‘lock in’ their preferences on platform governance topics like intermediary liability and competition policy. Building on the analysis of major bilateral and multilateral trade agreements, as well as leaked documents from ongoing negotiations, the paper provides a mapping of the issues related to platform governance included in these instruments. Using this dataset, it then analyses the respective positions of various countries on relevant issues in the negotiations, seeking to create a typology of key issues that will provide a starting point for a deeper analysis of key actor strategies.
FROM DEVELOPMENT TO DEPLOYMENT: FOR A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH TO ETHICS	OF AI AND LABOUR
Authors: Posada Julian
Published: October 2020

In recent years, government and policy organizations, private companies, and research agencies have been discussing the potential disruption caused by the deployment of AI systems in working environments. This paper traces contemporary discourse on the relationship between artificial intelligence and labour and discusses how these principles must be comprehensive in their approach to labour and AI. First, the paper asserts that ethical frameworks in AI alone are not enough to guarantee the rights of workers since they lack enforcement mechanisms and the participation of worker organizations. Secondly, it argues that current discussions on AI and labour focus on the deployment of these technologies in the workplace but ignore the essential role of human labour in their development, particularly in the different cases of outsourced labour around the world. Finally, the paper recommends the use of already existing human rights frameworks on working conditions – notably the International Labour Organization conventions on the right of collective bargaining, the abolition of discrimination at work, and the right to equal remuneration – as a basis for a more comprehensive ethical framework on AI labour. It concludes by arguing that the central question regarding the future of work will not be whether intelligent machines will replace humans, but who will own and have a say on the systems that will ultimately work alongside humans.
IT'S REWIND TIME, EVERYBODY: THE CONTESTATION OF PLATFORM CULTURE IN	YOUTUBE'S YEARLY REVIEW
Authors: Reynolds CJ
Published: October 2020

YouTube Rewind, especially its controversial 2018 and 2019 offerings, surfaces contested and contradictory understandings of what YouTube culture is and who gets to speak for the platform. Adopting and morphing the idea of media events established by Dayan and Katz, I argue that Rewinds serve as $2 . Rewinds are moments of coming together around shared rituals, anthems, and cultural leaders. The violation of the formula for this ceremonial event in 2018 upset audiences and generated a mass, organized, and negative response. By tracing the flows of content creation, including the corporate-produced Rewind videos and critical response and reaction videos from YouTube creators, this project identifies competing visions and structuring tensions of platform culture. Focusing on the question of cultural development on YouTube via the social media event of Rewind videos forefronts the larger question of how researchers can talk about online culture on a globalized scale. From viewer-driven virality, to the establishment of microcelebrities, to the role of international cultural leaders on the platform, understandings of what it means to be a YouTuber emerge from more sectors than ever before. Is a singular Rewind possible for a platform that now encompasses over 100 countries and 80 languages? If corporate visions of what YouTube is and should be no longer generate popular excitement and backing, who then gets to speak for the platform? Focusing on YouTube’s premiere cultural event offers a starting point for understanding what YouTube $2 to those who structure their lives on and around the platform.
QUEERING THE MAP: PHYSICAL TRACES AND DIGITAL PLACES OF QUEER	LIVES
Authors: Robards Brady , Watson Ashleigh , Kirby Emma , Churchill Brendan , LaRochelle Lucas
Published: October 2020

QueeringTheMap.com, launched in late 2017 by designer Lucas LaRochelle, is a ‘community-generated mapping project that geo-locates queer moments, memories and histories in relation to physical space’. In a Google Maps-style interface, users can locate pins anchored to physical locations. Attached to each pin is a story. Collectively, there are tens of thousands of stories about being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming: coming out stories, stories of first kisses, sexual encounters, break-ups, pride marches, assaults, traumas, and realisations. These stories digitally layer physical spaces with anonymous individual and collective stories; they locate queer life and they queer the map. In this project we seek to document these experiences, improve understandings of community archiving and digital storytelling practices, and expose the potential for reconfiguring forms of resistance and solidarity through new platforms for collectivity and community-making. In this paper, we consider how these narratives may be understood at scale to provide insights into the digital architecture of queer lives. We focus our analysis on the 1,941 posts pinned to Australia, to consider how QTM reaffirms contemporary understandings of the physical-digital continuum and queers how we conceive of traces and places in this context.
SELF-TRACKING ‘FEMTECH’: COMMODIFYING & DISCIPLINING THE FERTILE	FEMALE BODY
Authors: Roetman Sara
Published: October 2020

This paper engages with feminist political economists to explore questions of affective labour and value-production in self-tracking technologies designed for the female body (‘femtech’). Self-tracking femtech is largely characterised by smartphone applications and smart devices that track user data relating to menstruation, fertility periods, sexual activity, ovulation, hormones, and health and wellbeing. This data can be collected through self-reporting or through automated transmission from sensory devices attached to the body. By reflecting on my own experiences with these technologies, this paper argues that users of self-tracking femtech perform the labour of reproducing our bodies and our affective relations in ways that are amenable to both capitalist and patriarchal structures of power. Situated within the broader shifts of care and social reproduction, self-tracking femtech can be understood as affective infrastructures that re-stabilise gender norms and continue to unevenly push the burden of reproduction onto a class of unpaid women. I explore the ways that affective experiences are shaped and modulated by self-trackers to (re)produce and discipline the fertile and sexual female body to be $2 a productive labouring body and heterosexually attractive feminine subjectivity. The labour of reproduction is further intertwined here with the labour of producing data for digital media industries that generates profit in the advertising marketplace. By examining co-constitutive and paradoxical forms of value at play, I dually situate self-tracking femtech within broader political struggles and locate the spaces of agency in our everyday entanglements with digital media technologies.
I AM THE VIRUS: DIGITAL STORYTELLING AND FICTIONAL TWITTER ACCOUNTS IN	THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS IN SPAIN
Authors: Roig Antoni , Martorell Sandra
Published: October 2020

The purpose of this work is to understand the role of digital storytelling as a conversation asset regarding social and health emergencies, specifically fictional parody characters in social media, as chroniclers of ongoing crises. We will focus on a strikingly popular phenomenon: the Twitter account @coronavid19, where the virus, presented as a fictional character, offers a humorous chronicle in almost real time through social media, from the early breaking news related to the presence of the virus in the country to the unfolding of an unprecedented social and health crisis. The account got more than 450,000 followers in its first week of existence, coinciding with the first confirmed Covid19 cases in mainland Spain (February 2020) and was widely covered by mainstream media. It currently has more than 860.000 followers, which is way higher than official health and governmental Twitter accounts. This paradigmatic case study has been chosen considering its impact from the early stages of the pandemic, but also its peculiarities as a fictional character and a privileged chronicler in the first person. Our case analysis is aimed to understand how fictional parody characters are built in discursive and extra-discursive terms, how they interact with followers and how narrative and character traits evolve along the crisis. We also want to observe whether they add nuances to social discussion, reframe news content (emphasizing or downplaying events) and serve as a tool to cope with hard times, fostering collective empowerment, mutual empathy, while stressing official recommendations using irony and mocking irrational behaviour.
#BABIESOFINSTAGRAM: THE DIGITALLY MEDIATED LIVES OF ‘ASPIRING’ BABY	MODELS AND BRAND REPS
Authors: Ruiz-Gomez Alexandra , Gavilan Diana , Avello Maria
Published: October 2020

This paper is part of an on-going study of baby accounts created by ordinary parents to reach audiences outside friends and families. More specifically, the aim is to provide insights on the growing phenomenon of commercial forms of sharenting where parents seek money–making opportunities through the lives and images of children. A qualitative exploratory approach is used to shed light on the practices used by parents to try to garner the attention of brands on Instagram. Content analysis is carried out of 308 posts and the baby accounts behind these posts. Findings reveal that accounts in our sample are predominantly used to seek financial opportunities in the fashion industry. This is observed in the post images where brands are tagged and children appear in carefully staged poses that emphasize the baby’s looks and the clothes worn. The choice of hashtags added to the posts suggest a willingness to participate in baby model contests and brand representation searches. The commercial motivations of these accounts is also evident in the profile description, where parents indicate that the child is ‘an aspiring baby model’ or that the account is open to brand collaborations. This investigation extends emerging research on the growing presence of children on digital spaces when profit is involved. We discuss privacy issues surrounding the intensely mediated lives of children who are commodified to obtain rewards such as brand partnerships and free or discounted products or services.
SUBVERSIVE IMAGINATION AND POSSIBILITIES OF CRITICAL AGENCY IN THE	LANDSCAPES OF CODE?
Authors: Saariketo Minna
Published: October 2020

This paper reflects the intertwinements of ‘agency’, ‘infrastructuration’, and ‘imagination’ in our increasingly networked technological everyday life. The focus of the research, navigating at the interfaces of critical media studies, domestication theory, STS, and critical software studies, is on the ways in which imaginations on agency are constructed and stabilized. Likewise, attention is directed to how societal power structures are produced, reproduced, and possibly challenged in the processes of constructing imaginaries of agency. To study the above mentioned perspectives together, critical cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall’s famous encoding/decoding model is applied and updated in the contemporary media technological context (Hall, 1973; 1980). Hall’s concept of ‘maps of meaning’ is brought in dialogue with the concepts of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’ by Sheila Jasanoff and ‘social imaginaries’ by Charles Taylor. The multidisciplinary, multimethod, and multidata approach of the research sheds light on the diversity and complexity of imaginaries of agency in our times. Based on the results, it is suggested that there prevails an almost resigned sense of agency that many people share in relation to the conditions of their technologically mediated everyday life. Despite sporadic negotiations and dissonances, it seems that people have become accustomed to the idea that they have very little, if any, chances to influence the structures of their networked daily environments. It is suggested that future research should concentrate on making visible alternatives to modes of technology-related action as well as develop ways to challenge people to creatively (re)imagine the kind of technology they want to live with.
FROM USER GENERATED CONTENT TO A USER GENERATED AESTHETIC: INSTAGRAM,	BRANDS AND THE APPROPRIATION OF DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY
Authors: Simatzkin-Ohana Liron , Frosh Paul
Published: October 2020

Recent research has emphasized the increasing professionalization of ‘user-generated content’ for digital networks and social media. This paper highlights a contrary but parallel process: the aesthetic ‘vernacularization’ of brand images on social media and the adoption of recognizably ‘amateur’ styles by corporate brands. Analyzing the official Instagram accounts of 24 leading fashion brands between 2014-18, our research project identified eight distinctive patterns in the corporate adoption of vernacular photographic styles. In this paper we discuss the three most common patterns: (1) $2 : sharing and crediting users’ photographs on the brands’ official feed ;(2) $2 : posting the ‘amateur-looking’ photographs of a celebrity or model associated with the brand; (3) $2 : selfie-style images created by brands themselves where the brand appears to be the ‘self’ that performs its own representation. Following this analysis, we argue that user-generated content has become detached from its primary authorial configuration (being generated by non-professional users) and has solidified into a recognizable style, a ‘user-generated aesthetic’, available for brand appropriation. This detachment constitutes a form of ‘context collapse’ that is characteristic of social media in other respects, but here appears in visual form: as the collapse of contextual distinctions that enable viewers to infer authorial status, milieu and purposes from visual indicators. It further conforms to the expansion of branding practices beyond the purview of marketing, advertising and celebrity into all aspects of social life, and in particular to Instagram as a social media platform that enacts marketplace logics.
"THANKS AMAZON FOR SCARRING ME FOR LIFE": WORKER BREAKDOWN AND THE	DISRUPTION OF CARE AT AMAZON
Authors: Smith Brendan
Published: October 2020

Infamous for their highly exploitative, algorithmically-managed labour regimes, Amazon fulfillment centers are sites of continual breakdown and disrepair for the bodies and minds of its workers. From a methodological approach via workers’ inquiry and content analysis, this paper aims to theoretically frame the effects (and affects) resulting from Amazon’s strategy of augmented despotism, which engenders new forms of domination mediated and augmented by digital tools. Through a content analysis of online video confessionals detailing the physical and mental experiences of worker burnout and breakdown, this paper aims to bring the voices of (ex)-workers at Amazon to the forefront of understanding Amazon’s integrated architectures of labour management, surveillance, and control. The focus of this content analysis will be on the experiences of “broken” Amazon workers interacting with Amazon’s technological media apparatus of augmented despotism, with a special focus on the company's virtual health clinic: Amazon Care. As worker confessionals on YouTube attest, Amazon Care is as much an architecture of managerial surveillance, control, and discipline as it is of “care.” While other wearable and trackable technologies haunt the Amazon worker during their shift, Amazon Care extends the company’s technological power beyond the confines of the fulfillment center. Drawing from political and technological theories of labour and care, this paper will look into how Amazon workers navigate (and often escape) the affective and embodied confines of Amazon's augmented despotism.
AUTOMOBILE PLATFORM CAPITALISM: A VEHICULAR HISTORY OF THE DIGITAL	ECONOMY
Authors: Steinberg Marc
Published: October 2020

This presentation traces the relationship between Internet-based platform capitalism and Toyotist automobile manufacture. It argues that the auto industry and its managerial analysts play crucial roles in the development of platform theory and platform capitalism. While analyses of platform capitalism have tended to focus on the digital economy, this paper article highlights the continuities between digital platform capitalism and the manufacturing paradigms of the automobile industry, and the Toyota Production System as it developed in the 1960s in particular. This includes attention to the Japanese and American managerial theorizations of automobile manufacture that are the heartlands of platform capitalism. This genealogy impacts how we periodize the platform capitalism, and where we locate the emergence of platform theory. Ultimately it makes a case for thinking through the continuities of today’s digital platform capitalism and the commercial internet with what this talk will term automobile platform capitalism.
PERCEPTIONS OF ALGORITHMIC PROFILING ON FACEBOOK AND THEIR SOCIAL	IMPLICATIONS
Authors: Tamò Larrieux Aurelia , Fosch Villaronga Eduard , Velidi Shruthi , Viljoen Salome , Lutz Christoph , Büchi Moritz
Published: October 2020

With every digital interaction, individuals are increasingly subject to algorithmic profiling, understood as the systematic and purposeful recording and classification of data related to individuals. Large Internet firms, such as Facebook and Google/Alphabet, as well as third-party data brokers collect and combine detailed personal data to create sophisticated profiles for predictive purposes. Research has started to look into people’s perception and engagement of algorithms, showing that many users are unaware of the existence of algorithms, for example those which curate news feeds, and that a majority feels uncomfortable with algorithmic profiling on Facebook. In our research, we investigate perceptions of algorithmic profiling on Facebook by addressing the following questions: What user narratives of profiling on Facebook exist? What reactions do users have when confronted with Facebook’s inferred profiles? What are the social implications of user perceptions of profiling? Drawing on rich and recent survey data from 292 US-based Facebook users, we identified four overarching themes relating to Facebook's profiling activities: uncertainty, naiveté, realism, and fatalism. While the third theme is the most prevalent, Facebook is perceived as very powerful when it comes to algorithmic profiling. However, when confronted with their own profiles through the "My interests" and "My categories" sections in the Facebook Ad preferences menu, many users indicated surprise at how imprecise or even wrong some of the inferred interests and categories were. We discuss the social implications of our findings with regards social exclusion and social justice.