bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
THE AFFECTIVE BODY: PLATFORMED PRESENCE AND VIRTUAL EMBODIMENT IN THE POPULIST POLITICS OF NARENDRA MODI
Authors: Bhattacharya Laboni
Published: September 2021

Political theory agrees that the charismatic leader’s cult of personality is a cornerstone of populist politics, with an increasingly distrustful, contentious, and internally divided society seeing the leader as the embodiment of the popular will more viscerally than the electoral process allows (Laclau 2005). The power of the hypermasculine leader persists in the digital age where populists exert authoritarian control over media narratives and infrastructures, as feminist critiques of the iconography of statesmen like Putin, Erdogan and Duterte demonstrate (Chavez and Pacheo 2020). Yet this brand of strongman politics is discursively co-produced by the leader’s physical presence; my presentation argues in contrast that Indian PM Narendra’s Modi’s affective body is animated by its persistent digitization, virtualization, and absence of liveness. Modi’s populism is driven by his appeal as a technocrat, a man accessible to the people via hologram, Twitter, exclusive apps, 3D modelled YouTube videos, and other digitally enabled forms of disembodied representation which create a “fantasy of unmediated access” (Govil and Baishya 2018). When Modi appears in public to perform yoga or lay a silver brick in the foundations of a temple, his corporeal form is one iteration of his virtualized, mediated persona. Modi’s independence from the demands of embodiment is made possible by his substantive digital presence. The experiential intensity and interactivity of social media creates what I term “platform affect”, which mobilizes affective discourses like nationalism to material effect, such as drawing large crowds galvanized by a sense of intimacy with Modi’s virtual and physical person.
VIRTUAL LEARNING AFFORDANCES AND IDENTITY: A CASE STUDY
Authors: Cirucci Angela M
Published: September 2021

This case study pairs a walkthrough analysis of two popular virtual
learning environments (VLEs) (Zoom and WebEx) with undergraduate responses (n=250) to an
open-ended survey to investigate how VLE affordances impact student identifications and
quality of learning. Previous research has found that interaction and social presence are
necessary for learning online, but professors find these relationships difficult to achieve
when students will not, or cannot, turn on their cameras. Preliminary findings include three
main themes. First, students find Zoom more user-friendly because it is designed to look
like popular social media apps, yet they are still not comfortable being visible. Second,
many students are concerned about their classmates and professors seeing their physical
backgrounds, particularly those who reported having family incomes below $50,000.
Subsequently, they rarely turn on their cameras. Third, BIPOC who identify as women fear
being judged based on their physical appearance and also choose to rarely turn on their
cameras. This study is one of the first to explore VLE affordances and their impact on
identities. Early analyses point to already marginalized groups feeling the pains that came
with the shift to online learning more acutely. Professors and universities should provide
training for identity personalization and find ways to invite students to participate that
do not include mandatory cameras.
POLITICAL GAMES IN VIRTUAL HONG KONG
Authors: Davies Hugh
Published: September 2021

Following Akbar Abbas’s seminal 1997 study Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance, this paper argues that just as Hong Kong is disappearing in the real world, it is re-appearing in the virtual world of videogames. With attention to the 2019 protests in the city of Hong Kong, this paper reviews media reportage, academic scholarship and explores virtual game spaces to examine how videogames and other digital platforms came to enact, elaborate and represent the 2019 activist movement. Discussing a number of videogames that were specifically developed as objects of protest such as Liberate Hong Kong (2019), Revolution in Our Time (2019), and Add Oil (2019), this paper also considers the ways in which existing digital games such as GTAV (2013), Pokémon GO (2016), Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020) as well as digital platforms such as Twitch, Airdrop, and Uber were tactically deployed as sites of protest by Hong Kong activists.
PERCEIVED INTERCONNECTEDNESS AND THE DEPENDENCE ON AMBIENT CONTEXT ON TWITTER DURING ELECTIONS
Authors: Demirkol Tonnesen Naciye Ozlem
Published: September 2021

In this paper, I explore the role of ambient context in the encoding and decoding of election tweets and the ways these tweets signal perceived affective interconnectedness between users. I particularly explore the tweets by Turkish microcelebrities that do not make sense outside of a transient context and thus rely on the ambient context provided by shared online or offline experiences. These tweets include reactions or responses to TV interviews, news reports, rallies and so on. In scholarly works, similar tweets have been mainly observed within hashtagged datasets where the hashtag provides the necessary context. Building on Abidin’s (2015) account on perceived interconnectedness as a performance of intimacy between influencers and followers, I analyse such tweets as signifiers of affective interconnectedness that reinforce a ‘feeling of community’ (Dean, 2010). Thus, I argue that during political events, for Twitter microcelebrities, affect, as in, manifestations of experienced emotions (Papacharissi, 2012), replaces other strategies of intimacy in building these bonds. Political events create an environment where intimacy is capitalized to reinforce affective experiences and is simultaneously generated through them. Understanding the subtext in these affective expressions imply a degree of togetherness between the microcelebrity and the follower, a shared, in-group experience that relies on an existing familiarity and reinforces the intimacy between them.
WITNESSING LIKE A USER: MOBILE NOTIFICATIONS AND THE LAYERED CONSTRUCTION OF MEDIATIZED TERRORISM
Authors: Fitzgerald Andrew Arthur
Published: September 2021

This paper study the imbrication of data-driven devices and platform infrastructures and the mediatized construction of terrorist attacks. It analyzes the role of smartphone push notifications and technical affordances of “layering” media across diverse media devices and platforms in users’ mediatized life (e.g. screenshotting a tweet, posting it to Facebook, and users’ commenting on the post), and these platform and device features role in co-constructing terrorist attacks as datafied media events along with mobile media posts and reactions by users and formal news accounts and aggregations by media outlets. Using a data collection framework that logs screenshots of participants’ mobile media devices every five seconds over the course of longitudinal studies, I qualitatively observe screenshots capturing the mobile media usage of 16 subjects from late May to late June 2017, including media relating to two terrorist attacks in the UK. This paper illustrates the role of mobile device and datafied platform features in the sparking of mediatized microrituals and the broader construction of terrorist attacks as datafied media events. It also highlights the layering of mediatization, wherein the above-mentioned interface elements often migrate with a given media object across platforms within a single mobile environment on the user-end, and as it is layered with the users’ in-person contexts beyond the screen. The study of mediatized terrorism, therefore, must be understood across these layers, necessitating further empirical exploration and conceptual development.
TRACES OF BLACK FREEDOM IN THE MACHINE: ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF DIGITAL BLACK RELIGION
Authors: Gault Erika
Published: September 2021

There was a time when one wanted to learn about Black religion you went to church, the Black Church to be more specific. The “all-in-one agency” which W.E. B. DuBois described the Black Church as certainly operated as a centralized and essential aspect of Black life. Its networks have come to signify Black believers’ emancipatory visions since its beginning during slavery in America. Today Black users’ contemporary engagement with digital technology has both broadened and complicated the scholarly understanding of the Black Church and Black religion to include more than its Christian manifestation. A number of works provide important theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of black digital use, digital structures of inequality, and counter-discourse production. On the topic of digital religion, works have emphasized the importance of digital technology in mediating religious experience. Yet, despite findings that people of African descent are often early adopters of technology, at the intersections of blackness, religion, and digital technology scholarly work remains sparse. This paper provides both a survey and framework for the study of digital Black religion. The work of Black religious media scholars is paired with that of Heidi Campbell and others writing on digital religion to offer a needed approach to the articulation and study of digital Black religion as a tradition rooted in notions of freedom.
CLOUD CULTURE: FLUID MEMORIES ON PLATFORM ENCLOSURES
Authors: Gekker Alex
Published: September 2021

This paper brings together emerging work on the platformisation of cultural production (Nieborg and Poell 2018; Duffy, Poell, and Nieborg 2019) with (critical) approaches to digital archiving (Berry 2016; Brügger 2018; Ben-David 2019) and algorithmic curation (Noble 2018; Amoore 2020) to explore a proposed emerging ‘cloud culture’. The term encompasses (1) the technological capacity to modify cultural commodities after they have reached (and perhaps experience by) users; (2) the erosion of digital ownership, emblematic of similar trends in companies limiting one’s ability to modify – or even repair – their owned hardware and software; and (3) the data-driven race for content optimisation, where platform owners use consumer surveillance to deliver their products for maximum engagement (Helles and Flyverbom 2019). These three components of the term are further explored in relation to the ontological and epistemological repercussions of a continually updating cultural commodities, across four key domains. First, cloud culture highlights $2 . Second, it emphasises the $2 , and the shift of platform power toward large-scale cultural revisions. Third, it alerts over the seeming $2 of replaced and rewritten digital objects. Fourth and ultimately, this might have severe repercussions on $2 both for media researchers and – more importantly – the public at large
PLATFORMIZING DELIVERY WORKERS' EXPERIENCES: BUILDING WORKER-OWNED
PLATFORMS IN BRAZIL, SPAIN AND FRANCE
Authors: Grohmann Rafael
Published: September 2021

The article aims to analyze the emergence of worker-owned platforms,
specifically delivery workers’ experiences, as one of the laboratories of platform labor and
the circulation of workers’ struggles Drawing on interviews with six cases in three
different countries (Spain, France and Brazil), the research highlights the commonalities,
specificities and challenges of platformizing delivery workers’ experiences in different
countries. The analysis consider following dimensions: productive processes and work
organization, technological challenges and building platforms, use of social media to
communicate with and organize workers, and the future of worker-owned experiences. The
initiatives had very different trajectories. In Spain, some cooperatives were born from
union struggles. In France, we saw a strong relationship with CoopCycle, a federation of
delivery co-ops that provides its own software based on the principles of digital commons.
And in Brazil, small collectives and co-ops that still depend on social media platforms to
execute their work are emerging. Despite different contexts, there are commonalities, such
as the low number of workers, the central role of social media for communicating and
organizing work, and the emergence of cooperation among cooperatives, which shows that scale
does not need to be a standard in platform economies. The conclusions point out there is an
ongoing and emerging process that can be the beginning of a broader process of reinventing
local economic circuits of production and consumption that involves digital platforms for
the common good.
INTERDEPENDENCE AND NETWORK OVERSIGHT IN 1990S INTERNET
GOVERNANCE
Authors: Grosse Meghan
Published: September 2021

In October 2016, the contract between the United States Department of
Commerce and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) officially
expired. This contract represented a long-standing and close relationship between the United
States government and ICANN, a relationship that positioned the U.S. as a kind of linchpin
in determining the shape and coordination of the global, extraterritorial internet. This
research seeks to address the question: what interests and values shaped ICANN at the time
of its establishment and in what ways do debates about this system reflect broader concerns
about the U.S.-centric nature of early internet governance policy? I address this question
using archival analysis focusing on the Ira Magaziner Electronic Commerce papers at the
Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas. In examining this archive, there are
repeated concerns about the U.S.-centric nature of early internet governance policy,
concerns that were clear as early as the mid-1990s and which remained at issue with the
oversight of ICANN until 2016. While espousing the values of competitive free-market, the
internet governance policy promoted by the U.S. government during the Clinton Administration
raised concerns about the concentration of power and potentially monopolistic control of the
network by a single nation. Understanding the foundations of debates around oversight and
multistakeholderism that took place as early as the 1990s helps us better understand more
recent changes in internet governance and also help contextualize and ground discussions
about how to best create a truly representative global internet in the future.
TOWARDS CIVIC PARTICIPATION IN THE DATAFIED SOCIETY: CAN CITIZEN ASSEMBLIES DEMOCRATIZE ALGORITHMIC GOVERNANCE?
Authors: Hintz Arne
Published: September 2021

Citizens are increasingly assessed, profiled, categorized and scored according to data analytics, their future behavior is predicted, and services are allocated accordingly. State-citizen relations become quasi-automated and dependent on algorithmic decision-making, yet (largely) without people’s knowledge and without avenues to meaningfully engage and intervene. This raises significant challenges for democratic processes and active citizenship. How do we participate as citizens in a society in which we are constantly rated and categorized in ways that we do not understand? How do we affect the development and management of the very data systems that increasingly organize society? How do we develop new democratic practices to ensure participation and accountability? This paper explores emerging opportunities for participatory and deliberative forms of governing the implementation of data analytics, particularly in the public sector. It investigates how models of engagement and deliberation – from citizen juries and citizen assemblies to deliberative polls and public dialogues – can advance civic participation in the roll-out and implementation of data analytics and thus democratize algorithmic governance. It assesses the suitability of these practices by evaluating, e.g., the level of participation, policy impcts, and institutional challenges and obstacles, bringing together insights from the fields of critical data studies and democratic innovation. The paper draws on findings from 15 expert interviews conducted between 2019 and 2021 with members of government and civil society as well as a fact-finding workshop that form part of a two-year project investigating the practices, structures and constraints of citizen engagement with datafied governance.
#YELLOWPERILSUPPORTSBLACKPOWER: MEMORY WORK FOR INTERRACIAL SOLIDARITY
Authors: Kang Yena
Published: September 2021

As various racial justice movements emerged under the “Black Lives Matter” slogan after George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, Monyee Chau posted some artwork on Instagram with the slogan, #YellowPerilSupportsBlackPower. The artwork—symbolizing Asians with a yellow tiger and African Americans with a black panther—ignited Asians’ activism in support of African Americans and became circulated via multiple social media platforms. In this study, I view the #YellowPerilSupportsBlackPower movement (YPSBP) as digital activism, and I analyze how Asian Americans project their “Asianness” to advocate for the Black community. In particular, I focus on memory work among Asian participants when they demonstrate their solidarity with the Black community. By analyzing mediated memory work on Instagram, I identify the three types of memory work in which Asian participants engage. I conclude that this memory work plays a key role in legitimatizing a process through which Asian Americans can produce affective ties with the Black community that build a multiracial identity extending beyond color lines. This exploration of interracial solidarity enriches both the social movement and digital activism scholarship by illustrating how memory work mediates and amplifies affective solidarity.
BLACK GIRL TRIES KOREAN MAKEUP: RACE, GENDER, AND TRANSNATIONAL
PLATFORM
Authors: Kim Dasol
Published: September 2021

This study aims to theorize how YouTube fundamentally capitalizes the
racial and gender identity of women of color and local culture in a way it facilitates
inter-racial and inter-cultural conflicts. I specifically focus on so-called K-beauty
(Korean beauty), a catchy trend on YouTube which encompasses aesthetics, cosmetic products,
and beauty ideals from South Korea, characterized by pursuing glowing, dewy, and light skin
tone featuring a variety of skincare products. K-beauty is now being adopted by non-Koreans
in North America including Black women influencers on the borderless platform of YouTube,
who created the Black Girl Tries Korean Makeup video series. By using a Critical
Technocultural Discourse Analysis approach, I examined YouTube videos, comments, as well as
the module titled “Building a Global Channel” to analyze not only the contents and
discourses around that but also the platform that might have shaped this intercultural flow
on YouTube. Black women YouTubers actively critiqued the light skin preference, as well as
anti-Blackness reflected in K-beauty brands through the Black Girls, Tries Korean Makeup
video series. Korean viewers, on the other hand, strongly rejected these accusations of the
anti-Black aspect of K-beauty, explaining distinctive Korean racial dynamic as a one-ethnic
country where the light skin preference is not translated to the anti-Blackness. I argue
that this inter-cultural and inter-racial conflict arguably has been shaped by YouTube’s
digital infrastructure that prioritizes short, trendy, how-to-style videos, that do not
require a lengthy contextualization of each culture’s beauty practices, and history of
oppressions.
RECKONING AND REPAIR: THE URGENT CONVERSATION ABOUT RACE IN THE BLACK
CHRISTIAN PODCAST CIRCUIT
Authors: Laughlin Corrina
Published: September 2021

This paper focuses on the Black Christian response to the 2020
uprisings against police brutality in the United States. Through a critical discourse
analysis of three podcasts and interviews with podcasters, this paper argues that the Black,
Christian podcast circuit is a counterpublic (Squires, 2002) that seeks to change Christian
culture in America. I argue that it is the affordances of the medium of podcasting that make
this counterpublic possible and that make it a potent force for changing the Christian
conversation about race. These podcasters offer a portrait of a divided Christian church in
need of repair and they make the case that repair is only possible through decolonizing the
Christian faith, repenting and offering reparations for the racial trauma caused by white
Christians, sparking Christians’ activist inclinations in favor of racial justice causes,
and interrogating and correcting sexism within both the Black church and white evangelical
culture.
STRIVERS, MAINTAINERS, ACHIEVERS: NETWORKED TRAJECTORIES OF OLDER ADULTS
LEARNING TO USE TECHNOLOGY DURING A PANDEMIC
Authors: Marler Will
Published: September 2021

While research has explored digital divides in older adults’
technology skills and uses and in their communication uptake during the pandemic, we lack an
understanding of the on-the-ground experiences and trajectories of older adults seeking to
adopt digital technologies to maintains social connection during the COVID-19 pandemic. What
balance of independence and interdependence do older adults seek and experience as they
attempt to take up new devices and applications, such as tablets and video chat, during a
period of physical distancing? I introduce “strivers,” “achievers,” and “maintainers” to
describe different experiences of in(ter)dependence that emerged at the intersection of
technology use and physical distancing for participants during and after the technology
training program. Independence is reflected among those who were able to translate provided
technology resources into an expanded social presence during the pandemic. Interdependence
relates to those who became even more dependent on others, with the addition of needed
technology support, while aspiring to replace offline relationships with those promised
through digital technologies. Simultaneously, by declaring oneself “not lonely despite being
alone,” others declared independence despite failing to realize the promise of digital
technology as a stand-in for in-person connection. Research on older adults and digital
technology can benefit from examining not only the possession of digital skills and support
for technology use, but also the meanings that older adults bring to their experiences of
inclusion and exclusion as they adapt to digital technologies while aging – and sheltering –
in place.
THE DIGITAL CLOSET: PLATFORM CENSORSHIP AND LGBTQIA+ INDEPENDENCE
ONLINE
Authors: Monea Alexander Paul
Published: September 2021

This presentation draws on data from my forthcoming book with MIT
Press to demonstrate how heteronormative and cisnormative bias pervade Silicon Valley
culture, get embedded in benchmark datasets and machine learning algorithms, and get
formalized in company policies and labor practices surrounding content moderation. The
presentation begins with an examination of workplace culture at Google, gaining insights
from Department of Labor investigations, testimonials from previous employees, and informal
surveys and discourse analysis conducted by employees during the circulation of James
Damore's infamous 'Google memo'. The presentation then moves on to examine bias embedded in
benchmark datasets like WordNet and ImageNet, both of which served as the training datasets
for Google's Image Recognition algorithms (like GoogLeNet). Lastly, the presentation turns
to Facebook's heteronormative and cisnormative content moderation policies and the
outsourced labor practices it uses to institute what Facebook has described as 'human
algorithms' to review content in accordance with these policies. Throughout the presentation
I demonstrate that we can piece together information about proprietary code by looking to
leaked documents, public records, press releases, open-source code, and benchmark datasets,
all of which, in this instance, instigate a systemic heteronormative and cisnormative bias
that is increasingly being embedded in the internet.
TWEETING BACK: EXPLORING BLACK FEMINIST HASHTAG COMMUNITIES ON TWITTER
AND INSTAGRAM
Authors: Peterson-Salahuddin Chelsea
Published: September 2021

The use of social media by Black women and femmes to talk about
topics from a Black feminist perspective has been explored within the larger context of
studies on Black Twitter and content analysis of circulated Tweets online. However, studies
have yet to empirically study Black feminist social media communities' nuanced dynamics by
directly speaking to those involved across a range of networked conversations. To fill this
gap, this study conducted 21 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with individuals who
engaged in eight different black feminist hashtag conversations across Twitter and Instagram
to expand our current understanding of how black feminist intellectual production has been
developed and broadened through the affordances of digital media. Findings suggest that
while black feminist hashtag discussions have allowed Black women to “talk back” to
hegemonic mainstream and popular discourses about Black women, these conversations are
constantly at stake of appropriation and co-optation, replicating historical erasure of
Black women’s intellectual production.
EMERGENT GOVERNANCE: COMPETITION POLICY AS PLATFORM REGULATION
Authors: Popiel Pawel
Published: September 2021

Much of the scholarly debate around platform regulation is
outcome-focused, concerning rules and norms that should govern platform behavior, rather
than focusing on questions of policy processes. However, the question of politics underlying
the development of these rules is essential to understanding how and why particular forms of
oversight have developed in response to the growing scope of platform capitalism. To address
this gap, this paper provides a preliminary account of why competition policy has emerged as
a prominent governance mechanism for platform oversight, which privileges stronger antitrust
enforcement and economic regulation and has resulted in antitrust lawsuits against and
investigations into major tech companies like Google and Facebook. With the US as a case
study, I examine a series of 2017-2020 policy debates about oversight of digital platform
markets, exploring how the boundaries of competition policy are discursively contested and
negotiated in these debates by stakeholders ranging from policy experts to regulators to
public interest groups. I argue that these policy debates, driven by a burgeoning
antimonopoly movement, produced a set of policy ideas vis-à-vis platform oversight that
coalesced around a governance paradigm rooted in competition policy. However, the framework
ultimately ultimately prioritizes optimizing competition in digital platform markets above
other goals, like data regulation. Consequently, it came up short in providing a policy
answer to the expansive forces driving platform capitalism. I theorize these blind spots as
partly attributable to the dominance and insularity of the competition policy framework as a
foundation for governing platform sectors.
DISEMBEDDEDNESS IN MACHINE LEARNING DATA WORK
Authors: Posada Julian
Published: September 2021

Firms and research organizations require humans to annotate raw data
to make it compatible with machine learning algorithms. These tasks are often outsourced to
individuals worldwide through labor platforms or infrastructures that serve as marketplaces
where labour is exchanged as a commodity. The firms that operate them consider workers as
“independent contractors” without the social and economic benefits of traditional employment
relations. This presentation explores the personal networks of Latin American data workers
who train and verify data for machine learning algorithms from their homes. A series of
in-depth interviews and an analysis of a self-completion questionnaire and web traffic data
suggests that these workers are embedded of networks of trusts build on online and offline
interactions. These findings show a continuation of exploitative supply chains in the
current artificial intelligence market, where wealthy companies and research institutions in
advanced economies profit from the economic and political situation of developing countries
to access disembedded labor. This paper concludes by arguing that, though outsourced online
labour, artificial intelligence developers not only extract value from their workers, but
also indirectly from their communities and personal networks.
SHARED NETWORKS: THE PATHS OF LATIN-CENTRIC INDIGENOUS NETWORKS TO A
PLURIVERSAL INTERNET
Authors: R. Rosa Fernanda
Published: September 2021

This research paper examines the emergence of shared networks in
Tseltal and Zapoteco communities in Chiapas and Oaxaca (Mexico): internet first mile
signal-sharing practices that articulate interconnection infrastructure and coexistence
values to extend the internet to areas where the services of existing larger internet
service providers are unsatisfactory or unavailable. In the case studies analyzed,
indigenous people become internet codesigners by infrastructuring for their own local
networks and interconnecting to the global internet. The paper argues that a hybrid
materializes at the level of network interconnection when comunalidad, or the way of these
communities, supported by unlicensed frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, towers,
radio antennas, houses rooftops, routers, and cables meet the values of the internet service
providers and their policies. Shared networks are a result of what these arrangements both
enact and constrain, and the evidence of vivid struggles of Latin-centric indigenous
networks towards a pluriversal internet.
DEEP GAMES: ADDRESSING MENTAL HEALTH THROUGH INDEPENDENT VIDEOGAME
DEVELOPMENT
Authors: Ruffino Paolo
Published: September 2021

Game workers and reports on the videogame industry frequently
document cases of anxiety, depression, burnout and impostor syndrome. Mental health issues
are exacerbated among independent developers and freelancers. The article draws on
interviews with four London-based independent videogame developers who have been producing
'deep games' about mental health. The article argues that conceiving, producing and
releasing these videogames is understood by their makers as a strategy to establish new and
'deeper' relations with consumers, participants and other developers. Developers seek
relations with other game workers and players through the process of making, researching,
testing, and showing their videogames. Their responses draw on biographical self-reflexivity
and are articulated within a network sociality that conceives the individual developer as
the agent of change. The development of videogames about mental health is interpreted by the
participants as facilitating exchanges of autobiographical experiences that are otherwise
regulated by the norms of professional networking. At the same time, these exchanges aim at
the establishment of new forms of sociality and at a fairer and more inclusive videogame
industry.
THE STREAMYARD CYPHERS: ONLINE PLACE-MAKING WITHIN AN INDIAN HIP HOP
COMMUNITY
Authors: Sarkar Pradip Kiran
Published: September 2021

This paper presents an ethnographic account of how a community of
Bengali-speaking rappers called the Cypher Projekt, based in the Indian state of West
Bengal, attempted to create an online place for conducting cyphers during India’s harsh
lockdowns in 2020. As an integral practice in Hip Hop culture, a rap cypher is akin to a
poetry slam and typically held in physical locations where proximity between rappers is key
to lyrical improvisation and competitive engagement. The Covid-19 lockdowns imposed
throughout India in 2020 forced this community of Indian rappers to explore online
environments for conducting the cyphers. However, due to infrastructural constraints related
to latency in Internet connections, the cyphers were replaced with informal discussion
sessions. These sessions were referred to as the Streamyard cyphers, owing to use of the
free version of a web-enabled video-conferencing application called Streamyard. The
ethnographic study revealed how the online sessions served as lively informal hangouts for
members of the community, in line with several characteristics of Ray Oldenberg’s third
place. However, there were other crucial aspects that did not meet the characteristics of a
third place, which necessitated the explanatory power offered by the Indian social practice
of the adda. The Streamyard cyphers clearly offered a vibrant third place for the
undertaking of addas amid the Covid-induced Indian lockdowns of 2020. While Oldenburg’s
notion of the third place still holds relevance for the examination of informal sociality,
in the Global South, its application requires augmentation with scholarly analyses of social
practices in specific sociocultural contexts.
ON GETTING CARRIED AWAY BY THE TIKTOK ALGORITHM
Authors: Schellewald Andreas
Published: September 2021

In this paper I respond to debates on the addictive and distractive
quality associated with algorithmic environments like the popular short-video app TikTok.
TikTok has frequently been discussed for its addictive nature. Many commentators and critics
rendering the app as emblematic for the ways in which digital media as such distract their
users from more meaningful and profound experiences. Contrasting such commentary, I draw on
a one and half year long ethnographic investigation of TikTok. Doing so, I outline how young
adult users of the app appropriated the TikTok algorithm's addictive quality in their search
for distraction and escape in everyday life and during the pandemic. Teasing out
similarities with prior media forms, like soap operas or magazines, offering similar sites
of escape in daily life, I discuss how the sense of getting carried away on TikTok was
constructed by users in interaction with the app's algorithm. Finally, I will conclude by
arguing that independence, in the context of algorithms and their emotional consequences,
comes to matter not in absolute but relative terms. While for my participants ‘mindless
scrolling’ through TikTok induced pleasure, the same practice, on other platforms, like
Instagram, induced boredom. These subtle differences within the landscape of ‘addictive
media’ are often overlooked within debates and the question how they come into being require
more attention.
NOSTALGIA AND THE BACKLOG: /R/PATIENTGAMERS AND THE TRANSACTIONAL NATURE
OF LEISURE
Authors: Scully-Blaker Rainforest
Published: September 2021

This paper uses the findings of an investigation into the
/r/patientgamers subreddit to account for the ways that our leisure time and our play have
been assimilated by the logics of neoliberal, late capitalism. I do this by tracing classed
experiences of slowness as experienced by video game players. The figure of the patientgamer
was selected not just because of their protracted approach to video game consumption, but
because the grows out of a frustration with the financial and temporal costs to access
leisure. Through Foucauldian discourse analysis, two major themes were detected across a
number of posts which traced how many players tried, and often failed, to slow down their
lives in restful ways through their play and the conversations that emerged from the impulse
to treat their leisure time as work. Specifically, users’ nostalgia for their childhoods and
their anxieties around possessing a video game backlog are both emblematic of the way that
video game play has been made legible to capitalist logics such that any distinction between
labour and leisure becomes moot and attempt to lift from the patientgamer ethos some
potential ways that the work of play may be reframed to undercut logics of efficiency and
productivity. The case study of /r/patientgamers holds relevance not just for the study of
games and/as culture, but of how technocapitalism instrumentalizes all leisure and the
consequences felt by those who try to slow their rhythms of consumption but do so without
proper attention to issues of class and power.
INDEPENDENT OVERSIGHT, DATA GOVERNANCE AND THE TEMPORAL CONSTRUCTION OF
FORENSIC EVIDENCE: THE MAKING OF THE FIRST STATEWIDE RAPE KIT TRACKING PLATFORM
Authors: Shelby Renee
Published: September 2021

Police management of sexual assault kits (SAKs) has led to systemic
disorganization resulting in lost and forgotten forensic evidence. In response, advocates
champion 'sexual assault kit tracking platforms' as a pillar of survivor-centered and
trauma-informed approaches to rape kit reform at the state level and to create independent
oversight over forensic processes. In 2017, Idaho became the first state to implement a
statewide tracking platform. The Idaho Sexual Assault Kit Tracking System (IKTS) allows the
public to track kits from distribution to collection, and testing at law enforcement
facilities. The emergence of tracking platforms raises questions about what governance
paradigms, data relations, and discourses these systems enable. I find concerns about
"timeliness" and the temporal life of forensic evidence structured the creation, deployment,
and maintenance of IKTS. I argue timeliness is a data governance paradigm with multiple and
shifting meanings of temporality that comprise various legal, social, and data
relationships. I show how the discourse of tardy, slow, and untimely forensic evidence is a
mechanism to codify consistent statewide forensic practice and centralize legal
decision-making. The legislature's treatment of SAK disorganization as a problem of
unmanaged "temporality" assumes a view of evidence processing as merely and neutrally
unmechanized. On one hand, this treatment obscures how racialized rape myths shape police
decision-making; on the other, IKTS protocols offer some intervention. I argue this should
not be read as signs of a racial justice technofix, but as indications of the limits and
possibilities of a "technolegal" response to violence.
THE QUANTUM STATE OF INFRASTRUCTURE RECONFIGURATION IN 5G
Authors: Ten Oever Niels
Published: September 2021

Transnational information networks are a proxy for power that embody
visions of futures and possibilities (Mosco 2005; DeNardis 2020). This paper looks at the
topological reconfiguration of networks that comes with the development and deployment of 5G
technologies. The paper argues that 5G networks exist in an apparent paradox of quantum
superposition: the networks are controlled both by states and private corporations, and the
intelligence is located both in the end-points as well as in the network. But just like in
the thought experiment of Schrödinger's cat, if one would observe the networks in case of an
incident, the control over the network resides inside the network and with the state.
However, this would merely describe the topographic qualities of the network, not its
topological configuration. I use the concept of a quantum state that originates in physics,
but is readily used in quantum social science (ie Barad 2007; Der Derian and Wendt 2020), to
explain how, in the development of the topology of 5G networks, several ‘states’ that seem
exclusionary occur simultaneously. This approach helps to explore how the creation of
material possibilities in transnational information networks is entangled with transnational
institutions, markets, and nation-states. Through this contribution, I seek to build a
bridge between constructivist and realist traditions in international relations by using
approaches from quantum social science and science and technology studies to increase
understanding of the role of communication networks in tussles for power.
QUARANTINE VLOGS: DIGITAL AFFECTIVE LABOR AND SELF-GOVERNANCE DURING
COVID-19
Authors: Yalın Alkım
Published: September 2021

This research explores how did influencers incorporate the Covid-19
pandemic into their regular content production on YouTube by specifically examining the
recent genre of "quarantine vlog," which emerged in concurrence with global lockdowns. I
adopt a grounded theory approach to analyze the YouTube transcriptions of purposefully
selected 9 quarantine vlogs filmed by women influencers during the early months of the
pandemic, along with 250 user comments. My analysis shows that quarantine vlogs are
significantly different than ordinary vlogs. I draw on existing research on influencer
cultures to explain this dissimilarity as a tension between influencers' struggle to form an
intimacy with the viewers - which can have a soothing effect in a moment of a crisis - and
the use of vlogs as a neoliberal device in order to preserve their aspirational image. I
demonstrate that quarantine vlogs reveal that influencers are no longer able to perform an
aspirational ideal in their videos without first engaging with the mental stress, anxiety,
confusion, and loneliness brought by COVID-19 or apologizing for their relative privilege
and demonstrating sympathy towards their followers who are in hardship. At the same time, to
preserve their aspirational persona, they reframe the pandemic moment as an opportunity for
productivity and self-growth. As a result, influencers carry out substantial affective labor
and engage in a delicate self-governance to preserve their relevance and online visibility
during a global moment of crisis.
EVERYDAY DATA CULTURES
Authors: Albury Kath , Burgess Jean , Kaye Bondy , McCosker Anthony , Kennedy Jenny , Wilken Rowan
Published: September 2021

This panel deploys a range of qualitative methodologies to investigate how processes of datafication meet with the subjective experiences of ordinary people, and the practices of everyday life. We draw on the model of ‘everyday data cultures’ proposed by Burgess (2017) to explore the ways diverse data practices – including the production and circulation of data visualisations, modes of data storage and vernacular engagements with data literacy – can be understood as aspects of culture. Following Burgess, we define everyday data cultures as the practices that form around and in response to the social media and other data (and data trails) that people generate as we go about our daily lives. These practices form from our diverse engagements with, experiences of, and approaches to understanding and negotiating these data Across these four papers, we address the everyday politics of social media platforms; the development of vernacular pedagogies of AI and machine leaning practices; the historical datafication of sex and gender, and mundane workplace practices of storing, concealing and revealing personal data. In doing so, we seek to highlight and amplify everyday human agency, as well as explore its limits and uneven distribution, and consider how it is being transformed through the logics of data and the machines that feed on them.
THE LEGITIMATIZATION OF YOUNG PEOPLE’S DIGITAL MEDIA PRACTICES WITHIN NEOLIBERAL CONTEXTS AND ECOLOGIES
Authors: Coulter Natalie , DiGiacomo Daniela , Ellerbe Briana , Willett Rebekah Jane
Published: September 2021

This panel focuses on different ways that practices of children, youth, and families are legitimatized (and deligitimatized) in schools, homes, and market places. With a focus on media consumption, the four papers examine the lived realities of families in the late 2010’s, a time period dominated by Trump-era politics, neoliberal ideologies, digital capitalisms and dilemmas of trust. In this moment, children and youth are positioned variously as in need of media literacy, parental regulations, and social controls. Simultaneously, children and youth are looked to as the future generation of political activists, savvy consumers, and promotional actors. In these polarized and sometimes conflicting positions, particular practices are recognized and condoned, while others are subject to intense scrutiny. We ask a number of questions: what discursive constructions are available for children and youth engaging with digital media? What options do parents have in terms of positioning themselves and their parenting in relation to children and media? In what ways are hierarchies of value enacted and replicated in relation to media and education? These questions are all framed by larger questions from the field of child studies and how the child is framed in various discourses - civic, parental, promotional and educational.
FROM TOP-DOWN TO BOTTOM-UP: POLITICAL IMAGE MANAGEMENT AND THE
PRESERVATION OF WHITE SUPREMACY THROUGH VISUALS AND MEMES ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS
Authors: Winter Rachel , DeCook Julia
Published: September 2021

Social media platforms play an increasing role in politics,
facilitating the circulation of populist texts disseminated by politicians, official
campaign media, and user-generated content, all of which contribute to voters’ perceptions
of politicians and political issues. The networks and affordances of social media platforms
allow for the development of an individualized, affective connection with voters, which is a
particularly important strategy for far-right politicians, who are often stigmatized.
Furthermore, social media enables the circulation of user-generated materials in a form of
digital political participation, allowing citizens to respond in real-time to political
developments. While digital political participation ostensibly offers the potential for the
expression of marginalized perspectives, digital texts predominantly emphasize and enforce
existing hierarchies, particularly the supremacy of whiteness. This panel explores visuals
and memes circulated on social media through the lenses of platform studies, whiteness
studies, nostalgia, and Critical Discourse Analysis. By examining both “top-down” media
disseminated by public figures and “bottom-up” user-generated content, this panel provides
an in-depth understanding of the social media ecosystems that work to preserve and extend
far-right values and white supremacy. Rachel Winter focuses on the influence of official
campaign materials on user-generated content, as well as the impacts of both on candidate
image management and the racial hierarchy of the United States. An analysis of
representations of race in user-generated Rafael “Ted” Cruz and Robert “Beto” O’Rourke memes
reveals an embedded valuation of whiteness and white supremacy to the detriment of other
racial demographics. Political memes collected from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr,
and Reddit uphold the importance of the white racial identity of candidates and, in so
doing, attempt to preserve White American identities from the perceived threat of
multiculturalism embodied in racially diverse politicians and their constituents. Julia
DeCook examines nostalgia and chronotopes in alt-right memes, contending that the emphasis
on “tradition” over “progress” is an attempt to unify the alt-right and preserve white
identity and supremacy from threats of globalization and feminism. The alt-right creates
virtual nation-states that use consistent linguistic strategies to enable these groups to
engage in a form of collective action. Examining white supremacist memes from Reddit and
Instagram, Panelist 2 explores the ways that time, memory, and the abstract conception of
“the past” are used in digital propaganda to appeal to younger voters and emphasize the myth
that whiteness must be protected from the threat of multiculturalism.