bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
AFFECTIVE PUBLICS: “MAY GOD BLESS YOUTUBE”
Authors: Bagdogan Seyda
Published: April 2023

This paper is about Turkish women cooking on YouTube and how their digital labour is connected to the feminization of work in global aspect through affective publics next to hope labour and care delivery. Papacharissi (2015) explains affective publics as “publics that have been transformed by networked technologies to suggest both spaces for the interaction of people, technology, and practices and the imagined collective that evolves out of this interaction” (pp:125-126). Since offline and online activities are entwined in everyday life due to a great amount of interaction, the networked performance of self emerges along with digital steps an individual takes (Papacharissi, 2015: p.99). When a person makes a move online, (s)he performs towards an [imagined] audience that is shaped by her/his background and daily life. Because identity within presentation and narrative is performative and requires reflexivity in intra-publics as Papacharissi states (2010): “The sense of self-sustained is reflexively adjusted across platforms, publics, and taste cultures to enable optimal expression and connection. The management of this reflexivity, across spaces, publicly private and privately publicly, generates both tension and opportunity for the individual”. From the point of a networked self, gender and religion play a significant role since they are subtly embedded into manners and visibly marked in bodies, in particular, in Islam. While Muslim women blossom on social media as an influencer through consumer culture, they keep modest dressings and use their profile to be inspirational by supporting their acts on their faith base (Waltorp, 2015; Kavakci, & Kraeplin, 2017).
POPULISM IN CONTEXT. A CROSS-COUNTRY INVESTIGATION OF THE FACEBOOK USAGE OF POPULIST APPEALS DURING THE 2019 EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT ELECTIONS
Authors: Bene Márton , Magin Empowerment , Haßler Jörg , Russmann Uta , Lilleker Darren , Kruschinski Simon , Jackson Dan , Fenoll Vicente , Farkas Xénia , Baranowski Paweł , Balaban Delia
Published: April 2023

Recent scholarship demonstrated that Facebook is a convenient space for populist political communication as its unmediated and viral nature make populist appeals highly efficient in voters’ mobilization (Engesser et al., 2017). However, less attention has been paid to the way these populist messages appear on political actors’ communication, and what post- and page-level factors they are associated with. We investigate these questions in the context of the 2019 European Parliament (EP) election based on a unique cross-national dataset covering 12 European countries. In our research project we categorized more than 8,074 Facebook posts published on the main pages of 67 parties. Our findings show that the three dimensions of populist communication are used strategically different way and appear in different communication context. Anti-elitist messages are articulated in relation to economy, labor and social policy and immigration mostly by extreme parties. People-centrism is frequently used in relation to labor & social policy, and in European- and mobilization-focused posts all over the political landscape. Out-group messages appear in immigration-related posts and in far-right parties’ communication.
MAKING A MEDIA CAREER ON AND BEYOND YOUTUBE: DIVERSITY IN PROFESSIONAL IDENTITIES OF YOUTUBE CREATORS
Authors: Bidav Tugce
Published: April 2023

YouTube as part of a growing social media entertainment (SME) industry has taken various steps to professionalise, formalise and regulate the field of user-generated content and successfully integrated self-professionalised YouTube creators into an emerging creative workforce of SME. The industrialisation and professionalisation of YouTubing have created the assumption of a formalisation of professional identity as a YouTuber or a content creator in the SME industry. Contrary to this assumption, I argue that there is a divergence from fixed categories as it is not possible to fix permanently or define conclusively the professional identity as a YouTuber because conditions of content creator labour are precarious. In this paper, drawing upon qualitative data collected for my doctoral research, I investigate how creators who engage in self-governance as risk-bearing creative agents form their professional identities inside or outside YouTube careers and illuminate the diversity and ambivalence in their professional identities due to the precarious nature of their work. Despite being at different career stages and having a wide range of backgrounds, motivations, skills, and experiences, YouTube creators who participated in this project had something in common: They needed to be flexible in shifting between different professional identities and types of employment relations in order to make a media career on and beyond YouTube. This is because it is hard to imagine or maintain a single career path towards being a professional creator due to existing or future uncertainties.
SOCIAL MEDIA FEEDS AMID THE ELECTION EVERYDAY: DIGITAL BOUNDARIES AND DISRUPTION DURING THE 2020 U.S. ELECTION
Authors: Butkowski Chelsea Paige
Published: April 2023

Ongoing political events can reshape the topography of our social media feeds and platformed experiences, destabilizing everyday routines of digital media consumption. The 2020 U.S. presidential election extended this disruption far longer than typical U.S. elections due to extended mail-in ballot counting and political unrest. Within this distinctive political milestone, I study how “ordinary” citizens consume, witness, and feel through social media during an ongoing election. My research centers on social media feeds as sites of political media exposure, examining election media experiences as well as the practices participants use to navigate their feeds as ever-shifting, ephemeral digital environments. I move away from top-down approaches to studying the social media feed by using a “small data,” observational interviewing technique that I term feed analysis interviewing to conduct three interviews each with 21 participants over the course of the election. Ultimately, my preliminary results suggest that participants understand their feeds as spaces of contestation between election affect and their “everyday,” “real,” and “normal” media lives. They use a series of sociotechnical practices to navigate and enforce these imagined boundaries, going beyond political avoidance to differentiate realms of political experience. While introducing a new methodological approach to study political communication and the social media feed, this research also challenges scholars to consider how “ordinary” citizens define and negotiate junctures of politics and everyday life in digital spaces.
ARCHIVING THE INSURRECTION: THE CASE OF R/DATAHOARDER
Authors: Chapman Edward Miezio
Published: April 2023

On January 6th, 2021, right-wing demonstrators forcibly entered the United States Capitol building in an effort to disrupt the certification of the 2020 presidential election. Rioters documented their efforts on social media and live-streaming platforms, creating a digital footprint of their actions. In response, members of the r/DataHoarder subreddit initiated an ad-hoc archival project to collect, deduplicate, and preserve incriminating evidence from the Capitol insurrection. This research examines the r/DataHoarder insurrection archive through the lens of a collective and spontaneous archival project. I examine the methodology undertaken by the Redditors as well as their underlying values and motivations informing their data hoarding in response to the national event. I apply thematic coding as well as quantitative analysis to a dataset of 2,700 Reddit comments documenting the archival effort. I find that users were drawn to the archive project out of a desire to contribute to law enforcement efforts, enact punitive justice upon the rioters, engage in public discourse, and preserve information for posterity. Redditors who engaged with the project repeatedly tended to focus on technical and coordination tasks while single-time participants offered encouragement and identified sources for archiving. Calls to reveal personal information about rioters or to target their places of employment were often ignored and typically proposed by Redditors who did not engage with the project otherwise.
MOROCCAN-SPANISH COUPLES’ DECOLONIAL RESPONSES ON TIKTOK
Authors: Civila Sabina , Jaramillo-Dent Daniela
Published: April 2023

In the past years, the use of social media has allowed migrants and other minority groups to communicate, obtain information and build an identity through self-representation and content creation. The possibility to talk about their experiences, connect to other content creators and interact with the platform allows to decentralize the European narrative and offer visibility to other cultures. In this context, TikTok emerges as one of the platforms where traditionally marginalized populations narrate their experiences and enter public debates. In this case we study Spanish-Moroccan mixed couples who must face the cultural stereotypes derived from the geographical, historical, and colonial confluences between these two nations. To carry out the study, a qualitative analysis was carried out by identifying TikTok videos using the hashtags #mixedcouples and #SpainandMorocco in their Spanish and English versions. We then identified other hashtags of interest that appeared together with these and found other videos of interest. We viewed a total of 8,653 videos and identified six profiles of interest from creators that self-identified as being part of a Spanish-Moroccan mixed couple and had more than 10K followers. This analysis reflects the difficulties faced by people who chose more intimate forms of integration and the existing colonial paradigms in terms of mixed romantic partners. At the same time, these creators exemplify the existence of points of encounter between seemingly opposite cultures and nationalities through their (self)representations and discourses on this platform, as well as the increased visibility they are achieving through their content and profiles.
LOOKING FOR MONTREAL DIGITAL CITIZENS: FOR WHO ARE OPEN DATA MADE?
Authors: Coutant Alexandre , Millerand Florence , Delias Lucie , Fortier Marie-Soleil
Published: April 2023

Municipalities' development of open data portals is part of a political drive to bring citizens and local governments closer together. However, despite significant investments, these initiatives rarely find their audience, because they respond primarily to an imperative of openness that places them in a logic of supply rather than demand. Also because citizens have a minimal understanding of the concrete implications of open data. In this context, one can legitimately ask for _whom_ are these open data portals created. Using the City of Montreal (Quebec, Canada) as a case study, we provide a nuanced answer to this question. If the socio-technical device set up seems to meet the needs of an "imagined" public more technophile and entrepreneurial than most citizens are, this discrepancy is perceived and countered by many processes. Our longitudinal study over a decade allows us to detect a co-construction in tension of the web portal. On the one hand, we find preoccupations with municipal prerogatives, administrative routines, and open-data movement ideals - sometimes mixed with territorial branding strategies. On the other, we find attention to citizen appropriation, the search for a better understanding of empirical audiences and a willingness to design the portal for the nebulous public of "Montrealers". We base our analysis on a three-tiered data: the _imagined_ publics in municipal discourses, the publics _configured_ by the digital device, and the publics _constructed_ through the actions and strategies of the actors. We discuss findings on the portal’s evolution, and on the clash between imaginary worlds.
DECOLONIZING CREATIVITY: A CROWDSOURCING PROJECT ABOUT CREATIVITY AS SURVIVAL
Authors: De Souza e Silva Adriana , Dufresne Kelsey , Xiong-Gum Mai Nou Xiong-Gum
Published: April 2023

Understanding creativity from a decolonial perspective means removing the focus from the individual as innovator (as well as its profit-oriented goal), and instead highlighting the ongoing networked relationships among people, technologies, and spaces that often occur with creative practices. This creative process is not concerned with the creation of new things. Rather, it is about the mobility and networking of resources that can improve lives and facilitate survival strategies. In order to understand how creative practices occur in non-traditional contexts outside the colonial Global North perspective, we have developed a PubPub repository to crowdsource examples of creativity. PubPub is an open-source, web publishing platform that prioritizes community-generated and knowledge sharing. It is a low-barrier entry method to share information and knowledge within one's community of learners—in our case, individuals interested in creative practices that occur outside traditional corporate and profit-oriented domains.

In this presentation, we will describe the conceptualization and development of our online repository, focusing on how open science knowledge and crowdsourced information can help decolonize creative processes. Our project will accomplish four main goals: (1) explain this concept of creativity for a broad and non-academic audience, (2) share previous research and materials about this topic, (3) ask the audience to contribute to the collection, and (4) display the crowdsourced examples from the audience. In building our PubPub housing, we were especially interested in collecting publicly-identified instances of creativity to support the development and accessibility of a broad collection of examples found across the world.
GRAPPLING WITH THE MODEL MINORITY MYTH: ASIAN AMERICAN FOOD BLOGGERS’ ACTIVISM THROUGH BLACK LIVES MATTER ON INSTAGRAM.
Authors: Dejmanee Tisha
Published: April 2023

While Asian American food bloggers constitute an overrepresented racial minority within the predominantly white food blogosphere, food blogs rarely constitute productive spaces for discussing or building community around Asian American experiences even when published by Asian American bloggers. This study addresses the need for further intersectional analyses of food blogs that specifically take race into account as it explores the racial discourses generated by Asian American food bloggers participating in Instagram conversations around #BlackoutTuesday and Black Lives Matter in 2020. I find that #BlackoutTuesday authorised the discussion of race in a way that was not previously visible in the food blogosphere – for instance, Asian American food bloggers used Instagram posts in these conversations to identify with the politicised identity term ‘Asian American’ which, in turn, inspired solidarity and action amongst the Asian American community in support of Black Lives Matter. However, Asian American food bloggers also perpetuated elements of the model minority myth, distancing the microaggressions they had experienced from the ‘more serious’ racism and threats faced by Black Americans rather than acknowledging their joint and precarious structural oppression. This data demonstrates that the racial experiences of Asian American food bloggers continue to be silenced or diffracted, largely due to the ways that Asian American participation in this digital culture is structured through assimilation and racial commodification. Yet, despite these limitations, this conversation has value in contributing to visibility around minority allyship within the Black Lives Matter movement while also challenging the premise of political silence by minority bloggers.
THE VIBES ARE OFF: TRACING VIRAL TARGETED THEORIES ACROSS TIKTOK
Authors: Eadon Yvonne Melisande
Published: April 2023

The social media and short video streaming app TikTok has grown exponentially in the past four years. This exploratory research project outlines and defines a new kind of viral phenomenon taking place on TikTok: that of the targeted theory. Targeted theories are amateur investigations of an individual creator based on an—often mundane—activity recorded in a TikTok video. Targeted theories are often undergirded by mini-moral panics, charging targets with being kidnappers, killers, fakers, cheaters, etc. Targeted theories are related to online harassment; in many cases they constitute a type of harassment. They are also related to conspiracy theories, but are distinct from them in that targeted theories accuse an individual, rather than a group, of duplicity. How do TikTok’s platform affordances create an environment that is (or is not) especially hospitable for targeted theorizing? How are the identities of targeted creators who are marginalized exploited and even weaponized as part of targeted theorizing? This project tackles these questions by tracing the rise and fall of three case studies of targeted theories on TikTok, and the normative and critical discourses that emerge around them.
HASHTAGS, HIERARCHIES AND HEGEMONIES: MAINSTREAM DIGITAL FEMINIST ACTIVISM AND INTERSECTIONAL CRITIQUES
Authors: Fox Izzy E
Published: April 2023

This paper focuses on the digital-material hybridity of the contemporary feminist activist, particularly the problematic and progressive potential offered by the technological affordances of the Internet and digital social media. In addition, the paper highlights the associated anxieties for feminists of being online and engaging in what is often, in this “age of surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2019) and toxic masculinity, a hostile, commodified and misogynistic milieu. Furthermore, the digital affordances enabled through the proliferation of Web 2.0 technology inform the nature of feminist online discourse and campaigning, which has, at times, contributed to the moral panic that surrounds attempts at centering marginalized voices, particularly members of the trans community and sex workers.

The paper will explore the relationship between online tools and platforms adopted by mainstream contemporary feminists and the role they have played in constructing ‘othering’ hierarchies within feminism, as well in enabling the intersectional critique of these narratives. Avoiding either cyber-utopian or dystopian arguments, or a techno-determinist or utilitarian stance, this paper accounts for the complex and contradictory environment that the Internet offers to feminism. The paper also recognizes the enmeshed nature of feminists with their digital tools and platforms as well as the problematic and progressive feminist activism taking place online.
INFRASTRUCTURES OF CARE IN NDN SPACES: MUTUAL AID AS A FORM OF RADICAL RELATIONALITY
Authors: George Alaina Sarah , Parkhurst Nicholet Deschine
Published: April 2023

The Internet and social media platforms afford Native Americans in the United States the ability to connect, organize, and mobilize for social justice beyond geographical boundaries and across the Native diaspora. Decolonizing research that takes an Indigenous research approach unsettles the dominant theories of social media use and helps center our focus on the possibilities that Indigenous peoples already imagine for themselves whether it be to strengthen their communities and culture, to work towards resistance and decolonization, or to move them towards resurgence and beyond. This research examines how the Internet and social media platforms become sites of decolonizing work through the facilitation of radical relationality, or more specifically, mutual aid. We are two Diné scholars, and approach this research with the Diné emphasis on K’é and Sa'ah Naagháí Bik'eh Hózhóón.
DRAWING TO DISRUPT: ALTERNATIVE NARRATIVES TO THE MANOSPHERE
Authors: Gerrand Vivian
Published: April 2023

Content calling out everyday sexism on social media has grown in prominence in recent years through the work of feminist Instagram accounts such as @theequalityinstitute, @disbonjoursalepute and @vulgadrawings. At the same time, materials associated with the so-called ‘manosphere’ on forums that promote the narrative that men are victims of women’s empowerment have proliferated. Intersecting with colonial, far-right and white supremacist views, this content promotes traditionalist gender norms that eschew feminism and are imbued with misogyny.

Popular feminist influencer and cartoonist Lily O’Farrell’s (@vulgadrawings) memes about sexism began to engage with the nuances of the manosphere in 2021 when she decided to talk to young men who were trolling her Instagram account. These men had become aware of her account after it was shared in a men’s rights subreddit group. Concerned that the group was made up of young men predominantly aged 16-23, O’Farrell decided to investigate the movement by joining Incel (involuntary celibate) subreddit groups.

Following these investigations, the cartoonist produced a series of meme drawings titled: ‘Everything I’ve learned about Incels’ (2021), which illuminates the dynamics of the phenomenon for her mostly feminist 266 000 followers. Instead of demonising Incels, her drawings provide an anatomy of the movement that allows viewers insight into its logics.

O’Farrell’s drawings 'call people in' within a context of calling out everyday misogyny. Through a multimodal content analysis, this paper considers them as a possible alternative narrative strategy that disrupt gender assumptions through empathetic engagement with young men at risk of violent misogynist radicalisation.
IN ON THE GRIFT: HOW PLATFORMS GOVERN AUTHENTICITY FOR NEO-COLONIAL ENDS
Authors: Graham Timothy , Whelan-Shamy Daniel
Published: April 2023

Cryptocurrency has attracted widespread criticism for its exploitative logics that consume resources and trap unwitting investors into highly volatile, unregulated markets with worsening wealth inequality. A key factor in the rise of crypto trading is social media, where an ecosystem of spammers, grifters, ‘crypto influencers’ and celebrities such as Elon Musk amplify hype and generate public interest. While platforms moderate orchestrated platform manipulation through the opaque concept of ‘coordinated inauthentic behaviour’ (CIB), here we argue that Twitter is largely ignoring widespread crypto-related CIB on its platform– because it is profitable. Informed by a study of 1.8 million tweets about the top five crypto coins, we develop a neocolonial perspective of CIB that highlights how Twitter exploits it strategically to turn a blind eye to financial exploitation and techno-utopian subjugation on the platform. While the line between authentic and inauthentic coordinated activity is not always clear cut, we suggest that platforms construct the problem in such a way that strategically obfuscates its distinction. This raises critical questions for content moderation and platform regulation that will require us to think outside the compromised nomenclature that platforms have invented for their own ends.
‘HOW MUCH SPACE AM I SUPPOSED TO TAKE?’: UNDERSTANDING 'DIGITAL INCLUSION FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT' THROUGH FA'ASAMOA
Authors: Hourigan Aimee
Published: April 2023

It is widely held that efforts to achieve the United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable Development Goals must sit alongside efforts to achieve ‘universal’ digital inclusion (Graham, 2019). In Samoa, an independent island state in the Pacific, digital inclusion has been positioned as a key ‘international development’ agenda that will ‘leapfrog’ the nation into the 21st century. However, a similarly strong motivator has been fa’asamoa (the Samoan way) which, with its emphasis on relationally grounded action and knowledges, operates in tension with the underlying colonial constructs of ‘modernity’ evident within current 'Western' conceptualisations of ‘digital inclusion for international development’. In following Mignolo (2007), this paper details fa’asamoa-grounded perceptions and experiences of ‘digital inclusion for international development’ held by Samoan members of two Pasifika-led community organisations in Brisbane, Australia. The 'participants', as peer researchers, held a central position in designing and implementing the research agenda and objectives, further putting abstract conceptualisations of decolonisation into practice. Drawing on discussions and design artefacts created during a co-design workshop held in late-2021, this paper outlines how the peer researchers (consciously and unconsciously) navigate tensions between fa’asamoa and current 'Western' structures and practices of ‘digital inclusion for international development’ in their everyday and envisioned engagement with ICTs and digital technologies. In turn, this paper critically questions the effects of on-going 'Western' hegemonies in the construction of ‘modern’ subjectivities and the enactment of ‘modern’ life, and further offers critical insight into the role of technology in the discursive and practical conception of alternatives to ‘modernity/coloniality'.
IMMIGRANT TIKTOKERS DECOLONIZING ALGORITHMIC VISIBILITY
Authors: Jaramillo-Dent Daniela
Published: April 2023

Immigration is deeply rooted in colonial structures that define who migrates and where, through a hierarchized perspective of the representations, knowledge, and ideas. It is possible to extrapolate these societal requirements to the digital space of social media platforms, where a combination of human and algorithmic moderation systems determine what is available, visible, and viral. Thus, colonial structures of dominance are perpetuated through coded biases and algorithmized oppression systems. The internal functioning of these moderation infrastructures is obscure, although we can glimpse at them through the contents and discourse of creators who describe their experiences with the platform, its algorithm, and the moderation policies that shape and affect their content creation practices. In this paper, we illustrate the different vernacular and platformed practices of immigrant content creators who portray the ways in which they negotiate their visibility with TikTok and its algorithmic system. The examples were extracted from a larger study that comprises 57 Latin American immigrant tiktokers who reside in the US and Spain. We use the concept of algorithmic (in)visibility as the basis for the study. The initial findings suggest that these creators deploy platformed practices such as the (re)use of audio tracks for visibility and protest; the use of TikTok vernaculars such as humor and sarcasm to convey controversial ideas; and partial deplatforming to protest the blockage of their profiles on TikTok. These practices provide insights about the decolonial negotiation of algorithmic (in)visibility taking place on social media platforms today.
DELETING VIDEOS ON TIKTOK AS ALGORITHM RELATED IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT
Authors: Klug Daniel
Published: April 2023

On TikTok, users’ self-presentation is based on interaction and communication with and through short video content rather than on profile information or messaging. TikTok users commonly display awareness for how content is customized and develop strategies and video creation practices. Our qualitative interview study examines the practices of deleting videos and making videos private as forms of impression management online.

We generally find that TikTok users deleted videos because the content or message did not represent their views or attitudes anymore or because they feared it would negatively affect their impression in offline reality. More experienced users also deleted videos in case they failed to achieve the desired feedback. We specifically identified impression management strategies related to participants’ algorithmic literacy. Participant’s assumptions of how the TikTok algorithm works influenced their decision to set videos to private instead of deleting them even if they only have small numbers of followers and likes or only occasionally post or interact with content. A main motivation to set a video to private was that deleting would mess up the users’ personalized algorithmic video feed and ultimately lead to missing trends they are looking for. Many participants also mentioned deleting videos would affect the impression the TikTok algorithm has of their profile and eventually push their videos to the wrong audiences. In this context, our results provide new insights into the effort and thought that users put into making short content on TikTok and how they manage this content to create online identities.
WHAT IS PRIVACY LITERACY FOR?
Authors: Kumar Priya
Published: April 2023

Networked devices, sensors, and the algorithmic processes that power them pervade nearly all facets of daily life. These systems are designed by an elite class of experts and powered by data extracted from populations of people. Many people remain unaware of what data these systems extract and how systems and institutions use data, raising significant questions about privacy. One response to such concerns is to call for educational efforts that increase people’s understanding, or literacy, of digital data flows. Literacy is often regarded as an end in itself, an unquestionably good thing. Yet literacy does not operate autonomously. Teaching someone to understand something does not automatically improve their life. Privacy literacy efforts thus need to be explicit about what they seek to accomplish. In other words, what is privacy literacy for? I argue that privacy literacy efforts should harness education to mobilize people toward changing the technological _and_ social conditions that discipline subjects toward advancing institutional goals. To avoid perpetuating oppressive power dynamics, I advocate that privacy literacy efforts embody a critical pedagogy where teachers and students learn from each other about what privacy means, how data-driven systems do and don’t afford privacy, and what needs to change to create worlds where people can flourish. I also recommend that privacy literacy efforts align with social movements whose visions identify paths away from extraction and toward relations that respect the inherent humanity of data.
LIQUID CONSUMPTION IN THE PLATFORM ECONOMY: A COMPARATIVE CASE STUDY OF THREE PLATFORMS AND SIX USER GROUPS
Authors: Lutz Christoph , Stocker Volker
Published: April 2023

The notion of “liquid consumption” draws on Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity to describe shifts in consumer behavior in recent years. Liquid consumption is contrasted to more traditional “solid” consumption and is characterized by ephemerality (rather than endurance), access (rather than ownership), and dematerialization (rather than material possessions). Despite the popularity of liquid consumption theory and the prominent role of digital platforms in shaping liquid consumption, a thorough analysis how digital platforms enable or constrain liquid consumption is missing. In our research, we address this gap and study the role of liquidity on three key digital platforms in the platform economy: Airbnb, Uber, and Fiverr. The research relies on a comparative case study method and is informed by the walkthrough approach, answering three distinct research questions: 1. How inherent is liquidity in a certain product/service category in the first place (pre-platform)? 2. Where do different platforms fall on the dimensions of the liquid-solid consumption spectrum? 3. How does the solidity/liquidity of the consumption/use/experience differ between providers and consumers?
CONTESTING TECHNOCOLONIALISM? THE 'ORDINARY TRANSCRIPTS' OF EVERYDAY RESISTANCE
Authors: Madianou Mirca
Published: April 2023

This paper investigates the extent to which marginalized communities contest practices of datafication and technological experimentation which are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in the aid sector. Drawing on seven years of research in the humanitarian and development sectors, the paper explores forms of resistance to digital aid practices. The paper is divided into two parts. The first section observes how datafication and digital innovation in the aid sector rework the colonial genealogies of humanitarianism and digital technology. I then theorize resistance in situations of asymmetrical power. The second section discusses empirical examples of everyday contestation. Drawing on Scott’s notion of the ‘hidden transcripts’ (1985), the paper develops the term ‘ordinary transcripts’ to illustrate the modest critique of digital power through everyday life practices such as non-participation and the oppositional appropriation of digital aid projects. Listening to the ‘ordinary transcripts’ of everyday resistance is also partly a methodological argument as it is only through ethnographic encounters that these small acts of contestation can be noticed. The paper concludes that the arguments about digital power and the persistence of colonial legacies do not preclude the acknowledgement of human agency. However, the ordinary transcripts of everyday resistance do not equal decolonization which requires a radical restructuring of power relations. Still, ordinary resistance needs to be recognized for it may contain the seeds of future decolonial struggle.
ALGORITHMIC JUSTICE FROM BELOW
Authors: Mniestri Aikaterini , Randerath Sebastian
Published: April 2023

Tracking has become an integral part of users’ social media experience and the political economy of platforms. Creator studios are part of a larger assemblage of machine-readable metrics and data analytics on the back end of a digital platform. While it has become common practice for creators to make use of this feature to grow their business, creators have also appropriated it to engage collectively in “algorithmic gossip” around social issues. We observe how algorithmic gossip can become instrumental in the hands of minoritized groups. Particularly, following the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, creators noticed that their posts were less visible after using platforms to report on the movement. As more and more creators took screenshots of their analytics and posted them, they were able to force a response out of the company. In response, Tik Tok launched an incubator to boost talent from the black community. Thereby, the company made a commitment “to elevate and amplify their voices”. In this paper we ask: Does algorithmic gossip about tracking provide a basis for overcoming algorithmic oppression or is it incorporated for hegemonic strategies of platform governance and silencing? We argue that end users gather insights from the analytics on the creator studio to reveal patterns of algorithmic injustice and bias. In the second part, we argue that platform companies undermine the collective struggle of minoritized groups through self-governance. As a result, we contend that this case study legitimizes arguments in the discourse against the self-governance of platform companies.
THE EMERGENCE OF NETWORKS ON FACEBOOK MEMORIAL PAGES
Authors: Navon Sarit
Published: April 2023

Facebook Pages is an essentially public sub-platform that allows users to reach an audience, create a large network of followers, and become admins. Pages’ official aim is to serve businesses, communities, and public figures, yet they are commonly employed in different aims: to memorialize and publicize ordinary people. This paper examines these practices through an in-depth qualitative analysis of eighteen cases, combined with a digital ethnography conducted between 2018-2021. Findings illuminate the role that these memorial Pages serve as social capital resources and reveal how admins negotiate Facebook affordances when creating, designing, and maintaining such Pages. Admins use the Page and its network of followers to run an extensive memorial activity, both online and offline, and to turn the deceased into a public figure. They discursively position the deceased as a special person whose story carries social significance and collective moral value, hence worth public remembering. Acts of engagement with the Page emerge as socially valued actions, and the followers, who are otherwise strangers, are framed as vital partners in this process. Admins use the followers to accumulate various resources: money donations, physical attendance in events, emotional support, and more. These amount to the social capital that admins generate. Finally, users form a causal connection between visible and measurable online engagement (Like, Share, Follow) and cognitive or emotive implications – public memory, recognition, and esteem. Together, these findings provide fruitful insights into social capital processes on social media sites, memorialization practices, and public remembrance.
TUMBLR META-FANDOM: REFLECTIONS AND REPAIR
Authors: Neill Hoch Indira
Published: April 2023

Drawing from qualitative interviews with nine active Tumblr users conducted in the Fall/Winter of 2021-2022 and qualitative multimodal analysis of high-circulation “popular” Tumblr posts, this research assesses and analyzes transformations in user attitudes towards Tumblr three years on from Verizon’s porn ban, and immediately prior to and following additional attempts to restrict adult content enacted by Automattic.

This research considers iterations of Tumblr’s meta-fandom, or fan practices centered around Tumblr’s cultures and communities themselves, rather than a more traditional media property (Tiidenberg, Hendry, & Abidin, 2021), as locations where nostalgia and repair are contested. Meta-fandom practices are analyzed through the lenses of reflective nostalgia (Boym, 2001) and repair (Jackson, 2014) as a way of contending with both the recounting of a place and time on Tumblr that the users themselves know never really existed and the desire to acknowledge that Tumblr always has been “broken” but users continue to thrive, even in the wake of declining overall usage.
GEOGRAPHIES OF SELF-SUFFICIENCY: PROTOTYPING EXPLORATION, EXPERIENCE, AND ACCESS
Authors: Noone Rebecca
Published: April 2023

Scrolling through Google Maps application or website, it is difficult to avoid Google Maps’ hallmark promises of explore and experience. From calls to “explore and experience the world”, “discover new experiences”, “find places for you” or “have the confidence to explore, access to experience”, explore and experience (and their iterations of discover, find, and access) command imaginaries of unrestricted entitlement and complete control over one’s personal domain. This Google Maps rhetoric reifies exploration and experience as desirable mobilities without acknowledging the politics they enforce and the relations to space they enact. This paper asks: in these projected geographies of self-assured navigation, who is the prototype that fulfills the fantasy of seamless mobility and unrestricted claims to space?

I divide this paper into three sections— Explore, Experience, and Access— to analyze what these modes are, what they are contingent on, who they prioritize and the harms they reinforce and reproduce. In the final section, Access, I address the limits Google Maps claims to space and present a necessary reorientation. I argue that Google Maps’ imperatives to explore, experience, and access space are based on a colonial raced, classed, and ableist prototype—the self-sufficient user. In organizing space around the self-sufficient user, Google Maps extends and entrenches settler colonial dispossession and ableist gatekeeping. Ultimately, Google’s imaginary of untethered exploration— the experience and access it engenders— carries a heavy weight.
MATRIX OF DEPENDENCE, POSTCOLONIALISM, AND SOCIAL MEDIA REGULATION IN AN AFRICAN CONTEXT
Authors: Obia Vincent Adakole
Published: April 2023

This paper considers the relation of dependence that defines the practice of social media and internet content regulation in an African context. With social media regulation in Nigeria as a case study, it gives attention to debates drawn from postcolonial thinking, structural imperialism, and platform power, presenting new research on the concept of the matrix of dependence. To do this, I gather data by interviewing 19 stakeholders on what they perceive as credible alternatives to social media regulation in Nigeria, given their opposition to the proposed formal approach represented by the 2019 Internet Falsehood Bill. Analysis was done using Braun and Clarke’s (2021) reflexive thematic analysis. Findings point to four alternatives/themes: copying Western nations, platform self-regulation, governance built on trust, and digital media literacy. I expand on these findings to show that underlying each suggested alternative is the notion of subalternity under which Nigeria functions as it pertains to new media governance. I further argue that this construct can be applied to the wider African continent, suggesting that postcolonialism shapes the use and regulation of new media technologies in what can be understood as the matrix of dependence.
WHERE IS THE GLOBAL SOUTH? A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF GEOPOLITICAL REPRESENTATION IN DIGITAL ACTIVISM RESEARCH
Authors: Oezkula Suay Melisa , Reilly Paul
Published: April 2023

The diffused and global nature of many digital contexts makes it difficult to trace what regions (incl. The Global South) are represented in digital activism research. This systematic review aimed at providing a sense of this distribution in digital activism research between 2011-2018 (N= 315 articles) through a coding of categories tied to region and marginality. These factors included choice of case study, case study origin and location, author origin, region and ethnic foci of the publishing journals, and digital/ social media platform (as tied to specific user demographics). The results show a high representation of Global North cases and campaigns, as well as non-region-specific and high-visibility social media groupings (e.g. hashtag publics), particularly the case in platform-based research (i.e. digital data sources). This means that researchers may need to rethink (a) where (e.g. which platform spaces) and how disadvantaged and less visible social groups are represented online, (b) which precise ethnic or regional groups such research is meant to capture in digital spaces, as well as (c) what these hindrances mean for democratic participation, grassroots movements, and counterpublics.
ASSESSING POLICY TRADEOFFS AND SILOS IN REGULATING PLATFORM POWER, PLATFORMIZATION, AND DATAFICATION
Authors: Popiel Pawel
Published: April 2023

A key concern in international policy debates about articulating oversight of digital platform markets involves policy silos, arising from the scope of platformization and datafication, and the challenges in defining their policy boundaries and coordinating a comprehensive policy response. This paper examines how policymakers grapple with the problem by looking at a growing number of expert inquiries on digital platforms—a proxy for the international policy debate—that focus on policy problems ranging from market dominance to privacy risks to the spread of disinformation. Specifically, the paper develops a schema of related policy silos and tradeoffs that arise in these debates: 1) policy area silos, 2) market / sectoral silos, 3) temporal silos, and 4) normative tradeoffs. Then, it critically examines the implications of these silos and tradeoffs for policy interventions aimed at addressing concerns related to datafication and platformization, raising key questions about the scope of and assumptions underlying platform regulation internationally and noting the way they constrain policy design and thwart more holistic policy solutions.
PROTEST MOVEMENTS ON LINKEDIN AS SPACE FOR CHALLENGING SOCIOTECHNICAL IMAGINARIES
Authors: Prá Raquel , Antonello Claudia Simone
Published: April 2023

The aim of this paper is to reflect on how the transformation of LinkedIn into an online environment from which are carried out critiques and questionings about the labor market, management practices, and work relations in Brazil, allow us to challenge sociotechnical imaginaries about the platform. The emergence of protest movements about circulating content on the platform reveals that, although certain technological configurations impose themselves on users, LinkedIn is not unique, universal, or deterministic, but multiple. This article addresses the technical issue, not yet properly explored by the ontological turn movement, discussing the protest movements on LinkedIn as a starting point for challenging pre-existing sociotechnical imaginaries, in order to boost societal change and new technological futures. The methodological strategy adopted to conduct the study was digital ethnography. Data collection, part of ongoing research, took place between March 2021 and February 2022. It includes news reports on LinkedIn and observations of posts on LinkedIn and discussions among members of a blog and a Facebook group gathered to conduct critiques of the content circulating on LinkedIn. Preliminary findings suggest that the movement of questioning from the platform itself seeks to appropriate the technological affordances and constraints imposed by LinkedIn to make it a space for awareness, problematization, and promotion of societal change. By establishing new uses for the platform, unrelated to the commercial objectives for which it was created, this movement gives conditions for the constitution of new sociotechnical imaginaries in relation to the platform itself and also, to rethink work relations.
ANTICIPATING SOCIO-TECHNICAL CHANGE: USERS BELIEFS AROUND REDDIT’S IPO
Authors: Proferes Nicholas
Published: April 2023

Platform changes are a phenomenon endlessly confronting social media users, impacting how they create and consume content. The social media platform “Reddit” is, as of writing, in the midst of a significant planned shift in their socio-economic foundation. Reddit’s owners are moving the company from being a privately held business to a publicly-traded one. While scholarly attention in domains such as human-computer interaction (HCI) has focused on tracing how users understand and respond to changes in the interface features of social media, less consideration has been given to how users make sense of the socio-economic side of the social media platform equation. Through a thematic analysis of Reddit posts and comments mentioning the Reddit IPO made to “r/announcements,” “r/theoryofReddit,” “r/askreddit,” “r/stocks,” “r/wallstreetbets,” and “r/technology,” this study examines how users discuss and make sense of socio-economic change in this social media environment. Findings from this study focus on three themes: 1) What aspects of the techno-cultural facets of Reddit (defaults, protocols, algorithms, and interfaces) users believe might change as a result of the IPO. 2) What policy changes users believe might occur on Reddit, particularly in relation to moderation practices and the kinds of content allowed on the site. And, 3) User beliefs about the particular interests that these changes may serve.