id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
spir-10494	McEwan, Sean Rutherford	THIS MEME IS WHAT WE CALL PROGRESS”: HISTORY-AS-MEME, MEME-AS-HISTORY ON 4CHAN	2018-10-31	AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research; 2018: AoIR2018	Association of Internet Researchers	eng	10.5210/spir.v2018i0.10494	https://spir.aoir.org/ojs/index.php/spir/article/download/10494/8363	Memes “act as the locus of memory”, says Gabriella Coleman of the peculiar relationship 4chan has to its own history, made necessary by the ephemeral nature of large amounts of its content (2009). Rather than having an on-site permanent archive as such, its collective history and memory is sublated into and through the circulation and production of memes. Taking this as a prompt, this paper makes the case for the (re)production, circulation, and referencing of memes as embodiment of a particular historical ontology: a mode of being constructed in relationship to, and through, its own past. Memes, in other words, are a new way of thinking about, and experiencing (digital) history: they contribute to, and are part of, new “infra-structures of feeling” (Coleman 2017). With this in mind, I use Benjamin’s reading of Klee’s Angelus Novus as a framing device to start to think about how memes encourage and embody certain modes of being-in-the-world. I do so in specific reference to 4chan and its privileging of a certain subject position along lines raced, classed and gendered, although possibilities for other forms and spaces are considered. On 4chan, the New Man of neofascism remakes the world memetically, in his own image.
oai:journals.uic.edu:article/10495	Meese, James Michael	CITIZEN OR CONSUMER? THE RIGHT TO DATA ACCESS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION AND AUSTRALIA	2018-10-31	AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research; 2018: AoIR2018	Association of Internet Researchers	eng	10.5210/spir.v2018i0.10495	https://spir.aoir.org/ojs/index.php/spir/article/download/10495/8364	This paper presents early stage findings from a research project that explores whether the provision of data access addresses concerns that have emerged with regards to data collection by private and public actors. Using the recent right to data access secured by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as a point of departure, I examine Facebook and Twitter’s response to these regulations through the lens of their data access policies and processes. I analyse what sort of data is made available and assess what benefit the public gains from having access to their social media data. I then offer a conceptual intervention through a comparative analysis of the divergent approaches two jurisdictions take to data access. I compare the GDPR with an ongoing debate around the introduction of a consumer data access right into Australian law and analyse how these divergent legal traditions and public discourses alter the conceptualisation and enacting of the data access right (and digital rights more generally). This paper provides a timely examination of a right that has emerged in response to the increased datafication of society. As well as offering a detailed analysis of how social media platforms have responded to the data access provisions within the GDPR, the comparative analysis of the EU and Australia shows that significantly different legal foundations can animate this right, ultimately presenting two starkly different visions of internet users as either consumers or citizens.
oai:journals.uic.edu:article/10496	Mercea, Dan	THE POLITICAL INFORMATION TO PROTEST: AN ASSESSMENT OF TOPICAL SOCIAL MEDIA USAGE IN CONTENTIOUS POLITICS	2018-10-31	AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research; 2018: AoIR2018	Association of Internet Researchers	eng	10.5210/spir.v2018i0.10496	https://spir.aoir.org/ojs/index.php/spir/article/download/10496/8365	This article leverages social media and survey data to probe the scope and depth of political knowledge possessed by participants in the Romanian 2017 #rezist protests. For several months, demonstrators gathered in town squares around the country to oppose a project law intended to water down penalties for corruption in high office. Against the backdrop of well-founded scepticism regarding exposure to and engagement with political knowledge on social media, we scrutinize the social media usage of protestors with an interest in the formulation and circulation of political knowledge. We find evidence of applied political knowledge as a prominent component of public activist communication on Facebook. An examination of the network structure further revealed bottlenecks in the circulation and brokerage of knowledge, a result that helps qualify the aforementioned scepticism.
oai:journals.uic.edu:article/10497	Mitchell, Lewis; Dent, Joshua; Ross, Joshua	MO’ CHARACTERS MO’ PROBLEMS: ONLINE SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM CONSTRAINTS AND MODES OF COMMUNICATION	2018-10-31	AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research; 2018: AoIR2018	Association of Internet Researchers	eng	10.5210/spir.v2018i0.10497	https://spir.aoir.org/ojs/index.php/spir/article/download/10497/8366	It is widely accepted that different online social media platforms produce different modes of communication, however the ways in which these modalities are shaped by the constraints of a particular platform remain difficult to quantify. On 7 November 2017 Twitter doubled the character limit for users to 280 characters, presenting a unique opportunity to study the response of this population to an exogenous change to the communication medium. Here we analyse a large dataset comprising 387 million English-language tweets (10% of all public tweets) collected over the September 2017--January 2018 period to quantify and explain large-scale changes in individual behaviour and communication patterns precipitated by the character-length change. Using statistical and natural language processing techniques we find that linguistic complexity increased after the change, with individuals writing at a significantly higher reading level. However, we find that some textual properties such as statistical language distribution remain invariant across the change, and are no different to writings in different online media. By fitting a generative mathematical model to the data we find a surprisingly slow response of the Twitter population to this exogenous change, with a substantial number of users taking a number of weeks to adjust to the new medium. In the talk we describe the model and Bayesian parameter estimation techniques used to make these inferences. Furthermore, we argue for mathematical models as an alternative exploratory methodology for Big" social media datasets, empowering the researcher to make inferences about the human behavioural processes which underlie large-scale patterns and trends.	nan	7	.pdf	application/pdf	2717	172	56	THIS MEME IS WHAT WE CALL PROGRESS”: HISTORY-AS-MEME, MEME-AS-HISTORY ON 4CHAN Sean McEwan, University of Illinois-Chicago Figure 1: A variation of the “Distracted Boyfriend” meme, which combines the titular unfaithful partner with Angelus Novus Suggested Citation (APA): McEwan, S.. (2018, October 10- Accompanying this was a commercial appropriation and codification of meme production by outsiders, such as Icanhazcheeseburger and Know Your Meme, and subsequent loss of cultural cache as the Internet’s meme factory to “Normie” platforms such as Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter.	cache/spir-10494.pdf	txt/spir-10494.txt